The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (13 page)

‘I didn’t want a house in Beverly Hills,’ she remarked later in the year, ‘and I didn’t want a movie star’s palace. I just wanted a small house for me and my friends.’ A plan to turn the garage into an apartment, in which her friends could stay, was quickly formulated. But, contrary to what we’ve been led to believe in the past, she only intended to live in the property while she was working. She regarded her apartment in Manhattan as her
real home. In between her Hollywood duties, the actress planned to simply shut the property down and return to New York. ‘She bought the house as a place she could close up when she wasn’t working,’ Ralph Roberts confirmed in 1972. ‘She had to work out there [in Los Angeles]. She needed the money.’

Due to some unwise spending and a downturn at the box office, Marilyn was astonished to discover that, once again, she was strapped for cash and had insufficient money available to put down a deposit on the property. (On Wednesday 3 January 1962, her New York Bowery Savings Bank book boasted just $596.77.) ‘I don’t know where the hell my money goes,’ Marilyn once remarked to fellow screen actress Jane Russell. ‘I never seem to have anything. The more I make, the less I have . . . I’m coming out worse than when I was modelling.’ The simple truth was that, throughout her short life, her income was severely hampered by woeful business advice, the highest tax rates and an unruly assortment of landlords, friends, charities, hairdressers, make-up men, secretaries, housekeepers, decorators, drama coaches, physicians, psychiatrists, attorneys and accountants. Hollywood auditor Jack M. Ostrow, the former treasurer of actor Burt Lancaster’s independent production company, Norma Productions, was clearly struggling to keep up with the actress’s activities and evidently failing to earn the colossal $2,500-a-year wages she was paying him.

It has regularly been repeated, as printed in
Life
magazine for August 1962, that the house on Fifth Helena cost the actress $77,500, and that, with DiMaggio’s help, she had paid a $42,500 deposit. In fact, the property had been put up for sale by Mr and Mrs Pagen for $69,000. Following a discussion with Rudin about the building’s leaky roof, the actress came in with her first offer, a rather low $52,500. This was naturally declined by the couple. However, her second offer of $57,500, still $11,500 below the asking price, was not. A deposit of only $5,750 ($5,000 of DiMaggio’s money, $750 of Marilyn’s) was duly paid on Monday 29 January and the sale was completed by Thursday 8 February, the day she started moving in. The repayments of her 15 year 6 month mortgage, at 6.5 per cent interest, were scheduled to begin on Sunday 1 April. (However, the $320-a-month payment plan soon became a problem for her. In late June, just three months after the mortgage had started, the bank was forced into drawing up a new disbursement schedule for her.)

Before she signed the contract for the property, Marilyn walked into the dressing room of her North Doheny Drive apartment, sat down and burst into tears. She did not know for sure why. ‘It was just I could never imagine buying a house alone,’ she later theorised. ‘But I’ve always been alone, so why couldn’t I imagine it?’ In a letter sent to her former father-in-law, Isidore Miller, Marilyn described her new home as ‘little . . . with a big
swimming pool,’ adding, ‘the neighbourhood is quiet and yet it is close to shopping areas.’ The impressive Brentwood Country Mart, with its shops and stalls arranged around a central courtyard, was just a short drive away.

Even though she had now officially acquired the Brentwood bungalow, she unsurprisingly decided to retain both her apartment in New York and, for the opening few months of 1962 at least, the one in Los Angeles. (Just prior to purchasing the Fifth Helena property Monroe had spent all her spare money – $25,000 – on having her North Doheny Drive apartment redecorated and newly furnished. However, the work was halted when she witnessed the mess that the decorator was creating. The trauma made Marilyn ill and she suspended the project. Citing loss of earnings, the decorator sued her for several thousand dollars, although the case was eventually dropped.) Monroe undertook the lengthy journey between her Los Angeles homes many times during the opening months of 1962.

One such excursion took place during the third week of January, and involved a number of visits to the Beverly Hills Hotel. First, unhappy with the projects Fox were offering her, Marilyn had arranged a lunchtime meet with her publicist, Arthur P. Jacobs. The setting was the hotel’s very expensive but comfortable Polo Lounge, a place fabled as ‘the only real watering hole in town where deals can make a man or woman a millionaire overnight’.

