Marilyn Monroe (72 page)

He wanted to go to her, but his manager, Milt Ebbins, insisted it would be better to contact her lawyer or her doctor. Ebbins was unable to reach Greenson, but he did track down Mickey Rudin at a cocktail party. It was about 9:30 when the lawyer called to check on Marilyn. Eunice Murray, spending the night in the dressing room, answered the second phone. She reported that Marilyn was resting in her room. She insisted everything was fine. As far as she knew, it was. In fact, Marilyn was probably already dead or dying.

Murray awakened at 3 a.m., surrounded by full-length mirrors. Like Natasha Lytess twelve years previously, she sensed something wrong. She flicked on a light and put on a robe. What she saw in the hall distressed her. A phone cord ran under Marilyn’s locked door. Ordinarily, the phone would have been “put to bed” under a stack of pillows in the guest room.

Moments later a phone rang at the Greenson home. The doctor wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Marilyn’s slurred voice. Instead, he heard the frightened housekeeper. She followed instructions to knock on the door and shout Marilyn’s name. There was no response. She rushed outside. The night air was cool and damp. Marilyn’s lamp was on, but heavy curtains blocked the view. Murray, reaching through an iron grille, pushed them aside. Marilyn, naked, lay sprawled face-down on the bed, one hand resting on the telephone receiver.

Greenson arrived at 3:40. He smashed a pane of glass with a fireplace poker and reached in, undoing the latch. Dr. Engelberg, who came ten minutes later, pronounced Marilyn dead.

Marilyn had finally given in to her mother’s judgment. On the
night of August 4, she finished what she believed Gladys had set out to do when she tried to kill her baby daughter.

Marilyn’s life had been one of rare achievement. On her own, against almost impossible personal and professional odds, she had created something brilliant and magical—”Marilyn Monroe.” Her creation had brought immense pleasure to millions of people, and would continue to do so long after she was gone. The world loved Marilyn. Yet in the end she felt utterly unloved and alone. For thirty-six years, Marilyn, with her immense life force, had fought against an equally strong pull towards death. Tonight, death triumphed, and her struggle was over.

The doctors conferred. Greenson, to his horror, learned about the twenty-five Nembutals. As often happens after a suicide, the “what ifs” and the “if onlys” hovered in the air. If Greenson had known about the barbiturates, almost certainly he would have been alert to Marilyn’s cry for help. Her death might have been prevented. At 4:25 a.m., Greenson, devastated, called the West Los Angeles police station.

Now that Marilyn was gone, Greenson would confide to Anna Freud that he realized all his knowledge, desire, and strength had been insufficient. Marilyn’s death was a blow to his pride, he admitted. And it was a blow to his science. But most of all, it was a blow to him personally, for he had cared about her very much. Anna Freud wrote back that she knew exactly what he was going through. She had once returned from a trip abroad to discover that a patient of hers had committed suicide two days previously. She explained to Dr. Greenson that one goes over and over in one’s thoughts how one might have done better, the process inevitably leaving the survivor with a terrible sense of defeat. “But, you know,” Anna Freud continued, “I think in these cases we are really defeated by something which is stronger than we are and for which analysis, with all its powers, is too weak a weapon.”

Greenson knew it would take him a long time to get over Marilyn’s death. It hurt even to think about it, yet he sensed it was only by remembering that someday he would be able to forget. He longed to spend a few days talking himself out with his own analyst, Max Schur, in New York. (Schur had been Sigmund Freud’s personal physician.) But there was no time for that now. Greenson was interviewed at length by the police, by the district attorney’s office, and by a panel of twelve psychological experts dubbed the “suicide squad.” The latter had been
appointed by Dr. Thomas J. Curphey, the chief medical examiner and coroner for Los Angeles County, to determine whether Marilyn had been capable of taking her own life.

When someone commits suicide, friends, family members, and other associates often question whether the person could possibly have done such a thing. So it was quite normal when Marilyn’s housekeeper, makeup man, hair stylist, and others in her entourage suspected that she had died by accident (having lost track of how many pills she’d taken) or even by foul play. The haunting image of her hand on the telephone receiver led several people to believe that Marilyn’s final act had been to try to call them. A natural death is hard enough to deal with; the idea that someone close died intentionally may be almost impossible to bear. Denial frees the survivors from endlessly examining whether there were any indications that a suicide was going to occur. And of course, it frees them from a certain amount of guilt.

