The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (14 page)

It was a dire time for Fox. Shooting at the vast lot ground to a complete halt on Friday 26 January, when filming of Jerry Wald’s comedy
Mr Hobbs Takes a Vacation
, starring James Stewart and Maureen O’Hara, concluded. With the cameras still waiting to roll on Monroe’s new movie, the next shoot would not take place until Wednesday 14 February, when Irwin Allen shot a few brief, pre-production sequences for
Five Weeks in a Balloon
. The lull at 20th Century-Fox would sadly persist for the next two months.

There were problems elsewhere in Marilyn’s career. On Friday 26 January, following a year of sporadic deliberation, word finally seeped out in several newspapers that the actress had turned down NBC’s $100,000 offer (at that point the highest in television history) to star as torrid prostitute Sadie Thompson in the 90-minute, colour, video-taped TV adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s
Rain.
It was actually old news. Following five months of fruitless negotiations between the actress and her representatives, and a deluge of publicity based alternately on both hopelessness and despair, the studio, in particular its president, Robert E. Kintner, had actually washed their hands of it six months earlier on Friday 28 July 1961.

The show’s history was a long and expensive one. Featuring stars such as Fredric March and Florence Eldridge, and a specially adapted screenplay by Rod Serling, creator of
The Twilight Zone
, it was originally set to be NBC TV’s ‘big offering’ in the autumn of 1961. The original choice to play Reverend Davidson in the production was Richard Burton, but he declined the role through fear of Marilyn’s well-known tardiness. Producers of the play failed in their attempts to assure him he would still able to leave the set each night in time for his 8.30 curtain call at the Majestic Theatre in midtown Manhattan, where he was starring alongside Julie Andrews in the Broadway musical
Camelot
.

Marilyn had been set to sign her contract for
Rain
on Friday 10 February 1961, but was unable to do so because of her admittance to the Payne-Whitney Psychiatric Clinic just three days earlier. Despite this, NBC still worked feverishly on the project and by May had pumped some $100,000 into it: $25,000 each for the TV rights and Serling’s reworking of it, and a further $50,000 split between the below-the-line scenery costs and fees for Ann Marlowe as executive producer. With Marilyn still unwell following her bouts in hospital, the studio planned to finally tie up all loose ends in the production during the weekend of 27 and 28 May. They failed. However, work continued into June.

On Thursday 15 June, just hours after flying in from Los Angeles, Marilyn welcomed Serling to her Manhattan home to discuss the project further. (He would later describe her as ‘warm, friendly, beautiful but
odd
’.) In an interview carried out that month with television writer Marie Torre, he took the opportunity to air his immense dissatisfaction with the drama. ‘I
ago,’ he remarked, ‘then sat back to await reaction. Everyone went silent.’ When he contacted NBC again, he was informed Marilyn had become enamoured of the original, 1923 play version,
Rain: A Play in Three Acts
by John Colton and Clemence Randolph, and that she had been rehearsing that adaptation on her own. When he was told this, he flipped. ‘If they want the old version of
Rain
, they had better get another boy,’ he screamed. ‘I accepted the assignment on the understanding that they wanted an updated story, something that would come out fresh. I’ve seen so much of the old
Rain
, I’m waterlogged. It’d be pointless for me to even bother.’

Nevertheless, production on
Rain
laboured on. On Wednesday 21 June, in preparation for her 3.30 meeting the following afternoon with NBC executives, Marilyn held an emergency, 3.15pm conference at her apartment with both Lee Strasberg and her attorney, Aaron Frosch. However, despite her and the studio’s most valiant attempts to prove otherwise, the play hit the buffers on Wednesday 28 June, when the actress was rushed to New York’s Polyclinic Hospital for her gall-bladder operation. Scrapping it altogether, shortly afterwards, for a multitude of reasons, then became the most obvious solution.

A fact overlooked by many previous biographers is that, by the time it was shelved, work on
Rain
was so far advanced that sponsorship with the cosmetics giant Revlon had even been arranged. The company had agreed to underwrite the show’s estimated $350,000 cost. A locale for the taping of the show had even been reserved not once but twice. For four straight weeks, one of their studios in Brooklyn, New York had been earmarked for the production: the first between March and April, the second, three months later, between Saturday 1 July and Tuesday 1 August.

