Read The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story Online

Authors: Keith Badman

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Arts & Literature, #Actors & Entertainers, #Television Performers

The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (10 page)

BOOK: The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story
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He and Marilyn had first met in January 1960, in bungalow 21 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, during the filming of
Let’s Make Love
, when she was desperately in need of counselling following a heated argument with her acting coach, Paula Strasberg. Counselling sessions between the two of them did not however commence until the following May, shortly before Marilyn began shooting her penultimate movie, the drama-laden
The Misfits
, and it was during that film that he was forced into making his first major decision about the star.

In soaring temperatures of 95 to 110 degrees in the shade, the actress had played out her most demanding role. However, it became too much for her and she had difficulty with her performance. Director John Huston lost his patience and snapped, describing her as both ‘useless’ and ‘hopeless’. To ease her mental anguish she turned to her Nembutal tablets. As Huston recalled, ‘She took so many sleeping pills to rest that, in the morning, she had to take stimulants to wake her up and this
ravaged
the girl.’

Time spent on the set with one of the movie’s co-stars, Montgomery Clift, no doubt triggered her actions. They shared a lot in common, for instance, a love of New York and a hatred of Los Angeles. He often alluded to it as ‘Vomit, California.’ He was also a habitual user of narcotics. During a break in filming one day, he demonstrated to the actress how, by pricking the top of a Nembutal capsule and pouring its contents directly into a glass of water or champagne, the drug could be made to take effect much faster. Marilyn would remember this ‘trick’ and use it to devastating effect.

Production on the movie had been temporarily suspended when, on Monday 29 August 1960, Marilyn was flown out to Los Angeles and,
under the name of Mrs Miller, was placed in Westside Hospital, a small private Hollywood-based hospice, where doctors discovered she was a barbiturate addict and had been habitually taking approximately 20 sleeping pills a day, enough to kill a non-user. Amid threats that she was to be sacked, Greenson persuaded the producers of the movie to give Marilyn another try.

Eight months later, in May 1961, she reluctantly returned to Los Angeles and began seeing Greenson again, but this time on a more regular basis. However, he was not her first choice. He was, in truth, a last resort. As a friend of the actress once remarked, ‘I felt Ralph had a big ego. Like a lot of doctors he wanted to be God, and of all the analysts in LA she found him.’

In fact, seven other psychiatrists were approached before she decided to contact Greenson again. Due to her previous suicide attempt and the insanity which was known to be prevalent in her family, they had shied away from taking on the actress, fearing she might succeed in a bid to kill herself while under their care. But Greenson had no such qualms and possessed the courage to accept her as one of his patients. There was a dark drawback, though. His form of counselling was experimental, unorthodox and, most worryingly, highly dangerous. With so much time being spent in the doctor’s company, Monroe soon became aware that he was an advocate of the copious use of drugs, routinely prescribed barbiturates and tranquillisers. This extreme form of counselling would eventually drive Monroe deep into her own personal hell.

As time rolled on, depending on her emotional state, he would usually end up seeing her, both consistently and intensively, between five and seven times a week. ‘He saw her every day, for a fairly prolonged period of time,’ Greenson’s colleague Dr Hyman Engelberg ominously recalled, ‘and I just suspected that there was too much attachment for good, impartial judgement on his part.’

Marilyn’s initiation into psychoanalysis had begun in early 1951 when, in the aftermath of an unsuccessful attempt to contact her father, she began seeing Dr A. Gottesman at his clinic in Los Angeles, paying $200 for each session. In February 1955, two months after arriving in New York, and following a suggestion by her business partner, celebrity photographer Milton H. Greene, who sensed that Monroe might have certain mental difficulties, predominantly relating to her troubled childhood, Marilyn began visiting Freudian analyst Dr Margaret Hertz Hohenberg at her office up to five times a week. There she was stripped of her Hollywood glamour, subconsciously taken back to her childhood traumas and reminded of her ongoing depression and anxiety, her schizophrenic
mother and her unhappy relationships with men. The therapy clearly did not agree with the actress. In truth, it completely turned her life upside-down. The facts speak for themselves. Before psychoanalysis she appeared in 27 movies in eight years. Afterwards, in the same period of time, she starred in just six.

