The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Marilyn and Dr. Schwartz were then led out to the grounds by a nurse. He remembers the facility as being surprisingly bucolic, with sprawling, well-manicured lawns and numerous oak-tree-shaded areas in which patients could relax and roam. They found Gladys sitting at a picnic table, wearing a fur stole around her neck. She was a small-boned, frail woman now, with silver hair pulled back from her face and tied in a small knot with what appeared to be a simple rubber band. The doctor recalls thinking that she looked very much like what he might imagine Marilyn to look at age sixty-two. Moreover, he would also recall Marilyn later confessing that when she laid eyes on her mother she experienced a strong and unexpected feeling of bittersweet nostalgia sweeping through her. A large purse sat in front of Gladys on the table. It appeared as if she was searching inside it for something. Marilyn approached carefully. “Mother?”

  “I’m here,” Gladys said rather loudly, as if a nurse was taking attendance.

  Marilyn sat across from her mother. “Mother, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” she said. “This is Dr. Schwartz.”

  Dr. Schwartz distinctly remembers Gladys pulling her purse closer to her for a moment.

  “You’re new,” Gladys said, eyeing the visitor suspiciously. Then, turning to her daughter, she said, “I don’t know him.”

  Marilyn then explained to her mother that she and the doctor had come to tell her something very important. She looked to the doctor and said to him, “She won’t listen to me, so you tell her.”

  There was an awkward moment as Marilyn waited for the doctor to tell Gladys why she should take her medication. “It was a little bizarre,” he recalled, years later. “I wasn’t a psychiatrist, I wasn’t even her doctor, but [Marilyn] seemed desperate, so I did my best.”

  The doctor then spoke to Gladys about the importance of taking her pills, but it was mostly for Marilyn’s benefit. As he spoke, Gladys continued rummaging through her purse. When he was finished, Gladys looked up at him and asked him if he were a doctor. He nodded. “Well, I’ll say a prayer for you and you can say one for me,” she said pointedly. “That’s more powerful than anything. Norma Jeane knows that.”

  “No. Mother, no,” Marilyn insisted. She then explained that perhaps they’d all been wrong about Christian Science since neither of them had thus far been healed by the religion. She said that she now believed they needed more than just faith—they also needed medication. Then she briefly explained that she too had lately endured some very difficult times—she was probably referring to her stay at Payne Whitney—and that she now truly believed that both of them would benefit from Thorazine.

  Gladys listened intently until Marilyn stopped talking. Then Gladys looked at Schwartz. “I don’t know what you’ve been filling this child’s head with,” she said, according to his memory of the conversation, “but Norma Jeane knows that the path to heaven is through prayer and devotion.”

  “But maybe these drugs are an answer to your prayers,” Marilyn said. “Our prayers.” She continued pleading with her mother so vehemently, so passionately in fact, that she soon began to cry. “Can’t you listen to me, just this once?” she said through her tears. She said that “after all of these years” she now finally realized how truly torturous Gladys’s life had been and that she wanted to help her. “Please, I never ask you to do anything,” she continued, “but I’m begging you now.”

  Gladys watched her daughter with a distant gaze. Finally, she asked Marilyn exactly what it was she wanted her to do. Marilyn said that all she wanted was for Gladys to take Thorazine for at least a week, or maybe even a month, if possible. “I know you’ll feel better,” Marilyn said.

  “And then what?” Gladys asked.

  “Then you can leave here,” Marilyn answered, “and get your life back.”

  Gladys leaned in to her daughter. “And what life is that, dear?” she asked. “This place is all I’ve known for years.”

  “I just want you to get better,” Marilyn said.

  “You want me to get better for you,” Gladys responded, “and I thank you for that.” Then, staring intensely into her daughter’s eyes, she added, “but, Norma Jeane, I want you to get better for you.” Mother and daughter just looked at each other for another long moment. Then Gladys suddenly changed the subject. She turned to the doctor and, touching the fur that was wrapped around her neck, told him that Norma Jeane had given it to her. When he said he thought it was beautiful, she looked pleased. She said that the hospital staff rarely let her have it. However, when the weather got cold, she’d ask for it, and usually the staff would give it to her. She suggested that he touch it. The doctor cautiously reached out and began to stroke the pelt, but when he did, Gladys winced and pulled back forcefully. “You have an evil touch,” she said, her face suddenly darkening. All of this was just too much for Marilyn. With that, her tears began to flow again, unchecked. “You’ve upset Norma Jeane,” Gladys told the doctor. “She can be very sensitive.”