NBC even went so far as to pencil in when the play would make its TV debut.
Rain
’s grand premiere was set to take place as a back-to-back attraction with the new, 60-minute Bob Hope comedy extravaganza,
The World Of Bob Hope
(the first in a series of specials about prominent Americans) during the evening of Sunday 29 October, giving the station an uninterrupted, peak-time, 8.30–11pm television showcase. But, despite shifting the deadlines to suit Marilyn several times (penultimately, the last week of June and finally, the concluding week of July) it came to nothing. As one NBC spokesman desolately remarked, ‘It all took a great deal of time and money.’

Although no official reason for the cancellation was given, the industry’s rumour mill was already in overdrive, suggesting that the actress’s refutation stemmed from her drama coach, Lee Strasberg, or from her either being ‘too ill’ or ‘too tense’ to do the show. For once, the rumours were partly true. With regard to the latter, Marilyn was indeed unwell. And
with regard to the former, problems had come to a head when Strasberg, in his dual role as production supervisor and ‘artistic arranger’, began insisting to studio bosses that he should sit in on the shooting and direct Marilyn from the sidelines. Unsurprisingly,
Rain
’s director, George Roy Hill, was against this arrangement and threatened to quit in protest. Although he failed to carry out the threat, it was the last straw.

On the public front, Monroe put on a brave face, showing she was undisturbed by this latest disappointment, but inside she was gravely saddened. In particular, she felt that she had failed
Rain
’s writer, from whom she had received a very flattering and encouraging note. ‘I had a letter from Somerset Maugham [it was typed on Tuesday 31 January 1961] saying how happy he was I was going to play the part,’ she recalled in an unpublished interview for
Ladies’ Home Journal
magazine. ‘He even told me something about the real woman on whom he based the character.’

February 1962 started with a second rare photo shoot. Since Marilyn’s appearance at the premiere of
The Misfits
one year earlier, and her fleeting visits to hospital, the actress had rarely been seen in public and, aside from November’s photo session for Douglas Kirkland, she had not participated in any new projects. So it came as a great shock to everyone when, in late December 1961, she agreed to take part in another photographic assignment, this time with Willy Rizzo, the influential Hollywood correspondent for French magazine
Paris Match
. Due to his already scheduled trip to Tinseltown that month and a friend who knew Marilyn’s publicist, Pat Newcomb, Rizzo set his sights on the impossible. He wanted his
own
session with Monroe.

Realising his chances were slim, Rizzo and his friend concocted the angle that a cover story backed by a nice slice of positive publicity might be just what the actress needed. Amazingly it worked. Just days after submitting the request, Rizzo received a call from Newcomb saying Marilyn had agreed to be photographed. A private luxury home belonging to a friend of his in Los Angeles was immediately booked for the assignment. News that Rizzo had managed to secure a session with the semi-reclusive Monroe even reached many American papers on or around Thursday 4 January.

As planned, Rizzo arrived in the city a month later, on Tuesday 6 February. His first discussion about the shoot took place later that day. He informed Newcomb that, to take full advantage of the strong morning sunlight, he should begin the session early. The publicist had reservations about this. She knew her employer was unreliable at that time of the day, so an afternoon starting time was mutually agreed. Agreeing to a date when they could actually carry out the session became the next problem.

A date of Thursday 8 February was soon pencilled in, but after several hours of waiting on that day, Newcomb phoned Rizzo with some bad news. The actress would not be coming. She was tired and feeling unwell. (With the purchase completed and the contracts signed, Marilyn actually began moving into her new home that day.) The publicist went on to promise that she would be fit to attend the following afternoon. But, 24 hours later, the photographer once more found himself at a loose end. At 6pm, however, Monroe finally arrived: not to begin her session, but for a face-to-face apology. Suffering from fatigue after her house move, she gave him her word she would be there the following day and kissed him. His legs turned to jelly. ‘For you, I would wait a week,’ he affectionately informed her.

True to her word, the following afternoon, a rather tired-looking Marilyn turned up at the rented house in Los Angeles to begin her photo shoot. As Rizzo recalled, she had done her own make-up and made a bit of a ‘hash of it’. On that hot afternoon of Saturday 10 February, during a four-hour session, he captured the actress in extreme close-up, perched on a sun-lounger and lying down by the edge of a swimming pool. A mixture of black and white and colour shots were taken, the best of which first saw the light of day in the Saturday 23 June edition of
Paris Match
(no. 689). ‘Marilyn was immensely sad at the meeting,’ Rizzo later lamented, ‘and that sadness was very visible on the pictures.’

