The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe—my fifteenth book—was, without a doubt, my most challenging, primarily because its development took so many years. I first began to work on it in 1995 at the time I was writing Sinatra: A Complete Life, my biography of Frank Sinatra. Then, in 1998 and 1999, as I wrote Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot, I continued to keep the Monroe project on the back burner. I always knew that many of the interviews I would conduct for books about Sinatra and the Kennedys could and should be utilized in a book about Marilyn Monroe. I was very fortunate to draw from these interviews because, in the intervening years, many of those valuable sources would pass away. However, I believe that each is well served on these pages.

  Also, I am very fortunate to have been associated with the same private investigator and chief researcher, Cathy Griffin, for the last twenty years. Much to my great advantage, Cathy has also worked on a number of books about Marilyn Monroe in the past. Therefore, I was able to rely on her many years of research, including invaluable interviews she conducted in the past, again with people no longer with us.

  I must acknowledge my domestic agent, Mitch Douglas. He has been a very important person in my life and career for more than ten years, and I thank him for his constant and enthusiastic encouragement. He went the extra mile for me, especially with this book.

  Dorie Simmonds of the Dorie Simmonds Agency in London has not only been an amazing agent for me in Europe for the last ten years, but a loyal and trusted friend. I so appreciate her dedication to me and to my work. Dorie manages to perform miracles for me on a daily basis, and I don’t know how she puts up with me. However, I do know that an author could not ask for better representation, or a better friend.

  My capable fact checker and editor, James Pinkston, has worked for me on my last five books. He reviews everything I write long before anyone at Grand Central ever sees it—thank goodness! I can’t imagine what kind of book we would be publishing if not for Jim’s tireless quest for accuracy. Working with him on The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe has been a true honor and joy.

  THE TRUE EXPERTS

  Whenever I write a new book, I am fortunate to meet people who have devoted their lives to better understanding my present subject. If an author such as me is lucky enough to be able to call upon true experts in the field in which he’s working, it just makes for a better and more comprehensive book. Happily, I had the good fortune of being able to call upon one of the greatest, I think, experts in all things Marilyn, and that’s James Haspiel. I thank him for the time he gave in setting straight some of the myths about Marilyn. Mr. Haspiel was not only a fan of Marilyn’s, he became a close friend of hers. In fact, if I had to recommend any of the many books that have been published about Marilyn over the last forty years, I would wholeheartedly recommend Haspiel’s two books, Young Marilyn: Becoming the Legend and Marilyn Monroe: The Ultimate Look at the Legend. They’re both revelatory not only because they are so personal in scope but because the many photographs of James as a youngster with the stunning Marilyn in her prime are absolutely priceless. I was truly inspired by James’s devotion to Marilyn and by the way he brought her to life in his books. No doubt, every author’s vision of a subject is different, and so I am therefore not sure how James will feel about my “take” on his greatest star—but I have so loved his. Mr. Haspiel was interviewed on March 17, 1998, and again in April 2008.

  I also have to thank my very good friend of many years, Charles Casillo. Charles is another “ultimate” Marilyn Monroe fan who understands her character and personality so well. He also brought her to life in a different way, a fictional telling of her story called The Marilyn Diaries. It’s a terrific book and I would recommend it as well. I want to thank Charles for setting me straight on so many details about Marilyn’s life. To show you how long Charles and I have been thinking about Marilyn’s life and career, he and I actually interviewed Kennedy hairdresser Mickey Song more than ten years ago—he touched up Marilyn’s hair for her “Happy Birthday” performance at Madison Square Garden in 1962. I had completely forgotten that we collaborated on that effort until I found the tape recording of the interview while researching this book. Whereas I, apparently, have a bad memory for such things—thank goodness for tape recorders!—Charles does not. He remembers virtually everything having to do with Marilyn Monroe, and for that I thank him. This is a much better book because of him.

