The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (25 page)

Did the extra pressure on Marilyn to return to work and deliver the movie push her dangerously to the edge, we wonder? When she returned home on the night of 10 April, she was painfully aware that hers was the only film in production on the deserted, huge 20th Century-Fox lot. (According to Donald Spoto’s 1993 book,
Marilyn Monroe: The Biography
, Joanne Woodward was at the studio concurrently shooting
The Stripper
. In fact, work on this did not begin until Monday 28 May 1962, seven weeks
after
Marilyn shot her screen tests. Woodward was at the studio, on Stage 12, a few weeks prior to this date, but only for rehearsals.) The livelihoods of 150 underpaid Fox employees, as well as the studio itself, were entirely reliant on her vigour, reliability and ability to complete the picture. I suspect these demands on Marilyn were too great and she simply wasn’t able to cope.

Two days later, on Thursday 12 April, pre-production on
Something’s Got To Give
was thrown into further chaos when a surprisingly rejuvenated Marilyn suddenly, but not entirely unexpectedly, announced that she was off to New York to be with her mentor and drama coach, Lee Strasberg. She excused her decision by saying she needed to work with him before starting the new picture. Naturally, with the actress’s legendary reputation for frequently going ‘absent without leave’ during production of a movie, Fox executives were reluctant to see her go. George Cukor remonstrated with her but knew he had no power to prevent her from travelling. But Fox did. So Peter Levathes was drafted in to firmly deliver the command, ‘Marilyn will not be allowed to travel to New York.’

Pre-production continued and a script conference between the film’s associate producer and art director, Gene Allen, Henry Weinstein, George Cukor, scriptwriter Walter Bernstein and Marilyn, was called for Friday 13 April. Due to arrive at Fox at 10am, she did not materialise until midday, breezing into the office breathless and apologetic. Despite strictest orders from the highest powers, she was still pursuing her idea of heading to New York. The taxi in which she had arrived, and which was to transport her to the airport, was still running outside. ‘I’m sure you don’t really mind the little trip,’ she nervously told her seated, speechless colleagues. ‘I’m just going, you know, to oil the machinery.’

The seminar started but concluded within 30 minutes, during which time Marilyn’s main suggestion was that her character should be more exciting. Throughout, the actress sported large, dark sunglasses to shield
her eyes, which were red and weepy due to the medication she was taking. ‘She was in good spirits,’ Bernstein recalled for
The Gleaner
newspaper, ‘and full of energy, a trait I had not associated with her. Her enthusiasm seemed spontaneous and she included everyone in it . . . She was not glamorous. She was not even pretty. But her appeal was genuine, a child’s appeal, sweet and disarming.’ The meeting reached its conclusion when the studio doctor, Lee Siegel, arrived to give Marilyn a vitamin injection. Minutes later, she rolled down her sleeve and bid everyone a fond farewell. No one present tried to discourage her from leaving. They knew there was no point. Furthermore, with the actress away and the script needing another slight rewrite, it was agreed that shooting should be postponed until Monday 23 April.

Working from original source material previously thought lost, I can categorically state that Marilyn Monroe headed out to New York on the afternoon of Friday 13 April 1962 to see Lee and Paula Strasberg and did
not
meet or sleep with the President of the United States during that three-day period.

Close scrutiny of his White House diary corroborates this. It reveals that, at 6.20pm on the evening of Friday 13 April, JFK boarded the USS
Northampton
for an overnight cruise to Norfolk, Virginia. One day later – between 2.30 and 3.10pm – he watched military exercises with the Shah of Iran at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and on Sunday 15 April – between 12 midday and 12.56pm – the President attended mass at the Community Center in Middleburg, Virginia. He experienced another typically full weekend and had no time whatsoever to spend with the actress. Marilyn spent the weekend of 13–15 April 1962 neither in JFK’s bed nor in Manhattan at a ‘super-private, ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate, fund-raising affair’.

Aside from meeting Lee Strasberg that weekend, however, Marilyn did catch up with English-born reporter William J. Weatherby, who had first encountered the actress in 1960 during his report for the
Observer
on the making of
The Misfits
. They became acquaintances and over the ensuing 21 months, she would be interviewed by him at length on at least three separate occasions. Their last-minute meeting took place during the afternoon of Saturday 14 April, in a small booth at the rear of a decidedly low-key, unglamorous bar on Eighth Avenue. Uncharacteristically, Marilyn was already there when Weatherby arrived.

