The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (7 page)

So, in May 1961, after almost 11 months of futile deliberations, and two full months after shooting was due to commence,
Goodbye Charlie
was finally put on hold (albeit until Hollywood actress Debbie Reynolds
rescued the role in 1964) and another suitable screenplay for Monroe was sought. After concurring with her attorney that she
did
still owe them one more movie, Skouras agreed not to sue the actress. He also gave his blessing to her appearing in
Rain
, but only on the proviso that it was completed by Monday 30 October – a date when, Fox hoped, she would finally be ready to commence work on her next (and final) film for them.

In unison with the movie’s abandonment, following the realisation that Hollywood was the only place to be if she wished to prolong her profession, Marilyn packed her bags and, once more, returned to Los Angeles. She was reluctant to do so. As she had announced to the American press on Monday 27 February 1956, ‘My real home now is New York.’ In her mind, her return showed that her attempts at success as an actress away from Tinseltown had been a failure, and it hurt.

She had worked tirelessly to drag herself out of the industry’s gutter, had married America’s most admired sports hero and the country’s most revered playwright and had toiled endlessly at the Actors Studio just to gain respect as an actress. ‘When she came to New York [in December 1954],’ Lee Strasberg recalled, ‘she began to perceive the possibilities of really accomplishing her dreams of becoming a great actress.’

Marilyn loved being there. The city’s people, theatres, night-life and genuine sense of optimism agreed with her immensely. She mixed with intellectuals, socialised in creative circles and had even become friends with top-rated writers Truman Capote and Carson McCullers. She wholeheartedly identified with the place. Yet, just over six years later, she found herself back in Hollywood, back where she started, in a city she hated, filled with people she barely trusted and with whom she had precious little in common. ‘Even though I was born there,’ she once remarked to her writer friend, Truman Capote, ‘I still can’t think of one good thing to say about it. If I close my eyes and picture LA, all I see is one big varicose vein.’

‘This was the last act for her. She’d come back defeated,’ her close, New York-based friend Norman Rosten recalled. ‘She was going back to her roots,’ screenwriter Arthur Schulman observed, ‘back to the way she’d be treated when she was giving blow-jobs in the afternoon . . . She was a queen, but
not
to those people. They patronised her, saying, “You’re not really one of us.”’ Worryingly, Marilyn also knew that she was fast approaching 35, the age when many of Hollywood’s most famous female players were known to have been cast aside.

Thanks in part to her few friends, however, Monroe soon warmed a little to the idea of being back in Tinseltown. While the singer was in Hollywood performing a children’s charity concert, her initial weeks were spent as a guest of Frank Sinatra at his bachelor pad in Coldwater Canyon.
In an attempt to cheer her up, a present from him, a small white poodle, was waiting for her upon her arrival. Of Scottish descent, it had been acquired from actress Natalie Wood’s mother Maria, a renowned breeder. On account of Frank’s well-publicised connections to the Mafia (though Sinatra wasn’t keen on the moniker), Marilyn affectionately baptised the pet ‘Maf’.

On Sunday 11 June, Marilyn had been among a host of Hollywood celebrities at St Cyril’s Roman Catholic Church in suburban Encino for the christening of Clark Gable’s 10-week-old son, John Clark Gable, who was born just 124 days after his father’s death. Wishing to be discreet, the actress slipped quietly through the star-studded crowd in a veil and a subdued black dress. She looked like a widow. After the service, she joined the others at a champagne reception at the Gables’ nearby home. She and Gable’s widow, Kay, had evidently forgiven each other following Kay’s suggestion that Monroe’s persistent delays on the set of
The Misfits
had contributed to her husband’s death. In fact, they had become friends. Two months earlier, on Tuesday 11 April, she had drafted a letter to the actress which read, in part, ‘I miss Clark each day more. I’ll never get over this great loss. But God has blessed me with three great children and precious memories.’ Kay even sent Marilyn a copy of the child’s first-ever photograph.