  Just then, according to the doctor’s memory of these events, an elderly woman walked up behind Gladys. Oddly, the woman reached toward Gladys’s hand and held it. Without saying a word, she just stood there.

  “Who’s this?” Marilyn asked, forcing a smile.

  “This is Ginger,” Gladys replied. “She’s my friend.”

  “Hello, Ginger,” Marilyn said. “Would you like to join us?”

  Gladys began to stand. “Ginger doesn’t like visitors,” she said, her voice now suddenly flat and devoid of expression. “We’ve got to go back inside.”

  As Gladys began to pick up her purse, Marilyn said, “No. Wait a moment.” She reached into her own pocketbook and pulled out a small flask. Quickly, she slipped it inside her mother’s purse.

  Gladys, after a pause, seemed to perk up again. She gave her daughter a childish grin. “You’re such a good girl, Norma Jeane,” she said finally. “A very good girl.” She smiled. Marilyn beamed back at her. Then Gladys turned and began to walk away.

  Marilyn and the doctor watched as Gladys and Ginger made their way across the expansive lawn. Though they didn’t know it, it would be the last time mother and daughter would ever lay eyes on one another. “I don’t say goodbye,” Gladys announced loudly, her back still to her daughter.

  “She never has,” Marilyn said quietly. “Maybe that’s why I have to say it so often.”

  Pat: “My Friend Is Dying”

  At about this same time—in mid-June 1962—Marilyn Monroe was scheduled to participate in a number of photo shoots for Vogue and Cosmopolitan magazines. She decided to keep those commitments. For one of the sessions, she wanted to use as a setting the beach behind Pat Kennedy Lawford’s home. Therefore, she and Pat met for lunch to discuss the shoot and also to catch up as friends. “At this point, Pat didn’t know what was going on with Marilyn and her brothers,” said a Kennedy relative. “And she was afraid to ask… she was actually afraid to know.”

  As soon as Marilyn showed up at her home, Pat could see that she was in terrible condition. According to a later recollection, Marilyn told her friend that she was “humiliated” by what had happened at Fox. She said that she had never before had so much anxiety in her life, but that she was now trying to focus on the future. “What’s next?” she remarked. “That’s what I want to concentrate on from now on.” She indicated that she believed Something’s Got to Give would go back into production. In fact, she said that she had sent telegrams to many of the actors apologizing to them and asking them to return. “However, I would like it if the entire crew was new,” she told Pat, “because I don’t know that I can face them. I let them all down and I think they probably hate me by now.” She also told Pat that she felt that she was “on the brink of understanding what my problem is,” and that all she needed was “more time. I know I can overcome this,” she said cryptically. “I just need everyone to give me a little more time.”

  Pat was worried. Marilyn seemed manic. A few of Pat’s friends were having lunch on the patio when Marilyn
arrived. Pat suggested that the two of them go out and join the group. “Maybe some sun will do us all some good,” she offered. “Would you like a whiskey sour?” Marilyn, of course, said she would love a whiskey sour, but first she wanted Pat to do her a favor. “Please tell [the guests] that I am here and see their reaction. If it looks like they would hate it if I joined them, I won’t.” It seemed like such an odd request. However, there was little about Marilyn that made sense on this particular day. When she began mouthing words that Pat couldn’t even make out, she decided it would be best if Marilyn didn’t join the others, after all. Instead, as she later recalled it, she sat down with her friend at the bar and tried to have a serious discussion with her about the medication she was taking, and whether or not she was abusing it. It’s not known what specifically was said during this talk, only that Marilyn became very upset. “I thought I was getting better,” she told Pat as she rose to leave the house, “but now I see that I’m not. I’m worse, Pat. I’m worse than ever. Maybe I’m even worse than my mother, and she’s pretty bad, Pat!” She then left in tears.