‘I could see the change in her as I walked toward her,’ he recalled in his 1976 book,
Conversations with Marilyn.
‘Her body had lost some of the shape and sap of youth. Her face lacked some of its former fullness.’ He noticed that her skin seemed more stretched over the bones and less shiny.
‘She had some make-up on this time,’ he said, ‘but it didn’t hide the tiredness or the lines, and she must have known it . . . I couldn’t believe that the woman I saw had changed so much.’

They spoke about Arthur Miller’s recent marriage and mentioned she might go the same way again. When asked whether she had anyone in mind, Marilyn replied, ‘Sort of . . . only problem is, he’s married right now. And he’s married, so we have to meet in secret . . . He’s in politics.’ ‘In Hollywood?’ Weatherby asked. ‘Oh no, in Washington.’ If Weatherby’s recollections are accurate, it was obvious she was embellishing her one-night encounter with President Kennedy at Bing Crosby’s home.

The reporter noted that Marilyn reminded him of a ‘star-struck girl’ at the mention of Kennedy’s name. As their conversation unfurled, the actress made it clear she was very supportive of the President. ‘I think he’s going to be another [Abraham] Lincoln,’ she insisted. Conversation came to a halt when Weatherby visited the men’s room. He returned to find a strange man bent over their table talking to the actress. Mistaking her for a prostitute, he was making a rather ungainly, alcohol-induced pass at her. Weatherby was naturally aghast at the confusion and shouted his anger at the man, who sheepishly walked back to his nearby table.

It was time for a change of setting. Marilyn and Weatherby climbed inside a taxi and resumed their conversation on a bench in Central Park. Watching squirrels play and pigeons search for food punctuated their latest exchanges. Their time together soon ended; Marilyn had a meeting with Lee Strasberg to attend, a movie script to discuss and a journal interview to finish. Weatherby walked her back to 59th Street and watched as the actress climbed aboard another taxi. Just as the vehicle was about to pull away, she informed him she wouldn’t be returning to the Big Apple ‘for a long time’. Marilyn’s remark would unfortunately prove to be prophetic. This was her penultimate visit to New York.

The actress’s day concluded back at her apartment when, after a gap of three months, she finally wrapped up her piece for
Redbook
magazine. Her banter with the writer, Alan Levy, was once more most enlightening. ‘I’m looking forward to eventually becoming a marvellous, excuse the word, marvellous character actress, like Marie Dressler, like Will Rogers,’ she exclaimed. ‘I think they’ve left this kind of appeal out of the movies today.’ Once again, she was extremely philosophical. ‘I am trying to prove to myself that I
am
a person,’ the actress declared, ‘then, maybe I’ll convince myself that I
am
a person. The most difficult task I have ever set myself is
know
thyself, and I would underline it.’ This tone continued throughout most of the conversation. ‘Acting is very important,’ she announced. ‘To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation.’

As promised, Monroe returned to Los Angeles on Sunday 15 April and a chat with Henry Weinstein was uppermost in her mind. Their exchange, by telephone, took place late that night. It was a problematic one. Early on the morning of Monday 16 April, Weinstein called scriptwriter Walter Bernstein. His conversation with Marilyn had left him in a high state of panic. ‘Lee Strasberg practically liked the script,’ Weinstein announced. Bernstein was naturally pleased by this but confused as to why the producer was so clearly unnerved. His puzzlement ended when he was informed that the script Strasberg had given his tentative blessing to was the one Bernstein had just scrapped and was currently overhauling. Due to her incessant rewrite demands, Fox, and in particular Cukor, had decided to keep Marilyn out of the revised-scripts loop; she, inadvertently, had taken a woefully out-of-date version of it to New York.

Weinstein was naturally horrified by this predicament. His worries had intensified when, during the previous night’s conversation, Marilyn also told him that she concurred with Strasberg’s decision that the screenplay was generally OK but still needed a bit of work, in particular ‘a few more jokes’. Weinstein passed this verdict on to his scriptwriter. ‘That’s
not
what it wants,’ Bernstein angrily shouted. Weinstein agreed.

