The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (27 page)

‘She arrived on the set looking absolutely lovely,’ Cukor recalled in 1963, ‘and then [we] found she had frightful difficulty in concentrating. I used to tell her, “You do it so easily, you’re so accomplished,” and she’d perform some straightforward actions such as walking down a path and I’d say, “Oh, that’s great, perfect,” but then she’d reply, “Oh no, I’ve lost it.” Her inability to concentrate got worse. At the end, she couldn’t do anything and was quite incapable of sustained mental effort.’ In another interview, this time with Los Angeles radio station KNX-AM, he confessed, ‘Marilyn’s a conscientious girl in her efforts to get it right. She’s a little trying. All she thinks of is to get the stuff on the screen and make it good. That’s her real, real motive.’

Due to her persistent sore throat, Monroe read very few lines. That afternoon, after noticing signs of her weakening, studio publicist Jon Campbell solicitously asked Marilyn how she was feeling. ‘I’m fine,’ she replied, ‘except that I’ve got a temperature.’ She was indeed running a temperature of 102 degrees. Following the children’s dismissal at 4pm, she shot a short sequence with Dean Martin and then, at 5.20pm, left the studios.

Despite her apparently happy demeanour, the turmoil surrounding the movie and the countless script changes had infuriated Marilyn and, when she returned home that evening, she could not relax. Studying, learning and acting out the following day’s script encompassed her every waking thought; as the evening drew to a close, instead of becoming sleepy, she became agitated, panicky and even more awake. On top of her virus and sinus complications, slumber naturally became a forlorn hope. A half-hearted form of sleep only arrived after she had consumed a handful of
sleeping pills, washed down with a glass of champagne. ‘She would say, “Call me tomorrow at 5am,”’ Eunice Murray recalled at the time. ‘I’d get everything ready in the morning but she just couldn’t make it.’ The actress had barely slept and by the time she arrived at the studio two hours later (at 7am on the morning of Tuesday 1 May), she was totally exhausted.

Fox staffers Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder – the actress’s make-up man since she started at Fox in 1947 – and costumier Marjorie Plecher took one look at the actress and instructed her to go to her dressing room and lie down. After a brief 30-minute respite, they roused her and began readying her for shooting, but Marilyn wasn’t prepared for such a duty. She was clearly suffering. To help revive her, the actress drank cup after cup of assistant Hazel Washington’s strong black coffee. It was a futile exercise. As Marilyn’s dress was slid up and placed around her lithe physique, the actress began to wander aimlessly around her dressing room as if she was mesmerised. The final straw came when she passed out under a hair-dryer. Shooting anything was naturally out of the question and it was universally agreed at 7.35am that Marilyn should return home. Later that morning, her press agent Pat Newcomb justified the decision to the enquiring press: ‘Marilyn’s resistance is low since she had that gall-bladder operation. That was major surgery and takes three or four months to get over [the operation had actually been performed a year before]. She’s on a sort of diet, nothing fried.’

In truth, it wasn’t the changes to the script that had angered the actress so. It wasn’t the revisions to the screenplay that had forced her to stay awake late into the night; it wasn’t the last-minute alterations to the dialogue that had made her turn up for work in an unemployable, hypnotic state. It wasn’t even the virus infections which she was clearly unsettled by. It was actually symbolic of her frail self-confidence and her complete inability to deal with any major changes that were suddenly thrust upon her.

‘There’s a phrase that’s used by doctors,’ Marilyn’s physician, Dr Hyman Engelberg, once tellingly remarked, ‘called Psyche and Soma, which means psychological things and body things; they usually affect each other. When she [Monroe] was depressed, her resistance dropped to infection.’ And such was the case during the shooting of
Something’s Got To Give
in April 1962.

In addition, for the first time during production on the movie, Marilyn was, once again, frighteningly alone. Fox chairman Spyros P. Skouras, a true Marilyn supporter, was ill and unapproachable and her trusted film friend, scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson, was back at home in London and inaccessible. With no real friends to hand, a script she had trouble remembering and a screenplay she was frustratingly unhappy with, the
filming of
Something’s Got To Give
quickly turned into one long arduous chore. As the days progressed, she would only go to the studio when she was called or able and, unfortunately, she was not capable of doing so again until Monday 14 May. The days in between were spent in an almost reclusive existence at her Fifth Helena home. Occasional trips, such as that on Saturday, 12 May, to Pearson’s nearby Brentwood Fine Liquors & Wines store at 2530 San Vicente Boulevard to purchase – for $173.22 – a case of Dom Perignon champagne, punctuated her boredom.

