The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (41 page)

On Wednesday 4 July, and with time running out fast, work on the article hastily got under way when Meryman arrived at the actress’s home in Fifth Helena. As he admitted, his heart was pounding and he did not know what to expect from her. Having been met at the door by Eunice Murray, he entered the premises to find Pat Newcomb inside. ‘The house was saturated in paranoia,’ he later recalled for the 1965 book,
The Tragic Venus
. Meryman reeled back in shock at the sight of a virtually empty living room. There was nothing in it except for a couple of chairs. He placed his tape recorder on the floor and knelt down in front of it trying to make it work. Suddenly, in front of him, he saw yellow Capri slacks and heard a voice saying, ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ It was Marilyn.

Meryman admitted he found her extremely likeable and very smart, but not in the slightest bit sexy. He didn’t find her particularly attractive either, largely down to, as he put it, her ‘large head and jaw’. But he
was
enchanted by her, especially her innocence. In an unprecedented move for an interviewee, in order to prepare for the session, the actress had requested Meryman’s questions in advance. As the discussion unfurled, she displayed her full range of emotions – rage, wit, bravado, kindness and unhappiness – and discussed her childhood, films, Hollywood, fame, ambitions, dreams and ideas as effortlessly as she had ever done. It was an insight not accorded to anyone but her closest friends. But, despite this, Meryman still sensed she was suspicious of him and was walking on eggshells throughout. ‘I really felt that she needed to control the interview,’ he recalled in another interview. ‘She wanted to be in control of it, you know, on top of the situation. And she was!’

In a June 2001 interview for CNN’s
Larry King Live
show, Meryman recalled, ‘The minute Marilyn started talking, I knew instantly that I wanted to reproduce her words like a monologue on the page. She talked with just this tremendous gusto, images tumbling over each other, sometimes not making a lot of sense . . . I felt that she was terribly vulnerable, terribly needy, terribly distrustful. She felt betrayed right and left. She felt betrayed by her friends.’

At a suitable point in the discussion, the actress suggested she should go into her kitchen and cook a steak for them both. But when she peered into her refrigerator, she found that it was completely bereft of food. Eunice Murray had, once more, omitted to do the household shopping. With no sustenance forthcoming, Monroe proceeded to give Meryman a guided tour of her home and outlined her plans for it. She also proudly showed off her garden, which was now blooming with a wide range of multi-coloured flowers. Back inside, the champagne continued to flow and Meryman’s interview resumed. The actress spoke about the way businessmen and others misunderstood the actor, adding that actors and actresses were not machines, as so many people thought, and that a performance depended on many factors.

When the conversation began to drift away from this most interesting subject, Meryman attempted to bring it back. ‘Now, what was it like, confidentially, when Marilyn was cranking up for a scene?’ he innocently asked. But the actress was unimpressed with the query. She froze and the room became icy. ‘I don’t crank anything,’ she screamed. ‘I’m not a Model T. Excuse me but I think that’s kind of disrespectful to refer to it that way. I’m trying to work as an art form, not in a manufacturing establishment.’ Meryman apologised for his ill-conceived joke and she accepted it. But the frostiness remained and he was forced to reconsider any subsequent inappropriate jokes or questions.

A 30-minute telephone call from her
Something’s Got To Give
co-star, Wally Cox, punctuated the first day’s session. One from Joe DiMaggio interrupted the second. When it came, Marilyn shouted to Murray, ‘If it’s an Italian, tell him I’m not here.’ Her doctor, Hyman Engelberg, was a visitor to the house that second day. Entering via the key secreted in the fuschia pot by the front door, he had arrived to administer a $25 liver injection.

Following two days (and over eight hours) of interviewing, the lengthy session was over. Marilyn clinched it by curiously remarking, ‘Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.’ The banter concluded with a request from the actress, ‘
Please
don’t make me a joke.’ The actress walked Meryman to the door and said
goodbye. As he walked down the driveway, he turned back and glanced back at Marilyn, who was still standing in the doorway. Noticing his action, she waved and called, ‘Hey, thanks.’

Meryman immediately headed back to New York to type up the piece. ‘I only think she did the piece to get her voice out in the world,’ he recalled in 1986. ‘She had just been fired from Fox and she wanted her side told.’ In the 1992 television programme
Marilyn: The Last Interview
, he most tellingly remarked, ‘I never saw
any
sign that this was a woman giving her last interview, on the verge of committing suicide.’

Set to arrive at 2pm,
Life
’s photographer Allan Grant arrived 15 minutes early at Fifth Helena on the afternoon of Friday 6 July. (Contrary to the widely held belief, the session did not take place on the Saturday.) He thought arriving before the allotted time was a good idea since the magazine was expecting a roll of his ‘Marilyn-at-home’ snaps to be on board a flight to New York later this evening.

Once inside the actress’s bungalow, he was introduced to Pat Newcomb, make-up artist Allan Snyder and Eunice Murray. Marilyn, meanwhile, was in another room, being attended to by her hairdresser, Agnes Flanagan. Grant immediately set to work loading his cameras and positioning his lights. Tasks completed, he sat and waited for his subject to appear. Approximately 20 minutes passed before Marilyn appeared, sporting a bathrobe and clutching an obligatory glass of champagne. The actress was visibly far from ready and Grant naturally began fearing he was going to miss his already tight airplane deadline.

