The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (28 page)

To cover his slothful speed and in an attempt to undermine her confidence, Cukor clandestinely (and quite inaccurately) remarked to studio executives that Marilyn’s performance in front of the cameras was ‘useless’ and that she was incapable of ‘matching her takes’, and that as a result, endless retakes were required. But close examination of the surviving footage proves they were not. It was obvious that the director’s deep-rooted hatred of Monroe was manifesting itself in imperceptible sabotage of both her and her career.

In front of the cameras, Marilyn was, to begin with, often shy and diffident with her suggestions. But that soon changed. During one day of
shooting, she strolled up to the director and asked for permission to change a word in the script. When he surprisingly granted her wish, she would, in the style of a chameleon, completely alter her mood and timid demeanour and excitedly clap her hands in sheer delight. Touchingly, Marilyn seemed thrilled that anyone would ever consider doing such a thing for her. With her confidence spiralling, the floodgates opened and Monroe-enforced script changes began happening almost on a daily basis, most of which were unsurprisingly directed at Miss Charisse. Marilyn insisted that any references to Cyd in the screenplay as ‘beautiful, seductive or desirable’, should be excised, along with any indication that the husband of both these glamorous women was, even for a moment, remotely attracted to anyone but Miss Monroe.

Another script change came in the sequence where, for the only time in the movie, Marilyn was set to wear a negligee. Eager to display her stunning new slimline physique, she wanted the scene to be rewritten to show it off more. Unsurprisingly, the director once again succumbed to her demands and, for the second time, the actress was truly elated. Seeing her immense pleasure, and simultaneously seeing a way to successfully press ahead with the movie’s shooting, Cukor immediately announced to the cast and crew that, from that moment on, any suggestions and last-minute revisions to the script should be submitted to Monroe for her approval.

With her dislike of certain parts of the script so apparent, the actress was overjoyed by the suggestion, but suddenly she became apprehensive about her newfound role. Half of her was unnerved about the power that had just been thrust upon her; the other clearly enjoyed her newly acquired potency and soon made it clear that she would almost kill anyone who dared to take it away.

Despite Monroe’s and Cukor’s strong dislike of Strasberg, it was evident that the coach’s presence was having a positive effect on Marilyn. For four straight days, from Monday 14 to Thursday 17 May, the actress arrived punctually on the set and participated (for the first three days at least) in every conceivable session of shooting. On the first day, she found herself pitted against a most uncooperative canine and its extremely frustrated trainer.

Once again, the scene focused on Marilyn’s character as she returned home after five years away. This time, the sequence showed her reunion with the family’s cocker spaniel. But surprisingly, the delays were not down to the actress; they were due to the dog, Jeff, who continually failed to obey the cues and commands of his owner Rudd Weatherwax, the eminent trainer of dogs such as Lassie. The animal would turn out to be more difficult to work with than the star.

Kneeling on the floor near the edge of the pool, the animal’s perpetual disobedience made it impossible for Monroe to deliver her short line ‘I used to come here a long time ago’. Take after fruitless take followed, during which the actress, her platinum-blonde hair reflecting the brilliance of the huge arc lights, repeatedly broke down into fits of giggles. The shooting of this short sequence (due to last just 15 seconds in the completed movie) dragged on for most of the day. But strangely, at no point during the shooting did anyone think about replacing the animal with a more cooperative one or scrapping the sequence altogether.

Over the years, it’s been claimed that Marilyn was ‘out-of-it’ and lethargic on the set of
Something’s Got To Give
. The truth was that, when she managed to drag herself to the set and appear before the cameras, the actress was, for the most part, simply
sensational
. She ascended to the occasion and acted like the true cinematic star she was. Reporter Vernon Scott of the
Fresno Bee
newspaper corroborated this. As a visitor to the set, he was able to see first-hand just how alert, talkative, informative and decidedly friendly the actress was.

‘When the take [with the dog] was completed,’ he wrote, ‘MM returned to her dressing room and whisked from a form-fitting dress to snug Capri pants and sweater. She opened a bottle of champagne and said, “I feel wonderful.” She looked it too.’ He asked her if she was aware of the flurry of excitement that accompanied her activities in Hollywood. ‘Gee, I never pay that much attention to that,’ she replied. ‘Maybe it’s because I’m in such a hurry all the time trying not to be late that people are in a state of excitement around me.’ His report concluded, ‘Marilyn’s eyes sparkled when she was asked if she planned to marry again. She came up with an answer no press agent could concoct. “I’m going to stay single forever . . . for now.”’ Without any possible doubt, the actress was back on form and truly excited about both the film and her future.

