Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (91 page)

• On her future: “I want to be an artist and an actress with integrity. As I said once before, I don’t care about the money. I just want to be wonderful.”

But Marilyn had been burned so often by the press that she seemed not to trust Meryman entirely, and by the conclusion of their sessions she seemed to him cool and withdrawn. When photographer Allan Grant arrived to take the photos that would accompany the interview, Marilyn was, as Pat and Eunice recalled, in a giddy mood, making funny faces and joking. “What are you, some kind of a nut?” Meryman asked with remarkable insensitivity. This stopped her cold, for his remark had obviously hurt, and she was wary when he delivered a transcript of their conversation on July 9.

Marilyn requested only one cut from her taped remarks: “She asked me to take out a remark she had made about quietly giving money to needy individuals.” Like the best of herself, her charity would remain private, a secret between her and those she longed to help. She walked with him to the driveway, and then, just as he was about to
depart, she stepped forward. “Please,” she said in a whisper, “please don’t make me a joke.”

After completing the month’s scheduled photo sessions and interviews, Marilyn and her old friend Sidney Skolsky were reunited—the first meeting in over a year—for a project that had long been important for both of them: he would produce and she would star in a film of Jean Harlow’s life. But first they would need the cooperation of Harlow’s mother, “Mama Jean” Bello, and so on Sunday, July 15, they traveled to Indio, a town near Palm Springs. There they found the charmingly eccentric old lady, surrounded by relics, photographs and mementos of her beloved “Baby Jean.” Her approval was immediately forthcoming, for she took one look at Marilyn and declared that she could swear her baby had come back from the dead.

To those who knew the continuing parallels in the lives of the two platinum blondes, Mama Jean would not have sounded far from the mark. In fact, an outline of Jean Harlow’s last months provides an eerie stencil for Marilyn’s:

On January 30, 1937, the newly re-elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt invited Jean to his Birthday Ball in Washington; in order to attend, she had to leave the filming of
Personal Property
, which caused a dustup in Hollywood—at least until Louis B. Mayer realized the enormous publicity value of her appearance.

That spring of 1937, Jean spoke with Carolyn Hoyt, an interviewer from
Modern Screen:
“I have achieved, of late, a degree of peace. I feel now at peace with myself and with my world. I have attained this by forcing myself to realize that all I can do is done in the best way I know—and that, as they say, is that.” The sentiments might have been uttered by Marilyn to Meryman.

Also during the spring of 1937, Jean’s recurring illnesses were blithely treated with only sedatives and narcotics by the notorious Dr. E. C. Fishbaugh, who prescribed the same, and with the same harmful effects, for Fay Wray’s alcoholic husband.

On June 7, 1937—twenty-five years to the day before Marilyn was fired from
Something’s Got to Give
—Jean Harlow died of kidney failure, her last film incomplete. She was twenty-six, a creature of Hollywood, loved by millions, at last recognized for her talents—yet in the end failed by her Hollywood colleagues.

After taking tea with Mrs. Bello, her guests returned to Los Angeles. The three agreed to meet again in August, and before that, Marilyn and Sidney decided to meet two weeks later, at four o’clock on the afternoon of Sunday, August 5, to work on a treatment for
The Jean Harlow Story
.

Despite her almost daily injections, the difficulties of her sessions with Greenson and the uncertainties of the future, there was a fresh maturity in Marilyn Monroe that summer. And although she was dependent on certain chemicals, they seemed only fitfully to stymie her life—and this itself may be testimony to her fundamental strength, her resolve to overcome obstacles past and present. “Summarizing this time,” said Pat Newcomb, “I would say that yes, she was in control of things.”

Ralph Roberts heartily agreed. “She was really taking control of her life and asserting herself that summer,” he said, sentiments echoed by, among others, Rupert Allan and Susan Strasberg. Roberts recalled that during the last months of her life, Marilyn was more optimistic than she had been in two years. She nurtured a close friendship with Wally Cox and renewed one with Wally’s special friend, Marlon Brando. “And she saw,” Roberts added, “that Greenson was severing all her close relationships, one by one. He had tried to cut me and the Strasbergs and Joe out of her life—and now Marilyn said he thought it would be better if she dismissed Pat Newcomb, too. By the end of July, Marilyn realized that if she was going to have any friends left, any life of her own at all, she might have to disconnect from Greenson.”

