The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (8 page)

One day later, at approximately 9.30 on the morning of Monday 11 September, he knocked on the door of the North Doheny Drive address she had offered. It opened, and he was shocked to discover that the shadowy caller to his show was indeed the world-famous actress. Clay recalled she was wearing a bathrobe, sipping champagne, and was looking depressed and confused. The disc jockey listened compassionately to the actress’s problems. During the exchange, she revealed how lonesome she had become. ‘How can anyone as famous as you be so lonely?’ he asked. ‘Have you ever been in a room and felt loneliness?’ she enquired. ‘Well, multiply that by 40 rooms, then you’ll have some idea about how lonely I am.’

However, when Frank Sinatra re-entered her life, she had no further use for Clay. Marilyn began dating the Rat Pack star again immediately. On Wednesday 13 September, they were spotted in the Crown Room at Romanoff’s restaurant in Hollywood at a cocktail party given by film producer Harold Mirisch for the director of
Some Like It Hot
, Billy Wilder. With Sinatra by her side, Marilyn enjoyed the night immensely. On the dance floor, she and Sinatra were inseparable. As Dorothy Kilgallen, the so-called ‘Voice of Broadway’, wrote in one of her columns, ‘Marilyn Monroe looked as if she could have danced all night with Frank Sinatra.’ Marilyn and Frank would be joined at the hip for the next two weeks.

However, their relationship hit the buffers on Tuesday 26 September. Just hours after the couple had flown into New York from Hyannis Port, and while Marilyn sat alone in her apartment, planning their future, Sinatra went out on a date with his former wife, screen actress Ava Gardner. Following dinner at the Colony restaurant on Madison Avenue, they attended a show by his close friend, jazz pianist Stan Kenton, and his orchestra at the trendy Basin Street East club. Despite their bravest attempts to keep their visit a secret, by the time they reached their table, in one of the far corners of the room, word had got around who had just walked through the door and, unsurprisingly, the press were informed. Marilyn flew into a rage and terminated her brief, two-week relationship with Sinatra with immediate effect.

Sinatra was unconcerned by the rejection. Just two weeks later, he began seeing the South African entertainer Juliet Prowse, who had caught his eye during rehearsals in Las Vegas for the musical
Irma La Douce
. Resentment between Monroe and Sinatra simmered for months. When
Redbook
magazine’s Alan Levy dared to ask him, a few months later, how well he knew the actress, he flippantly asked, ‘Who?’ When told this, Marilyn retaliated by saying, ‘Tell him to look in
Who’s Who
.’ Sinatra
counteracted by declaring, ‘Miss Monroe reminds me of a saintly young girl I went to High School with who later became a nun.’

Unsurprisingly, with her sanctioned five-month respite from the studio about to expire, Fox were back in touch with Marilyn that month. Following an immense amount of cajoling by their despairing stockholders, the corporation’s executives set about drafting a series of letters to the actress’s company, Marilyn Monroe Productions (MMP), each one politely reminding her of the fact that she legally owed them another movie and suggesting she star in a new picture they had in mind: a production bearing the title of
Something’s Got To Give
.

Largely thanks to their insistence that the film would be made entirely under their terms and that any requests from the actress would be completely ignored, their first two letters to Marilyn’s company went unanswered. The third was far more intimidating. Its message was quite clear: make this picture or we’ll ‘drag you through the courts’. Matters intensified when Spyros Skouras declared that he would, once more, seek an injunction preventing her from working at another studio if she didn’t fulfil her four-film deal with Fox. As the final straw, the prearranged deadline for her decision, the end of October 1961, was reimposed.

In truth, since she was still handcuffed to her $100,000-a-movie ‘slave’ contract with Fox, Marilyn wasn’t fervent about making another film for the studio. She knew far greater sums (and more appealing projects) awaited her elsewhere. For instance, she had enthusiastically discussed with French director Henri-Georges Clouzot shooting a movie with him in France and had talked about making
The Naked Truth
with Harold Mirisch in Hollywood. With regard to the latter, she defiantly remarked to Louella Parsons, ‘If he gets a director, I’ll make it. Mirisch is my favourite producer. He
cares
what happens.’