  Maryanne Reed allowed me access to her complete collection of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia, most of which was culled from the files of the newspaper Hollywood Citizen-News and the Woman’s Home Companion, both of which are now defunct. I am so grateful to her. This material was invaluable to me in that it provided many leads and also included the unpublished notes and interviews of reporters who were covering Marilyn for the News and Companion in the 1950s. I listened to and utilized in this work thirty-five previously unpublished taped interviews and conversations with Marilyn intimates such as Jim Dougherty, Ida Bolender, Wayne Bolender, and costars such as Jane Russell, Betty Grable, and Lauren Bacall, all of which Ms Reed generously had transferred from reel-to-reel format to cassette for my convenience.

  Also, Maryanne Reed has on file many documents associated with Inez Melson’s relationship with Gladys Baker and Marilyn Monroe. This includes correspondence between Ms. Baker and Ms. Melson, as well as rare published interviews such as one that appeared with Melson in The Listener (London) on August 30, 1979. Acquired through a private purchaser, they became key to my research. Importantly, Ms. Reed also obtained from a private source tapes of interviews conducted with Eleanor “BeBe” Goddard that were made in or around January 1991. She also provided me with documents relating to Emmeline Snively, including a rare interview with her that was published in the Los Angeles Daily News on February 4, 1954. Working with Maryanne was a real pleasure and I am eternally grateful to her for everything she did for me while I was working on The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe.

  GENERAL RESEARCH

  Over the course of years I have devoted to The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, a great number of people went out of their way to assist me, literally hundreds of relations, entertainment journalists, socialites, lawyers, celebrities, show business executives and former executives, associates, and friends as well as foes, classmates, teachers, neighbors, newspersons, and archivists. However, at the very beginning of this project, I sat down with my researchers and investigators and posed the very important question: What is there about Marilyn Monroe that has not been reported in about a hundred other books about her? It took us some time to answer that question, and we had a few false starts over the years—as my publisher well knows! However, it was the relationship between Marilyn and her mother, Gladys Baker, that began to most fascinate me as we continued our research, and I soon realized that it was one of the stories I most wanted to tell on these pages—because it had never before been told. I must thank my amazing researcher Michael Stevens, who uncovered much of the information on the Rock Haven Sanitarium and of Gladys Baker’s time there. What a wonderful job he did for me on this book! He dedicated himself to Ms. Baker’s memory and was truly a champion of hers during this entire process. Together, we went on an amazing fact-finding journey, and I thank him so much for the experience. I’ll never forget a moment of it. Also, he obtained from a private collector more than twenty-five files from Rock Haven regarding Gladys’s treatment there, most of which were invaluable to my research.

  Also important, I must acknowledge all of the fine people at Julien’s Auctions for making available to me so many of the letters and notes from Gladys Baker that were utilized in this book and, I might proudly add, for the first time in any Marilyn Monroe biography. Also, my researchers obtained a treasure trove of material—including correspondence from Gladys Baker, Berniece Baker, BeBe Goddard, Arthur Miller, Joe DiMaggio, Dr. Ralph Greenson, and, of course, Marilyn Monroe—from the following auction houses: Bonham’s, Butterfields, Christie’s, Hunt Auctions, and Sotheby’s.

  I�
�ve had many investigators and researchers over the years, but none who have been as consistent as Cathy Griffin. Cathy is also a fine journalist in her own right. It would be easy with a subject as popular as this one to simply reinterview those people who have told their stories to others and hope for an occasional new angle. However, Cathy always manages to locate people who have new, previously untold stories—such as the story of Charles Stanley Gifford Jr., the man Marilyn believed to be her half brother. Gifford broke his silence for the first time on these pages, and I thank him for his interview of May 9, 2008. How Cathy ever locates people like him, I’ll never know, but I’m very glad she does. This particular work represents our seventh book together. I thank her for her assistance over the years, her tenacity, and, most of all, her friendship.