With the actress still residing at his home, questions about her alleged affair with Frank Sinatra dominated her early spell back in Hollywood. When columnist Louella Parsons confronted her about this, she made light of the tittle-tattle by replying, ‘I couldn’t be more surprised . . . He has always been very kind to me,’ adding, ‘I want to go to his and Dean Martin’s birthday party at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.’ Which she did. At midnight on the night of Wednesday 14 June, at Martin’s surprise belated 44th birthday celebration, she was seen seated at the very edge of the Sands’ stage, champagne glass in hand, gently swaying along to the music, enthusiastically applauding each number and gazing up adoringly at Sinatra as he performed. Rumours of their affair were ignited further when the two were spotted having an intimate tête-à-tête in the lounge immediately after the show. But despite the gossip, Monroe toddled off to bed alone, while Frank remained behind, chatting with his show business pals way into the early hours. (For the record, by the middle of June 1961 Monroe had dated Frank just twice and not five or more times, as many previous Monroe scholars have led us to believe. Their relationship would, in fact, not intensify for another three months.)

Marilyn’s time in Las Vegas was brief. Later that day, accompanied by her press agent, Pat Newcomb, she flew out of the city en route to Los Angeles International Airport. After an exceedingly brief stopover in Coldwater Canyon, Marilyn was escorted back to the airport where,
amid great excitement, she caught her flight back to New York’s Idlewild Airport, arriving there during the evening of Thursday 15 June. Amid tidal waves of wolf-whistles and flash bulbs, she remarked ‘No comment’ to reporters who had enquired why she had suddenly returned. In fact, she was there for two reasons. First, business. Thanks to the amount of time she had spent there, most of her ongoing promotional and occupational matters were still being handled in the city. For instance, within an hour of her homecoming, she was holding court in her Manhattan home with Louella Parsons and
The New York Herald Tribune
’s ‘Television Today’ columnist, Marie Torre. Then, with matters concerning her television play
Rain
deepening, Marilyn held a late-night meeting with the show’s scriptwriter, Rod Serling.

Second, she was there to prepare for an operation to remove her gall bladder, a procedure which had to be brought forward when, during the evening of Wednesday 28 June, she began suffering from severe intestinal pains. An ambulance was summoned to her apartment and, with Joe DiMaggio by her side, she was taken to the local Polyclinic Hospital. X-rays confirmed that an impacted gallstone was causing the inflammation and discomfort, and emergency surgery was scheduled. The successful operation (classed as an emergency because it took place outside the normal morning operating hours) took place the following evening, Thursday 29 June.

On Tuesday 11 July, after two weeks of recuperation in her private room, the actress was deemed fit enough to leave hospital. Before doing so, her obligatory New York hair stylist (and that of the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy), the eminent Kenneth Battelle, known professionally as plain ‘Kenneth’, was urgently summoned to fix the actress’s tresses. ‘I had flown in from Europe that day,’ he recalled in 1961. ‘I flew to New York for three hours just to do Marilyn’s hair’ (he received a cool $1,000 for doing so). Since many of her stomach muscles had not yet stretched back to normal and were not fully functioning, she was unable to walk properly, so she was forced to exit the building in a wheelchair. A crowd of approximately 500, comprised of journalists, photographers, well-wishers and the curious, were waiting to witness her departure. ‘I feel wonderful,’ she shouted before she gingerly stood on her feet and climbed aboard her waiting car, which was ready to escort her back to her Manhattan apartment. One of her other New York press agents, Howard Haines, was ready there to help her inside, where waiting to greet her was her half-sister, Berniece Miracle.

There is no truth in the story that, shortly after Marilyn’s exit from the hospital, she and Miracle were driven to Connecticut by the actress’s close friend and masseur, Ralph Roberts, for a vacation. At this point, the actress was still barely able to move. Medical reports dated Monday 24 July reveal
that, two weeks after she left the clinic, the actress was still recuperating at her New York home and was now just about able to leave her bed, but only for ‘several hours a day’. Further evidence that she remained holed up in her apartment for many weeks after her operation came from the manager of Westhampton House on Westhampton Beach, who revealed that, one week after the actress was discharged from the hospital, the ever-thoughtful Joe DiMaggio booked, as a surprise for the actress, two rooms at the Long Island resort. When quizzed about the reservations, an astounded Monroe was quoted as saying, ‘I have
no
plans to go anywhere at all.’ Nor did she. Closely abiding to a restrictive two-month diet which had been set by her doctors, she did not venture out of her apartment again until Tuesday 8 August.