But Marilyn knew that, for the immediate future anyway, it was academic to make plans away from Fox. The actress had even started to avoid reading the new screenplays she would receive from rival film studios. Instead, she would hurl them on to the heap which had begun to form (and subsequently collapse) in both the bedroom and on the table in the living room of her new apartment. And so, on Tuesday 26 September, a month before the imposed deadline, MMP finally replied to Fox’s proposal. Three weeks later, on Monday 16 October, following more discussions with the studio, Marilyn irrevocably agreed in principle to the project and a contract was signed. A starting date of Wednesday 15 November was soon approved.

In another attempt to pacify their clearly despondent star, Fox even arranged a meeting for her that day with Owen McClean, the studio’s head of talent. The get-together, set to take place at 3.30pm in office 147
at the studio’s West Pico Boulevard locale, was to provide the actress with the opportunity to unburden herself of any worries she had concerning the film. However, industry insiders were already beginning to doubt she would fulfil that appointment. On Friday 6 October, the
Ogden Standard Examiner
sensationally claimed that Marilyn was now ‘too thin and run down’ to report to the studio that day and even prophetically insisted she should abstain from movie-making until 1962.

Marilyn’s spiritless endorsement of
Something’s Got To Give
was shadowed by her and her attorney’s decision to fight Fox one last time. Their latest, quite unexpected attempt to gain advantage over the studio came in the shape of a considerable list of demands, which included the replacing of David Brown as the movie’s producer (he would be excised from the film in December 1961), the rewriting of the script to make it ‘more sexy’ (even though she had no rights to make such a demand), a promise of a substantial bonus when she completed the film, the rights to approve all publicity stills before they were released to the press, approval of leading man, supporting cast (including the substituting of comic Don Knotts with Monroe’s newly acquired friend, Wally Cox of NBC’s
Mr. Peepers
fame), the engagement of Franz (also known as Frank) Planer and Billy Daniels as cameramen, the employment of Jean Louis as clothes designer, the hiring of Sydney Guilaroff as hairdresser and chiefly, her obligatory election of director. Remarkably, the studio assented to each and every one of her requests.

Forty-nine-year-old, New Jersey-born Frank Tashlin, a man best known for writing and supervising comedies featuring the likes of Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope and Jayne Mansfield, had been Fox’s first choice of director. His fine-tuning of comedy-writer Edmund L. Hartmann’s recently completed script was an integral part of his posting. However, no doubt due to his connections to her great platinum-blonde rival at 20th Century-Fox, Jayne Mansfield and to the fact that Tashlin had prepared the screenplay without Marilyn in mind (amazingly, Monroe had accepted the role in the first place completely oblivious to the fact that it had begun life two years earlier as a vehicle intended for Mansfield), she made it clear she didn’t want him involved. So the plan was immediately vetoed and Fox had to turn their gazes once more to the obligatory Monroe-approved list of directors, which had been submitted to the studio on Tuesday 26 September.

Among those featured on this inventory of 16 were Billy Wilder (with whom Monroe had worked on
Some Like It Hot
), David Lean (director of the 1957 movie
The Bridge On the River Kwai
) and John Huston (whom Marilyn had befriended during the shooting of
The Misfits
). The
Psycho
director and master of the macabre, Alfred Hitchcock, was the most astonishing name to be listed. The choice became even more astounding
when Fox announced that
Something’s Got To Give
was, in fact, a reworking of RKO’s light-hearted 1940 screwball bedroom comedy,
My Favorite Wife
.

Marilyn was cast in the role of Ellen Wagstaff Arden, a photographer believed killed during a trans-Pacific yacht race, but who turns up very much alive, having spent the previous five years on a desert island, on the day that a judge pronounces her dead and her husband is about to remarry. Rewritten to replicate the style of the highly popular bedroom comedies of the late 1950s and early 1960s starring Doris Day (which featured opulent people in desirable locations experiencing amorous difficulties), the first version of the script of
Something’s Got To Give
was packed with frothy, inoffensive humour and lightly contrived pathos.

The part also marked a prominent change of direction for Monroe. After years of portraying either cabaret singers, hookers or short-sighted gold-diggers, she was set to play the role of a normal, San Francisco-based, upper-class suburban housewife and mother. Believing that the movie could possibly make her more popular than ever, the acting challenge slowly began to excite her and she waited anxiously for news of who would be directing her.

