Authors: Barbara Leaming
What exactly was he suggesting? Studio executives seemed unsure. It was almost as though they were constitutionally unable to hear what Rudin had just explained to them. As Frank Ferguson saw it, Rudin wanted two things: money and script approval. Levathes offered a bonus if Marilyn finished
Something’s Got to Give.
Meanwhile, Ferguson expressed confidence that the studio’s position was sound. He expected Marilyn to report on November 15. Whether she would remained in question. Rudin had another meeting at Twentieth on November 9. This time the screenplay was the issue. Frank Tashlin had written it without Marilyn in mind. At Cukor’s suggestion, Twentieth had recently hired Arnold Schulman to tailor the material for her. The studio promised to send Marilyn a copy as soon as it was finalized, but reminded Rudin that she did not have script approval.
That afternoon, Marilyn put in an appearance at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The new production chief had asked to have lunch with her and her lawyer in an effort to establish a friendly relationship. Levathes returned to the studio in the belief that he probably had been successful. Still, Marilyn had not said yes to
Something’s Got to Give.
And she still had not said yes on November 13, two days before she was due to come in. On the 14th, Rudin again asked for a copy of the screenplay, saying that Marilyn would not report before being shown a script. It did not arrive. The next day, Marilyn failed to appear and Twentieth suspended her. Suddenly, Rudin began to talk about other projects Marilyn might do to fulfill her obligation. Tennessee Williams had advised her to do
Celebration
for Jerry Wald. Rudin also mentioned Vera Caspary’s
Illicity.
By this time, Marilyn’s daily life had settled into a routine. Late in the day, she would be driven to Santa Monica in a green Dodge. Her housekeeper (provided by Ralph Greenson), Eunice Murray, would drop her off in front of a five-bedroom, white stucco house. Perched on a hill, it had a large, velvety lawn, with sparkling ocean views in one direction and city views in another. In a front window, Marilyn could usually see Dr. Greenson, in shirt and tie, at a wooden desk. He sat in a leather chair, under a wood-beamed ceiling, with a vase of roses from the garden nearby. Marilyn, on her first visit, had been some thirty minutes late. The
doctor declared that lateness communicates dislike. After that, Marilyn made a point of being early, pacing palm-lined Franklin Street until it was time to go in. She tended to be his last appointment.
Ten months previously, Dr. Greenson had made a promising discovery. For some time he had been immensely frustrated in his treatment of a young schizophrenic. Filled with guilt about what he perceived as his own therapeutic failures, he asked Anna Freud to come from England as a consultant, but she declined. The case seemed to be stalled when Greenson happened to ask his daughter, Joannie, an art student, to drive the patient home one day. The patient’s response was electric. As she chatted with Joannie in the car, she seemed like any other healthy young person. After that, Greenson regularly assigned Joannie to take her home. Though the change vanished as soon as she and Joannie were apart, the fact remained that the patient had made her first significant progress when Greenson involved her with a member of his family.
Thus, Greenson’s unorthodox and potentially controversial decision to integrate Marilyn into his home life was a deliberate one. As he told Anna Freud, he had to improvise. Yet he often found himself wondering where this was going. Joannie, as a little girl, had been taught to keep out of sight of the patients, so her role with the schizophrenic had been very much a departure. Her involvement with Marilyn was even more unusual. When Marilyn arrived, the twenty-one-year-old Joannie would meet her at the door. On the days when Greenson lectured at the university and thought that he might be late for Marilyn’s session, he asked Joannie to take her out for a walk.
Marilyn, with the doctor’s permission, kept a bottle of Dom Perignon at the house so that she could have a glass of champagne at the end of her hour. Afterward, she often stayed for dinner. She adored the Mexican kitchen where the family tended to gather, and the beamed, wood-paneled living room filled with books and art. Its focal point was a grand piano. An immense fireplace was decorated with colorful Mexican tiles. From a balcony, one could see the garden and the swimming pool. There was a bo tree, a descendant of the sacred Indian fig tree beneath whose branches the Buddha gained enlightenment. Beneath it stood a Polynesian Tiki god, five feet tall, with an open mouth and a bedazzled expression, which Greenson had given to his wife for Christmas.
