The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (37 page)

Moreover, with regard to the funding of
Something’s Got To Give
, as producer Henry Weinstein remarked, knowing how troublesome Marilyn was, Fox should have budgeted for 16 weeks instead of eight. By doing so, the movie would have easily been completed. With regards to the accounts, Marilyn had, as we know, agreed to her contractually obligated $100,000 fee regardless of whether she actually received the fee (which she didn’t), or how long the film would take to produce. Consequently, and in complete contrast to the picture painted by Fox at the time, Marilyn’s absenteeism did not add to her costs to the studio at all.

And one more detail regularly overlooked is that Elizabeth Taylor was actually absent from the set of
Cleopatra
far more times than Marilyn was from that of
Something’s Got To Give
: 99 out of 101 days in one instance. Filming started on Friday 30 September 1960, but she did not appear on the set until almost a year later, on Tuesday 12 September 1961, by which time shooting had shifted from Pinewood Studios in Iver, England to Rome in Italy. The ostensible reasons included food poisoning, suicide attempts, and a supposed automobile accident in Rome on Friday 27 April 1962, actually invented to account for damage to her nose suffered thanks to a beating she received from her new lover, Richard Burton. The bruises on Taylor’s face were so severe that she was forced to miss 22 straight days of filming, far more than Marilyn ever managed.

But we also have to wonder whether Monroe’s apparent disruptiveness on
Something’s Got To Give
was influenced by Taylor’s scandalous behaviour on her 1960 movie,
Butterfield 8
. From the start, Taylor, like Monroe had made it clear she wanted to make the film, yet seemed to do everything she could to get out of it, even announcing several times that the script was poor and insisted on changes being made to it. Desperate like Marilyn, to break free from her studio – in Taylor’s case, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer – she gained agreement that, if she made the movie, they would grant her wish and end their pact with her. Before shooting commenced, Taylor, like Monroe, insisted on a long list of provisos, in her case a final say in costumier, hairdresser and actors employed on the production. With regard to every one of those points, Marilyn followed suit.

Monroe always appeared to regard Taylor as a rival. Fury must then have engulfed her when, on Monday 17 April 1961, several months after completing
Butterfield 8
and just six weeks after almost dying of
pneumonia, Taylor was awarded the most notorious ‘pity Oscar’ in Hollywood history. Marilyn was never even nominated for the award. As I revealed earlier, her decision to ‘give away’ her rights to her nude swimming pictures was inspired by her overwhelming desire to knock Taylor off the front of the world’s magazine covers. Furthermore, was her decision to go au naturel influenced not by George Cukor but by Taylor’s revealing nude bath sequence in
Cleopatra
, which she had shot just 11 weeks earlier? I suspect it was.

Much of this information has been hidden for almost 50 years. But the sad fact is, should it have been uncovered, released or published at the time of the movie’s cancellation, it would probably have fallen on deaf ears. As far as the industry was concerned in mid-1962, Marilyn’s movie career was well and truly wrecked, and it seemed that no one in the industry was prepared to save it.

Marilyn spent the first eight days of June 1962 in seclusion behind the high walls of her white-bricked Brentwood hacienda, refusing to open her door or answer questions about her future from anyone, especially journalists. She slept until noon and when she did venture out, which was seldom, she wore her obligatory black wig and dark shades. Hardly any of her neighbours reported seeing her.

Sitting within her sparsely furnished home with associates such as Pat Newcomb and Lee and Paula Strasberg, Marilyn knew she was facing the biggest challenge of her adult life. She understood better than anyone that, following her dismissal by Fox, the company that helped create the ‘Marilyn Monroe’ image, she could be virtually washed up as a big money star. Furthermore, she knew full well that if any producer wanted to gamble on her again after this latest fiasco, he would be playing with loaded dice. She also understood that very few insurance companies would be willing to cushion a producer’s fall should the unpredictable and seemingly uncaring actress once again spin into one of her prolonged states of fragility.

Marilyn’s life was seemingly at a crossroads and her existence as a world-famous celebrity apparently hung on a knife’s edge. Or did it? Not according to some. On Sunday 10 June, Hedda Hopper announced in her ‘Hollywood Today’ column that the actress had been invited by Fox president Spyros Skouras to appear as one of the stars of his ‘Star Spangled Ball’ gala, to be held at New York’s Waldorf Hotel on Thursday 8 November. The person accepting the role of Honorary World Chairman at the event was none other than President John F. Kennedy . . .