During the next 24 months, Marilyn’s personality was disassembled and reconstructed. Hohenberg also analysed her dreams and partook in free-association games with her, essential elements when searching for clues to the patient’s unconscious. To combat the intense emotional pain she was now encountering, and the powerful, all-consuming feelings of hopelessness engulfing her, Marilyn was prescribed larger and larger quantities of barbiturates. In turn, she began to question everything in her life. She told friends she felt as if she was ‘going round in circles’ and would significantly ask ‘not where I was going, but where I had been’.

Her intake of other prescription drugs (stimulants to keep her going during the day and relaxants to help with her insomnia at night) also snowballed. Her dependence on alcohol also grew, all of which was potentially disastrous for someone with so many anxieties and for an individual suspected of being manic-depressive. In 1957, and with no major breakthroughs seemingly accomplished with Hohenberg after two years of consistent consulting, Monroe’s then husband, Arthur Miller, recommended that she change to another psychoanalyst. Early that year, he suggested she should start seeing New York psychiatrist Dr Marianne Kris, another practitioner heavily slanted towards the theories of Freud. Monroe would visit Kris at her Central Park West offices five times a week and once again, she was administered barbiturates.

Their four-year doctor/patient relationship came to an abrupt and tragic end on Tuesday 7 February 1961, when the actress entered Manhattan’s famed eight-storey Payne-Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center, a hospice also known as ‘the rich people’s crazy house’. Marilyn had been harbouring guilt about the recent death of actor Clark Gable, and believed wrongly that his fatal heart attack had been precipitated by her perpetual tardiness on the set of
The Misfits
. Her fears apparently intensified when she caught sight of an article in which Gable’s widow Kay shockingly announced ‘
The Misfits
helped kill him . . . It
wasn’t
the physical exertion that did it. It
was
the waiting, waiting, waiting.’

Despite what folklore has led us to believe, it is in fact far from certain that Monroe’s unreliability contributed in any significant way to Gable’s death. For one thing, delays during filming never disturbed him. After working with the alcoholic actor Spencer Tracy, he was actually quite used to them. Tracy’s excessive drinking during the shooting of
San Francisco
in 1936 and
Boom Town
in 1940 had postponed filming for up to a week. In contrast, Marilyn’s actions would only defer things for a few hours. Clark was most supportive of her and never once displayed to her or their fellow cast members how impatient he was with her unpunctuality. In an interview carried out just days before his death, on Wednesday 16 November 1960, Gable gave credence to this by remarking, ‘She might have arrived late at the studio sometimes but when Marilyn was there, she was
really
there. Other actresses can arrive early and
never ever
be there.’ For another, despite being regarded as the fittest man on
The Misfits
set, Clark was in poor health during the making of the movie. His intake of three packs of cigarettes a day, while filming in the scorching, flat Nevada desert, obviously did not help his well-being.

Furthermore, the blame game actually stalked several other paths. American gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, believing the claim that Clark had over-asserted himself in stunts involving wild horses during the filming, placed Gable’s death squarely on the shoulders of the film’s director, John Huston. (Marilyn herself soon took issue with this, and quickly informed Hopper that Gable only did the things in scenes in which his face was shown and that a stunt man did most of the other heavy work.) Other commentators would announce that they believed the actor’s death was actually correlated to overwhelming grief following the death of his good friend, Hollywood actor Ward Bond, just 11 days earlier on Saturday 5 November.

Whatever the truth, Marilyn’s attempts to shrug off Kay Gable’s remarks failed, and suicide, by throwing herself out of her New York apartment window, was apparently contemplated. In her 1979 book,
Marilyn Monroe Confidential
, the actress’s personal maid Lena Pepitone recalled, ‘The window was wide open. Marilyn was standing before it with her white robe on . . . The only time she ever came near the window was to wave good night to me. This was more than strange. Both of her hands grasped the outside housing. It looked as if she might jump. I ran over and surprised Marilyn by grabbing her around the waist. She turned round and fell into my arms . . . ’

Evidently, details of this recklessness were passed on to Dr Kris and, after one particularly painful counselling session between her and the actress, the psychiatrist suggested Marilyn should book herself into a health centre. The person who gave his blessing to the plan was Joe DiMaggio. Leonard Lyons of
The New York Post
reported. ‘Joe DiMaggio apparently has assumed the responsibility for making the decisions about his ex-wife’s welfare.’ His report continued: ‘DiMaggio stepped in quietly, unobtrusively and ably, the way he always moves. He heads the contingent of her advisors who will see to it that Miss Monroe receives the care and
rest she needs after her recent, trying experiences both domestic and professional.’

