The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “This woman was desperate,” Greenson’s son Danny recalled. “She couldn’t sleep and she said how terrible she felt about herself, how worthless she felt. She talked about being a waif, that she was ugly, that people were only nice to her for what they could get from her. She said life wasn’t worth living anymore.”

  The doctor that Greenson had asked to cover for him while he was out of town rushed over to the house and felt that Marilyn was suicidal. He attempted to confiscate any pills she had and hoped she would be okay long enough for Dr. Greenson to return, which he did as soon as he heard how poorly his star client was faring.

  After she missed yet another day of work, the cast and crew of the film were pretty much finished with her. Dr. Greenson met with the Fox executives to tell them that Marilyn would do whatever he wanted her to do, and he could guarantee that she would return to work. He wasn’t believed. On June 8, Fox fired her from the film and then filed a half-million-dollar lawsuit against her. Some thought it was George Cukor the studio should have gotten rid of, and perhaps with him gone Marilyn would have shown up for work. It was difficult to say, though, because she was so removed from reality at this time—especially off her Thorazine—that all bets were off. For instance, she wanted Cyd Charisse’s hair dyed a darker color since, in her view, there should only be one blonde in the movie and Charisse “unconscious wants it [her own hair] to be blonde.” Even more outrageous, Marilyn viewed the rushes of a bedroom scene between Dean Martin and Charisse, wearing a revealing negligee. She accused the actress of padding her bra and threatened to walk off the picture if the padding was not removed. It was another instance where Monroe’s paranoia surfaced; Cyd Charisse’s bra was not padded. In the end, Marilyn had showed up for only about a third of the movie’s production days thus far. The film was a million dollars over budget.

  Naturally, Marilyn was upset about being fired. In her view she had been loyal to 20th Century-Fox for sixteen years and was now being treated without regard for the legitimate problems she faced in her life. In Fox’s view, those had not been sixteen good years. Yes, she made a great deal of money for the studio—and, truly, was underpaid in a way that even today seems shocking—but almost every movie she ever made caused so many problems for everyone involved that some people had begun to wonder if she were worth it. Of course, the same could be said for Elizabeth Taylor and practically every other actor and actress working in the business at that time. That said, Marilyn was a woman whose aspirations had always been very basic. All she ever wanted was to be an actress and to be good at it. Oh… and she wanted to be famous. That was about it. There was never a monetary motivation. Money and prestige meant pretty much nothing to her. The modest house she’d just bought is evidence of her simple and, really, very charming taste. How her dreams got so screwed up was probably beyond her comprehension at this time, especially given her mental illness.

  Marilyn wouldn’t take it all without a fight, though. As soon as she was dismissed, she began to orchestrate a major campaign to make sure the public knew she was alive and well. Her public relations venture included a cover story in Life magazine that was, no doubt, the best and most thought-provoking interview she’d ever given. Richard Merryman had told her that he wanted to discuss not only the legend of Monroe, but also the woman. In what now seems like an eerily prescient moment, Marilyn quipped, “The legend may become extinct before publication day. Not the woman, but the legend.”

  Reading the article today, one senses that Marilyn was such a nice, decent person, it makes her travails all the more tragic. She certainly wasn’t one of those celebrities who resented her success or her popularity. About her public, she told Life magazine’s Merryman, “In the morning the garbage men that go by 57th Street when I come out the door say, ‘Marilyn, hi! How do you feel this morning?’ To me, it’s an honor, and I love them for it. The workingmen—I’ll go by and they’ll whistle. At first, they whistle because they think, oh. It’s a girl, she’s got blonde hair and she’s not out of shape, and then they say, ‘Gosh, it’s Marilyn Monroe!’ And that has its—you know, those are the times it’s nice, people knowing who you are and all of that, and feeling that you’ve meant something to them.”

  Of course, Marilyn being Marilyn, she also couldn’t resist the dramatic “exaggeration,” like this one: “Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night—up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it.” That likely never happened. But it’s a nice image, anyway.

  However, regarding her feelings for Fox, she was very clear: “I think that when you are famous, every weakness is exaggerated. This industry should behave like a mother whose child has just run out in front of a car. But instead of clasping the child to them, they start punishing the child. Like don’t you dare get a cold—how dare you get a cold! The executives can get colds and stay home forever, but how dare you, the actor, get a cold? You know, no one feels worse than the one who’s sick. I wish they had to act a comedy with a temperature and a virus infection. I am not an actress who appears at a studio just for the purpose of discipline. This doesn’t have anything to do with art. I myself would like to become more disciplined within my work. But I’m there to give a performance and not be disciplined by a studio! After all, I’m not in military school. This is supposed to be an art form not just a manufacturing establishment. The sensitivity that helps me to act also makes me react. An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?”