Chapter Eight

Despondency, Rebirth, Photo Shoots and the Cal-Neva

Saturday 9 June 1962–Monday 30 July 1962

‘B
eing fired from
Something’s Got To Give
was hard for her to take,’ Eunice Murray admitted in 1962. With despondency engulfing her life, Marilyn was unexcited by the prospect of sharing another stage with the President. Following the White House rejection, she knew that in any case it was a hollow promise.

Her appearance was suffering too. ‘Her hair was unkempt,’ wrote the Hollywood reporter Martin Buckley, ‘her nails were longer than usual.’ The actress’s consumption of alcohol, in particular champagne, was also increasing. Daylight was almost a luxury for her now. She would get through the days, but it was the nights that were too long. Suddenly, she was at a loss about what she should do with herself. Fox had fired her for tardiness, but now she had no reason to be on time. Yet she found herself watching the clock. Murray would suggest she eat something. She didn’t answer. ‘She would get quiet, stay quiet for hours and hours,’ the housekeeper recalled. In her 1975 book,
Marilyn: The Last Months
, she revealed that the actress ‘spent a lot of time musing with a far away look in her eyes. Some might have seen this as depression.’ In the words of her good friend, the Hollywood publicist Rupert Allan, Marilyn was ‘facing the dark tunnel of her career’.

She used to enjoy the idea of staying at home all day. But not any more. The interior decorating ideas that had once engaged her no longer seemed
important. Ornaments she had purchased for her Mexican-style bar cantina still lay in the box. She had no desire to open it. On the occasional nights when she
did
go out, she would go for a drive with Murray in the housekeeper’s green Dodge car. Her favourite was along the Santa Monica beach where she would trail the curve of the sand, without having to ponder where she was going. Sometimes she would drive past Peter Lawford’s house. Many times she thought about stopping. She rarely did.

Saturday 9 June was spent holed up in Beverly Hills in her white brick apartment at 882 North Doheny Drive. Far from the party spirit, and with the bruises still prominent on her face, she failed to show that evening at Dean Martin’s special bash for her. The eleventh-hour get-together at his home in Beverly Hills was intended to cheer her up following her sacking. Instead, as the rain fell, Marilyn sat alone, contemplating her future. Her solitary companions were her dog, Maf, and the Sinatra records that spun continuously on her player. Fruitless calls to the Attorney General and her fan club secretary, Madge Inman, punctuated her banal proceedings. The actress’s despondency increased when the latter informed her that, once more, she had just
50
letters waiting for collection.

It was a far cry from September 1953, when Fox assigned 20 girls from the script department just to help catch up on the actress’s mail, which was piling up at the rate of 10,000 letters a month. With her bank balance dwindling fast, she naturally began to question whether the $262.65 it was costing her to run the club each month was worth it. Earlier in the day, when the sun started to shine, she had ventured to Coldwater Canyon, where she sat for hours, watching the children play in the park. The hurt of not being able to mother a child of her own had returned to haunt her. ‘Marilyn no longer felt the struggle was worth the try,’ one New York columnist correctly theorised at the time. ‘She simply refused. She refused to even get excited about scripts. An offer for a musical arrived. It stayed on her table unread.’

The proposal in question, sent by telegram on Friday 15 June, was from Natalia Danesi Murray, the New York representative of Anita Loos, the author of Monroe’s smash 1953 movie
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
:

Dear Miss Monroe: On behalf of Anita Loos, now in Europe, we would like to know if you would be interested star role new musical based on French play ‘GoGo’. Book by Anita Loos, lyrics by Gladys Shelley and entertaining music by Claude Leville. Can send you script and music if you express interest. Natalia Danesi Murray.

The musical was set to earn Marilyn $5,500 a week, the highest such offer for an entertainer at the time. But, as her attorney, Milton Rudin,
revealed, ‘She turned down the offer from Las Vegas, even though she needed the money, because she couldn’t take getting up in front of people.’

