The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (31 page)

With applause both for herself and the President still ringing in her ears, Marilyn left the stage. Waiting to meet and congratulate her as she descended from it was Brooklyn-born opera diva Maria Callas. Monroe
then headed for her dressing room where she collapsed and, in an attempt to lower her temperature, bathed with cool hand towels. She then briefly took her front-row seat next to Miller and her three other associates. Judy Garland was seated nearby and, as Marilyn passed by, she inclined forward to embrace her.

The historic dual Kennedy/Democratic Party event concluded at precisely 11.55pm, having run for precisely 2 hours 25 minutes (rather than four hours, as some researchers have insisted). A crowd in excess of 10,000 excitedly lined the streets and cheered as JFK’s car departed from the Garden, making its way across town to Park Avenue and up to the Upper East Side townhouse at 33 East 69th Street belonging to Arthur B. Krim, where Kennedy was to be the guest of honour at a private gathering for the dignitaries, friends and performers who had worked tirelessly to put the evening’s show together.

Photographers from the world’s press were banned. However, snapper Cecil N. Stoughton was not. He had been chosen by the White House to exclusively document the private affair. The party for 75 people, which also included a short performance by entertainer Diahann Carroll, was a truly joyous occasion. In an interview with
National Geographic
, Stoughton recalled, ‘Everybody was there, Maria Callas, Jimmy Durante, Shirley MacLean. And when Marilyn showed up. I got a shot of JFK, Bobby and Marilyn all in the same frame when they were packed in the library with a whole bunch of other guests.’

The picture he referred to has since become world-famous. It shows the actress, still wearing her famous dress, standing in between John and Bobby in front of a large bookshelf and clutching, in the palm of her left hand, her present for JFK, an 18ct, $5,000, gold Rolex ‘President’ watch inscribed with the words, ‘Jack, with love as always from Marilyn May 19th, 1962.’ Tucked inside the timepiece’s box was a poem, which read, ‘Let lovers breathe their sighs / And roses bloom and music sound / Let passion burn on lips and eyes / And pleasures merry world go round / Let golden sunshine flood the sky / And let me love / Or let me die!’

Introduced in 1956 at the Basel Watch, Clock and Jewellery Fair, the ‘President’ turned out to be one of the company’s flagship models. A version of the watch presented to President Eisenhower to celebrate his reelection to the White House in November 1956 featured the new, so-called ‘President’ bracelet and the name remained with it; hence, six years later, Marilyn chose to purchase one for JFK.

It’s worth noting that a fourth individual, historian Arthur Schlesinger, is also seen in the original photograph, although, so as to add credence to the belief that Marilyn, Bobby and John had slid away from the others for a discreet, private discussion, his presence is excised from practically every
subsequent reproduction. The image however does perfectly corroborate Schlesinger’s recollections that he and Bobby had ‘engaged in mock competition’ for Marilyn’s attention at the party. The Attorney General – of whom she would later remark, ‘It was good to see a smiling, friendly face’ – apparently startled her by discussing politics, something that no one had ever attempted doing with her before.

Marilyn’s escort that evening, Isidore Miller, tellingly recalled in late 1962 the get-together at Krim’s. ‘She [Marilyn] took me along to meet the President. She said I was her date and when she went up to the President, instead of saying, “I am pleased to meet you, Mr. President,” she said, “I want you to meet my former father-in-law.” I’m sure she was thinking about the thrill I was getting instead of etiquette.’ His remark provides us with reliable evidence that, following their brief liaison at Bing Crosby’s house just seven weeks earlier, Marilyn felt she knew the President well enough to avoid the standard introductory protocol, and that she had failed to divulge to Isidore even the remotest details about her intimate tryst with Kennedy.

For the few remaining years of his life, Miller would treasure a photograph taken at the party, which showed Monroe and the President laughing spontaneously at one of his humorous remarks. Aside from the time when they watched Diahann Carroll perform, everyone at the gathering stood but, despite his protestations, the actress insisted he should sit. When he did, she knelt down beside him. ‘She was very beautiful and caring,’ he recalled. Marilyn never strayed far from him or that area of the house for the entire night, causing her to miss the fine range of delicacies which had been laid out on a table in an adjacent room.