‘She was unhappy with a couple of properties that Fox had offered her,’ Jacobs recalled in 1963, ‘so she asked me why I didn’t find a project and produce it. She even offered to sign a deal splitting the production 50/50 with me.’ Nothing was in mind until one of his other clients, entertainer Gene Kelly, handed Jacobs a script he had been working on. Jacobs read it, saw it as a vehicle for Monroe and called Kelly. They immediately began discussing a deal. ‘Marilyn flipped over the story and said she wanted to do it,’ Jacobs remembered. ‘But then Gene got tied up for a year in his [ABC] television series,
Going My Way
.’

The second occasion for her visit to the hotel was to meet
Redbook
columnist Alan Levy. The women’s magazine had always been a great favourite of Marilyn’s and, ten years after she first appeared in it, she finally assented to a lengthy interview. Sporting a purple dress with matching scarf, an outfit she described as her ‘purple people eater wardrobe’, she was interviewed one evening in the building’s dining room. During the six-hour session, she spoke openly about her marriages, her struggle for self-understanding and her hopes for her future. She also revealingly informed Levy that she stood 5ft 6in in her stockinged feet, weighed less than 120 pounds, wore size 8 slacks, but had lost nothing on top. ‘I’m not only proud of my firm bosom,’ she philosophically announced, ‘but I’m going to be proud of my firm character.’ With exhaustion beginning to set in, the
interview soon ended. But before they parted, Marilyn agreed to conclude it some time in the not-too-distant future.

Monroe visited the Beverly Hills Hotel for a third time to catch up with her friend Esther ‘Eppie’ Pauline Friedman Lederer, otherwise known as US advice columnist Ann R. Landers. And she made her fourth visit to meet an old Hollywood hand, Nunnally Johnson, the sixth scriptwriter employed on
Something’s Got To Give.
(For a fee of $125,000, his work on the production had commenced on Wednesday 24 January.)

Since May 1961, numerous scripts for the film had been written and systematically rejected, and Johnson had been desperately summoned by Fox to produce what everyone hoped would be the final, Monroe-tailored version. She had worked with Johnson on the hit 1953 film comedy
How to Marry a Millionaire
and trusted his work. In time, they would grow to enjoy each other’s company immensely, but their first meetings had been less than gratifying.

‘Working with Marilyn Monroe was a disturbing experience,’ Johnson recalled in 1961 of that earlier encounter. ‘I used to be sympathetic with actresses and their problems. But Marilyn made me lose all sympathy for actresses. She doesn’t take the trouble to do her homework. In most of her takes, she was either fluffing her lines or freezing. She didn’t bother to learn her lines and if it hadn’t been for Natasha Lytess [Monroe’s former acting coach] she wouldn’t have been able to learn
any
lines. I didn’t think she could act her way out of a paper bag. She’s got no charm, delicacy or taste. She’s just an arrogant little tail-switcher. She’s learned to throw sex in your face.’

After a while, however, a firm friendship was formed and in early 1962, the chance to work together again materialised. ‘This job came out of the blue,’ Johnson recalled at the time. ‘I happened to be in New York in January and they [Fox] were getting
desperate
. They asked me to try my hand on a rush job.’ He was correct. Since the studio were anxious to get the shooting of
Something’s Got To Give
under way at the earliest opportunity, and with each of the five preceding writers employed on the movie failing miserably in their task, it was now of the utmost importance that Johnson should complete a script as soon as possible and – even though she had no legal obligation to do this – obtain approval of it from Marilyn.

Several times during the early part of the year, the actress had circuitously gone public about her dissatisfaction with the standard of screenplays she had received. On Monday 8 January, reporter Sheilah Graham was used as the actress’s mouthpiece when, in her column for the
Stars and Stripes
newspaper, she forthrightly declared, ‘Marilyn Monroe is right in wanting a good script for
Something’s Got To Give
. Until she does, Marilyn isn’t
giving her assurance that she will make the film.’ A week later, on Monday 15 January, the Associated Press’s movie and television writer, Bob Thomas, reiterated Marilyn’s displeasure in his column. ‘Concerning
Something’s Got To Give
,’ he wrote, ‘it may be Marilyn Monroe who isn’t satisfied with the script.’

