The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (38 page)

Bobby’s action in handing over his number, however, was in itself not an unusual one. Other film stars, such as Judy Garland and Richard Burton, had the number and often called the Attorney General when they were in distress or just needed someone to talk to. Bobby was a compassionate man and above all, a good listener.

Evidence for this final meeting between Marilyn and the President can be found in an excerpt from
Answered Prayers
, the partially unpublished memoir by the highly flamboyant Louisiana-born writer Truman Capote. Best known for
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, he had grown very close to the actress and was heartbroken that she lost out to Audrey Hepburn in the movie version of his book. On Monday 11 June, the actress had lunch with Capote at the posh Manhattan restaurant La Fonda Del Sol. During their get-together, she covertly informed him of what had transpired between her and the President. Noticing a new maturity about her, and detecting she wasn’t so giggly any more, he told her, ‘Why cry over Jack? Between him and Bobby, they can’t raise a decent hard-on and I know a lot about cocks. I’ve seen an awful lot of them and if you put all the Kennedys together, you wouldn’t have a good one.’ His claim of familiarity with their genitalia stemmed from the time when, during his stays in Palm Beach with financier Loel Guinness and his wife, style arbiter Gloria, he would frequently witness the sight of the Kennedy boys, who lived nearby, going for a swim in the nude. (It was no secret that Capote had no time for the Kennedys. In the book
Conversations
, he remarked, ‘The Kennedy boys are like dogs. They can’t pass a fire hydrant without pissing on it.’) Capote’s comment made Marilyn laugh, but it wasn’t quite the response she was looking for.

In a further attempt to make amends for the President’s decision, and to explain in more comfortable surroundings the precise reasons why he had chosen to retreat, during that call to her Brentwood home on 13 June Bobby also invited Marilyn to a gathering at Peter Lawford’s beachside house, which was set to take place the following Sunday evening. Concerned by the contusions that remained visible on her face, and still smarting over the rebuff, she declined the invite by way of a cryptic Western Union telegram, which was sent later that day, at 10.15pm, to Bobby and his wife Ethel at their country home in Hickory Hill, McLean, Virginia. It read:

Dear Attorney General and Mrs Robert Kennedy: I could have been delighted to have accepted your invitation honouring Pat and Peter Lawford. Unfortunately, I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. After all, all we demanded was our right to twinkle. Marilyn Monroe.

Once deciphered, it appears that her enigmatic message was in fact a cleverly disguised, snide yet astute below-the-belt attack on the Kennedys. The party in question was
not
to honour the Lawfords (their eighth
wedding anniversary was actually six weeks earlier, on Tuesday 24 April) but to salute the 12th wedding anniversary of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. The actress had shrewdly notched up a small, self-satisfying if vindictive victory against both the President and his family.

Marilyn’s visit to the Big Apple was brief. On Wednesday 13 June she headed back to Brentwood, where she visited her physician, Dr Hyman Engelberg, and received anaemia shots and tablets for her increasingly jittery nerves. In the middle of the month, fed up with her nondescript, clinging existence, she suddenly decided that she was no longer prepared to lie down. After being tossed to one side by Fox and now the mighty-powerful President, she concluded she didn’t want to just fade into the distance. Instead, she was ready to retaliate. She had worked long and hard to reach her position as one of the world’s most famous film stars and she was not ready to throw it away.

Two people were instrumental in this decision. As we can guess, one was Joe DiMaggio. The other was Frank Sinatra. Since Marilyn’s sacking by Fox, Sinatra had taken an increasingly active hand in her affairs and had even been advising and consoling her, usually by phone. On Saturday 16 June – just a day after returning to Los Angeles from a two-month world tour in aid of children’s charities – concerned at her absence the previous evening from his surprise ‘Welcome Home’ bash, held in the recently completed new wing of Dean Martin’s home, he called Marilyn and invited her out to dinner. (A tip-off that Juliet Prowse was in attendance had played a huge part in her decision not to attend.)