With Marilyn once more absent from the set, Weinstein was forced to resume his daily ritual of posting updates on her condition. Towards the end of the second week’s shooting, he burst on to the set with thrilling, but somewhat sarcastic news. ‘Miss Monroe’s temperature is down to 98.6, only two-tenths of a degree above normal.’ Disgruntled Buck Hall was naturally unimpressed by the announcement. ‘I get a higher fever than that walking up the stairs,’ he cynically muttered.

In Marilyn’s absence, director Cukor continued to film around her, scenes in which her presence was not needed. Over the years, reports have circulated that, by Tuesday 8 May, the 13th day of the movie’s production, Fox completely shut down production on the movie because Cukor had run out of sequences to shoot. But that is untrue. Rather than being confined to the Fox lot and Sound Stages 8, 14 and 15, he took the movie away on location and, on 8 May, shot scenes with Dean Martin at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Harbor. Remarkably, the actor remained upbeat throughout the early parts of the movie; in a reference to Marilyn’s continual absence and the two young children working on the film, he humorously quipped to members of the American press, ‘We had some little kids in the picture when we started. Now they’re ready for
college
.’

By now, however,
Something’s Got To Give
was four and a half days behind schedule and sadly, it was set to get far worse. Two days later, on Thursday 10 May, Marilyn’s 16th day of absenteeism, the movie’s daily production sheets noted that, in order to complete the film by Wednesday 27 June, her presence was required for every one of the remaining days of shooting. Since she was still phoning in sick, the chances of that happening were very remote indeed. Naturally, the Fox hierarchy were beginning to worry. But, thankfully, there was a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

With promises that she might be fit for filming on Monday 14 May, a story conference was called by the actress on the preceding Sunday afternoon. The movie’s scriptwriter, Walter Bernstein, was the only person requested to attend and Marilyn’s Mexican-style bungalow was the natural choice of setting. ‘She met me at the door,’ Bernstein recalled for
American journalist Scott Carson in 1973. ‘Her hair was in curlers; her face was pale from her confinement. Her manner was friendly but she seemed to have little energy. Her smile was pallid.’ An exceedingly brief tour of her new home followed. ‘She apologised for the bareness of the house,’ Bernstein remarked. ‘She had bought furniture in Mexico, which had not yet arrived. The living room contained only one chair and she insisted I sit in it. She sat on the floor, her script before her on a low coffee table and we went over several of the scenes.

‘She was very shy about her own suggestions, as though she felt they were unworthy. But she had obviously been working on her part and, like a good actor, had found insights that improved the character she played. On the other hand, also like an actor, many of her ideas were good for her and not so good for the story. But if I hinted at this, her face would go blank for a second, as though the current had been turned off, and when it was turned on again she would continue as though I had said nothing at all, not disagreeing with me, not even referring to what I had said, simply going on with what followed. I had met this reaction before. It is the normal, uncomplicated self-involvement of the movie star. It stems from a splendid and incorruptible narcissism.’

During their discussion about the script, Marilyn began referring to herself in the third person, rather like Caesar. ‘Remember you’ve got Marilyn Monroe here,’ she remarked when talks shifted to discussions about her wearing a bikini in the movie. ‘Remember you’ve got to use her.’ Monroe and Bernstein’s quite harmonious conference lasted three hours, during which time she delighted in acting out her part, especially the sequence where she spoke with a Swedish accent for her role as her husband Nick’s foreign maid, Ingrid Tic. The actress was naturally overjoyed by Bernstein’s applause at the end of her demonstration. But, according to the scriptwriter, the meeting was futile. He regarded the conference as nothing more than an excuse for her to enforce her authority on both the movie and script.

‘Before I left [Marilyn’s home], she offered me a can of Mexican beer and showed me around the house,’ Bernstein recollected. ‘Then we went out into the garden and she showed me where she was going to plant trees. She was proud of the house. It evidently meant a great deal to her. She was eager that it be liked.’ In his words, he left the bungalow feeling like ‘a deck-hand on a ship with no one at the helm and the water ahead full of rocks’.

