The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (34 page)

Legend has it that, between that Friday night and the opening hours of Monday 4 June, the actress spent the entire time holed up in her Brentwood home. And that is indeed what transpired. On the evening of her 36th birthday, shortly after arriving back home, Marilyn once again found herself alone with no one to love, no one to care for, and absolutely no one to speak to. So she reached for her pills. She instinctively knew that, in times of despair, she could always rely on them. With Dr Greenson out of the country on a five-week combined business and holiday trip to Switzerland and Tel Aviv, Marilyn returned to her old habit of consuming her pills on a round-the-clock basis. As a result, she suffered an emotional relapse. But was her deterioration precipitated by some other incident?

An event in Washington that Friday evening might hold the key. At 8pm on Friday 1 June, President Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline hosted a private dinner and dance at the White House, its last of the social season. The black-tie gathering had been organised by the First Lady as an act of thanks to the United States Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith,
for his helpfulness during her recent visit there. Fifty-one specially invited guests were in attendance. But Marilyn was not one of them.

Believing she was now an accepted part of that crowd, and no doubt going on assurances from Peter Lawford that she would receive one, she had expected an invite would be forthcoming. As we have seen, she was even preparing a gift to present to Kennedy that night. But the summons did not arrive. A phone call from Lawford corroborating the snub obviously followed and an appearance at Chavez Ravine was swiftly arranged by Joe DiMaggio in an attempt to brighten her spirits. Coming on top of the news that her former husband, Arthur Miller, as well as both Lee and Paula Strasberg, had on Friday 11 May attended a dinner party at the White House, held to honour André Malraux, the French Minister of Cultural Affairs, she rightly regarded this as an almighty slap in the face. On Marilyn’s birthday night, just 13 days after she had been the star, the showpiece, the grand finale of Kennedy’s big birthday gala, she had been unceremoniously snubbed by him, his wife and his associates.

Did this rejection, while she sat alone in her bedroom, brooding, seething and staring at the painting on her birthday night, tip her over the edge? I suspect it did.

Early on the morning of Saturday 2 June, with Greenson out of the country, a substitute doctor had to be summoned to Marilyn’s home. Many previous Monroe biographers have suggested that, once again, she was treated by Milton Uhley. However, I tend to side with the belief that the actress was looked after by Greenson’s close colleague, the charismatic but tenacious 46-year-old psychoanalyst Dr Milton Wexler. Greenson had shared offices with Wexler for several years and was greatly influenced by his co-worker’s notions about the importance of closeness between analyst and patient.

During his visit to Marilyn’s home, after observing the huge stockpile of tablets which had accumulated on her bedside table, Wexler promptly scooped them all up and dropped them into his black medical bag. Unlike Greenson, he was strict about multiple drug use. Seeing her pills vanish into a deep, dark abyss, Marilyn began to panic. They were symbolic of her refuge. With her drugs no longer to hand, she found herself in a quandary; if she couldn’t rest, she couldn’t recuperate, and if she couldn’t recover, she had absolutely no chance of returning to work. Full of anxiety, she now needed Dr Greenson’s help (and prescriptions) more than ever.

Despite requests to the contrary from Greenson’s family, Marilyn set about contacting him. Due to the nine-hour time difference between Los Angeles and Switzerland, Eunice Murray’s long-distance conversations with the doctor had to take place in the middle of
his
night. She read out a list of the actress’s hastily prepared questions, in particular where she
could obtain her pills at short notice. His negative answers did little to ease her predicament, so Pat Newcomb was forced to move in to the actress’s home. Her own supply of tranquillisers, enough to tide Marilyn over until Greenson’s return, accompanied her. Over the ensuing 48 hours, Newcomb watched over Monroe during the day and slept in a berth erected at the foot of the actress’s bed at night. The pair rarely left the bedroom, the door of which was largely kept locked throughout. With Marilyn now suffering from withdrawal symptoms, she was in bad shape. Newcomb and Murray knew instinctively she could not be left her own.

Producer Weinstein announced he was desperate to know what happened to Monroe that weekend, describing it as a ‘defining moment’ in her life. In truth it
was
. It was the moment when the actress and everyone close to her became frighteningly aware of just how addicted Marilyn was to Nembutal. As the well-informed Hollywood reporter Donald Stewart wrote shortly after the actress’s death, ‘She had been taking about 20 pills a day, enough to
kill
a non-user.’ The sad truth was that, for that entire first weekend of June 1962, the actress was, as Eunice Murray recalled in her 1975 book, ‘in a comatose state’.