  Thank you, also, to Jane Maxwell, a terrific pop culture historian who allowed me to have access to all of her notes and files concerning Natasha Lytess. Her assistance was invaluable. She also gave me access to all of the documents that were culled from her research using “The Milton Greene Papers.”

  Also, I would like to thank Juliette Burgonde, Cloe Basiline, Maxime Rhiette, Suzalie Rose, and especially Mary Whitaker in London, who helped with the UK research.

  Thanks to Samuel Elliot for helping us with all of the Bolender family history. What a tangled web that was to sort through, and I could not have done it without Mr. Elliot.

  Of course, I reviewed every one of Marilyn Monroe’s films, as well as all of the made-for-television movies and miniseries about her and, obviously, scores of documentaries. I would not have had access to all of this material had it not been for the efforts of Nick Scotti in the United Kingdom. I definitely owe him a debt of gratitude for procuring all of this important research material for me. Also, I reviewed—and it took months, I might add—the vast 20th Century-Fox collection at UCLA, which contains detailed letters from executives about all of Monroe’s movies at the studio, legal and production files pertaining to same, as well as daily production reports. This material was also important to my research in all areas of this book.

  Thanks also to the staffs of the Hans Tasiemka Archives in London and the Special Collections Library of the University of California in Los Angeles.

  As always, Marybeth Evans in London did a terrific job at the Manchester Central Library reviewing reams of documents for me and pointing me to just the ones I needed for this book.

  Thanks also to Suzalie Rose, who did research for me in libraries in Paris. She and Carl Mathers spent so much time thinking about Marilyn and coming up with new ways to tell her story.

  I also have to thank the fine folks at Photofest for some of the terrific photographs that are found in this book. I go to Photofest first whenever I begin the process of selecting pictures to illustrate my books. They always come through for me, and I thank them.

  Bernie Abramson, who was a personal photographer for President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had photographs of Marilyn with Peter Lawford, Pat Kennedy Lawford, and Frank Sinatra that he’d taken and that I had never before seen. I am so grateful to him for allowing us to publish them here, for the very first time in any Marilyn Monroe biography.

  I want to thank all of the dedicated people at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their assistance on this and all of my books. I must also thank James Pinkston for all of the time he spent at the Academy Library for me.

  I also owe a debt of gratitude to Donald Spoto, the best-selling author of the excellent Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, for his having donated all of his interview tapes for that project to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His generous donation made it possible for me to obtain background and quotes from Marilyn Monroe’s publicist, Patricia Newcomb, and also from other sources who are either dead or were simply not available to me at this time. I also must acknowledge Maurice Zolotow, who wrote the first in-depth biography of Marilyn Monroe—Marilyn Monroe—published in 1960, before her death. Mr. Zolotow stored many of his papers in a collection at the University of Texas, and his impeccable research was vital to my own. As a side note, I have always been moved by the poignant last passage in Zolotow’s book about Marilyn. He wrote, “Now, at thirty-four, Monroe has it all… [but her] great achievement has been the making of herself and the imposition of her will and her dream upon the whole world.… In one sense, then, her life is completed because her spirit is formed and has achieved itself. No matter what unpredictable events may lie in her future, they cannot change who she is and what she has become. And there will be many surprises and alterations in her life ahead; there will be, in Hart Crane’s phrase, ‘new thresholds, new anatomies.’ In her heart is a questing fever that will give her no peace.… her soul will always be restless, unquiet.”

  I would be remiss in not mentioning the other preeminent Marilyn Monroe biography, and that is, of course, Anthony Summer’s Goddess. It’s one of the first books historians most often turn to when trying to understand Miss Monroe—and rightly so.