In an attempt to appease their clearly troubled star, Fox counteracted by releasing a short statement of their own, which read: ‘Director George Cukor says Marilyn Monroe doesn’t have to wig-wag her derriere in
Something’s Got To Give
because the role can be sexy without it.’ On Wednesday 24 January, the actress informed Fox she still did not care for the script and would only shoot the movie if her demands for another writer were met.

Three bottles of champagne were consumed by the pair during their latest three-hour seminar, which again took place in the hotel’s legendary Polo Lounge. In sharp contrast to the long-held belief that she was always late for her appointments, Johnson announced in amazement, ‘I arrived (script in hand) 15 minutes early and surprisingly Marilyn was
already
there. She’s just as likely to be too early as too late.’

When discussions about the movie finally got under way, he was equally amazed to discover that the actress was still unconvinced about it, particularly its old-fashioned storyline. She also doubted her own judgement, feeling that she’d made too many dubious mistakes in the past and could no longer reliably trust her instincts. Johnson recalled, ‘I outlined the situations in the script to see how she responded. I think she liked it.’ Marilyn was especially partial to the sequence where she was set to perform a Hawaiian hula-hula dance. The thought of location work at the Navy Station in San Diego, where her submarine rescue scene was due to be filmed, also appealed to her.

Before their meeting concluded, Johnson handed the actress the latest copy of the screenplay and instructed her to be uninhibited about any changes she wanted to make. As a guide, he told her that whenever she read something that was out of character, she should mark the sequence with a cross and whenever she read a line that wasn’t funny enough, she should mark it with a double cross.

Unfortunately, the process of administering these revisions was an extremely arduous one. After Marilyn had read Johnson’s latest rendering, she would post her cross-filled copy back to him at his flat in London’s Grosvenor Square. Once he received it, he would administer her changes and accommodate them into his own. Afterwards, he would painstakingly send the newly revised script, page by page, back to her in Los Angeles for her approval. Once she had given her endorsement to the latest modifications (usually by way of a late-night transatlantic phone call), the
new, bang-up-to-date version of the
Something’s Got To Give
script would be read over the phone to Fox executives back in Los Angeles.

With so much to-ing and fro-ing taking place, it was no great surprise when, on Tuesday 16 January 1962, 20th Century-Fox announced that shooting on
Something’s Got To Give
had been pushed back two months to Thursday 15 March. Upon hearing this, on Saturday 20 January, Marilyn paid a hastily arranged visit to the movie’s new producer, a chain-smoking, podgy young 20th Century-Fox staffer named Henry T. Weinstein, at his home in Beverly Hills. However, there was another reason for her doing so. She knew Carl Sandburg was going to be there too. Just a month after their last encounter, she was eager to see him again.

Instead of outlining fresh plans for the film, those gathered together that night, who also included Weinstein’s wife Irena, spent most of their time sipping champagne and Martinis while playing mimic games and dancing the conga. To help with Marilyn’s insomnia, Sandburg even demonstrated a series of exercises which involved holding books over their heads. Once exhaustion had set in, physical activity gave way to conversation, not about
Something’s Got To Give
but on personal matters. During one such private exchange, the actress took the opportunity once more to pour her heart out to the poet. He replied by curiously informing her, ‘You are
not
what is wrong with America.’ The actress was truly fond of him. ‘He is so pleased to meet you,’ she once admitted. ‘He wants to know about you and you want to know about him.’

Acclaimed photojournalist and portrait snapper Arnold Newman was also present that evening, and managed to capture a fascinating photographic record of the event. Shortly before his death in June 2006, in an interview with PBS for their
American Masters
television documentary, entitled
Still Life
, he remarked, ‘She [Marilyn] had already met Carl Sandburg. They were drinking champagne . . . here they were, the great poet, biographer of Lincoln, and Marilyn, talking together. Two icons talking together and I thought, “This I have got to photograph.” When Marilyn spoke with Sandburg, she felt she could really pour her heart out, and she did. She was really troubled. That was a
sad
woman.’

Despite her strongest intentions to do otherwise, Marilyn was still unintentionally disrupting pre-production work on her new movie.
Something’s Got To Give
had been officially announced in a blaze of glory on Tuesday 2 January by Peter Levathes. With a cast list still either un-chosen or unsigned, however, the credulous Henry T. Weinstein in the producer’s chair and a screenplay Marilyn was far from satisfied with, the movie was nowhere near the starting block.