In fact, everything pointed to the conclusion that Marilyn had killed herself. There had been prior attempts to take her own life. There was a family history of suicide. She had been feeling especially defeated in recent weeks. Though there had been talk of future projects, one had to wonder whether she was capable any longer of doing a film, let alone a play. Marilyn had been despondent the day she died. Toxicological tests showed that a combination of Nembutal and chloral hydrate had proven fatal. The only thing that could never be known was whether, as on previous occasions, she expected to be saved. The one person who might have disclosed that was Marilyn, and she was dead. Still, in light of all the rumors, the coroner ordered a “psychological autopsy.” On the basis of the report, Dr. Curphey later ruled the death a “probable suicide.”

Meanwhile, there was confusion about who would claim the body. Marilyn’s sixty-two-year-old mother was her closest relative, but she was incompetent. At Rockhaven Sanitarium, Gladys appeared to have no reaction to her daughter’s death. Initially, Marilyn’s half-sister couldn’t be reached in Florida. Joe DiMaggio came from San Francisco as soon as he heard about Marilyn. He hadn’t seen her in two months, though they had often talked on the phone. He was prepared to make the funeral arrangements, but the coroner couldn’t release the body without a family member’s permission. Finally, Berniece, contacted by telegram, gave Joe the go-ahead. She flew to Los Angeles early on Monday morning.

On Wednesday, August 8, a small group of invited mourners entered the tiny Westwood Funeral Chapel. An organist played “Over The Rainbow,” among other selections. Marilyn, in a green Pucci dress and a platinum wig, lay in a velvet-lined, open bronze casket. George Solotaire and Joe DiMaggio, Jr., in his Marine dress uniform, were present. So were the Strasbergs and the Greensons. (Lee Strasberg and Marianne Kris had been left the bulk of the estate, with the stipulation that the psychiatrist use her inheritance to further her work.) Also in attendance were Marilyn’s housekeeper, makeup man, hair stylist, masseur, and driver. There were two of Marilyn’s attorneys, her half-sister, her publicist, her former secretary, and a few others—but no movie stars, no studio executives, and no press. Frank Sinatra and the Lawfords had been excluded. Arthur Miller chose not to attend. A tearful Lee Strasberg, voice quivering, delivered the eulogy. But the most poignant moment occurred as the coffin was about to be closed. Joe DiMaggio leaned over to kiss Marilyn.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” Joe wept.

Something extraordinary happened after that. Joe’s life with Marilyn had been messy and embarrassing. He frequently lost his temper and did things he was later ashamed of. The dignity he prized had often eluded him. He never seemed to understand why the relationship failed to live up to his ideal. But in his impeccable behavior following Marilyn’s death, Joe finally recaptured some of the “deft serenity” he once knew on the baseball field. He was steadfast in never talking about her in public, yet he made it clear precisely how he felt. His silence, once a sign of awkwardness, became a form of grace.

The story that began when Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan arrived in Los Angeles to pitch
The Hook
came to an end on January 23, 1964. That evening, Miller’s long-awaited autobiographical play
After the Fall
had its premiere in New York. Directed by Kazan, the production marked the first time the two men had collaborated in thirteen years. The origin of the play itself also dated back to that earlier time. Miller had been writing about Marilyn in one way or another since 1951, when he fled Los Angeles having known her for only a few days. The moral crisis Marilyn
provoked exploded in his thin brown notebooks. As early as 1952, Miller had discovered his own alter ego in Quentin, a tortured, unfaithful husband, torn between the claims of ecstasy and morality.

For more than a decade, Miller’s autobiographical work-in-progress proceeded in fits and starts. He worked at a cluttered desk in Brooklyn as children’s voices wafted in from other rooms. He worked in his study on East 57th Street, while Marilyn, at the other end of the apartment, strummed a ukelele and sang “I Wanna Be Loved By You.” He worked in a spartan one-room studio in Roxbury. But in all those years, Miller failed to bring his play to completion. Marilyn’s death changed all that. Miller seemed suddenly to know why he was writing and where the play must go.