Marilyn gushed with joy when Sinatra called. Following his severance from Prowse, Frank was ready to resume his relationship with the actress. He picked her up at her Brentwood home, his only visit there (before leaving, the actress insisted on giving him a guided tour). During dinner that night, at his jointly owned Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood, Frank put his lawyers at her service and informed her his film production company, Essex, would be prepared to produce her next movie. In fact the pair discussed starring in two movies together:
How To Murder Your Wife
, a comedy especially written for them by George Axelrod, and
What a Way to Go
. The latter, a comedy-musical about a woman who is a fatal jinx to her husbands, greatly impressed the actress and was soon touted as the follow-up to
Something’s Got To Give
. J. Lee Thompson, director of
The Guns of Navarone
, was even suggested as the movie’s director.

When news of Frank and Marilyn’s clandestine meeting and planned movie collaboration reached the Hollywood news wires, Sinatra remarked, ‘I think it would be good for Sinatra. It is good company. It is good chemistry. The public would find it exciting.’ However, the announcement
did not excite everyone. In a reference to the actress’s legendary on-set antics, critic Dorothy Manners sarcastically suggested in one of her columns that one of the movies they had in mind should be retitled
How To Murder Your Co-Star
.

Clearly invigorated by Sinatra’s support and persuasive coaxing, Monroe took a rejuvenated interest in everything around her, especially the transformation of her home. On Sunday 24 June, at a cost of $65.50, Louis Alatorre of the Patios-Block Walls company at 1959 Corinth Avenue, Los Angeles, arrived to cut and fit a new Inca red tile on the property, acid clean her brick patio walls and drill a hole through one of the walls in the kitchen to improve its drainage. Marilyn regularly toasted this new-found euphoria. Six days earlier, on Monday 18 June, for instance, she had sent Eunice Murray out to the Briggs Wines & Spirits store, at 13038 San Vicente Boulevard, to purchase (for her) a $14.43 bottle of Dom Perignon and (for Murray) one bottle of Smirnoff vodka and one of J&B Scotch whisky (total cost $15.11). With the recent arrival of her first shipment of Mexican furniture, she became absorbed in plans to turn her Fifth Helena home into what she called ‘Mexican-modern’.

The actress, naturally, also became obsessed with kick-starting her career. She began by gathering the press and anyone who was keen to listen to her story about how she had been betrayed by the Hollywood star system. She also instigated a campaign to win back her job at 20th Century-Fox. Fellow actress Cyd Charisse, angry that Fox had welched on their agreement, immediately agreed to be part of the effort. ‘Of course, Marilyn,’ she replied, ‘whatever you do is fine with me.’

Hollywood’s best known hair stylist, Sydney Guilaroff, was another individual summoned. In the third week of June, hot on the heels of Bobby Kennedy’s surprising lack of success in the matter, Guilaroff rang Fox executives and said, ‘If I can get rid of the people around her and get her back on the set, will you take her back?’ They replied with a resounding ‘Yes!’ But in fact, by the time he called, the wheels to reemploy Marilyn were already well in motion.

The first meeting to discuss Monroe’s rehiring had actually taken place during the afternoon of Saturday 23 June. In a clandestine, previously undocumented encounter, Marilyn had a personal face-to-face discussion with Fox vice-president Peter Levathes at her home on Fifth Helena.

Levathes had contacted the actress after receiving a call from Spyros Skouras; the Fox president had in turn called Levathes following his meeting with Darryl Zanuck, whom Marilyn had met for lunch during her brief stay in New York. With his Second World War epic
The Longest Day
now completed, and with problems at the studio continuing to concern him, on or around the afternoon of Friday 15 June Zanuck had arranged
a clear-the-air meeting with Skouras in New York at his hospital bedside. It was during that conference that he suggested, for the long-term benefit of both the studio and its stockholders, that they should rehire Monroe. Since Zanuck was a major investor at Fox, Skouras was forced to agree. Although no one said as much, they had agreed that there was no substitute for Marilyn.

Suspicious of Levathes’ motives that Saturday afternoon, Monroe astutely secreted Pat Newcomb in an adjoining room, door slightly ajar, to eavesdrop and take notes of what he said and promised during the meeting. That way, as the actress believed, he and Fox would have to adhere to every pledge he made.