When shooting concluded for the day, and with Strasberg still stuck to her side, Marilyn climbed back into the Carey Cadillac Co. limousine and, after returning home to change, was driven to the nearby Brentwood market to do some shopping. Her chauffeur, Rudy Karensky, dropped them back at Fifth Helena at 9.15pm precisely. The car’s hire charges for the day ($102.43 including a generous 15 per cent tip) served as proof of her propensity to spend cash at every available opportunity.

Via the pre-booked limo, Marilyn returned to the movie set one day later, and once more shot sequences which focused on her character’s sentimental homecoming. In a memorable, heart-wrenching sequence, the actress was seen encountering her two young children, who, unlike the family’s dog, failed to recognise her. Before filming began, in an attempt to put the young actors firmly at ease, the actress spent many moments
interacting and playing with them. Everyone present on the set that day recalled how moved they were with Marilyn’s actions. They all knew just how badly she wanted to be a mother herself.

Following a most enjoyable, trouble-free day of shooting, the actress left the studio. As folklore has it, she then headed for a series of dinner parties in the Hollywood hills, one of which was an event honouring Dr Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist and expert on consciousness-altering, mind-expanding drugs. The actress was ostensibly keen to meet him and during their brief liaison, and following her request, she was apparently introduced to lysergic acid diethylamide, a drug most commonly known as LSD. A sexual liaison supposedly followed. He later claimed that they ‘Took a drive, walked by the sea, and took [the popular sedative] Mandrax.’

After examination of several highly respected notes, files, diaries and well-researched biographies about Leary, I can categorically announce that this never happened. The tale about his encounter with the screen legend actually grew out of one of his several, highly embellished LSD flashbacks, which he in turn passed on to his many disciples over the ensuing years. Ultimately, it appeared that Leary himself would end up believing his illusory encounter with Monroe actually happened. In truth, he was getting confused with President Kennedy’s 41-year-old mistress, the socialite and painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, a lady who truly
did
contact Leary to try LSD. She had apparently turned the President on to marijuana cigarettes during their infrequent meetings at the White House.

In fact Marilyn returned home, where she spent the evening rehearsing her lines for the following day’s shoot and her song for the important forthcoming birthday gala. A day later, on Wednesday 16 May, she returned to the Fox lot, but worryingly, her temperature had risen to 99.2. When the news of this sneaked out, Buck Hall, a self-confessed enemy of the actress, dejectedly muttered, ‘Oh well, that takes care of the rest of the week.’ He was wrong. Monroe managed to work throughout most of the day, and shot scenes with the children beside the pool. (During the afternoon session, following her lunch break, she returned to Stage 14 at 1.20 but did not arrive on the set until 2.55.)

She was continuing to take immense pride in the film and how she looked on screen. At the end of most of her days on the set, Marilyn paid a visit to David Bretherton, the movie’s editor and therefore first viewer of the movie’s ‘dailies’ (the first positive prints made by the laboratory from the negatives photographed during the previous day’s shooting). She naturally enquired how she looked in her sequences and took great delight when he informed her she was ‘wonderful, just wonderful’. The actress’s publicist, Arthur Jacobs, recalled they always had a difficult time trying to keep her away from these screenings and remembered how she would
sneak in at the back of the theatre, watch them and then, when the lights went up, begin to make preposterous judgements on how she might have been better lit or shot from a better angle. ‘Of course, one simply
did not
do that,’ Jacobs recalled in 1982, ‘not if one wanted to stay on the right side of the director, crew and company.’ To discourage her from such interventions, Cukor even went as far as to arrange screenings during the afternoons in a secret projection room.

Marilyn was back at the studio on Thursday 17 May but worked for just five hours. At 12.30pm, a helicopter arrived at the Fox lot, landing in the large yard just outside Sound Stage 14. Its mission was to collect Monroe, her press agent Pat Newcomb and coach Paula Strasberg, and whisk them to Los Angeles International Airport where they were set to catch a flight to the Big Apple. There, on Saturday at Madison Square Garden, Marilyn was due to participate in ‘New York’s Birthday Salute to the President’, an all-star celebrity event with dual purposes as a fund-raising gala for the Democratic party and a celebration of John F. Kennedy’s upcoming 45th birthday.