This decision would soon be firm, but first there was the matter of her relationship with Fox. By Wednesday, July 25, Hal Kanter had completed his revision of
Something’s Got to Give
and submitted it to Peter Levathes, Weinstein’s future being now as uncertain as that of Skouras and company.

Marilyn welcomed Levathes to her home on that same day, July 25. Before his arrival, Marilyn was awake early and, determined to look her best, greeted Agnes Flanagan (who washed and styled her hair) and Allan Snyder (who deftly applied a morning makeup). Cautious about a discussion without an agent or attorney present, Marilyn then asked Pat Newcomb to come over and stand unseen behind a bedroom door, to witness her meeting with Levathes.

In 1992, Levathes provided an account of that morning with Marilyn, and his recollection was later confirmed by Pat:

As so often with Marilyn’s history at Fox, we simply decided to reinstate her. I was the one responsible for firing her, so I wanted to be the one to personally rehire her. No one wanted bad blood. She told me she didn’t want her name tarnished, nor did she wish to ruin anyone. She did not seem unhappy or depressed at all, she asked if we could review the new script and we did. She read it and was very astute about it, thinking carefully before she made some excellent suggestions. Marilyn saw, for example, great comic potential for a scene she had in mind: “A woman who has been off on a desert island for years wouldn’t eat so delicately with knives and forks . . .” And she suggested another scene in which her character just forgot about shoes, because she was unused to wearing them. I remember saying, “Marilyn, these are beautiful ideas!” She was very happy and creative and glad to have a say in the revised script. She was in fine spirits and looking forward to getting back to work.

It seemed to Levathes that all the anguish, all the pain could have been avoided but for “her so-called advisers, who caused her a terrible identity crisis.” He told her that the lawsuits would be dropped, and that she was to be rehired at a higher salary; to whom, he asked, ought the new contract be sent? Marilyn hesitated, then said she would reply later that week. She seemed to him very pleasant and reasonable, and before he departed she said something that stayed with him over the years:

You know, Peter, in a way I’m a very unfortunate woman. All this nonsense about being a legend, all this glamour and publicity. Somehow I’m always a disappointment to people.

He never saw her again, for very soon his fortunes changed, if not as dramatically as hers.

When I said good-bye, she returned to the task she was engaged in when I arrived. There was an array of photos of her [by Bert Stern and George Barris], contact sheets and prints all over the floor, and she was making decisions about them. This was not, I thought, a shallow person, and I was sorry I never really knew her. She was a woman who made distinctions, who thought about her life, who knew the difference between sham and reality. She had depth. Of course she was enormously complex and I had a sense of some real underlying suffering there. But at her best there was no one like her. The wounds with Fox were healed, and when I last saw her, she was like a young and beautiful starlet, eager to do a picture that now had real possibilities.

Their hopes were unrealized, for soon there was another corporate earthquake at Fox. Darryl F. Zanuck was elected president of Twentieth Century–Fox, Levathes was booted out, and Milton Gould and John Loeb resigned from the board. Every decision made before Zanuck’s return was to be reevaluated, but after forty years in the business, even he (who never had a great appreciation of Marilyn’s talents) knew something about the box office. If anything had to give, he said, it would not be Marilyn Monroe. Zanuck personally attended the meetings on the recommencement of
Something’s Got to Give
.

For the last weekend of July, Marilyn had been invited to be the Lawfords’ guest at the new Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe, where Frank Sinatra was going to sing. To this she had readily agreed, and (as Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan knew) she had telephoned Joe and asked him to meet her there. Although Robert Kennedy was due to arrive in Los Angeles that weekend and she had originally planned to hear an address he was to give, there were now more important matters on Marilyn’s agenda. Except for her appearance at Sinatra’s Saturday evening performance, she and Joe kept a low profile during the entire weekend. “She didn’t want to be seen about too much,” recalled Roberts, “because she was afraid of any discord between Joe and Frank.”