Author George Carpozi Jr was another observer of the actress. ‘Few friends saw Marilyn. She retreated behind the walls of her [Brentwood] Spanish bungalow . . . She lived alone with her poodle. She didn’t socialise except for her doctor, lawyer and Eunice. People about town seemingly washed their hands of her . . . Her days were unbearably aimless. During the long afternoons, Marilyn pottered around her garden, sat by her pool in her back yard, occasionally read and seldom spoke to friends on the phone . . . ’

However, on Thursday 14 June, her telephone
did
ring. It was Walter Winchell, the so-called dean of Hollywood gossip columnists, innocently calling to invite Marilyn to the Coconut Grove night club to see a performance by singer Eddie Fisher. ‘We thought maybe Marilyn could use a friend or two in her moment of need,’ he informed the actress’s press agent, Pat Newcomb. Before slamming the phone down, Newcomb abruptly declared, ‘She’s not talking to
anyone
!’ Marilyn did not receive the invite. She would not have gone anyway. Fisher was Elizabeth Taylor’s husband and the last thing she needed at that moment was to see her archrival’s smiling face, gloating at her current misfortune.

Four days earlier, on Sunday 10 June, following a highly inspirational early-morning visit by Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn had surprised everyone by making a decidedly low-key, but action-packed trip to her adopted homeland of New York. One of her many appointments was to see Isidore Miller. When she told him about what had happened at Fox, she began to sob. He asked her, ‘Why are you crying?’ She replied, ‘Dad, because you are such a wonderful man and you are interested in what will happen to me.’ She also caught up with her trusted friend, the writer Truman Capote, and attended a meeting with Fox’s veteran Hollywood executive Darryl F. Zanuck, who had just flown in from Paris. But the main reason for her visit, following a request from Peter Lawford, was to see the President of the United States.

With rumours of an affair between him and the actress now gaining momentum in the presidential circle, no doubt triggered by her sultry performance at his gala, Kennedy felt that Marilyn was a luxury he could not afford. He knew their one-night liaison had put the administration in great jeopardy and was well aware that, through the stringent bugging of his brother-in-law Lawford’s beachside home (eavesdropping equipment had been secreted under carpets, in chandeliers, on the phones and in ceiling fixtures) and the illicit recordings of conversations carried out
there, any one of Kennedy’s enemies could have amassed damaging information about the President.

With regard to his connection to promiscuous women, the heat was already on. On Tuesday 27 February, the FBI’s Director, J. Edgar Hoover, had sent a memo to top Kennedy aide Kenneth P. O’Donnell, notifying him that the President had been involved with 26-year-old Judith Campbell, a woman known to frequent mob circles and, prior to her involvement with Kennedy, recognised for her relationships with both Frank Sinatra and Mafia leader Sam Giancana. With no alternative in sight, JFK was warned by Hoover he could not risk the scandal of yet another extramarital connection, however innocent, becoming public, especially one with someone as famous as Monroe. At once – knowing moreover that the decision would please his wife – he decided to cease communication with Marilyn; hence her White House dinner party snub on Friday 1 June. He had, in her eyes, for the want of a more suitable expression, cut and run.

So he wished to explain. Following examination of the President’s diaries, I believe his decision to clarify everything to the actress came during the evening of Sunday 10 June, following his stopover in New York to visit, with Peter Lawford, his ailing father Joseph, who was still recuperating in the Manhattan rehabilitation centre, Horizon House. Discussions between Kennedy and Marilyn took place later that night at his regular New York base, the Carlyle Hotel, sometime after 6.55pm. It was their final encounter. Amid a feeling of disappointment, she returned to her apartment shortly after. (For the record, the President left the hotel at 8.55 the following morning and flew on to New Haven, Connecticut where, at 11.30am, he received an honorary degree from Yale University. He returned to Washington that afternoon at precisely 3.42 by helicopter, arriving back at the White House exactly ten minutes later.)

His decision to excise the actress from his life was then relayed to his brother Bobby, who in attempt to ease her obvious disappointment, and to apologise for his failure to help her at Fox, rang the actress at her Brentwood home during the evening of Wednesday 13 June and passed on his number at the Justice Department. A disclosure about this came from Pat Lawford, who in her 1988 book,
The Peter Lawford Story
, sensationally claimed that Bobby had apparently informed Marilyn she was ‘not even a serious affair for the President’ and was ‘just another of Jack’s fucks (
sic
)’.