  “After that, Pat was shaking all over,” said the same Kennedy relative. “It was then, I think, that she decided that being forthright and honest with Marilyn was not a good idea. ‘I now think I need to be like everyone else in her life and just tell her that everything is fine,’ she said, ‘because I don’t think she can handle the truth.’ Pat said that if it had been any other woman who was that troubled, she would have immediately called that friend’s husband. But Marilyn had no one—just that creepy psychiatrist, and Pat didn’t trust him at all. So she picked up the phone and called Joe [DiMaggio]. I don’t know what she said to him, and I don’t know his response. I only know that Pat was left with a feeling of dread. ‘I felt that it was inevitable,’ she said. ‘I felt my friend is dying and that there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.’ ”

  In mid-June, Bobby and Ethel Kennedy were hosting a party at Hickory Hill, their home in Virginia, for Peter and Pat Lawford. Knowing that Marilyn was very close to Pat, they decided to invite her. One wonders, if Ethel believed Marilyn was having an affair with her husband, would she have invited her into her home? It seems doubtful. If Bobby was having relations with Marilyn, it also seems doubtful he would host her at Hickory Hill. A Kennedy relative recalls that the only trepidation about that evening had to do with how many people were, by now, well aware that Marilyn and JFK had been intimate. What would happen if Jackie decided to show up at the party? She wasn’t invited, but what if? It was a risk. Maybe not one Marilyn was willing to take, though. She decided not to go, realizing that she would be seeing Bobby anyway at the end of the month at another party at Pete and Pat Lawford’s. She sent this telegram to Ethel and Bobby on June 13, 1962:

  Dear Attorney General and Mrs. Robert Kennedy: I would have been delighted to have accepted your invitation honoring Pat and Peter Lawford. Unfortunately, I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. After all, all we demanded was our right to twinkle. Marilyn Monroe.

  On Wednesday June 26, 1962, Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to return to Los Angeles—without Ethel—and Peter and Pat planned to return the favor and host another party for him at their home. “I want Bobby to see my new house,” Marilyn told Pat on the phone earlier that week. “Really?” Pat asked. “But why?” Marilyn didn’t really have an answer. She just wanted him to see it, she said. Pat tried to explain that, logistically, it would be complicated. After all, Bobby was coming straight to their house from the airport. She could think of no reason to bring him to her home. “Well, there would a reason if you had to come and pick me up,” Marilyn suggested. Of course, Marilyn could have driven to the Lawfords’ home herself. She wouldn’t let it go, though. So Pat gave in. On Monday, June 25, telephone records document that Marilyn called Bobby’s office in Washington to confirm that he would be at the Lawfords’ on Wednesday, and also to invite him to have a drink with her in her new home. She spoke to his secretary, Angie Novello, for one minute. And that’s how the very unlikely situation unfolded that saw Peter Lawford driving his wife, Pat, and Bobby Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe’s home on the twenty-eighth. Once there, Marilyn invited them in and showed Bobby around—Peter and Pat had previously been there.

  How very curious that Marilyn had no pretense about her environment whatsoever. She was incredibly down-to-earth, especially when one considers how big a star she was at the time. Her home was quite modest, just a few rooms. It wasn’t any bigger than the house the Bolenders owned in which she was raised. In fact, it was smaller! Yet she had no reservations at all about showing it off to Bobby Kennedy, a wealthy man who lived in an absolute mansion in Virginia on a sprawling estate. Her home was her home, and she was proud of it—no matter how small and inconsequential it may have seemed to outsiders—and she was eager to show it off. There were bigger concerns, she felt, than how much money she had or how well she displayed it. And in terms of housing, she was working on a more important structure. “As a person, my work is important to me,” she said during an interview this very same month. “My work is the only ground I’ve ever had to stand on. Acting is very important. To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation.”

  After just about a half hour, during which they sipped on glasses of sherry, the foursome got into Lawford’s car and then drove to their oceanfront home. At the end of the evening, Bobby Kennedy’s driver took back Marilyn Monroe back home—alone.