Marilyn did, however, want to meet briefly with Dean Martin, who was also at the Lodge that weekend—not only to express thanks for his support during the June crisis but also to discuss briefly a movie project that Arthur Jacobs wanted to produce for her and Dean, a comedy called
I Love Louisa
. Next week, Marilyn said, she was going to watch some of the films of director J. Lee Thompson, whom Arthur had suggested.

For years, there were scurrilous and unfounded rumors of Marilyn accidentally overdosing on barbiturates that weekend and requiring
emergency revival; and rumors of Marilyn socializing with various figures from the criminal underworld with whom she became sexually involved (among them, Johnny Roselli, Bugsy Seigel and Sam Giancana). But the actor Alex D’Arcy, who knew Marilyn (since appearing with her in
How To Marry a Millionaire
) and was also a close friend of Roselli—a key mob figure in Los Angeles—hotly denied both insinuations: “There was absolutely never any affair between Marilyn and any of these men,” he said. “In fact there was no connection between Marilyn and the mob at all! She was in Lake Tahoe to be with Joe!” Betsy Duncan Hammes, who also knew Roselli and Sinatra well, agreed: “I was in Lake Tahoe that weekend, and I saw Marilyn eating dinner. Giancana and his crowd weren’t there, and I would have known if they were.”

On Sunday evening, Marilyn returned to Los Angeles with the Lawfords, and Joe headed for San Francisco, to appear in an exhibition game and to tell his family what he and Marilyn had decided that weekend. As Valmore Monette confirmed, Marilyn had finally agreed to remarry Joe. “He loved her a great deal and they had always been in contact,” according to Monette, “and he told me that he had decided to remarry her. He thought things would be different than they had been before and that everything would work out well for them now. I knew that was why he left us and was going back out there in 1962.”

Marilyn and Joe planned a wedding date of Wednesday, August 8, in Los Angeles, and a radiant Marilyn returned home with Joe’s pajamas. “She was fighting to take responsibility for her own life,” said Susan Strasberg, “and so she was getting out of relationships that were not good for her and back into one that was. She knew she needed some sort of emotional and spiritual anchor.” The same need could be said of Joe, who had become a kind of commercial Flying Dutchman, respected but lonely.

On Monday, July 30, Marilyn saw excerpts from Thompson’s films in Arthur Jacobs’s screening room and, on the spot, agreed to accept him as director for
I Love Louisa
early in 1963.
⁴
Jacobs added that
Jule Styne, who had given Marilyn “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” for
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, had agreed to write new songs for her. The same day, Marilyn tried to reach Milton Rudin, for she wished to make a new will; as attentive and supportive as he had been, however, Rudin felt that he could not sign a will and certify that she was of sound and disposing mind, for he believed her to have serious problems with both pills and paranoia. In a way, Rudin was correct, for Marilyn’s problems were far from solved, and she knew she had to face her dependence on drugs and on Greenson just as she had to continue a maturation that in many ways was just now beginning. But that she was of unsound mind is quite another assertion.
⁵

Since her teens, Marilyn had long believed she had nothing else to offer but what Grace Goddard, photographers and studios claimed: the mass appeal of her beauty and her body. She also believed that “Marilyn Monroe,” although at least partly a false pretender, represented a part of her true self. She had indeed encouraged an image of sexual allure and availability, and the endorsement and acceptance of her in those terms were important.

But there was another aspect of her personality—or more accurately, a real identity behind the persona. Marilyn had often tried to repress and disguise the image with black wigs and dark glasses, without makeup. She tried to separate herself from “Marilyn Monroe” by reducing “her” to another, a third person—“her”—“Would you like to see me be her?” Unlike other screen stars, Marilyn never fused the two. Marlene Dietrich, for example, eventually believed the illusion created for her, and the fall that injured her body at the age of seventy-five also wounded something within. Believing her youth and illusory self were all she had, Dietrich had to withdraw from public
view when the youth and glamour faded, and for the last sixteen years of her life she was virtually a recluse.