The announcement that Monroe had been added to the star-studded bill was made to the American press on Tuesday 10 April, a day after she had informed the Fox executives of her intention to appear. Regardless of what we’ve been told before, Marilyn’s request to appear at the gala came directly from personality agent Earl Blackwell of the company Celebrity Service International, who had acted after receiving an order from the show’s executive producer, the famed Broadway composer Richard Adler. Adler had liaised with Bobby Kennedy, who had moved after obtaining an order from the President himself.

When Adler rang Marilyn at her apartment in New York, on Friday 13 April, to tell her about the lyrics he had just penned for her, she had promised him she would be wearing an ‘historical gown’ for the occasion. It was an undertaking she did not forsake to deliver. The size 5 gown, a clone of one worn by entertainer Marlene Dietrich during one of her shows in London, was a second-skin, sheer, sparkling creation by 54-year-old French clothing designer and multiple Academy Award nominee Jean Louis Berthauldt. Once famed for the black satin strapless dress worn by the actress Rita Hayworth in her 1946 film
Gilda
, and for the figure-hugging stage wear used by Dietrich on her world cabaret tours, he would soon be best remembered for the gown which Marilyn would wear when she breathlessly serenaded ‘Happy Birthday’ to the President of the United States on Saturday 19 May 1962.

The actress ordered the full-length, silk soufflé creation from the Hollywood outfitters, Western Costume Co., situated at 5335 Melrose
Avenue in Hollywood, immediately after receiving the invitation. ‘I want you to design a truly historical dress, a dazzling dress that is one of a kind,’ Marilyn begged Jean Louis. As he remarked, the gown was designed to ‘delicate in wholesome freshness her new and slimmer contour’.

Various estimates of its cost have been given over the years – $3,000 according to one author, $7,500 or $12,000 according to two others. In fact its cost, including tax, materials, labour charges and overtime, came to $1,404.65. The silk soufflé dress itself cost $1,027.36, its 2,500 intricately woven, hand-stitched rhinestones and mirrors came to $321.89, and its beading cost $55.40. To complete the dazzling outfit, Marilyn paid $35.68 for a pair of white stiletto shoes. The grand total of $1,440.33 was cleared by the actress by way of a handwritten cheque on Friday 8 June.

The actress kept the outside world totally in the dark about the gown. Even her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, was oblivious to it. The first glimpse she had of it came by way of one of Jean Louis’ hand-drawn sketches, which he had brought over during one of his regular trips to Marilyn’s home. During his visits, he and his assistant, Elizabeth Courtney, would be met at the door by Murray and escorted into the actress’s inner sanctum, her bedroom, where, behind its firmly locked door, she would excitedly be measured.

In a 1973 interview for the
Winnipeg Free Press
, Jean Louis recalled, ‘With a fitter, I went to her house. She was not always on time but she had champagne and caviar for us while we waited.’ When she eventually appeared, she was barefoot and wearing a gown. ‘She opened the robe, and she had no clothes on under it,’ he remembered, ‘“If you are going to dress me,” she said. “I want you to see what I look like.” I was aghast. I am shy. Her behaviour was totally without guile or brazenness. She had no self-consciousness whatsoever about her nudity and simply thought it would be much easier for me to get her real measurements if she were unencumbered by clothes.’

‘She was the most wonderful person,’ Elizabeth Courtney remembered in 1962. ‘She was very loving, and very appreciative of the least little things you would do for her. I’ve been in this business for 29 years and I’ve worked with a lot of stars, but Marilyn really was something extra. She would thank me a dozen times when I made her costumes, like I was doing something extraordinary.’

Marilyn had knocked herself out for three straight weeks rehearsing for her appearance at Kennedy’s get-together. The actress would undertake painstaking run-throughs, both on the days when she was at Fox – where, during lunch breaks on
Something’s Got To Give
, she would be coached by the studio’s music director, Lionel Newman – and at her Brentwood home each night after returning from the studio. Friends of the actress
touchingly recalled how she would be heard practising the song while she soaked in her bath tub. To hear how her rendition was shaping up, the actress even recorded her performances on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which had been loaned to her by Dr Greenson.