On October 25, 1962, two months after Marilyn committed suicide, the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater announced that Miller’s new drama would be its inaugural production. From the first, there was a distinct air of scandal about the project. The news that Miller had agreed to work with Kazan, perhaps the most notorious of the informers, came as a shock to many people. The nightmare of McCarthyism was not yet so far in the past that people were willing to forget what Kazan had done. Too many careers had been wrecked, too many lives destroyed. In his decision to revive the collaboration, Miller seemed to confer a certain amount of his own moral authority on Kazan. It was said in Miller’s own family that were Mary still his wife, she would never have permitted him to reunite with Kazan. A number of Miller’s friends were baffled by his motives. Norman Rosten blamed ambition. In Rosten’s view, Miller, unsuccessful in recent years, was “looking for a replay of his past triumphs” with Kazan. Indeed, there could be no denying that Miller’s once brilliant career had faltered badly since he lost Kazan. In a sense, the production of
After the Fall
took both men back to 1951 as they set out to match the glory they had achieved together with
Death of a Salesman.

It also took them back to the moment when the sexual triangle that had played such a vital role in Miller’s imagination began. When Miller and Kazan first encountered Marilyn, she had recently attempted suicide. In awe of Kazan, Marilyn dreamed that the great director might give her a role. At that point, it would have been inconceivable that the author of
Death of a Salesman
would even consider writing for her. More than a decade later, Marilyn had succeeded in killing herself, and the
former husband and the former lover seized the opportunity to reignite their partnership with a play devoted, in large part, to the star’s sensational life and death. The package seemed to have all the ingredients of the triumph that had long eluded Miller. In speaking of his intimate life with Marilyn, the playwright would tell a story the public very much wanted to hear. And, of course, Miller had Kazan back. This time, no critic would lament the director’s absence as Eric Bentley had done in his review of
The Crucible.
It was all rather like Kazan’s fantasy of two men, recently enemies, happily going off together at the end of
Baby Doll.

Questions of propriety aside, Miller did have the material for a fascinating and disturbing play. He might have probed a man’s feelings of guilt, shame, anger, and defeat when a woman he once loved takes her own life. Miller had written about suicide with immense sensitivity in
Death of a Salesman.
Unfortunately, he did something entirely different in
After the Fall.
Instead of the sympathetic treatment he had given Willy Loman, he depicted Marilyn as a shrill, devouring harpy. He used her propensity for self-destruction to justify his own decision to leave her when she was obviously very ill. In the end, Marilyn’s suicide had made it possible for Miller to finish his play. Importantly, it allowed him to sustain his self-image as a man of conscience. It provided the absolution he had been seeking. “A suicide kills two people,” Quentin tells Maggie, the character based unmistakably on Marilyn, “that’s what it’s for! So I am removing myself, and perhaps it will lose its point.” As in
The Crucible
, a man’s act of betrayal is shown to be the woman’s own fault; she drove him away. But in
After the Fall
, Miller goes further. He asks us to believe, and seems actually to have convinced himself, that he walked out for her own good.

There was every reason to expect that
After the Fall
was only the start of great things for both Miller and Kazan. Following the premiere, however, it quickly became apparent that matters would not work out that way at all. Miller’s unctuous exercise in self-justification met not with praise but with disgust. The play generated a huge controversy in the press and Miller, to his bewilderment, found himself reviled by critics for his unremittingly harsh portrait of Marilyn. Ironically, in exposing Marilyn as he did, Miller, who had refused to name names, became something of an “informer” himself. He surrendered the moral authority that had sustained him through a decade of artistic disappointment. Even his
friends were appalled by the play. Joe Rauh declared that he didn’t see how a man could write about his wives that way. Norman and Hedda Rosten were furious that he had depicted Marilyn as nothing more than a “slut.” Didn’t he remember how brave Marilyn had been during the HUAC crisis? Couldn’t he at least give her credit for having been ready to sacrifice everything for him? Why had he left out the powerful ideals that had been among Marilyn’s defining characteristics?