The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (12 page)

What then so disturbed the inner peace of Tinseltown’s greatest star? My belief is that beauty-obsessed Marilyn had started to wake up to the fact that she was maturing, and the thought that she was no longer a desirable young starlet greatly distressed her. Of course, even by Hollywood standards, at the age of 34 Marilyn was not assumed to be past her prime. She was still young in comparison with many of Tinseltown’s finest contemporary stars. But Marilyn Monroe was no ordinary star. Described by millions as ‘the girl with the most desirable, childlike beauty in the world’ and ‘
the
sex symbol of the age’, she knew that, at some point, her time as the globe’s leading sex-bomb would pass and her shelf life would expire. However, unlike contemporary blonde sex-sirens such as Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren and the British star Diana Dors, she was not about to lose her crown and stature without a fight.

In fact, as long ago as Friday 3 October 1952, Marilyn had given an exclusive interview to Lydia Lane for her weekly ‘Hollywood Beauty’ newspaper column. In a piece entitled ‘Marilyn Monroe’s Big Secret: She Enjoys Being A Woman’, aside from speaking about the movie
Don’t Bother To Knock
, her make-up tips and how a woman can make herself more attractive to men, she spoke excitedly about her first publication. At a cost of just 5 cents (and a stamped, self-addressed envelope), it focused on her strenuous yoga and exercise regimes and showed ways in which a woman could streamline her legs and ankles, correct the flabby undersides of her upper arms and firm and uplift her breasts. Available only from the
Oakland Tribune
newspaper, it became the very first star-endorsed keep-fit workout-cum-beauty book. Thirty years before Jane Fonda published her own best-selling celebrity workout, Marilyn was already endorsing keep-fit publications, dabbling in yoga, training at the gym and sprinting through the streets and alleyways of Hollywood before breakfast.

Now, nine years on, the fear that she might be losing her greatest assets, her heavenly body and breathtaking good looks, naturally horrified her. As she once remarked, her beauty was ‘something God gave me’. Marilyn’s diminishing glamour had first been spotted in January 1960, at the start of the shooting of
Let’s Make Love
. Studio technicians noticed that she had piled on a little excess weight, although she remained keen to display for the cameras her generous, God-given curves.

Immensely proud of her public appearance, she was accompanied everywhere she went by a wide range of lotions, potions, skin applicants, paints, powders and hormone creams. Enhancing her beauty was the best way to give meaning to her life. She knew she was a sexpot and rejoiced in the fact, but she knew, deep down, as time moved on, that every glance in the mirror would bring with it an opportunity to spot yet another recently arrived wrinkle and the ghost of another bulge. In Marilyn’s paranoiac eyes at the end of 1960, she had started to see her body sag, her beauty and the lines of her young woman’s body disappear; in turn, she began to sense that her career was hurriedly heading towards a brick wall. She also began to feel insignificant. Fear and confusion set in and, when the malevolent accusations about Clark Gable’s death appeared in the papers, her psychological problems intensified. She believed the only way to escape her emotional turmoil was suicide.

Monroe wasn’t the first to consider such madness. While she was saved, others were not. Stars such as Lupe Velez (1944), Carole Landis (1948) and George Reeves (1959) had all managed to do away with themselves simply because they felt their careers had either ended or were in decline. ‘I know how Lupe Velez felt. You fight just so long and then you begin to worry about being washed up. You fear there’s one way to go and that’s
down . . . I have no intention of ending my career in a rooming house, with full scrapbooks and an empty stomach,’ said Landis just four years before her
own
suicide. Swedish-born Inger Stevens was another casualty. She overdosed on barbiturates in 1970. Curiously, her doctor was one Ralph Greenson.

With regard to the incident at Payne-Whitney, a most invaluable insider to the unfolding events in Monroe’s life was Donald Zec, the long-running show business columnist of the
Daily Mirror
and a long-time friend of the actress. In his 1961 piece about Marilyn’s admission to the clinic, he wrote:

In a New York hospital, the best-known and one of the most mixed-up beauties was facing up to a harrowing problem – the problem of being Marilyn Monroe. She is restless, nervous, anxious and ill at ease. So what is driving this highly vulnerable blonde, once called a ‘humming-bird made of iron’ to a psychiatric couch? My guess, after some years of studying and talking with this tragic beauty, is that she is waking up to the fact that she is thirty-four years old . . .