  The Lost Weekend

  Pat Kennedy Lawford didn’t know what to do about Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t know if the stories she had heard through the grapevine about her brothers and her friend were true. Marilyn had definitely been saying that she was dating Bobby. However, Pat knew that one of those “dates” had actually been a dinner party at her home in her brother’s honor, and that Marilyn had just been a guest. Whom could she believe? Certainly Marilyn had never been the most reliable source of information. She also couldn’t depend on her brothers to tell her the truth. After all, it wasn’t as if the Kennedy men were ever honest about their indiscretions. One thing seemed true, though. Bobby had told Marilyn to stop pestering his brother Jack, and she was very unhappy about it. Had she built up her in her mind her relationship with JFK to be something it wasn’t? And if so, maybe she did have the poor judgment to somehow end up sexually involved with Bobby. By this time, it was beginning to seem as if anything was possible, everyone’s reality was just that skewed. “It was as if we were all caught in Marilyn’s nightmare,” said one Kennedy relative. “Everything sort of satellited around Marilyn’s sickness and no one knew what was true and what wasn’t, who was lying and who wasn’t.”

  Desperate for some direction, Pat Kennedy Lawford telephoned Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s press aide. * “I told her, Pat, you should know better than to believe this nonsense,” he recalled years later. “She said, ‘Honest to God, Frank, I don’t know what to believe anymore between what I hear Marilyn is saying and what everyone else is saying.’ I said, ‘Well, hear what I’m saying, Pat. It’s not true. If it was, I would know and I don’t, so it’s not true.’ She was so grateful. She said, ‘Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much.’ ”

  At this same time, Frank Sinatra called Pat—unusual, in that they seldom spoke—to say that he was sorry he had targeted her husband after President Kennedy decided not to stay at the Sinatra home in Palm Springs. He said that he wanted to invite the Lawfords to his resort, the Cal-Neva Lodge, for the weekend. (Though Frank and Peter were still not on good terms, for business reasons better left to a Peter Lawford biographer to explain, they tolerated each other from time to time.) Sinatra told Pat that he was performing in the main room and singers Buddy Greco and Roberta Linn were working in the lounge.

  Cal-Neva, located exactly on the California–Nevada border, boasted a beautiful showroom (where the same performers who frequented Las Vegas—Fr
ank’s friends, for the most part—appeared), an enormous dining room, plus about twenty furnished cottages that cost about fifty dollars a day. The luxurious gambling casinos were located on the Nevada side of the compound. It was advertised as “Heaven in the High Sierras.” Pat was against the idea of flying to Nevada to see Sinatra. However, she felt she had to at least mention the invitation to her husband. He, of course, couldn’t wait to go. If Frank wanted to mend fences, Peter was going to be at his side with a hammer and nails. “Pat and Peter had a bit of a disagreement about it,” said Milt Ebbins. “All I can tell you is that Pat didn’t want to go and Peter said, ‘We can not turn down an invitation by Frank Sinatra. If Frank wants us there, we have to go.’ Pat hated hearing that kind of stuff from Peter. But she buckled, and they went.” Marilyn also said she would like to go. Upset about something that had just occurred with her mother at Rock Haven—it’s unknown what, exactly—she said she could use a weekend away.

  Therefore, against Pat’s better judgment, she, Peter, and Marilyn departed for Nevada on July 27, 1962, in a private plane provided by Sinatra and copiloted by Dan Arney. “She had no makeup on,” Arney recalled of Marilyn, “and I didn’t realize who she was until we got into the airport and George [Jacobs, Sinatra’s valet] came out in the station wagon and said, ‘You know, that’s Marilyn.’ ”

  When the trio—Peter, Pat, and Marilyn—arrived, Sinatra greeted them and then installed Marilyn in Chalet 52, one of the quarters he always reserved for special guests. He then asked Peter and Pat to leave so that he could have some time with Marilyn. George Jacobs says that Frank had heard she was “having a crisis” in her life and wanted to know more about it. “He knew what was going on,” said Jacobs, “I think, with the Kennedy business. Or, at least he heard rumors. He knew she was upset. He wanted to know more.”