For the first time ever in her profession, Marilyn began preparing for the movie devoid of any agency representation. At the start of September, following a suggestion from both her publicist, Arthur P. Jacobs, and her Los Angeles attorney, Milton ‘Mickey’ Rudin, of the Sunset Boulevard law firm Gang, Tyre, Rudin & Brown, she had severed her ties with Music Corporation of America (MCA). The largest and most successful booking agency in the world and a company which handled the affairs of over 500 of America’s biggest and best film and television stars, MCA’s domination of the industry was immense. By late 1961, it was estimated that, if any client obtained a post on a film or television show, almost everyone else involved in the production would be an MCA client too. However, the agency had recently fallen foul of Robert Francis Kennedy – better known as Bobby – the Attorney General of the United States, whose Department of Justice had recently decreed that its dual role of agent and producer violated anti-trust laws.

Apprehensive about starting a new project without any kind of management, Monroe immediately sought new representation. A request was made to actress Polly Bergen’s husband, former MCA vice-chairman Freddie Fields, and his partner David Begelman, who were in the process of starting their new talent agency, Creative Management Associates (a clever anagram of MCA). To begin with, it operated with just four high-calibre stars: Bergen, entertainer Judy Garland, actor Kirk Douglas and the
comedy actor Phil Silvers, best known for starring as the conniving, fast-talking Sergeant Ernie Bilko in the 1950s US Army sitcom,
The Phil Silvers Show
. Publicity-wise, Arthur Jacobs represented them all and Marilyn wanted to be artiste number five on their new roster. However, her request was declined. It seemed her reputation for unreliability had finally caught up with her.

Her decision to fly solo could not have come at a worse time. Severely strapped for cash, on Thursday 14 September she had drafted a typewritten note to the United Artists Corporation, distributors of
Some Like It Hot
, requesting a $25,000 loan, agreeing to pay the money back at the rate of 4 per cent per annum on or before Friday 5 January 1962. Forthcoming royalties from the film were used as a guarantee. (Thankfully for the actress, her application was successful.)

In the third week of October, following a suggestion by Fox’s production head, Peter G. Levathes, and consent by Monroe, the studio announced that the director’s chair on
Something’s Got To Give
was to be handed to George Cukor. With a reputation for being annoyingly belligerent, extremely fussy but intensely stimulating, his track record boasted distinguished Hollywood films such as
Gone with the Wind
(1939),
The Philadelphia Story
(1940) and the Judy Garland version of
A Star Is Born
(1954). Described by many as being ‘cranky’, Cukor never hid his disgust at an actor (or actress) who arrived late on the set. ‘What the hell are you late for?’ he was frequently heard to say.

Renowned for his superb handling of the highly tempestuous stars Constance Bennett, Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn, in 1960 he had directed Marilyn on the sub-par but quaint comedy
Let’s Make Love
. His decision to direct her again took industry insiders by surprise, especially as their time together on the movie had been nothing short of a catastrophe. Her characteristic tardiness had helped make the movie run several weeks and uncounted thousands over budget. In addition, her successful attempts at shattering Cukor’s reputation as a great director of women continually disrupted the making of the film. He came to hate her for it and said so in high places around Hollywood.

But surprisingly, in July 1960, at the time of the film’s impending release, in an interview for the
Lowell Sunday Sun
newspaper, he waxed lyrical about Monroe and charmingly explained her tardiness away by saying, ‘Marilyn’s delays are neither irresponsible nor careless. She does not want to do a scene until she is ready for it and can give it her best. We have an agreement that she works only when she is satisfied she is ready to begin.’

Despite his warm and understanding words, Cukor was merely displaying polite professionalism to a colleague in an industry in which they both served. In truth, he despised her. Rather like Marilyn, Cukor had
been forced into making
Something’s Got To Give
. One of the many unequivocally clandestine homosexuals during Hollywood’s golden age, he had signed his two-picture deal with Fox at the time he directed Monroe in
Let’s Make Love
and, like the actress, had spent the interim doing his best to shirk his obligation to the floundering studio. Since
Goodbye Charlie
had failed to materialise at the start of the year, Cukor – like Monroe – still owed the studio one more film. When Fox called reminding him of his contractual obligation and offering a rather tempting wage packet, he relented, and on Monday 16 October verbally agreed a 26-week pledge to
Something’s Got To Give
.