With Monroe inevitably incapable of work, at 8am on Monday 4 June, Paula Strasberg phoned Fox and delivered the message that the actress was once again sick and ‘unable to travel to the studio’. It was the 17th time she had done so. Learning of her absence, Milton Rudin paid Marilyn a visit. When he confronted her about it, a half-hearted, heated exchange ensued, and when he tried to persuade her to return to work, she accused him of being on Fox’s side. Producer Weinstein managed to get her on the phone and told her he would be more than willing to send a car for her or even come and pick her up personally and escort her to the studio. But she was uninterested. She wasn’t going to film anything today. Moreover, with listlessness running through her entire body, it was impossible for her to do so.

When he heard the news, director Cukor flipped and immediately announced that he refused to shoot any more scenes without her. Regrettably, it wasn’t only the director who had had enough. Actress Cyd Charisse remarked that, for the first time ever during the filming, Dean Martin became angry when he was told his leading lady would not be coming. At 3pm, he stormed off the set for the final time. His tenure on
Something’s Got To Give
had just come to an end.

One day later, Tuesday 5 June, it was the turn of Eunice Murray to put in the dreaded 8am phone call to Fox and deliver the same message: the actress was ‘ill and unable to appear before the cameras’. Studio doctor Lee Siegel was dispatched to the actress’s home and swiftly informed studio executives that Marilyn’s sinuses had flared and her temperature
was 102. However, mistrust was erupting everywhere. No one at Fox believed him or accepted the severity of her illness. Importantly, Cukor had had enough. ‘This was a sick woman,’ scriptwriter Walter Bernstein controversially recalled for Fox in 1990, ‘but also a movie star. This was a movie star who was getting her way. She was doing this because she
was
a movie star and didn’t give a damn about anybody else and being destructive or self-destructive.’

However, contrary to what he and numerous others have said about the matter, Marilyn was desperate to sort out the mess she had helped create. That same day, the actress managed to place a call through to Spyros P. Skouras, even though he was recuperating from surgery in New York’s St Luke’s Hospital. Trumpeter Dick Ruedebusch was visiting Skouras when the call came through. Incensed by how the actress was misbehaving on his film set, Ruedebusch recalled, the Fox chief immediately jumped out of his bed and ripped down her famous nude calendar picture, which was hanging on his hospital wall.

On Wednesday 6 June, work on
Something’s Got To Give
officially shut down. Fox claimed they had no more scenes to shoot without their leading lady. When told this, Pat Newcomb was quick to point that this was incorrect. ‘There
are
other scenes to shoot,’ she insisted. ‘They can’t shoot them because there
isn’t
a completed script.’ The war of words had begun.

That afternoon, an anonymous studio insider announced to the American press, ‘Something has to be done with these unprofessional people. We have to sit down on them or else forget about the industry. They’re running it.’ In another statement, producer Weinstein worryingly remarked, ‘There had to be an agonising appraisal of the situation. We have to decide whether Marilyn can recover in time to continue with production and if the studio can stand further delays.’ When told of this utterance, Pat Newcomb partly reiterated her previous remark by saying, ‘There would not have been delays if there had been a completed script.’ Almost immediately, Fox responded by insisting there
was
a completed script but ‘Marilyn insisted on rewriting it
every
night!’

Back at Fox, studio executives, huddled together in a hastily called emergency meeting, listened intently as George Cukor firmly announced, ‘Marilyn Monroe
must
be fired and replaced.’ They agreed but knew that they were powerless to make such a decision. This rested with Peter G. Levathes, Fox’s plain-speaking, no-messing executive vice-president, who was away on a troubleshooting trip to Rome trying to resolve the unending mess surrounding Elizabeth Taylor’s ill-fated epic,
Cleopatra
. Her continual absence from the set had helped raise the cost of the film to a colossal $30 Levathes’s no-nonsense method resulted in the sacking on Friday 1 June
of the movie’s Academy Award-winning producer, Walter Wanger, whom Levathes held accountable for the debacle. As a result, Wanger never worked in Hollywood again.

Executives at the Fox meeting chose to delay any announcement about Marilyn until Levathes had returned and been consulted, and a suitable replacement had been found. However, Cukor was in no mood to wait and clandestinely passed the news on to two highly influential Hollywood gossip writers, Hedda Hopper and Sheilah Graham. The former’s article, for her ‘Looking At Hollywood’ column, appeared the next day and was entitled ‘Marilyn To Be Replaced; Is She Finished?’

