The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (6 page)

It was shortly after Marilyn’s divorce from Dougherty in 1946, and when she was taking her first tentative steps in Hollywood, that she was introduced to tranquillisers. During her early teens, along with the miracle of new-found happiness and burgeoning womanhood, had come the agony of menstruation. For several unaided years, Marilyn endured violent cramps and excruciating stomach tortures until one day, to help ease her discomfort and to aid with her sleep, she was handed some barbiturates.
Initially she consumed Seconal. Other, more fashionable tranquillisers such as Miltown, Equanil and Librium followed. However, Nembutal soon became her drug of choice.

Marilyn first took the pills in October 1947, when she was at 20th Century-Fox shooting her brief walk-on part in the Jeanne Crane/Dan Dailey romantic musical
You Were Meant For Me
. (The role would end up on the cutting-room floor.) Although it was the actress’s third for the studio, no one really expected her to linger in the industry. As Fox photographer Leon Shamroy, who shot her first screen test, once disparagingly remarked, ‘When you analyse Marilyn, she is not good looking, had a bad nose, bad posture and her figure is too obvious. She has a bad profile. Hers is a phoney sex.’ Even her first acting agent, Harry Lipton, was heard to comment, ‘She was thought of as a joke by many people and that hurt her badly.’

‘I was fired from Fox at 22, and fired from Columbia at 23,’ Monroe recalled in 1953. ‘They told me I should go home.’ Along with her intermittent physical pains, the horrifying thought that her chosen profession might well be a fleeting one was enough to direct the actress towards pills. She needed help to alleviate her anxieties. Slowly and imperceptibly her life began to be centred on these drugs; nobody outside her immediate circle of friends was aware of just how many pills she was beginning to pop, not only during the day but also at night. Subsequently, they began to transform both her emotions and thinking processes.

As with all barbiturate addicts, alterations in Marilyn’s personality began to take place, sometimes manifesting themselves in violent outbursts aimed towards either her family, friends or colleagues, while at other times she seemed crazy, eccentric and peculiar. By the 1950s, if you were a star of her calibre, you could get away with such behaviour. But she also had good days when she was sparkling and radiant and seemed absolutely fine to those around her. Such dramatic personality changes are typical of those living under the influence of Nembutal.

The lure of alcohol had already beckoned for Marilyn. Her consumption of spirits had increased in 1942 during her marriage to Dougherty. Aged just 16, she grew to love vodka, wine, occasionally sherry and especially champagne. But as her success in the movie business increased, so too did her intake. Monroe found in alcohol, as well as chemistry, a solution to all kinds of discomfort, not only physical pain but the pains of daily life; a solvent for her internal tensions and demons.

With a difficult childhood and a drug-fuelled adulthood, and with so much insanity running through her family, it would have been amazing had Marilyn turned out completely normal. Lack of emotional bonding in her very formative years, due to a sick and disturbed mother, generated an
immense black hole of emotional insecurities that could never be filled. In truth, Marilyn was always ten years of age in some place in her heart, frequently being dragged to the Los Angeles Orphan Home.

She had grown up as a sad-faced little girl, devoid of any firm structure and, aside from her time at the Bolenders’, of any consistent experience of living within a good, honest, loving family she could call her own. Unsurprisingly, since her efforts to gain affection and acceptance were sometimes rejected, she became an isolated, frustrated individual who never grew up. The cumulative result of her drug dependencies, childhood terrors and uneasy confrontations with the prejudices and peculiarities of different families was a grave sense of insecurity, low self-esteem and loneliness.

Conversely, despite her poor self-esteem, she became a survivor, motivated to succeed, and a seeker for love wherever she could find it. As Marilyn confided to her friend, leading Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Oettinger Parsons, the so-called ‘First Lady of Hollywood’, she had a fierce desire to be loved. Having known or experienced so little affection, she was anxious to have visible signs that someone cared for her. In effect, Monroe’s entire life was plagued by fear, anxiety and self-doubt, and this emotional dependency often alienated those who were attracted to her. Such was the case with the men in her life. She divorced Dougherty in 1946, and her subsequent marriages, to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio (in 1954) and the aforementioned Arthur Miller (in 1956), went the same way.