Conference over, an invigorated Marilyn decided that, to help ease any lingering doubts about the movie, she would call her long-time acting coach, Paula Strasberg, and ask her to fly in from New York at once and
be a supportive hand on the set. It seemed an obvious and simple scenario but, as it transpired, it only manifested new problems, especially since the actress was now beginning to
despise
Strasberg. Since Marilyn doubted her own judgement on many things and possessed precious little faith in herself as an actress, she constantly came to depend on the opinion and judgement of others – in particular that of Strasberg, who had made herself essential to the actress, so much so that the actress became resentful of the fact.

Paula had been sitting by Monroe’s side on the sets of her past five movies and had gained a reputation for quietly undermining any director’s control over the star. It was a manner of working that had naturally made her extremely unpopular. Strasberg was tremendously defensive and explosively confrontational about her employer. Whenever a director said anything untoward to Monroe, Strasberg would antagonise him by saying things like, ‘She’s a great star. You
can’t
treat her like that.’ Employing her was not cheap. Her four-week stint on
The Misfits
in 1960 had cost Marilyn $10,000. In the following year alone, she billed the actress $20,000 for her services.

However, despite her loathing, Monroe was still amazingly generous to both Paula and her husband Lee. At a cost of $11,000, she purchased for Paula 100 shares in the American Telephone and Telegraph company (AT&T), while trading in her own bonds to pay for Lee’s drama-study trip to Japan. Expenditure relating to their overseas trips was commonplace. Surviving records show that reverse-charge telephone calls were made by Paula to Marilyn during her 1961 trip to Paris, France, their purpose being to demand money for a plane flight home to New York. At a cost of $411, the actress duly obliged. That same year, the actress promised to hand to Lee’s Actors Studio her entire $100,000 appearance fee for
Rain
. In January 1962, she gave them, completely free of charge, her 1956 Ford Thunderbird car and one month later, when a financial crisis threatened to bring down the curtains on Lee’s studio, she made an anonymous donation of $12,500 towards it.

Paula’s first stretch on the
Something’s Got To Give
set came the very next day, Monday 14 May, when shooting resumed for the week. After spending close to two hours with Marilyn in the actress’s dressing room, she appeared on set at precisely 7.30am. ‘Weinstein arrived on the set with a small, dumpy woman wearing large, black-rimmed glasses and a black shawl over her head,’ Walter Bernstein recalled. ‘She looked like a matronly Russian witch or Dracula’s assistant. The crew on the picture gave her the nickname Black Bart. Weinstein introduced her as Paula Strasberg, wife of Lee Strasberg and personal drama coach to Marilyn Monroe . . . later he came back alone and said with great relief, “Paula
liked the set.” He spoke as if the set would have had to be dismantled if Mrs Strasberg had not liked it.’

When filming finally resumed, Strasberg stood quietly to the side of the cameras and watched intently as Marilyn went about shooting her scenes. Whenever Cukor shouted ‘Cut’ to signify the end of filming of a particular sequence, the actress would sharply look across to Strasberg and receive a signal, by way of either a nod or a head shake, as to whether the scene she had just shot was OK or needed doing again. This scenario was most prevalent during shooting on Friday 1 June. One of Monroe’s few requirements that day was to take the few short steps down the set’s tiny staircase. But due to Strasberg’s dissatisfaction with the way the actress was carrying out the action, Monroe ended up ascending and descending the staircase up to 12 times until her acting coach was satisfied and called time on the sequence. The fact that she was now overruling his directorship on the movie severely angered Cukor; naturally, he came to loathe her for it and bitterness between the two immediately flared. ‘I don’t think they [the Strasbergs] helped her at all,’ producer Weinstein controversially recalled for Fox back in 1990. ‘I think they just pumped her up full of lots of stuff so they could use her.’

Between scenes, Marilyn sat with Paula in a quiet area of the studio, where they conferred very seriously about how the filming was progressing. When shooting was ready to resume, the actress would carry this seriousness back on to the set. But since the movie they were producing was supposed to be a light-hearted comedy, Marilyn’s staid demeanour was gravely out of place and Cukor had to forcibly point out the fact, much to the actress’s and coach’s annoyance. Moreover, despite Marilyn’s genuine intention to successfully get through 15 pages of script each day, her targets were ironically hampered by Cukor’s decidedly listless work rate. As Peter Brown and Patte Barham wrote in their book
Marilyn – The Last Take
, he ‘squandered most of this time, expending almost twenty-seven hours and more than a hundred takes on two and a half pages of script, just nine lines of dialogue’.