Marilyn: A Biography (32 page)

She has three weeks of rest, withdrawal from
pills, and a hospital discharge. With Pat Newcomb at her side, she
gets back to her apartment after running a gantlet of reporters
racing through traffic to catch her attention for one more comment.
In such a quiet womb will the news of the day find gestation. Now
she is back in her apartment, and as usual after such a bout, is
restored for a little while. She makes plans to do
Rain
on
television with Lee Strasberg directing her, and gets a letter from
Somerset Maugham, who is delighted she will play the role. As
Marilyn says to an interviewer about Sadie Thompson, “She was a
girl who knew how to be gay even when she was sad. And that’s
important — you know?” Then
Rain
falls through. NBC will not
do it with Strasberg because he has no TV experience. Nor will
Marilyn do it with another director. “I only know what Lee’s ideas
are, and those are the ideas I want to put into the thing. I don’t
want to . . . find myself in something totally different from what
I expected or what I hoped for.” Yet, she is restless without work
and nibbled at by the edge of financial concerns. The TV contract
had been for more than $100,000, and that is now gone. She goes
surf-fishing with DiMaggio in Florida and visits half sister
Bernice. Then she gets “impatient” and flies back to New York.

She reaches her apartment in time to read in
a newspaper column that Kay Gable believes Marilyn “had brought on
Gable’s fatal heart attack from tension and exhaustion.” (If Gable
never complained to Monroe — “when she’s on the set,” he had said
to a reporter, “she’s there to work!” — he had, however, told other
reporters that in the old days of Harlow, “when stars were late,
they were fired.”) Marilyn opens her living room window and
prepares to jump. As she describes it to a friend the next day, she
knows that she must leap quickly. If she goes on the ledge and
waits and is discovered up there by people down on the street, and
then fails to jump, the resulting publicity will have to be worse
than death or going on with life. So she stands in the room, and
leans toward the window, eyes closed. Perhaps she passes through
some migration of the soul before she returns to her life in that
room. When next day she confesses how close she had come to
jumping, her friends are certain she must move to Hollywood, and
get a rented ranch house. With a single floor. She decides they are
right. Lee Strasberg is all she has left in New York. Something
vital seems to have left her. So she goes West still one more time,
and lives in analysis again, is it for the third or fourth time —
who can keep record of these arranged marriages of the mind? In the
late spring of 1961, she is on little but a routine of diet and
rest. She is to have a gall bladder operation (whose scar will yet
show in the famous nude studies Bert Stern will take) and seems to
respond well to the surgery — perhaps a knife in her belly pays
part of the debt to Gable. (Can this be the birthday in June when
André de Dienes sees her at the Beverly Hills Hotel after so many
years?) She commutes between New York and Los Angeles over the
months to come, her drug a life of no meaning.

A woman named Marjorie Stengel (who had
previously been secretary to Monty Clift) has come to work for her
now in New York, and through her eyes we get a portrait of these
months in Marilyn’s life. During the interview in which Miss
Stengel is given the job, the house phone rings and Marilyn picks
it up. Someone is asking for Miss Monroe. “She’s not here,” Marilyn
says in a rough voice and hangs up. It is the last sign of life the
new secretary will see. Days drift by.