Trusting his instincts and believing it was for a physical examination and rest, Monroe checked herself into the Payne-Whitney Psychiatric Clinic two days later under the alias ‘Miss Faye Miller’.

Immediately she was led to a small, white-painted cell completely bereft of any comforts. As the room’s heavy door slammed shut behind her, she realised she was not there for a sabbatical. She was being
institutionalised
. Marilyn froze when she heard the ominous snap of a lock closing tightly behind her. Kris had tricked both her and DiMaggio. The actress had been placed in the ward for the most seriously disturbed and depressed. For her, this was the worst fear of her life come true. She had been imprisoned like her mother in a mental asylum.

For four long, excruciatingly distressing days, while most of Broadway and Hollywood thought she was away, studying acting and readying herself for her role in the television drama
Rain
, Marilyn found herself locked away from the world, holed up in two different poky cement block cells completely devoid of lights and buzzers to summon a nurse. She was totally alone. When the sunlight filtered into her first room, the only objects on which Marilyn could gaze were the barred windows, the sealed entrance to her toilet, the scrawling on the walls left by its previous occupants and the door’s glass panes, through which the nurses could glance.

Later, when darkness set in, she distracted herself from the mind-numbing blackness and the incessant screams of her fellow inmates by pounding her fists against the cell’s rock-hard door until her fists were raw. When Monroe’s screams of protest and demands to be released went unheeded, she picked up the chair in her cell and smashed it against the pane of glass in her locked bathroom. ‘It was hard to do,’ she admitted. ‘I had never broken anything in my life.’ Marilyn grabbed a small fragment, placed it in the palm of her hand and walked over and sat on her bed waiting for the nurses to arrive, which they did within moments.

The actress was threatened with restraint. ‘If you’re going to treat me like a nut, I’ll act like a nut,’ Marilyn shouted and informed them that if they didn’t release her, she would harm herself. As she tellingly revealed in a letter of March 1961 to Greenson, ‘I’m an actress and would
never
intentionally mark or mar myself. I’m just that vain.’

After the incident, however, the actress was spied on continuously. It has even been erroneously claimed that she stripped off her hospital-style gown and sat naked on the cell’s floor so that observers peering through the glass on her small room had something to look at. A Puerto Rican orderly employed on the sixth floor at the hospital remembered, ‘Marilyn
was afraid of being left alone. On Wednesday night [8 February], she went and stood before a window and took off her clothes (
sic
). Someone thought she might do harm to herself so a nurse was called and Marilyn was taken to a security ward on the ninth (
sic
) floor, where patients have less freedom and are kept under constant guard.’ Marilyn recalled the transfer to another floor quite differently, later remarking, ‘They asked me to go quietly and I refused to move . . . so they picked me up by all fours, two hefty men and two hefty women and carried me up to the seventh floor in the elevator. I must say, at least they had the decency to carry me face down . . . I just wept quietly all the way there.’

The actress was immediately placed in another small, decidedly poky cell. Almost at once, a rather large, menacing nurse insisted she take a bath. ‘I’ve just had one,’ she retorted. ‘As soon as you change floors you have to take another bath,’ the nurse informed her. But she was unrepentant. No bath. The doctor in charge of the building soon arrived and shockingly informed Marilyn, ‘You’re a very, very sick girl and have been a very, very sick girl for many years. How could you possibly work when you are depressed? Does it interfere with your work?’ The actress was aghast at his line of questioning and angrily fired back, ‘Don’t you think that perhaps Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin and perhaps Ingrid Bergman have been depressed when they worked sometimes? It’s like saying a ball-player like [Joe] DiMaggio, could he hit the ball when he was depressed? How
silly
.’

BOOK: The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story
5.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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