The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (11 page)

Hours after Marilyn’s arrival on 7 February, naturally desperate to escape the hell-hole she found herself in, a concerned nurse at the centre had handed her a notepad and agreed to smuggle out a message to Lee and Paula Strasberg. The couple received this pitiful handwritten note the following day. It read:

Dear Lee and Paula,

Dr. Kris has put me in the hospital under the care of two
idiot
doctors. They
both should not be my doctors.
You haven’t heard from me because I’m locked up with these poor nutty people. I’m
sure
to end up a nut too if I stay in this nightmare. Please help me Lee. This is the
last
place I should be. Maybe if you called Dr. Kris and assured her of my sensitivity and that I must get back to class so I’ll be better prepared for ‘Rain’.

Please help me – if Dr. Kris assures you I am alright – you can assure her
I am not
. I do not belong here!

I love you both.

Marilyn

P.S. forgive the spelling – and there’s nothing to write on here. I’m on the dangerous floor. It’s like a cell. Can you imagine – cement blocks. They put me in here because they
lied
to me about calling my doctor and Joe [DiMaggio] and they had my bathroom door locked and I couldn’t get their key to get into it, so I broke the glass. But outside of that I haven’t done anything that is uncooperative.

Unfortunately, the Strasbergs, merely being friends of Marilyn, were powerless (or had no desire) to help. One day later, on Thursday 9 February, news of the actress’s stay in hospital reached the majority of the national newspapers. The piece in the
Daily News
even went as far as to reveal the alias which the actress had used when she booked herself in. Unsurprisingly, the announcement managed to attract an avalanche of newspaper reporters and photographers to the hospital.

An unidentified close friend of Monroe’s seen entering the hospital played down the situation by remarking to a
New York Post
reporter, ‘Marilyn’s entrance into the hospital means she has retired for a short rest. As for any special significance, this is none. Marilyn is prone into going into hospitals as a way of getting out of environment and escaping any conflict. She would go to a hospital the way another person might visit a doctor.’ Another individual making light of the matter was Ann Marlowe, the executive producer of Monroe’s planned television drama,
Rain
. Having cut short her Caribbean vacation to see the actress, she was quoted as saying as she entered the hospital, ‘The play will be video-taped as scheduled next month . . . Marilyn’s simply fatigued, just like she was in California when she was filming her picture,
The Misfits
. She went into the hospital for a rest this time. A hospital is the only place to get a real rest.’ On the steps outside, Marlowe added, ‘I have been in touch with the star and she will sign the contract for
Rain
as scheduled. All I can say is that she’s going to do it. She’s very eager to. This may postpone rehearsals a week, but that’s all.’

When quizzed about Marilyn’s condition, the actress’s press agent, John Springer, proceeded to bumble and fluster his way through a sequence of inconclusive, ill-informed answers. At first he confessed his ignorance of his client’s admittance to the hospital; then, after checking that she
had
in fact been admitted, decided to deny that the hospital specialised in dealing with psychiatric cases. His third statement was even more absurd, announcing that the actress had been admitted to ease her persistent cough. His fourth was both humorous and honest. ‘I have no idea what’s wrong with her,’ he confessed.

Preposterous stories about Marilyn and the hospital didn’t just originate from her unwitting press agent. Other stories broke which said that the
actress had been a patient at the hospital since Tuesday 5 December and, far from being confined to her small room, she had been bestowed with the privilege of being allowed to ‘periodically leave the building on a pass’ and had been seen out about on dates with Joe DiMaggio and
The Misfits
’ actor Montgomery Clift.

Journalists gathered in the Payne-Whitney’s lobby were now frantic for the truth. However, their endeavours for veracity were continually thwarted by the hospital’s tight-lipped officials. ‘Is she under restraint?’ asked one reporter. ‘Is she coherent?’ enquired another. But no answer was forthcoming. Nonetheless one shrewd reporter, Chiari Pisani, the American correspondent for the Italian magazine
Gente
, managed to accomplish what no other reporter was able to do. By contacting a staff doctor friend at the hospital and asking him to call one of the psychiatrists at the clinic familiar with Monroe’s case, she was able to pierce the hospital’s extremely tight barriers around the actress.