As their conversation unfolded, Levathes politely informed Monroe of one of their provisos for her return: she must replace key members of her staff, those known to have a disruptive influence over her on the film set. Besides the obvious names of Ralph Greenson and Paula Strasberg, the one other he put forward was that of Newcomb herself, who Fox felt wielded too much control over the actress. The example of George Cukor sometimes having to endure Newcomb in order just to speak to the actress was brought up. While Levathes spoke, Marilyn merely sat and listened.

The discussion soon ended, although another was planned. Her next and more widely known meeting with Levathes took place five days later, on Thursday 28 June. Once more, her home in Brentwood was the setting. This time, however, her attorney, Milton Rudin, and not Pat Newcomb was in attendance.

Guilaroff partly assented to Fox’s beliefs. In a 1966 interview for the magazine
Films and Filming
, he bluntly declared that, in his opinion, the people that had prevented Marilyn from completing
Something’s Got To Give
were indeed Strasberg and Greenson. So, determined to make a fresh start in her life and unburden herself of her money-draining sycophants, Marilyn took on board both the studio’s and Guilaroff’s advice. In late June, she began formulating plans to sever her professional ties to Paula Strasberg, as well as her husband, Lee, although she was unsure about cutting her links to Newcomb. Due to her drug dependency, she knew freeing herself from Greenson’s overpowering grasp was going to be another matter entirely.

Almost immediately, once the bruises on her face had subsided, Monroe was back at work. Through Newcomb, she had made herself available to three major magazines and for three straight evenings, beginning on Saturday 23 June (shortly after her meeting with Levathes) and concluding on Monday 25 June, she took part in the first of two lengthy photo shoots.
The first turned into an in-depth session for the high-fashion magazine
Vogue
, her first for this kind of publication.

A fact overlooked by every previous biographer of the actress is that, in order to prepare for the shoots, and in particular that for
Life
magazine, Marilyn had made a nostalgic, low-key trip to see Emmeline Snively of the Blue Book School of Charm and Modelling Agency, the first that she had ever belonged to. At the age of 19, Norma Jeane Dougherty, as she was known then, had signed with the bureau on Thursday 2 August 1945. Snively revealed to reporter Milton Shulman in 1956 that ‘Marilyn hadn’t enough money to pay for the course, so I paid for it. She paid me back later.’ Marilyn never forgot this generosity so, on or around Tuesday 12 June, during her short stay in New York, she met up again with Snively, who was working in the city at the time, and asked if she could pose for one of her classes. Her request was naturally granted, although most of Snively’s students that day were prominent, off-duty businessmen.

The photographer commissioned to carry out the first of Marilyn’s June 1962 shoots, meanwhile, was 31-year-old, Brooklyn-born
Vogue
photographer Bert Stern. He had first encountered Marilyn at a Manhattan cocktail party in 1955 and had always harboured a desire to photograph her. ‘I really wanted to be alone with her in the bedroom,’ Stern declared. He was about to get his wish.

After discussions with both the actress and her publicist, Arthur Jacobs, arrangements were made not to use a studio, but instead to shoot the pictures in the improvised setting of Suite 261 at the Bel Air Hotel in Beverly Hills, at that time the most secluded and sexy hotel in Los Angeles. Long before Marilyn’s arrival on 23 June, Stern was preparing for the shoot like a man anxiously awaiting his lover. He knew his desires for the actress went much further than his yearning to capture her in stills form. His camera was loaded, lights were in place, hi-fi was ready, Chanel No. 5, Marilyn’s favourite perfume, had been sprayed into the air and a case of 1953 Dom Perignon champagne was chilling in the refrigerator. Props in the form of several transparent scarves were strewn across the bed. All that was needed was the subject. Marilyn said she would appear at two o’clock. But because her meeting with Levathes overran, she did not appear until seven.

Tipped off about her eventual arrival by a phone call from the hotel’s receptionist, Stern immediately rushed down to greet the star and was surprised to find Monroe, the world famous Hollywood film star, completely alone. As the photographer recalled in his 1982 book,
The Last Sitting
, ‘I was surprised to see a girl walking towards me on her own. No PR agent, no bodyguard, no secretary. Totally alone.’ (Although not according to Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder. Shortly after her death, Snyder
submitted an invoice for $600.00 to Marilyn’s estate to cover three days of his services at the Bel Air Hotel on this day as well as the following two.)