When the party came to a close, the actress insisted on taking Miller home. At the elevator of the building where he was staying, they kissed goodbye. But, just as she was about to climb into her waiting limousine, she turned round, walked back inside and asked him to travel with her to Los Angeles the following day. He declined the offer but suggested he would make the trip sometime in the future, possibly in November. They would talk many more times on the phone but sadly, this would be their penultimate outing together.

Much has been written about the actress’s apparent clandestine meeting with the President (or his brother) immediately after (or during or prior to) Krim’s party. Some authors have suggested that she spent that night with JFK in his bed at the Carlyle Hotel. New York columnist Earl Wilson fuelled this myth when he announced that, shortly after 1am, Secret Service agents escorted Marilyn and the President to the basement of Krim’s apartment house and through a maze of tunnels which led to the
Carlyle Hotel, where JFK regularly maintained a penthouse. ‘I learned from an FBI agent that they remained in the suite for several hours. It was the last prolonged encounter between them,’ he sensationally remarked.

I can reveal that these accounts are fictitious and, moreover, unfeasible in practical terms. Is it possible that the President and the world-famous actress could slip away from Krim’s private, three-hour party without anyone noticing? It’s also worth remembering that Marilyn’s close friend Ralph Roberts went on record by saying that a meeting between JFK and Monroe that night was ‘impossible’ because he was waiting to give her a massage at her apartment following the party and departed in the region of 4am while she was asleep.

Furthermore, Marilyn was pictured leaving Krim’s party and climbing into her waiting limousine still wearing her skin-tight dress, a creation she had to be sewn into. Is it likely that, after Monroe had been intimate with JFK in his room at the Carlyle Hotel, he, the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, was responsible for sewing and hooking her back into the outfit? Marilyn’s stand-in and close friend, Evelyn Moriarty, concurred with this view. ‘So many people said she left the party and went to meet Kennedy, so please answer me, how could she get out of that dress and back into it? The dress had all those little hooks in it. She was sewn into it . . . The rumours about Kennedy started
after
she died,
not
before. Nothing was said. Nobody said
anything
about it [when she was alive]. She went to a few parties and he was there. She was a friend of his sisters.’

In addition, Marilyn’s date that night was Isidore Miller. Did she just abandon him while she went off to be intimate with Kennedy? Of course not.

Instead, Marilyn spent the concluding hours of the night in the platonic company of Ralph Roberts and James Haspiel at her East 57th Street apartment. As the latter wrote in his 2002 book,
Marilyn: The Ultimate Look at the Legend
, ‘I can tell you with
authority
that I was with Marilyn at her apartment ten minutes to four in the morning.’ This is confirmed by recently recovered receipts from the day of the JFK Democratic gala (19/20 May). Aside from the drive by her publicist, John Springer, Marilyn’s entire journeying around New York and to and from Madison Square Garden (between the evening of Thursday 17 May and the morning of Sunday 20 May) was aided by a limousine hired from the city’s Exec-U-Car Inc. Her invoice clearly shows that Marilyn’s rented car left its base at 11.15am and returned to its garage just over 17 hours later, at 4.30am. This, along with the recollection of Ralph Roberts, confirms that Haspiel’s announcement was entirely accurate.

Basking in the fame of her performance at the President’s bash, Marilyn flew back to Los Angeles the very next day, Sunday 20 May. Waiting to greet her at 10am at the city’s International Airport was another chauffeur-driven limousine. Hired by her at a cost of $17.00 (including tax) from the Carey Cadillac Renting Co. of California of 9641 Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Hills, its mission to whisk both her and her luggage back home to Brentwood.

Once there, desperate to learn of any new developments with Fox while she had been away, the actress immediately called Milton Rudin, who informed her that, as from the following day, the studio would no longer be footing the bill for her limousine hire. If she wanted a car to pick her up and take her to the studio each morning, she would have to pay for it herself. It was a petty act of revenge by a corporation still smarting over her decision to defy their wishes and fly out to New York. In just a few short hours, her feeling of utter euphoria had been replaced by one of sheer despair. Now completely demoralised, yet simmering, the actress remained holed up in her home for the rest of the day, trying to rest and preparing for the next day’s shooting.

At precisely 5.30am on Monday 21 May, as arranged the previous afternoon, Marilyn’s limousine pulled up on the driveway outside her home. Determined to demonstrate how unruffled she was by the studio’s vindictiveness, Monroe agreed to assume responsibility for the vehicle’s charges, but, in comparison with the previous arrangement, her directives for it were far more majestic.