During her New York internment, however, she did record a voice-over for a new American television special. Entitled
USO
–
Wherever They Go
, the show was a tribute to the United Service Organization (USO) on its 20th anniversary and to the entertainers who had performed for the American armed forces at bases at home and abroad, in peace and war. Naturally, footage of Marilyn’s performance with the Anything Goes Band before the troops in Korea in February 1954 was to be one of the show’s high spots. ‘She had just been released from the hospital when we called,’ the programme’s producer, Jesse Zousmer, recalled in 1961. ‘So we went to her apartment with a projector, sound equipment and the necessary technicians to show her what we were doing. She got such a kick out of the film and she eagerly agreed to write her own narration.’ The finished programme became NBC TV’s all-star ‘DuPont Show Of The Week’ when it aired on Sunday 8 October.

On Tuesday 8 August, following several weeks of convalescence, and after realising that, for professional reasons, she simply
had
to return there, Marilyn clandestinely flew back to Los Angeles. Travelling in a hat, headscarf and dark glasses, and in the guise of her East Coast secretary, ‘Miss Reis’, she had managed to keep everyone in the dark about her arrival, even her press agent, Arthur P. Jacobs. However, one person who was not was her former husband, Joe DiMaggio, who was there to meet her at the city’s International Airport. A scrum of reporters who had caught sight of the couple, and noticed in particular the actress’s new, svelte figure, immediately descended upon them and began asking if they were planning to remarry. Shortly after checking into her hotel, where she would reside for the next month, she was seen at the celebrity hang-out, Chasen’s in Beverly Hills. The sycophantic, but highly worshipped columnist Louella Parsons met her there and afterwards wrote gushingly: ‘I thought I hadn’t seen her look as well since the first time I knew her
years ago. She’s taken off so much weight that all those bulging curves are gone.’

During the month, Marilyn’s warm-heartedness shone through again when she fulfilled the wishes of 14-year-old Barbara Heinz, who was dying of incurable bone cancer in Wisconsin’s Appleton Memorial Hospital. With just a month to live, the young girl, a keen collector of toy dogs, penned a letter to the actress requesting a picture of her with Maf. Marilyn duly obliged. The photograph, taken on Friday 11 August, arrived at the girl’s bedside on Wednesday 23 August, inscribed with the words, ‘From Marilyn Monroe to Barbara Heinz. With love.’

A brief trip to San Francisco with DiMaggio, staying with his widowed sister, Marie, in the family home on Beach Street, and a middle-of-the-month excursion with him to Lake Tahoe, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, peppered the actress’s ensuing weeks. Sadly, that period would otherwise prove to be a desperately dreary one. Finding herself back in Los Angeles, a city she despised, Marilyn was desperately lonely. Even the pollution, which seemed to cast a pink veil over the city, was beginning to infuriate her.

The actress’s isolation intensified in the first week of September when she moved out of her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and returned to the small, rented apartment of 925 square feet, situated at 882 North Doheny Drive, West Hollywood, where she had previously lived during the period 1953–4. Built in 1952, it boasted just one bedroom. Since Frank Sinatra, as well as his personal valet George Jacobs, secretary Gloria Lovell and occasional bed-mate Jeanne Carmen also had homes in the building, it would become affectionately known as ‘The Sinatra Arms’.

With DiMaggio now back in New York, and with few friends to hand, Marilyn would spend most evenings alone, frittering away the hours by reading, watching television or listening to the wireless. Her favourite station was the radio broadcaster, KDAY. Hosted by Tom Clay, her show of choice was
Words and Music
. With its highly evocative, cohesive mix of news-bites and spoken words, the programme, broadcast daily from 4 to 8pm, soon became a highlight. Marilyn became hooked on the show, which developed into a form of company, and around Friday 8 September even began ringing the station.

Touched by Clay’s unique way of telling stories and his superbly executed discussions about childhood and marriage, and knowing full well that he answered every call to his show personally, her contact with the station intensified. To begin with, she preferred to remain anonymous but, after several more discussions, Clay felt courageous enough to ask for her name. ‘I’m Marilyn Monroe,’ she replied hesitantly. ‘Yes, sure, and I’m Frank Sinatra,’ he curtly retorted. Incensed by his response, she
terminated the call. However, she soon rang back. After sensing desperation in her voice, he agreed to meet her.