While Pisani eavesdropped intently, the friend asked the Payne-Whitney medic, ‘Has Marilyn inherited her mother’s mental condition, schizophrenia?’ Without any hesitation, the doctor clarified there were no symptoms. In her subsequent
Gente
column, Pisani reiterated this – ‘Schizophrenia is not a sickness you can inherit like epilepsy’ – and neatly summed up Monroe’s stay in the hospital by adding, ‘Marilyn does not have any mental problems. She is only psychiatrically disconnected in an acute way because she works too hard, two movies in one year and the recent third divorce.’

These revealing disclosures of course meant little to Marilyn, whose heart-rending pleas for assistance to escape her psychological tormentors were finally answered on Friday 10 February, when Joe DiMaggio appeared at the hospital. The actress had used her one permitted phone call to contact her former husband, who was in Fort Lauderdale at his Yankee Clipper Motel. After listening to tales of her torment, and realising that he was the one who had given his blessing to her admission, he assured Marilyn he would fly to New York immediately and do everything he could to release her.

When he reached Payne-Whitney’s reception desk early on Friday morning, he was in no mood for small talk. ‘I want my wife,’ he demanded aggressively. No one had the courage to point out to him that he and Marilyn were no longer legally married and that they had been separated for almost seven years. Instead, they tried telling him that they had no authority to release Miss Monroe to him or to anyone else. But DiMaggio was insistent. ‘If you do not release her to me,’ he warned, ‘I will take this place apart, brick by brick, piece of wood by piece of wood.’

Suddenly, following a hasty telephone discussion with Dr Kris, the
Payne-Whitney staff were informed by the hospital’s hierarchy that Monroe was indeed free to leave. It seemed that DiMaggio’s influential contacts had yanked the correct strings. (Assertions by Monroe biographer Donald Spoto that, at this point in time, she and the baseball legend ‘had not met for almost six years’, are completely inaccurate.) Just before she left the building, the actress looked across at the doctors and told them they should get their
own
heads examined.

And so, at five o’clock on Friday evening, when the majority of the waiting press hounds had seemingly gone home for the night, Joe began the daunting process of transferring his former wife from one hospital to another. However, their attempts to flee the building were hampered by two ever-vigilant members of the American paparazzi.
Journal-American
photographer John Dolan hid himself in the hospital’s back entrance, while reporter James Clarity held position in the hospital’s lobby. His persistent patrolling of the foyer was enough to hinder DiMaggio in his attempt to abscond. When the baseball legend caught sight of the reporter patiently patrolling his patch, he immediately turned on his tracks, returned inside and was forced to flee in a freshly hailed taxi.

Following Joe’s tip-off, an emotionally distraught Marilyn was forced to escape from the hospital through a maze of underground tunnels to another exit. This in turn led to a parking lot to where a limousine was waiting, motor running, to whisk her to her next destination, the New York Central Park West home of Lee and Paula Strasberg. Their daughter Susan recalled Monroe’s visit that day. ‘I saw her face just after she had been released from that New York mental clinic. There was an expression of amazement on her face as she talked. She said, “I was always afraid I was crazy like my mother but when I got in that psycho ward I realised
they
were really insane and I just had a lot of problems.”’

Following her brief meeting with the Strasbergs, Marilyn travelled on to the far less intimidating Neurological Institute of New York, at Fort Washington Avenue and West 168th Street. There, for the next 22 days, she rested in a private room to which her maid Lena Pepitone would regularly drop in soup, pasta, chocolate pudding and a fresh nightgown, and which DiMaggio would visit daily and decorate with fresh red roses.

Following her hasty departure from Payne-Whitney, the waiting paparazzi were left completely in the dark as to Monroe’s next destination. Innumerable phone calls to all the nearby hospitals and clinics were made by the news-hungry media. However, their attempts to find news of the actress’s current whereabouts were thoroughly fruitless. For the first time in many years, Marilyn had, albeit temporarily, successfully managed to evade the nation’s reporters. For 19 long hours, the whereabouts of the world’s most famous film star were completely shrouded in secrecy.