Despite its shaky start, her movie career eventually became decidedly more upbeat. With films such as
Niagara
,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
How to Marry a Millionaire
(all in 1953), Marilyn was launched as both a movie superstar and an international sex symbol. Immensely successful movies such as
The Seven Year Itch
(1955),
Bus Stop
(1956) and
Some Like It Hot
(1959) soon followed.

Even then, she had gained a growing reputation for unreliability on the film set. As Joshua Logan, the director of Marilyn’s 1956 movie
Bus Stop
, recalled. ‘She’d run in apologising, take a look in the mirror and then go through an agonising process of getting herself in the mood.’ On a typical day’s shooting of her most recent film,
The Misfits
, co-star Clark Gable would be on the set between 7.30 and 8am with lines memorised and ready to go. Monroe would not usually arrive until noon. A similar scenario had been played out during the production of her preceding movie,
Let’s Make Love
. Actor Tony Randall recalled how he reported for work for three days running but, due to the actress’s continual absence, did not perform once. On another day, when Marilyn did succeed in coming
to the set, he ended up shooting his first scene of the day at 3pm, just two hours before filming was due to wrap.

And more recently, box-office success was not assured. The produced-in-England movie,
The Prince and the Showgirl
(1957), the comedy
Let’s Make Love
(1960) alongside co-star Yves Montand and
The Misfits
(1961), written by Arthur Miller, were all far from fruitful at the box office.

Amid fears that her fame was in decline, in the middle of 1961 she was back in Los Angeles, where matters concerning her final movie for 20th Century-Fox were hijacking her life. But on a happier note, she had just celebrated her latest birthday. This is where our astonishing tale of Marilyn Monroe’s final years – as it was, as it happened – begins . . .

Chapter Two

June 1961–Monday 8 January 1962

H
er complexion pinkish-white in the radiance of late-afternoon sunlight, Marilyn smiled, wetted her lips and announced, ‘I’m very happy I’ve reached thirty-five. A midway mark perhaps? I don’t know. But I do know that I’m growing up. It was wonderful being a girl, but it’s more wonderful being a woman.’

It was June 1961, and as the actress had remarked to an American reporter, she had just reached her 35th birthday. Thankfully, there were no signs of the inner conflicts which had troubled her just a few months earlier during a short, turbulent stay at New York’s Payne-Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. At this mid-point in the year, Monroe was in fine fettle. In another interview that month, this time with Hollywood columnist Jonah Ruddy, she majestically revealed, ‘I feel marvellous. I’m on this high-protein diet and I weigh 123 pounds, which is about right for me. Yes, I feel absolutely wonderful.’

Considering she was receiving 10 per cent of
Some Like It Hot
’s gross box-office takings, she was just about surviving financially too. Two years after the smash-hit comedy’s release, the movie was still playing to packed houses across the country. However, by comparison, her next film project was beginning to look decidedly less auspicious.

Unproductive discussions about it had been going on between Marilyn’s New York attorney, Aaron R. Frosch, of law firm Weissberger & Frosch, and executives at 20th Century-Fox since Friday 1 July 1960, when the studio approached her with the idea of starring with the
Maverick
television star, James Garner, in George Axelrod’s comedy
Where’s Charlie?
, later retitled
Goodbye Charlie
. However, the gender-swap fantasy, which saw the leading male character, heartless lothario Charlie Sorel (to be played by Monroe), get shot by a jealous husband, fall out of a ship’s porthole, become lost at sea and return as a shapely blonde woman, did not impress the actress at all.

‘The studio people want me to do
Goodbye Charlie
,’ Marilyn raged at the time. ‘But I’m
not
going to do it. I don’t like the idea of playing a man in a woman’s body, you know? It just doesn’t seem feminine.’ Her tirade against the movie continued for months. ‘I used to watch Clark Gable on the set of
The Misfits
, in case I had to play a man,’ she announced in October. ‘But when I told him this, he laughed and said, “You don’t have
that
kind of equipment.”’