The latter’s damning piece, which appeared in the first editions of
The New York Mirror
later that evening, was entitled ‘No Show, Marilyn Getting The Bounce’, and read in part: ‘The studio is fed-up to the teeth with Marilyn Monroe. She hasn’t shown up for work for the past three days. But when she does, she’ll find out that she has been fired and replaced . . . 20th Century-Fox doesn’t want her anymore.’ Alternative versions of the report carried even more information: ‘Kim Novak has been asked. As soon as officials here can get an okay from Peter Levathes, head of production, who is now in Rome, they will make it official.’ Dean Martin meanwhile stayed well clear of the unfolding turmoil, calling himself ‘the highest paid golfer in history’.

So where was his leading lady amid all this verbal hostility? Keen to continue her home-based activities and avoid being photographed, Marilyn began her day by holding a relaxed phone conversation with her long-time associate, UPI Hollywood columnist Vernon Scott. ‘I’m really sick,’ she informed him. ‘I have a temperature of over 100 degrees and my throat is terribly sore. I want to get back to work and I hope the studio understands.’ Later, with the help of Pat Newcomb, the actress began preparing her dog Maf for his inaugural visit to the City of Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation, where he was due to have his first rabies vaccination.

The following day, Thursday 7 June, while the actress listlessly sauntered around her Brentwood home, Newcomb rang Fox and incorrectly informed them her client was still ‘unwell but improving’. She concluded by optimistically remarking that the actress would be ‘fit and ready for filming’ by the start of the following week. When quizzed by the hovering reporters who had started to gather like vultures outside Marilyn’s property, Newcomb remarked, ‘People
do
get sick. She doesn’t like it anymore than the studio. She still wants to do the picture and there is every justification she will.’

When the quote reached the news wires, Fox immediately refuted it. ‘
Look
at the star’s attendance record,’ a spokesperson at the studio raged,
‘12 out of 32 days. On her show days, she was usually on time for her 6.30am make-up call but then we had to wait around for her to emerge from her dressing room. That can be 10.30 or 11. After the lunch break, it’s another hour or two until she comes out. Then she quits at 4.30 or 5.’ Cold-war conversations between Marilyn’s camp and the studio were not to end there.

That day, moments after receiving yet another transatlantic phone call from Murray, Ralph Greenson abruptly cut short his trip, booked himself on the first available flight and rushed to the actress’s home where he found her lying in bed, unresponsive and partially sedated. (She was still consuming Newcomb’s tranquillisers.) Following a heated discussion by phone, Greenson then headed over to Fox for a hastily arranged personal tête-à-tête in Fox’s conference room with the studio hierarchy, as represented by executive vice-president Phil Feldman and manager Frank Ferguson.

With attorney Milton Rudin by his side, as the minutes of the meeting reveal, he began by admitting that his trips to Tel Aviv and Switzerland were ‘a part of the cause of what happened’. In an attempt to appease his disgruntled colleagues, he promised to excise troublesome drama coach Paula Strasberg from the actress’s life and career and insisted that he would ‘wean Marilyn off barbiturates and get her fit and ready for work by the following Monday’. In worryingly Svengali-esque tones, Greenson then notified them he would ‘be able to get the actress to go along with any responsible request’ and ‘persuade her to do anything reasonable’ that he wanted in order to complete the film. However, Fox weren’t listening. They were already pressing ahead for a replacement and were well on their way to calling ‘every actress in and out of town’.

The meeting came to a sudden halt when Rudin requested a private discussion with Greenson in another room. At once, they rose from their chairs and walked to an unoccupied room nearby, returning a few minutes later. Deliberations resumed immediately. Feldman began by telling Greenson he was unconvinced that Marilyn would be able to complete the movie. ‘Since her past history indicated nothing of the sort,’ he remarked, ‘and since I am a layman in the field, I am not convinced.’ The doctor retaliated by asking, ‘What
would
convince you?’ Feldman refused an answer, instead suggesting, ‘If you wish to progress the conversation further, you should allow a doctor of our own to consult with you about Marilyn’s problems.’ The name of Dr Karl Von Hagen, chairman of the Department of Neurology at the University of Southern California was suggested. Greenson immediately dismissed the idea and put forward several other names. Feldman vetoed the offer. A stalemate had been reached and, shortly afterwards, the meeting was adjourned. Greenson began his journey back to Marilyn’s home on Fifth Helena.