Marilyn gets up late in the hot New York
morning and wanders around in a blue baby-doll nightie. It is
slightly soiled. After a while she chews on some lamb chops and
eats cottage cheese, then takes a big glass of No-Cal black cherry
drink. “That meal alone,” says Marjorie Stengel, “might have been
enough to kill you.” Later in the day Marilyn talks on the phone
for a very long time with her analyst in Los Angeles. No one else
calls. Perhaps no one knows she is in town. Few letters arrive, yet
when a particular piece of fan mail is obscene, she will take a
look. On a bank application she carefully prints UNKNOWN in the
space for her father’s name. But then the mood is not without its
own blank space. In the kitchen, plaster is falling; the walls are
a dirty New York kitchen-yellow. The bathroom has no glamour — no
dressing table, no little lamps, no bright pattern for the shower
curtains, just a bathroom. In the bedroom, her walls are a dark
putty brown, and the furniture, French Provincial, is cheap and
painted white. A satin quilt of putty color serves as a throw for
the queen-sized bed. Overhead, on the ceiling, is a mirror. It is
her major touch. For the second bedroom is almost bare. There a few
pieces of odd carpet lie on the floor. In the reception room
Marjorie works among file cabinets. The best decoration is a
Toulouse-Lautrec in a frame; print and frame together must cost
fifty dollars. In the living room a contrast: all is white. The
walls are white and the rug, the white piano is there and a white
couch. Even the Cecil Beaton photo of Marilyn in a white gown is
there. White transparent leaves are in a vase. They are artificial.
Plants are brought in from time to time, but they die. Only the
artificial white leaves remain. And on the white shag rug is the
old stain of a dog. While Stengel works for her, there is talk of
cleaning the rug. It is finally picked up by Denihan’s, who “charge
her more than the rug can cost.” It comes back clean except for the
yellow spot: now chemists come from Denihan’s to make tests.
Doctors and pharmacists also appear, dressed in dapper dark clothes
and in dark horn-rimmed glasses. They are waiting for Miss Monroe
on the Spanish bench in her foyer with its black and white checked
tiles, waiting to bring pills and prescriptions in Marilyn’s name
or in other names. Sometimes the pills will be ordered in Marjorie
Stengel’s name. On the end table,
The Nation
is sitting, and
I. F. Stone’s Weekly
. On the night table in the bedroom is
The Carpetbaggers
and a volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
In the dark den where Marilyn makes her calls, there is only a gray
New York window on the court, yet here the plants stay alive.
Perhaps it is because Marilyn sits there so often to share the
undemanding gloomy light. And in the closet of the spare bedroom
evening dresses are lined up on wire hangers. There is no padding
to the hangers. Nor garment bags. In other closets are minks, and a
row of furs in white, also on wire hangers. A host of Ferragamo
pumps are on the floor. In another closet, two dozen Jax slacks
rest on wire hangers, with their price tags still attached. Yet
when Marilyn goes out to shop she puts on no underwear. Salesladies
gasp in their gossip over this. “She has a
smell
,” they tell
Marjorie Stengel over the phone. (Of course, they do not know that
Marilyn, like many another artist, may not wish to wash if in the
scent of the previous day some clue to experience can linger.)

One morning, going through the file, Marjorie
encounters a diamond ring in the bottom of the drawer. How long it
has been lying there, she does not know. Can it be a gift from
DiMaggio? (Whom Marilyn now calls Mr. D.) One given morning
Marjorie is told “a certain man” will call and she must do what he
tells her. But when the phone rings, the voice is clear. “Marge,
this is Joe DiMaggio” — he is obviously used to talking to people
named
Stengel
— and he asks her to meet him at the Shelton
where he will give her $5,000 to cover an overdraft in Marilyn’s
account at Irving Trust. Marjorie Stengel cannot comprehend
Marilyn’s secrecy. Many a morning she will get a glimpse of
DiMaggio as he slips out of the apartment not long after she has
arrived for work. Yet Marilyn will never indicate he has been
there. It is as if no one must know DiMaggio sleeps over.

Marilyn is coming to the end of her years in
New York. Each month she spends more time on the coast. Now, at her
analyst’s suggestion, she buys her house on Fifth Helena Drive in
Brentwood. It is a house exactly like his! Somewhere in this
period, she even phones New York in great excitement. She is having
a gala evening out with Sinatra. Although she has bought two
dresses at Magnin’s, she needs a particular dress from New York.
The maid, Lena Pepitone, flies out first class to bring the dress,
but in the interim Marilyn has found another.

Now New York begins to dissolve. Marjorie
Stengel is asked to move to Los Angeles and refuses, and will soon
leave her employ. Marilyn has transferred to Los Angeles and the
tedium of a life lived at low throttle. (Indeed, some hint of
illness is almost visible in the midst of her attempt to project
huge involvement in the pleasure of Carl Sandburg’s company.)

She takes a trip to Mexico and comes back to
Helena Drive with Mexican tin masks and lighting fixtures. It is
April of 1962. She has four months to live, and work is ready to
start on a film she will do at Twentieth for her contract. It will
be called
Something’s Got to Give
.

* * *

The script for the film has been rewritten —
from a story that is twenty years old. It is a Twentieth Century
special! If the director is George Cukor, that is no splendid omen,
for he directed her in
Let’s Make Love
, but at least the
co-star, Dean Martin, by way of Sinatra, is a friend. Peter
Levathes, new head of the studio, is, however, furious at the waste
Elizabeth Taylor has brought Twentieth on
Cleopatra
. He is
not the best man to put up with Marilyn. She, on the other hand,
can measure her salary of $100,000 against Elizabeth Taylor’s
$1,000,000.