The bad news did not end there. With Bernstein listening attentively, the producer hesitantly revealed that Monroe had in fact requested other amendments to the script; for instance, she was now firmly insisting that her character met her husband by
coincidence
, rather than by running after him. She also desired changes in the scene where Marilyn’s character unexpectedly arrives back home and encounters her two young children for the first time in seven years. The script’s insistence that they treat her rather frostily now appalled the actress. In her new idea, she demanded that she should win them over instantly, without even having to tell them who she was. As Weinstein and Bernstein’s conversation unfolded they became united in the belief that, considering the new version of the script had just been completed, this was now a major problem.

The news that Marilyn was demanding wholesale changes naturally spread like wildfire. Gene Allen, the film’s associate producer, was enraged when told of her eleventh-hour revisions and agreed they would be disastrous for the picture. So did George Cukor, who angrily confronted Marilyn at her home on the Monday morning. But she was unyielding and insistent that her demands should be met. Heated discussions over the script raged on for hours. Arguments between Weinstein, Bernstein, Cukor, Allen and various Fox executives were fought out in the director’s badly decaying mobile office and on Sound Stage 14, in full view of the startled studio employees. A stalemate was rapidly reached.

Marilyn was now so perturbed by the script that she became fearful of it and, in turn, of everything to do with the film. Allen soon realised that failure to make the actress’s amendments would only cause further delays to the start of shooting. A compromise about the revisions was soon agreed by everyone and, during the evening of Monday 16 April, Bernstein was once again ordered to rewrite the script. Upset by developments, Monroe turned to her pills. During the evening of Wednesday 18 April, she was driven by chauffeur to the Prescription Center on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills to collect a fresh consignment of sedatives, one of which was Nembutal.

In an attempt to pre-empt any impending confusion, Bernstein began utilising the colour-coding system (a device commonly employed when revisions of a screenplay are made), whereby each subsequent adjustment to the script was printed on different-coloured paper to the one previous. The very latest version of
Something’s Got To Give
began life as blue throughout. Within a day, the first revisions had been hastily sent out for everyone to read and approve. But Marilyn was
still
unhappy. In the sequence where her character, Ellen, ruefully announces that, after losing many of her items after the plane crash, she doesn’t possess many clothes, she caustically scribbled, ‘Too flat. It’s painting black on black so to speak. We don’t have to worry about heart. I have one believe it or not.’

She also queried how the script had been revised. ‘What has been rewritten?’ she asked. ‘New pages will inhibit me. Some changes should be made but not like this. Either way they have to trust me to play the scenes with heart or we are lost.’ The actress even took the opportunity to take a swipe at Bernstein’s credentials. ‘This writer may be good,’ she scrawled, ‘But not on this movie.’ Marilyn complained, and he was forced to rewrite certain sections of it again.

As the revisions from both Monroe and the other notables involved in the film began to pour in, Bernstein hurriedly incorporated these on to differently tinted pages, first yellow, then pink, symbolising respectively the second and third sets of changes to the screenplay. The completed versions were then hastily dispatched to the individuals’ homes. Either by accident or design, Marilyn would not usually receive hers until at least ten o’clock at night. (Bernstein’s script underwent so much transformation that, in the end, hardly any of his original, blue-coloured sheets remained.) From the outset, to avert any further problems, Marilyn was kept in the dark about the colour-change operation.

By Thursday 19 April, the latest, hurriedly finished 149-page screenplay of
Something’s Got To Give
, chiefly pink in colour, had been dispatched to everyone; everyone that is except for Marilyn. The copy she received was still
white
. It was an irresponsible decision. It was naturally becoming
harder for her to see where the latest amendments had been made. Attempts to study and learn her very latest lines were now a forlorn hope.

Marilyn devoured the latest version of the script that weekend. Bar Irving Shulman’s original, eight-month-old ending, every part of it had now been hastily rewritten and comprehensively restyled to suit everyone’s specifications. Unsurprisingly, the actress still found a few faults. Alongside Ellen’s line, ‘You know . . . far away in the South Sea Islands, when a man hurts himself, but doesn’t want people to see him cry, do you know what he does? He has someone cry for him,’ Monroe scribbled the words, ‘Sentimental schmaltz.’ However, there was no time left for changes. There were now just two days left before principal shooting was set to commence.