Chapter Three

Friday 17 November 1961–April (second week) 1962

W
ith the unpleasantness surrounding her operation, and with the problems surrounding
Something’s Got To Give
continuing to mount, Marilyn naturally steered clear of any new assignments. However, there was an exception. During the evening of Friday 17 November 1961, with time on her hands following the delay of her latest movie, the actress participated in a photo shoot with 27-year-old, Hollywood-based freelance photographer Douglas Kirkland, who was preparing a special 25th birthday issue of
Look
magazine. He had already photographed contemporary actresses such as Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland and Shirley MacLaine, but the one star he really wanted to capture in stills’ form was Marilyn Monroe.

The setting for the shoot was the John Engstead Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood. Accompanied by her publicist, Pat Newcomb, the actress was characteristically late. Set to appear at 6.30pm, she arrived at approximately 9.30. Marilyn soon requested that she and the photographer were left to do the shoot alone. In advance of the session, she had requested two items: chilled bottles of vintage Dom Perignon and a selection of Frank Sinatra’s records. ‘When she arrived at the studio for the photo session,’ Kirkland admitted, ‘I felt I’d been hit by a lightning bolt. She didn’t walk. She floated in slow motion . . . When I first approached her and met her for the first time, I expected this giant superstar but she wasn’t like that. She was quite the contrary.’

Kirkland took some of his pictures from his studio’s balcony, on which he draped himself so he could point his camera directly down at a naked Monroe, who was sprawled across a bed with just a pillow and a loosely draped white silk sheet for company. ‘Here I was, this young kid from a tiny town called Fort Erie in Ontario, Canada, a town of 7,000 people. That’s me. That’s who I really am and here I am with this sex-goddess of the world, dropping everything off in front of me.

‘At one point,’ he recalled, ‘she looked up and said, “Why don’t you come down here with me?” I got the pictures and I won’t claim there was anything between us other than the pictures. But a moment of truth for me, as a photographer, was I going to shoot or go down into the bed with her? I got the picture.’

Kirkland hastily developed the photographs and showed them to Marilyn the following day. She was, in his words, ‘dark and depressed and at first unimpressed with the images, until finally she fell in love with them’. The actress shredded the pictures she did not like in front of him. Summing up, Kirkland admitted, ‘This was not your average movie star. This was not just your average human being . . . She almost wasn’t human.’

In November 1961, following six months of intermittent, in-depth analysis, Ralph Greenson decided that it was the right time to resurrect the idea that it would be psychologically beneficial for Marilyn to live in a home of her own. The suggestion was emblematic of how Greenson, in recent months, had started giving Monroe counselling far beyond the realms of his profession. Advice on the kind of men she should date, the type of movies she should star in and the friends she should keep filled most of his conversational time with the actress. Keeping up with her every thought and word soon became an obsession for him.

Unlawful eavesdropping was his next step. To keep a close eye on Marilyn’s day-to-day activities, Greenson appointed a live-in companion for her, a 59-year-old woman by the name of Eunice Murray. Dr Greenson and his fellow psychiatrists had previously employed Murray as a support worker for some of their most prestigious clients. Originally only intending to spend three days a week with the actress, Murray would usually end up devoting five, although she never let on to the actress that she had been employed since 1951 as a psychiatric nurse. Marilyn apparently grew to like her. Pat Newcomb did not, however, and did her utmost to stay out of her way. She did not trust her. Perhaps Marilyn did not either, often decorously referring to Eunice as ‘Mrs Murray’. After a few months, however, her initial $60-a-week wage was welcomingly raised to $200. (Between Monday 1 January and Monday 11 June 1962, Marilyn would pay her a total of $3,860.)

To outsiders, Murray’s role was that of a friend, confidante and assistant in the actress’s everyday life, which included chauffeuring her to her various engagements (most importantly to and from Greenson’s nearby home at 902 Franklin Street), seamstress work, receiving visitors, answering the phone, cleaning the house and filling the cupboards and refrigerator with food.