She has lived in her own semi-retirement
while Liz’s photograph has been appearing on the covers of
magazines. Naturally, Marilyn has also caught a virus. Since her
time in Los Angeles usually consists of going from analyst to
internist, it is as if the virus reflects some spiritual essence of
doctors’ offices. She runs a small fever, small and chronic. Her
temperature is usually over 100 degrees, if under 101, but she has
an agreement that she can leave the set if it goes above 103. After
three weeks of shooting, she has managed to show up for a sum of
six days. Since they expect that, they have been prepared to shoot
around her. They all seek to cooperate with her: even Levathes
keeps away. But the script! It can hardly collaborate. Illness is
eventually equal everywhere to illness, and so every false line of
dialogue inhabits the metaphysical center of her virus. It is death
to work on that set.

And she is not dead. Something of interest
has been happening in her personal life at last. She would prefer
to be free and pursue a good time. Since Sinatra is friends with
Peter Lawford, she has met the Kennedys. She has, in fact . . . but
there is more than a little to say. Suffice it that on a Friday
morning in the middle of May, she does not appear at the set but
gets instead on a plane to New York. Jack Kennedy is being given a
birthday party at Madison Square Garden, and Lawford has invited
her to sing “Happy Birthday” to the President before twenty
thousand guests. She is not about to fail to appear. They have even
prepared her entrance. Three times her name will be announced, and
a spotlight thrown on an empty stage. Then she will finally be
introduced as “the
late
Marilyn Monroe.” It has been Peter
Lawford’s idea. He delights to play on tricky heights. Sometimes he
wins, sometimes not. The
late
Marilyn Monroe comes out in
all the champagne thermal of her evening gown, and sings “Happy
Birthday, dear President” as it has never been sung before. The
twenty thousand guests listen to a sexual electric of magnets and
velvets. Her voice is every mischief. Every dead ear in the house
will stir. “She sounds like she knows him awful well!” Kennedy,
with a fine grin, disengages himself from so supreme a throb of
secret history by remarking in his speech, “I can now retire from
politics after having ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me by Miss
Monroe.”

In her good time, Miss Monroe, ready to
retire from her present film, returns several days later to the
movie set. Officials at Fox are on the edge of firing her, but she
has a splurge of activity, as if the core of her delight is to
shake male decision once it has firmed. She comes in on the day she
has to do a swimming scene, and is in the pool for hours, virus and
all, even pushes the premise further, as if some of the Kennedy
family’s competitiveness has gotten into her, and she will soon
teach Hollywood who the center of female world publicity might be.
There, with the photographers Larry Schiller and Billy Woodfield
present for the magazines, and all of the camera crew, she takes
off the flesh-colored bathing suit she has been wearing to simulate
nudity, and is naked as she jumps in and out of the pool many
times, photographed front and back, for all the world. The look in
her eye as we study the stills is triumphant. These are “the first
absolutely nude shots of Marilyn Monroe in fourteen years.” She is
all of a naked five-year-old having the time of her life, and yet
is also become a part of the Kennedys — there is hardly a picture
she will take after this day in which she does not bear a
resemblance to the brothers and sisters of America’s most well
known Irish family, as if the Hogan in her has found identity in
the balance between certainty and daring. Wit, competition, and
victory are the alchemical elements of the psyche for which she has
searched so long. Never does she look more in command of herself
than in the photograph by Larry Schiller that shows her with one
leg hooked over the edge of the pool and the devil of the orphanage
in her eye. She is about ready to come out of the water, but who
can know what she will do next? The photographs of this swimming
party are ready by Tuesday, a syndicated story by Joe Hyams is
carefully broken on Wednesday. Every picture magazine in the world
now tries to reach Schiller, who (with Marilyn’s approval) controls
the picture rights. Before he is done negotiating, the photos will
appear in thirty countries. Marilyn has asked in her most charming
manner for no more recompense than a slide projector by which to
look at the color transparencies. She is, in effect, giving a gift
of thousands of dollars to the photographers, but then she is once
again our female Napoleon back from Elba to raise one last army for
a march on Twentieth.