Matters intensified in mid-January 1961, when, just two weeks before the release of her latest offering, the ultimately unsuccessful
The Misfits
, the studio, this time more forcefully, made it clear to the actress that they were desperate to get another ‘Marilyn Monroe’ vehicle under way and into the theatres. Despite her recent failings, she was still the studio’s biggest commodity and most bankable star. Her 20 movies for the studio had grossed over $200 million at the box office and importantly, as part of a four-film deal dating from December 1955, she owed them one more.

On Monday 30 January, Garner announced to the papers that he was still up for the part in it, but regrettably, Marilyn was not. However, the studio knew that, as long as they engaged one of the directors on her favoured wish-list, she would have no legal way out of shooting the movie. Among her inventory of 16, submitted to the studio late the previous year, were the Hollywood luminaries Joshua Logan (whom Marilyn had worked with on her 1956 movie
Bus Stop
), William Wyler (best remembered for
The Big Country
and
Ben-Hur
in 1958 and 1959 respectively), Carol Reed (fondly known for Orson Welles’ landmark 1949 film,
The Third Man
) and John Ford (of John Wayne westerns’ fame).

The studio approached everyone on her file, but they all declined the opportunity to direct the actress. In spite of her reservations about the role, Marilyn especially wanted 61-year-old, New York-born director George Cukor to be engaged in the production. However, due to his brief tenure on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer period drama
Lady L
, he was unattainable. Her attorney, Frosch, corroborated this in a note to the studio on Friday 14 April, which read, ‘Although Miss Monroe had indicated that she would not do the film, Marilyn Monroe’s failure to perform in
Goodbye Charlie
stems entirely from George Cukor’s unavailability to perform as director . . . ’ Six days later, on Thursday 20 April, Fox’s chief counsel, Frank Ferguson, responded in writing by saying that every conceivable
attempt had been made to secure the services of Cukor and at least one of the individuals she had named, and, since no one was available, they wished to discuss with her a suitable substitute. The claim enraged the actress. She was well aware that her New York-based drama coach and mentor, Lee Strasberg, had not been contacted, and realised that, by not doing so, Fox had failed to honour their original agreement.

On Thursday 4 May, in an attempt to appease their clearly agitated star, Ferguson announced, by way of another memo, that Strasberg was now being considered for the director’s role on
Goodbye Charlie
. Time was now running out fast. Friday 12 May, the date on which Fox were legally bound to find work for Marilyn or else risk losing her services for good, was now just eight days away.

After being fired by Fox in 1947, Strasberg, who by now was making a name for himself in New York City with his highly revered Actors Studio, was naturally reluctant to return. But after realising that, by taking the post, he would be helping Marilyn, he soon warmed to the idea. (Assertions by some previous Monroe biographers that he had no previous movie directorial experience are not entirely accurate. In 1945, he was at the helm of the First World War documentary
Story with Two Endings
.) Negotiations commenced immediately when the studio offered him a flat fee of $22,500 to direct the actress, but by now greed had set in. He wanted more, a sum consistent with other contemporary directors. Desperate to get the new Monroe movie into production, the studio caved in to his demand and immediately upped their offer, more than doubling it to a most generous $50,000. However, Strasberg still wasn’t happy. Desiring an even higher fee, he promptly dismissed it. But, this time, Fox weren’t listening and plans to engage Strasberg were swiftly shelved.

Possibly as a way of killing even more time, he then reappeared on the scene, insisting he would not allow the actress to shoot the movie anyway, asserting that the pressures of this on top of the ongoing problems with her NBC TV drama play,
Rain
, were coming too soon after her traumatic stay at the Payne-Whitney clinic. Fox retaliated by insisting that, as long as she was capable of working and they had engaged (or attempted to engage) one of her favoured directors on the movie, she could not lawfully decline the part. Marilyn meanwhile was adamant. With neither Cukor nor Strasberg at the helm, she would
not
make the picture. Even the announced intention of Fox studio president and true Monroe supporter Spyros P. Skouras to drag her through the courts over the matter failed to change her mind.