The ambiguity finally concluded at midday on Saturday 11 February, when a Columbia Medical Center spokesman announced that Marilyn had indeed been admitted there. In an exercise of damage limitation, a now fully clued-up John Springer moved swiftly to announce that ‘Miss Monroe was in the hospital for a complete psychical checkup. She is feeling well and is expected that her stay will not be prolonged.’ DiMaggio, along with Lee and Paula Strasberg, visited the actress on Sunday 12 February. With a large bunch of flowers resting firmly in his arms, DiMaggio forcibly informed reporters camped outside the building that the ‘exaggerated reports’ of her illness had ‘distressed’ her, adding, ‘She is suffering from nothing more than exhaustion following completion of two movies.’

Marilyn’s time at the hospital was indeed restful but it was also costly. Surviving hospital bills show that, on Thursday 23 February, the costs of a hired television, round-the-clock nurse and telephone calls to California came to a total of $1,113.38. Thanks to DiMaggio’s dinner and even more calls to Los Angeles, her bill the following day increased to $1,466.00.

Friends naturally rallied round. On Monday 27 February, the actress received a most uplifting telegram from Marlon Brando. In full it read, ‘Dear Marilyn, The best reappraisals are borne in the worst crisis. It has happened to all of us in relative degrees. Be glad for it and don’t be afraid of being afraid. It can only help. Relax and enjoy it. I send you my thoughts and my warmest affections. Marlon.’

On Wednesday 1 March, Marilyn handwrote a despondent letter to her doctor, Ralph Greenson. It began, ‘Just now when I looked out of the hospital window, where the snow had covered everything, suddenly everything is kind of a muted green. The grass, evergreen bushes – though the trees give me a little hope – the desolate bare branches promising maybe there will be spring and maybe they promise hope.’ The letter also displayed her anxieties, announcing that the previous night she was ‘awake all night again’, adding she sometimes wondered ‘what the night time is for. It almost doesn’t exist for me – it all seems like one long, long horrible day for me.’

Those observing Joe DiMaggio’s rescue of Marilyn from the Payne-Whitney hospital could not help but notice the depth of the love between them. Marilyn could always call, lean and depend on him. As she told a journalist in 1962, ‘To know that Joe is there is like having a life guard.’

But all was not well with the actress. Norman Rosten, a close friend of Marilyn’s, was another caller to the hospital. He noticed something quite significant. ‘During one of our visits,’ he recalled, ‘my wife and I found her lying pale and distracted on the upraised bed . . . she was ill, not only of the body and mind, but of the soul, the innermost engine of desire. That light was missing from her eyes.’

In truth, the unfortunate events at Payne-Whitney would haunt Monroe for the remainder of her short life. She believed that if Joe had not rescued her from the clinic when he did, she would have perished. Furthermore, Dr Marianne Kris soon realised that the incident was a serious error on her part as a psychoanalyst. Having once thought of her as a close friend, Marilyn now saw Kris as a betrayer and, following a heated confrontation between the pair, fired her soon after her release.

On Sunday 5 March, after 23 relaxing days in Room 719, Marilyn was discharged from the Columbia Presbyterian Center. The ever dependable but discreet DiMaggio was present to help her prepare for her release – although, with anger still running through her blood about what had happened, he was not her original choice. He was only summoned because Arthur Miller had flatly rejected her request to come.

As it transpired, Monroe and DiMaggio’s reunion did not end there. He would continue to fill the void left in her existence by Arthur Miller’s departure for the remainder of the actress’s life.

So was Marilyn’s month-long stay in two New York hospitals really precipitated by her inconsolable guilt following Clark Gable’s death? Like everyone in the movie industry, she was, of course, upset, but in truth they were hardly close. Furthermore, Marilyn, an emotionally battered woman, weaned on rejection and cruelty in her adolescent years, knew how to ride life’s punches. If not Gable’s death, what then had troubled Monroe’s mind enough to force her doctor’s hand into booking her into a psychiatric hospital? Was it her recent divorce from Arthur Miller? That is doubtful. Their marriage was dead many months before their separation became absolute and Marilyn, conjugally hardened by this point, recovered speedily from her latest marital blow.