In February, beginning the next phase of her life and taking up residence in her new home was the matter of most significance to Marilyn. Although the ten-roomed Brentwood home was extremely cramped and decidedly unglamorous, its purchase was a major accomplishment for her. Eager to leave an immediate mark on the place, just hours after moving in on 8 February, she feverishly began demanding changes. Different fixtures were summoned for the small bathroom and fresh colour schemes were outlined for the walls. With the tiny kitchen decidedly short on cupboard space, cabinets were also ordered. Following a hard sell by a salesman sent from the appliance distributors Kafton Sales Company, at 1518 North Highland Avenue, Hollywood 28, Marilyn felt compelled to spend $545.60 on a modern service space and a whopping $1,393.46 on a new, custom-made kitchen area.

Her outlay at the firm was incessant. For example, on Wednesday 11 April, she paid $624 (approximately $37 more than what she should have been charged) for a large, stainless steel, top-of-the-range upright Hotpoint refrigerator, and, two weeks later, on Wednesday 25 April, she shelled out $272 for a plush stainless steel sink. ‘Marilyn was just full of plans and ideas, plans about furnishing and decorating her home. She was just so proud of it,’
Eunice Murray recalled. The actress soon discovered that many of the locks within the property were not working. To partly remedy this, on Thursday 15 March, Edward P. Halavati of the well-established A-1 Lock & Safe Company in Santa Monica was called.

Most importantly, in line with Monroe’s craving for privacy, another change came with the number printed on one of her telephones. Instead of the real number, GR (Granite Bay) 476-1890, she arranged for digits belonging to the local West Los Angeles Police Department to be attached to the telephone she most commonly used, which was black in colour (and not pink, as is generally believed). With workmen such as electricians and builders about to descend on the property, she was well aware that her phone numbers could easily fall into the wrong hands, especially when news-hungry reporters were ready to offer vast sums of money for them. Just prior to bedtime each night, Marilyn would return this phone to its regular place in the guest cottage and, to avoid being disturbed by any late-night calls, would either cover it with pillows or simply remove the receiver from its cradle.

A white phone was attached to her second line. This, her privately used one, which very few people knew the number of, carried the digits GR 472-4830. Marilyn would keep this telephone beside her bed for her obligatory late-night calls to friends during her regular bouts of insomnia. The cord of each phone was approximately 30 feet long, so she could stroll freely around the house as she spoke.

While Marilyn occupied herself with the joys of moving house and finding ways to avoid the eagle-eyed press, pre-production work on
Something’s Got To Give
was continuing frantically over at Fox. Finding a suitable male actor to play opposite Monroe was now the major problem. The eventual male lead in the movie, the Rat Pack star and crooner Dean Martin, was not the first choice. He wasn’t the second, or even the fourth. He was in fact the eighth.

As with
Goodbye Charlie
several months earlier, the well-respected character actor James Garner had once again been the original choice to star opposite Marilyn. The official line was that he forced himself out of the film’s reckoning by demanding $1 million to play the role. But this was an invention. The truth was that the Mirisch Company, the producers of his next movie, the war epic
The Great Escape
, feared Marilyn’s legendary tardiness would prolong production of
Something’s Got To Give
and force Garner to miss the start of filming of their movie, which was set to begin shooting in Munich on Wednesday 6 June 1962.

In early December 1961, Fox insiders swept aside the setback by quickly suggesting that 36-year-old Rock Hudson be offered the part. When he proved to be unavailable, the studio shifted their attentions to 37-year-old
TV veteran Steve Forrest, but Monroe was unhappy about this and the approach never came. Others tipped and approached about the role were highly rated, rugged film star Stuart Whitman and singing actor Robert Goulet, but he was unable to take the part due to his commitment to Richard Burton and the musical
Camelot
, which was still running on Broadway. Possibly out of desperation, the names of respected Hollywood stars Jack Lemmon and John Gavin were then thrown into the ring, but they were dismissed by Marilyn almost as soon as they were uttered.