  She would also do her first layout for Vogue, with excellent photos by Bert Stern. It must have rankled her, though, that he wanted her to pose nude. She was trying to break away from that cheesecake image, or so she kept saying. Was she really, though? After the skinny-dip scene in Something’s Got to Give… maybe not. It’s clear that she was very confused at this point as to what her image was to be, and where she should draw the line. Some of the partially nude shots she took with Stern are stunning, though. Others, not so much. In those, she definitely looks exhausted, troubled, and not well. She even looks older, and that was unusual for her. She ended up doing more shots for Vogue, these in high-fashion wear and in moody black-and-white. However, even in that sitting, Stern somehow managed to get her to take off her clothes for more nude shots, this time draped with a sheet in a hotel bed. In the end, Vogue chose to publish the black-and-white fashion shots—a very wise (and gracious) choice.

  As for the movie? The studio decided to replace Marilyn in Something’s Got to Give with actress Lee Remick. “That was the end of it as far as Dean was concerned,” said Mort Viner. “He called me and said, ‘Get me the hell out of this movie. Jesus Christ, this is the biggest three-ring circus in show business and I’m the clown in the middle of it all.’ So we referenced a clause in his deal that said he would only work with Marilyn. And he quit the film saying, ‘No Marilyn. No Dean.’ It was bullshit, really. The real reason is that he didn’t want to start over with another actress and do all that work, again, on a movie that was not that great to begin with. He felt bad for the crew. A lot of people worked hard on that goddamn movie. It was a shame. But it was jinxed from the start. On the very first day she didn’t show up for work, the very first day, Dean said, ‘That’s it. This picture will not get made.’ ”

  In 1995, Dean Martin recalled, “I met Marilyn in 1953, before she met Frank, before she met Peter, before she knew any of us. I met her before she was all screwed up, so I knew what she was like then and what she had become, and I felt badly for the kid. At the same time, I was a little tired of all the bullshit. There was only so much you could take. In fact, no one had an easy life. We were all screwed up in our own ways. We all had problems. We were all doing drugs, let’s face it. I was no saint, either. But I showed up for work. You had to show up for work. That was the priority. You had to be glad you had a job and you had to show up for wo
rk. I’m not saying she wasn’t sick all of those days. Who knows? I wasn’t following her around like the FBI, I was just sitting on my ass waiting for her to show up at the studio. So, when I had my chance to get out, I did. However, the few scenes we did, I enjoyed, but getting to them… oh my God, I mean, the takes, one after the other, it would drive any man crazy. But… look… I liked her. She was a good kid. But when you looked into her eyes, there was nothing there. No warmth. No life. It was all illusion. She looked great on film, yeah. But in person… she was a ghost.”

  Gladys: “I Don’t Say Goodbye”

  When she first moved back to Los Angeles from New York, Marilyn was excited to rebuild the life she once lived in the sunnier, more tranquil locale. Yet there were elements to her life that had drastically changed since she last resided in California. Certainly, the difficult times she endured in recent weeks had made her even more famous than ever before—but for the wrong reasons. The public had already been made aware of her admittance to the mental hospital in New York, and now, as a result of her being fired from the movie, there was growing interest in her emotional state. Worse, her daily trips to see Dr. Ralph Greenson were now being noticed by some members of the press and even fans who had begun following her every move.

  Her time with Dr. Greenson—controversial as it was, even back then—had begun with a certain amount of frustration. While in New York, and under the care of numerous physicians there, Marilyn had come to believe that a certain pharmaceutical had been helpful in stabilizing her: Thorazine. It had begun to represent hope to her that she might be able to regain control of her often chaotic thought processes. Yet when Dr. Greenson heard Marilyn’s request for Thorazine, for some reason, he refused. Greenson had quickly become the one doctor Marilyn would trust and speak with openly, and he served that purpose well. Yet he knew all too well that Marilyn would at times have her own agenda when it came to her chemical treatment. It may have simply been that she was asking for more than he would have recommended, or that he didn’t want her to take it at all—but it was clear to her that she would need to find this wonder drug elsewhere, especially when her Los Angeles physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, also refused to prescribe it to her. Therefore, Marilyn continued her doctor-shopping ways with medics she had seen previously, most of whom had been starstruck by her and had given her whatever prescription drugs she requested.

  “She was waiting in the lobby,” recalls one of the doctors to whom she had paid a visit during the summer of 1962. “I guess she had her head down in a magazine as the last client of the day left, and then she just walked right into the office. She was a knockout—lots of teased-out blonde hair… red lipstick. I remember she was wearing a cream-colored coat that looked like satin to me. She had on a white dress and I specifically remember that she was wearing white stilettos. I mean, she was dressed to kill in all-white. Very impressive… very movie star.”

  Though Marilyn would address this doctor by the name of his previous employer—making it clear that she had so many doctors she didn’t even remember what they looked like!—it would quickly become apparent that he was a total stranger to her. Indeed, the man who had previously treated Marilyn had died and the one who now stood before her was his protégé and successor, the much younger Dr. Schwartz. *

  “I knew her immediately, of course,” says the doctor, “and I even knew that she had seen [the deceased doctor] for a time. I had only been an intern for a short time before he died. There was no one to continue his practice, so his wife asked me to stay on and at least help some patients through the transition.

  “She wanted Thorazine,” explains Dr. Schwartz. “I was wary of taking her on as a patient. Most doctors were afraid of treating a famous patient who had been suspected of attempting suicide. No one wants to be mentioned in a patient’s obituary as their last doctor.”

