The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (9 page)

David Hall was once again appointed as Cukor’s assistant. A good-humoured, well-developed man blessed with the curious nickname of ‘Buck’, he had been Cukor’s deputy on
Let’s Make Love
and regrettably he too had failed to be captivated by Monroe. ‘Next to her,’ Hall once cruelly remarked, ‘Lucrezia Borgia was a pussycat.’

And so, as the studio saw it, with a leading lady, director, producer and script all now in place, work on Monroe’s latest movie had successfully begun. It had not. Realising he was already committed to Warner Brothers and their sex-survey drama
The Chapman Report
, starring Shelley Winters and Jane Fonda (a project once intended for Fox), Cukor, to begin with, refused to sign a contract. (His six-month agreement, for a $300,000 fee and a 10 per cent share of the movie’s net profits, would not in fact be signed until Sunday 26 November.)

Despite the fact that there was still no leading man (or director) officially engaged to the production, Fox chose to excitedly rush-release details about the film. ‘Everyone can relax now and return to his knitting,’ the well-informed Louella Parsons inscribed in her syndicated article on Thursday 19 October, ‘Marilyn Monroe is all set for her next movie and it starts Nov 14 (
sic
) at 20th Century-Fox . . . George Cukor has been named by Peter Levathes to direct her . . . David Brown is the producer.
Something’s Got To Give
is described as exotic fun and real comedy. Its locale is from snow-capped Connecticut to sun-kissed Hawaii, so I reckon our girl will do a bit of travelling.’

To the outside world, it all appeared decidedly rosy. However, looks were deceiving. On Thursday 9 November, a goodwill meeting between Marilyn, her attorney Milton Rudin and Fox’s Peter Levathes was held at the swanky Beverly Hills Hotel. Several hours later, believing the get-together had been constructive, Levathes returned to the studio exultant in the belief that the relationship between the actress and Fox was now a happy one. He was deluded. Unbeknown to him, without a satisfactory screenplay to hand, and with Cukor now curiously absent from all of their meetings, she still wasn’t committing herself to the project. Her feeling
had not changed by Monday 13 November, just 48 hours before shooting was due to commence. One day later, Rudin instructed the studio that his client would not be reporting for duty until she saw (and approved) the latest version of the script.

In truth, Marilyn had been responsible for many of its delays. Far from happy with the latest adaptations, she had been conveying her thoughts to all concerned about how the screenplay should unfold. Her interference would only manage to produce numerous rewrites from a lengthy succession of disgruntled screenwriters. (In total, between May 1961 – when Edmund L. Hartmann, noted gag writer for Bob Hope, Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis and the Three Stooges, dusted down and began work on this newest version of the script – and January 1962, Fox hired and subsequently fired five different writers on the movie, three of which were down to Marilyn’s insistence.)

Hollywood screenwriter Arnold Schulman, who had penned
A Hole in the Head
for Sinatra in 1959, was the third from his profession employed on the movie. He quit the film in protest when he discovered the menacing treatment Marilyn had been receiving from certain members of the Fox hierarchy. He had encountered the actress for the first time in 1955 during her first spell in New York and regarded her as a true and trusted friend. However, friendship meant little in the Hollywood movie industry and Marilyn soon made it clear she was unhappy with several parts of Schulman’s work. Her loathing of it was manifested in several handwritten notes, scrawled across the screenplay’s front page and across several pages inside. ‘This is funny?’ she asked. ‘Not funny’, she maintained. ‘Not a story for me’, she insisted. On another page, she scrawled, ‘At one point in the story two women like each other but hate the man – all the fags are going to like it.’

Wednesday 15 November came and went. Marilyn failed to show and Fox unsurprisingly suspended her. Through her attorney, she counteracted by insisting her contract on the film was invalid anyway, since Cukor had failed to sign to the movie by the agreed date. (This was true. He would not officially commit himself to the production for another 11 days.) Immediately, she began pressing ahead with film plans of her own. Believing that she was now free from Fox’s stifling control, she hoped that her new scheme would become operational immediately.

Her plot involved her former, albeit transitory lover, the actor Marlon Brando. In a hastily handwritten letter to him on Tuesday 5 December, Marilyn suggested they should set up a film company of their own. In part, it read, ‘I need your opinion about a plan for getting out here for more than a temporary basis. Please get back to me as soon as possible as time is of the essence.’ (It took him five weeks to reply.)