  Numerous other organizations and institutions provided me with articles, documents, audio interviews, video interviews, transcripts, and other material that was either utilized directly in The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe or just for purposes of background. Therefore, I would like to express my gratitude to the following institutions: the American Academy of Dramatic Arts; the American Film Institute Library; the Associated Press Office (New York); the Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley); the Billy Rose Theater Collection in the Library of the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, New York; the Boston Herald Archives; the Beverly Hills Library; the University of California, Los Angeles; Corbis-Gamma/Liason; the Ernest Lehman Collection at USC; the Glendale Central Public Library; the Hedda Hopper Collection in the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills; the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts; the Kobal Collection; the Los Angeles Times; the Los Angeles Public Library; the Louella Parsons Collection at the University of Southern California; the Margaret Herrick Library (Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences); the Museum of Broadcasting, New York; the former Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio archives, now part of the Turner Entertainment Group, Los Angeles; the Museum of the Film; the National Archives and the Library of Congress; the New York City Municipal Archives; the New York University Library; the New York Daily News; the New York Post; the New York Times; Occidental College (Eagle Rock, California); the Philadelphia Public Library; the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News; the Time-Life archives and Library, New York; the Universal Collection at the University of Southern California; the University of Southern California; and, finally, Rex Features.

  SOURCES AND OTHER NOTES

  In all of my books I provide documentation of firsthand sources, which I think is very important to most readers. I also usually set forth the hundreds of other books, periodicals, magazine, and newspaper articles consulted by myself and my researchers. After careful deliberation, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that the listing of such material is nothing more than typing practice for all concerned. In truth, in my twenty-five years of authoring books about public figures, I have encountered very few people who have ever actually paid attention to such material. Therefore, with this, my fifteenth book, I am going to dispense with the customary page-after-page accounting of secondary source material, if only for the sake of space and time considerations. In a few cases, I will mention secondary source material in the notes that follow if I think it’s important to understanding my research. Generally, though, I can assure my readers that many books about Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys, Frank Sinatra, and others were reviewed as part of my research, as were countless newspaper and magazine articles.

  Also, in writing about a person as popular and also as beloved as Marilyn Monroe, a biographer is bound to find that many sources with valuable information prefer to not be named in the text. This is reasonable. Throug
hout my career, I have understood that for a person to jeopardize a long-standing, important relationship with a celebrity or a famous person’s family just for the sake of one of my books is a purely personal choice. Nevertheless, I appreciate the assistance of many people close to Marilyn who, over the years, gave of their time for this project. I will respect the wish for anonymity of those who require it, and, as always, those who could be identified are named in these notes.

  The following notes and source acknowledgments are by no means comprehensive. Rather, they are intended to give you, the reader, a general overview of my research.

  PART ONE: THE BEGINNING

  I relied heavily on the interview with Nancy Jeffrey, only surviving foster daughter of Ida and Wayne Bolender, conducted on May 21, 2008. I thank her so much for her trust and confidence.

  I’d also like to thank Louise Adams for her insight into the lives of Gladys Baker and Ida Bolender. Also, Rose Anne Cooper—who worked at the Rock Haven Sanitarium in La Crescenta, California—was extremely helpful and spent more hours with me in 2007 and 2008 than I’m sure she cares to remember. She even had photographs of Rock Haven, key to my understanding of the environment there. I owe a real debt of gratitude to both Ms. Adams and Ms. Cooper, both of whom I interviewed on February 1, 2007, April 10, 2007, June 15, 2007, and January 3, 2008.

  I must give special acknowledgment to Mary Thomas-Strong, whose mother was a close friend of Ida Bolender’s. I interviewed Ms. Thomas-Strong on April 1, 2008, April 3, 2008, and April 10, 2008. She also provided me with boxes of material invaluable to my research and to my understanding the complex relationship between Ida, Gladys Baker, and Norma Jeane. This material included correspondence files between her mother and Ida Bolender. It also included The Legend of Marilyn Monroe, a rare film source of information from 1964, from David L. Wolper Productions, Inc. This documentary features what I believe to be the only televised interview with Ida and Wayne Bolender. Ms. Thomas-Strong also provided for me the medical files of Della M. Monroe from the Norwalk State Hospital, including her death certificate (#4081). Moreover, she provided me with a copy of the documentary Marilyn: Beyond the Legend.