  Though Marilyn persisted in trying to convince the young doctor that her experience with Thorazine had been a positive one, he was still reluctant. “When you’re fresh out of med school you’re under real scrutiny,” he explains, “overprescribing could get you into all kinds of trouble. Not with the authorities so much, but it can leave a doctor with a bunch of drug-dependent patients. Some doctors would like that, because it kept people coming back—but I didn’t [like it].”

  Marilyn spent some time detailing her need for confidentiality —which made it easier for this young doctor to help her. While he refuses to detail what financial arrangements the two made, he doesn’t deny that he was compensated for the services he would provide. “There were a bunch of old prescription pads [from the deceased doctor],” Schwartz explains, “and since she wanted them [the prescriptions] written to a pseudonym anyway… I just did it. I wasn’t just doing it for the money, though. She actually seemed to be making sense to me. She convinced me it was in her best interest.”

  The young doctor was rightfully anxious about his dealings with Marilyn Monroe, and so when he received a phone call from her a few weeks later, he was leery of further involvement. Despite his concern, though, she seemed to be doing well. “She said she felt better than she had in ages, and asked how much I charged for a house call,” explains Schwartz. “I told her I wouldn’t visit her at home but she said that she didn’t want me to. She wanted me to go with her to see her mother.”

  Marilyn’s mother, Gladys, was at this time still being cared for at Rock Haven Sanitarium in La Crescenta, about a thirty-minute drive from Marilyn’s home and Schwartz’s office. Marilyn wanted the doctor to meet her there to try to convince Gladys, and also her doctors, that Thorazine could be an effective treatment for her. Again, after an undisclosed financial arrangement, Schwartz agreed to meet her at Rock Haven.

  “When I got to Rock Haven, the front desk was empty, which is unusual in such a place,” Schwartz recalls, “then I turned and looked down a hallway and all of the staff seemed to be congregated in one area. I knew she—Marilyn—was already there.”

  As odd as it may seem, Marilyn was actually early for the appointment. Schwartz found her—cloaked by a black-and-white scarf and wearing black-checkered pants—sitting across from an administrator and two doctors on staff. She seemed upbeat and hopeful—at least at first. (Note: These well could have been the “famous” black-and-white-checkered JAX pants worn by Marilyn in countless photos. She owned them for at least twenty years—even in photo sessions as Norma Jeane—and wore them very often.)

  “Guess what? She’s already taking it,” Marilyn told Schwartz as he approached. “Thorazine,” Marilyn added with a big smile. “Mother has been on it for a while.”

  “She’s being given it, anyway,” clarified one of the physicians present.

  “What does that mean?” asked Marilyn.

  The doctor then explained something that Marilyn already knew, that Gladys was a very stubborn woman. It seemed that the staff had often caught her attempting to avoid taking her medication. Marilyn said that she didn’t understand how that was possible. She thought a nurse would have stood in front of Gladys and waited while she took her pills. It turned out that a member of the staff would witness her pop the pills into her mouth, and would even wait while she drank a cup of water. Gladys would even be told to open her mouth to show that it was empty. However, she seemed to have mastered the ability to quickly tuck her pills between her teeth and inner cheek. That was at least what the staff assumed, since she seemed relatively unaffected by any of the drugs she was supposed to be taking. “She can’t do that,” Marilyn said, “you just can’t let her.” The doctor told her that it happened all the time. When he questioned Gladys about it, he said, she told him that the one or two times she actually took the medication, it stopped the voices in her head, “and then she missed them.” Therefore, she wouldn’t take the medication, and, he concluded, “if someone doesn’t want help, they won’t get any.”

  That statement angered Marilyn. “She isn’t well enough to know she wants help,” she said. “Why don’t you give her injections of it
? She can’t spit those out.”

  The doctors seemed to find that proposal absurd. Marilyn was told that the staff did not administer drugs intravenously at that facility. If a patient needed that kind of care, she was told, then she needed to be somewhere else. “Then she will be,” Marilyn threatened. “Just tell me where to take her.”

  It was then that one of the other doctors told Marilyn that Gladys had indeed been moved to other facilities numerous times, after episodes of extreme violence or threats of suicide. However, once her mother showed improvement, after having been given intravenous medication for a few days, she would always be released back to Rock Haven. He said he was surprised that Marilyn didn’t know about this. Perhaps he was referring to Gladys’s recent suicide attempt. “Not as surprised as I am,” Marilyn said, now very upset.

  “You wouldn’t want her spending the rest of her life in a hospital, would you?” he asked.

  “What do you call this?” Marilyn shot back.

  “To your mother,” he answered, “it’s home.”

  Marilyn didn’t know how to respond to that.

  According to Dr. Schwartz’s memory, Marilyn was most unhappy with the staff’s blasé attitude about Gladys’s avoidance of treatment. Also, it’s likely their description of a couple of her stays in two other facilities reminded Marilyn of her own experience at Payne Whitney. The last thing she wanted to do was make Gladys’s life more difficult. Therefore she decided that she would not remove her mother from Rock Haven but would instead at least make an attempt at personally convincing her to take her medication.