Marilyn also drafted a note to her acting coach, Lee Strasberg, in which she proposed that he should temporarily leave New York and head back to Los Angeles to assist with her new enterprise. When he appeared unwilling to do so, the actress flew to the Big Apple in the second week of December to talk over the matter with him personally. However, this still failed to sway his mind. Sadly, despite her most valiant attempts, and Brando’s initial willingness to discuss Marilyn’s plans, the idea never reached the functioning stage.

Her December trip to New York did nevertheless have a high point: she finally got to meet the 83-year-old, American-born Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, editor and poet Carl Sandburg. Their meeting took place at the apartment belonging to his close friend, fashion and beauty photographer Len Steckler. As he recalled on the website, thevisitseries.com, ‘Marilyn was three hours late, but [she] had an excuse. She had been at the hairdresser.’ The individual in question was her regular East Coast stylist, Kenneth Battelle. During her eleventh-hour visit to his salon, housed in Lilly Daché, Manhattan’s most elegant millinery and beauty emporium, located at 70–80 East 56th Street between Park and Madison, she asked him to match her hair colour to Sandburg’s: white. ‘Hours later I went to open the door,’ Steckler recalled for the Reuters news agency, ‘and there I was, face-to-face with Marilyn Monroe, and she looked more ravishing than on the screen.’

That afternoon, while Marilyn and Carl spoke and supped Jack Daniels whiskey, Steckler took out his Nikon camera and proceeded to capture a photographic record of the event, throughout which the actress sported her butterfly-shaped shades. She enjoyed Sandburg’s company immensely and excitedly counted down the days until they would meet again.

Back in Los Angeles, there were other troubles for Fox to contend with. George Cukor was now unavailable too. Work on his current project,
The Chapman Report
, had fallen way behind schedule and was not set to wrap until Boxing Day. This unforeseen delay meant that the filming of
Something’s Got To Give
had to be pushed back by seven weeks. With no other alternative, a new start date of Thursday 4 January was reluctantly pencilled in by both Cukor and the disgruntled Fox executives.

Marilyn had been unconcerned by the suspension or postponement. On Saturday 18 November, consistent with her contract, she knew she was due to be placed back on the Fox payroll. she was set to start earning a weekly wage again, despite the fact that the cameras on the picture had yet to roll. (She had been due to receive payment this way while working on
Let’s Make Love
two years earlier; a paltry $7,142.82 – before tax – every seven days.) As it turned out, Marilyn would fail to draw any money whatsoever from her new movie.

Although a request to receive her $100,000 fee for
Something’s Got To Give
movie in one lump sum had been flatly rejected by executives, the fact did not greatly trouble her. At this point, thanks to her recently received United Artists loan and her share of the
Some Like It Hot
profits, she was not short of money. A spokesman for the Mirisch Company, the producers of the comedy, spelt out the actress’s financial status during an interview in 1963. ‘Marilyn had received more than a quarter of a million dollars in the four years since the movie was released,’ he declared. Although in essence, for the previous two years, this and the loan had been her only sources of income, on Friday 17 November 1961, her City National Bank of Beverly Hills savings account book boasted a sum of $40,000.

Nevertheless, by following the advice of her lawyers – primarily Rudin – and choosing, for tax reasons, to take a deferment against profits instead of the large salary she could have easily commanded for her movies, the actress was gambling as heavily on her career as any of the motion picture studios. As the Mirisch Company spokesman also explained: ‘With
The Misfits
, the company [Seven Arts Productions] called for her to split 15 per cent of the gross with co-star, Clark Gable. He was due to receive $1 million for his role; Monroe just $500,000. But by late 1962, the picture had yet to see a profit.’ So concerned did she become about her finances, she resolutely never carried more than $20 with her when she left her home. All of her large purchases were made by cheque.