The latter was a task in which she failed miserably. As a close friend of the actress remarked in 1962 to journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, ‘Marilyn wasn’t being looked after. She was one of the most valuable properties in show business; she had press agents, doctors, hairdressers and a housekeeper. Yet when Marilyn wanted to cook a steak in her
own
house, she found there were
no
steak and
no
food at all! There was champagne, though. Marilyn had liquor and pills, but
nothing
to eat.’ Marilyn indeed often remarked to guests visiting her home that she had no food to offer them. For want of a better word, Eunice Murray’s primary role in Marilyn’s home was that of a spy.

‘I didn’t like being called Marilyn’s housekeeper,’ Murray admitted to reporters years after the actress’s death. ‘I guess there’s no word in the dictionary to exactly describe what I was. I was her chauffeur, her cook, her real estate agent, her social secretary.’ Privately, Eunice would tell people she was Marilyn’s ‘friend. She absolutely trusted me.’ Greenson believed that Eunice, in whom the nesting and family instincts were strong, would strengthen that side of Marilyn, relieving her of her obsessions and guilts about her failing career and unsuccessful marriages. Murray scrutinised Monroe’s every activity and mood and reported the results back to Greenson on a daily basis. He would then use this information during his next consultation with Marilyn and administer suitable advice.

It was his counselling that she should buy a property of her own that excited Marilyn the most, and she was keen to act upon it. Greenson believed the house would fill the void left by a baby or husband. In mid-December, following guidelines set by the actress, who specified that it should be ‘little and quiet’, ‘overlook the ocean’ and ‘resemble the house occupied by Dr Greenson’, Eunice set about searching for Marilyn’s dream property. Marilyn soon changed her mind about it overlooking the ocean and swiftly turned down Murray’s first suggestions on the grounds that they were not secluded enough.

In the second week of January 1962, after four weeks of frantic rummaging and following a tip-off from a local real estate agent, Eunice viewed another property. Sensing this one had more potential than the others, she made a request for a private tour. When she left it, feeling certain she had just found Marilyn’s ideal home, she excitedly rushed to tell the actress, who elatedly demanded to see it at once. Situated among
a tangle of avenues, drives and boulevards, it stood just a mile from the Greenson residence.

Built in 1932, the 2,300 square foot (extremely modest by Hollywood standards), L-shaped building with three bedrooms at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in the fashionable suburb of Brentwood stood at the end of a cul-de-sac in a green forest of similar cul-de-sacs near San Vicente Boulevard and Carmelina Avenue. The single-storey, Mexican-style structure with interior stucco and exterior adobe walls came complete with a red-tiled roof, wrought-iron grilles on the windows, cathedral beam ceilings, tiled fireplaces in both the living room and master bedroom, a garage, lush gardens, a detached guest house and a modest-sized, oval-shaped swimming pool, and was shielded by a high brick wall and a clutch of eucalyptus trees. Unsurprisingly, there were no distinguishing features other than the tiles featuring a coat of arms which sat at the building’s entrance; this prophetically read ‘Cursum Perficio’, a translation from the original Greek of a New Testament verse which, in translation, can mean either ‘I complete the course’, ‘I’m completing my journey’ or ‘My journey ends here’. Most pleasing for Marilyn, the building was just a ten-minute drive away from the studios at 20th Century-Fox.

Reached only via a winding lane that did not even bear a street sign, the building was almost completely concealed from the outside world. Unsurprisingly, this was what Monroe wanted. For her, the house was love at first sight. On Wednesday 10 January, Marilyn called Joe DiMaggio in San Francisco requesting him to come and view the property. A day later, after a lengthy once-over, he delivered the news she wanted to hear: he liked it too.

Later that evening, back at her North Doheny Drive apartment, Marilyn rang Milton Rudin, told him she wanted to purchase the house and instructed him to set the wheels in motion about obtaining it. On the morning of Friday 12 January, Rudin rang the agent and made a formal offer for the property of $52,500. This initial proposal was declined; however, her second, for $57,500, was not. Later that day, with the sum hastily agreed upon, Rudin drafted a letter to Alfred Hart of the City National Bank of Beverly Hills, on Roxbury and Wilshire Boulevard, requesting a mortgage for the actress through their real estate loan department. As he noted, ‘Marilyn is quite anxious to buy this property.’