Ralph and Hildi, after twenty-five years of marriage, remained
devoted to each other and to their children. He described himself as a Brooklyn Jew who had married a good Swiss girl. He called Hildi the one who made everything possible. She saw him as her other half; when she was scattered, he was organized; when she was timid, he opened doors. Their twenty-four-year-old son, Danny, a medical student, was also living at home that year. An accident had left him on crutches, his leg in a cast.
Dr. Greenson hoped to expose Marilyn to the warmth and affection of a happy family. He hoped to compensate for the emotional deprivation she had suffered since childhood. He hoped to assuage her painful loneliness. But in welcoming her into the household, he was also trying to make himself real and human in her eyes. He believed patients must be allowed to see that the analyst has emotions and weaknesses of his own. He believed the doctor must provide a model of someone who can be trustworthy and reliable despite his frailties. He strove to teach his patients to accept that human beings are imperfect, that one must learn to live with uncertainty.
Greenson diagnosed Marilyn as a borderline paranoid addict. Borderline personalities dread abandonment. They fear that being left means they are evil or bad. Faced with even a routine separation, they react with anger, cruel sarcasm, and despair. They cast certain people—a lover, a teacher, a doctor—in the role of savior, abruptly and viciously turning against them for not being sufficiently “there.” Borderline personalities, perceiving themselves to have been abandoned by those whom they have idealized, are apt to threaten or to attempt suicide. The diagnosis fit Marilyn to a tee. No wonder Greenson was wary of being idealized. Yet he risked bringing Marilyn into his home, aware of what might happen to her if he did not.
More and more, Marilyn was being pulled between two households in Santa Monica. On the one hand, she loved to attend the chamber music concerts held regularly in Dr. Greenson’s living room. On the other, she continued to be very much drawn to the Lawfords’. There, on Sunday, November 19, the event everybody had been waiting for finally occurred. A motorcade pulled up. Jack Kennedy, who had spoken at the Hollywood Palladium the night before, emerged from an open convertible that had been intended for Secret Service agents; on the way out to the beach, he’d insisted on changing cars. He had only a few hours to relax before returning to the Beverly Hilton to prepare for the first of a
series of talks with West German Chancellor Adenauer, and he planned to enjoy himself.
Kennedy, whose father had been active in the film business in the twenties and thirties, was decidedly at home in Hollywood. Inside his sister’s house, he swapped the dark business suit he’d worn to church for a sports shirt and blue denims. Before long, he was out on the sunny beach mingling with the Lawfords’ guests. Lawford, in the words of Gore Vidal, was “Jack’s Plenipotentiary to the Girls of Hollywood.” From the first, the President seems to have viewed Marilyn as a particularly desirable scalp to add to his belt.
Marilyn discovered in the President the perfect vehicle to play out her own emotional contradictions. After the failure of her third marriage, she had lost the chance for absolution that being Mrs. Arthur Miller was supposed to have provided. With Sinatra and Lawford, she plunged back into precisely the world she had once been desperate to flee. The President was very much of that world, though most people didn’t see him that way. Marilyn’s personal history gave her a unique perspective. Both Charlie Feldman and Joe Schenck had been close to Joseph P. Kennedy. Both had assisted, in one way or another, his mistress Gloria Swanson. Both had entertained young Jack in Hollywood. From the outset, Marilyn recognized the President as one of a particular group of men. She knew who he was and what he was after.
At the same time, Marilyn, like many Americans, was caught up in the romance of the Kennedy administration. He was young. He was modern. He was charismatic. He was passionate about ideas. He spoke to youth as perhaps no president had in recent years. In this light, Marilyn saw Jack Kennedy as a moral figure on a par with Arthur Miller. Certainly, Kennedy’s Saturday night speech at the Hollywood Palladium, an attack on right-wing “crusades of suspicion,” would have been familiar political terrain. As Marilyn later indicated to Dr. Greenson, she was prepared to do anything to help the President. The psychiatrist’s dilemma was that politically his own heart was very much with Kennedy.