In the middle of December, Fox executives contacted Marilyn again. They forcibly informed her that her argument (i.e. her claim that Cukor’s failure to commit to the movie invalidated her own contract) was not a legitimate one, and persuasively reminded her that, all things considered, she had a legal obligation to the studio. Fearing that the legal ramifications of the actress’s decision might result in even further delays, the studio once again, albeit reluctantly, cast their gaze towards Jayne Mansfield to star in the movie. However, Cukor was having none of it. ‘I admire Jayne,’ he told American show business columnist Mike Connolly, ‘not as an actress but as a girl.’ Further heated discussions between Fox and Marilyn’s attorney soon took place; in the third week of December, shortly after her return from New York, the actress finally relented and agreed in lukewarm fashion to shoot
Something’s Got To Give
.

Monroe spent Christmas in her decoratively unfinished Doheny Drive apartment, mulling over yet another mournfully inadequate film script while relaxing in the company of her former husband, Joe DiMaggio. During the day, they were seen out shopping, purchasing Christmas tree ornaments from a Mexican shop in downtown Los Angeles. Marilyn also went out alone, on a buying spree to Beverly Hills. Each of her expeditions
was spent in disguise, a thick black wig, although it was now common knowledge in the media that she always travelled this way. On Friday 6 October 1961, the
Times Recorder
newspaper had written, ‘Marilyn Monroe is not easy to spot on the street. [She] wears horn-rimmed glasses, peasant skirt and blouse, also chooz gum.’ On Christmas Day, they paid a visit to the Santa Monica home of her doctor, Ralph Greenson. She spent New Year’s Eve in her apartment with DiMaggio roasting chestnuts in front of her log fire. He broke from his teetotal lifestyle to usher in 1962 with a single glass of Dom Perignon champagne.

December’s amicable socialising, optimism and progressive planning quickly diminished as the New Year dawned. On the first day, Marilyn was saddened by the death of her famed defence lawyer, Jerry Giesler, who had suffered a heart attack, aged 75, in his sleep at his Hollywood home. A close confidant of Monroe, he had handled her divorce from DiMaggio in 1954. Further emotional stresses were heaped upon Marilyn when she learnt through the grapevine that Arthur Miller was preparing to remarry. His next wife was to be the photographer Ingeberg Morath, whom Miller had ironically met on the set of
The Misfits
. The actress was also shocked to discover that Morath was pregnant with Miller’s child. Overcome with jealousy, knowing she was unlikely to become a mother herself, Monroe was greatly affected by this news and sealed herself away in her bedroom, refusing to see or speak to anyone.

One further traumatic event was still to reach Marilyn. In the second week of January, Hollywood gossip columnists excitedly wrote about the engagement between Frank Sinatra and Juliet Prowse on Monday 8 January. While she proudly showed off her sparkling new 10-carat gold ring, he excitedly declared he was ‘very, very much in love’. Even though Marilyn’s romance with the Rat Pack star had been dormant for just over three months now, the thought that she was losing him in the marriage stakes severely hurt her. She soon became bitterly jealous of the dancer and began harbouring deep grudges towards her, especially since Prowse was a good decade younger than her and, in Marilyn’s own words, ‘had better legs’.

Openly dismissive of the heart-wrenching revelations about the former men in her life, Monroe made it clear to the few friends around her that the most significant thing for her at the start of 1962, even more important than her new film, was to move forward with her life, and that buying a home of her own was the key to this. After renting over 35 different homes, flats and hotel rooms (of fluctuating levels of luxury) over the previous 16 years, Marilyn announced she was ‘tired of living in apartments’. However, the decision to finally purchase was not entirely her own. It had actually derived from a suggestion made back in May 1961 by celebrated
Californian psychiatrist Dr Ralph Greenson, the latest in a line of psychoanalysts who had managed to practise their dubious methods of counselling on the star.

Born in 1911 in Brooklyn, New York as Romeo Samuel Greenschpoon, Ralph Greenson studied at Columbia University and at Berne University in Switzerland before obtaining a qualified medical degree in 1935, the same year that he married Hildegard Toesch. The couple settled in Los Angeles soon after. The name change occurred concurrently. In 1938, he studied Freudian psychology in Vienna and became close to its creator, Sigmund Freud. During the Second World War, Greenson served in the US military and, following his discharge, returned to Los Angeles where he began to practise the flourishing vocation of psychoanalysis. He would go on to become Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, and was soon to be known as Hollywood’s ‘therapist to the stars’ (Vivien Leigh, star of
Gone with the Wind
, was one such).