A good example of this took place later that week. At five o’clock on the morning of Thursday 24 May, the actress’s car (leased as normal from the Carey Cadillac Renting Co. of California) once more came to a halt at Marilyn’s house. However, instead of merely taking her directly to and from the studio, as Fox had previously demanded, the actress instructed her chauffeur, the ever-reliable Rudy Kadensky, first to escort her to the film studio and wait while she shot her scenes and then, at lunch time, to drive her to Beverly Hills and wait while she carried out her shopping (which, that day, included a visit to the Martindale’s book store where she purchased three publications, the novel
The Skin of Our Teeth
by Thornton Wilder, the war book
Captain MD
by Leo Calvin Rostein, and the new publication
The Tempering of Eugene O’Neill
by Doris Alexander).

Her limousine then drove her back to Fox, waited while she filmed further sequences and then escorted her back home to Fifth Helena when shooting had wrapped for the day. However, her use of the vehicle did not end there. After changing into casual clothes, she was then driven to the local Brentwood Country Mart, where her limo waited while she carried out her errands. A return trip to her home wrapped up both her and the
car’s day. A total of 43 miles was covered during that 15-hour period from 5am to 8pm. Her $81.43 bill was rounded up by an $11 tip. This scenario was repeated many times during the remainder of the shooting.

It wasn’t just cars she was hiring. Almost three weeks earlier, on Saturday 5 May, for a period of precisely one month and at a cost of $18, she had rented, from the Hans Ohrt Lightweight Bicycles store in Beverly Hills, an English-style bike. Her idea of
cycling
to and from Fox each day was soon shelved.

As we can see, Marilyn’s spending was still out of control. In a memo the following month from her Los Angeles secretary, Cherie Redmond, it was calculated that, between Monday 1 January and Monday 11 June 1962, among her other costs, Marilyn had spent a total of $6,401.71 on her wardrobe, $6,741.03 on hairdressing, make-up, beautifications and supplies, $10,131.23 on drugs and a colossal $15,411.18 on the services of Paula Strasberg. As the charges clearly demonstrate, the actress was still spending unwisely whatever money she had at her disposal.

With such a grave disregard of her finances, it came as no surprise when, on Monday 25 June, Milton Rudin was propelled to draft a note to her saying he felt obliged to ‘caution’ her on her disbursements since, ‘at the rate you have been making these expenditures, you will spend the $13,000 [the sum she had remaining in her accounts] in a very short period of time and we will have to consider where to borrow additional monies.’ Soon after, in an inter-office memo, the ever-assiduous Redmond touched upon the actress’s spending habits and fast-dwindling bank accounts when she ominously noted, ‘The fewer people who know about the state of Marilyn Monroe’s finances the better.’

On Monday 21 May, the actress’s car pulled up inside the Fox lot at precisely 6.05am. With wicker basket in hand, Marilyn climbed out and immediately headed to her dressing room where, 25 minutes later, she underwent make-up. To all intents and purposes, it seemed that filming of
Something’s Got To Give
was ready to resume for another week. And since it was the first time during the shooting that the movie’s three main stars, Monroe, Charisse and Martin, were all set to feature together in one sequence, for George Cukor in particular this was a most significant day. The clearly excited director relayed this fact to Charisse. ‘Don’t be so sure,’ she ominously retorted.

With no sign of Marilyn on the set, fear began to course through the director’s body. ‘When we were waiting for her,’ Charisse recalled, ‘he [Cukor] would say, “Now, look, this is the way she’s always worked. We must have patience and we’ll just work like she usually does.”’ After an hour of waiting, Cukor finally plucked up enough courage to venture to
the actress’s dressing room. But within minutes he was trudging out, shaking his head like a shell-shocked prize-fighter who had just been knocked out of commission but still couldn’t believe it. The actress had informed him that she was suffering from fatigue and unable to shoot any close-ups. She suggested they shoot them the following day. Cukor reluctantly agreed. At 10.40am Monroe was coaxed out of her room by Paula Strasberg, but the actress’s tiredness plagued the rest of the day’s shooting. At 5pm, she was dismissed with many of the day’s key sequences with the children remaining unfinished.