Lawford arranged another meeting two weeks later. On December 5, howling winds rocked New York. Gusts of up to sixty-eight miles per hour pried loose a stone ornament on a building directly across from the Hotel Carlyle on East 76th Street at Madison Avenue. An emergency crew secured the huge, heavy cresting with a rope in time for the
presidential motorcade to pass beneath shortly before 3 p.m. There were fifty police motorcycles and twenty-five cars. Jack Kennedy, wearing neither hat nor topcoat, rode in a bubble-top limousine, accompanied by a contingent of city officials who had met him at the airport. The President, on his way to Palm Beach, Florida, was to spend Tuesday night at the Carlyle. In view of the danger, he entered by a side entrance.
That evening the President was guest of honor at an awards dinner given by the National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame at the Waldorf-Astoria. Afterward, he went to a party at the Park Avenue apartment of Mrs. John Fell, the widow of a prominent investment banker. That’s where he was to see Marilyn again, Lawford having arranged for her to fly in for the occasion. But when the President arrived, Marilyn wasn’t there yet. As usual she swept in late, much to Lawford’s annoyance. It was his responsibility that such encounters ran smoothly.
Lawford wasn’t the only one frustrated in efforts to pin Marilyn down to a schedule. That month, Twentieth finally let her read
Something’s Got to Give.
A nervous accompanying letter pointed out that the screenplay had been revised specifically as a vehicle for her and was still in the process of being polished. It stressed the studio’s recognition that she would probably have suggestions of her own. Two copies of the script were delivered to her lawyer. Four days before Christmas, Rudin called Ferguson. Marilyn demanded changes, but that was not all. She wanted Twentieth to hire the cameraman from
Some Like It Hot.
She wanted a say in the casting. She wanted a say in the publicity. She reluctantly agreed to work with Cukor, but not with his color consultant. Afterward, Ferguson found himself wondering whether it was coincidental that “each calendar year seems to end in a crisis which has been created by this girl.”
The negotiations resumed after Christmas. Nothing was settled right away, yet the studio had a sense that progress was being made. Marilyn insisted that a good picture was her sole concern. It is significant that what she meant by “good” had changed drastically. She had once rejected the crowd-pleasing, money-making formula of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
How to Marry a Millionaire.
At the moment, however, her needs were different. She believed she had “slipped” in the past two years. She needed a hit.
When Twentieth proposed Nunnally Johnson to rewrite
Something’s Got to Give
, Marilyn was enthusiastic. He had done the screenplay for
How to Marry a Millionaire.
He knew how to write “Marilyn Monroe.” Marilyn feared he was still angry about her having turned down
How to be Very, Very Popular
, but Johnson declared: “Tell Miss Monroe that if everybody who turned down a script I wrote was no longer a friend of mine, I wouldn’t have any friends.” They reconciled over three bottles of champagne at the Polo Lounge. On January 24, 1962, Ferguson gave the go-ahead for a contract to be drawn up. Johnson went to England to work. Marilyn agreed to do the film if the script turned out as she hoped.
The nurturing atmosphere of the Greenson household appeared to have had a stabilizing effect. When the doctor advised Marilyn to exchange her depressing apartment for a home of her own, she chose a house in Brentwood expressly because it reminded her of the Greenson residence. It was on Fifth Helena Drive, a secluded cul de sac. Marilyn hoped to replicate the colorful tiles and other Mexican decor she associated with her happy evenings at the Greensons. She was particularly eager to reproduce the family kitchen.
Clearly, Marilyn missed the life, or more precisely the dream of a life, she had left behind in Roxbury. Her eyes would cloud over as she spoke of the white farmhouse that she and Arthur had redone. At the last minute, she seemed uncertain whether she wanted to go through with the purchase of the Brentwood property. She left the room, returning ten minutes later to sign. Later, she disclosed that she had been struck by the sadness of buying a house all by herself.
On February 1, Marilyn attended a dinner party for Robert and Ethel Kennedy at the Lawfords’. Remembering the fiasco of her previous meeting with Bobby, she did everything to make a good impression. Marilyn, seated beside the Attorney General, interrogated him about civil rights and other issues. Dr. Greenson’s son had helped her prepare a list of political questions. Never one for memorization, she peeked in her handbag intermittently. Bobby, delighted, spent much of the evening in conversation with her. The next day, she wasted no time in writing about the dinner party to Isadore Miller in Florida. She had every reason to expect Isadore would tell his son. Her timing suggests she was sending a message to Arthur. If the Attorney General thought well of her, shouldn’t he?