Monroe immediately offered Grant a glass of champagne, which he accepted. The two began discussing what she should wear for the photographs. He instructed her to dress casually. With these thoughts mulling around in her mind, she left to prepare with Snyder and Flanagan in tow. About 25 minutes later she reappeared in her obligatory tight-fitting Capri pants and a dark V-neck sweater. ‘There was nothing about her that reminded me of the lush, laughing Marilyn Monroe of the big screen,’ Grant later recalled. ‘To me, she seemed somewhat thinner and much more fragile than I expected . . . I detected sadness about her. She had become the Marilyn they [
Life
] asked for.’

The photographic session began. Grant captured the actress’s expressions at the article’s questions, which Newcomb read out aloud. During the brief shoot, Marilyn perched herself on the arm of her antique chair in front of the sunlit window, inadvertently piercing its lime-green fabric with her stiletto heel as she did so, and at one point playfully hung from one of the beams on the ceiling to show how she used to hang from a tree as a youngster while the boys looked on.

The frivolity ended when the actress became concerned with the lights
Grant had put up in the room. ‘She asked me if the light was OK,’ he recalled, ‘and I said, “To tell you the truth, this is the first time I’ve done a portrait and I don’t really know where the lights should be.”’ He was joking. But Marilyn did not realise this. She was horrified and began to panic. Noticing her distress, Newcomb swiftly interjected by saying, ‘For God’s sake, Allan, don’t fool with Marilyn that way.’

Grant apologised – ‘It’s a joke,’ he announced, ‘I’m sorry’ – and the session continued. Within two hours of its start, as planned, Grant’s film was on board an airplane heading for New York.

A copy of the completed
Life
article was sent for Marilyn’s approval on Saturday 14 July. Aside from quotes which referred to her clandestine donations to disadvantaged individuals and lines which she feared might upset her stepchildren, she gave her thumbs-up to the piece the following day. As her sister Berniece remarked, Marilyn described the interview as her most ‘accurate and gratifying’. (As scheduled, the article appeared in the edition published on Friday 3 August.) As a preview to the piece inside, the words ‘Marilyn Monroe Pours Her Heart Out’ appeared on the magazine’s front cover. Strangely, a picture of the actress did not; instead, this honour went to Major Bob White of the US Air Force and his son, Greg.

As July progressed, the actress oversaw more decorating work and happily devoured some recently received film scripts. She also found time to see Ralph Greenson on an almost daily basis, not merely for counselling but also for companionship. Despite her newfound optimism, loneliness was still an immense problem. Sessions at the doctor’s home in nearby North Roxbury Drive would usually last a minimum of 90 minutes; those when the doctor visited the actress’s home two hours. (Despite being seen by Marilyn as a friend, his charge to the actress was still $50 an hour.) Between Sunday 1 July and Saturday 4 August he saw her a total of 28 times.

She also spent some of this time in and around the vicinity of Sunset Boulevard. On one such visit, during the afternoon of Wednesday 11 July, she bumped into an old acquaintance, Hollywood show business reporter David Lewin, who remarked, ‘She was wearing firmly fitting white slacks and a loose purple top. She had come into town unexpectedly in her white, chauffeur-driven convertible to do some shopping for lunch.’ (In fact, though Lewin was obviously unaware of this, the actress was there to do some shopping and to purchase items for her next meeting with Fox, which was set to take place at the studio the following day.)

When he asked for an update about her seemingly floundering film career, Marilyn paused for a moment before announcing, ‘I am ready to
go back to work quickly, but I’m prepared to face lawsuits or almost anything else that may happen to me. I’m flexible and I can go it alone. My philosophy is still, “Enjoy the day” and the only difference between now and the last time we met is that I am single again and I have to enjoy the day alone. No, I’m not sad about it. After all, you can be alone, even with a husband.’

Marilyn was extremely relaxed and eager to talk off-the-cuff with an old friend, and after a brief interlude when the actress had to dash off to pick up chopped liver from the nearby delicatessen, she was more than willing to resume their conversation. Lewin continued by asking her about the Hollywood star system and the executives’ well-used phrase, ‘the inmates have taken over the asylum’. She replied, ‘I don’t understand the line. It is just some incompetent executive seeing how daring a slogan he can find.’

Obviously angered by the question, she continued, ‘The public makes a star. The studios made the system. I don’t lose any sleep over what is said. I lost sleep over much more important things like the H-bomb long before this.’ She paused for a moment before saying, ‘An actor isn’t a system. I just have me and I carry my ability wherever I go. I can work anywhere there is a part to play. I’d like to come back to England. What I do is to try to keep informed and up to date and learn about life. I do not rush, which is maybe why I’m late a few times. You rush and you just run yourself down. That’s why I like being in my thirties. It’s so much better than being in the rushing twenties.’

The conversation concluded when she remarked, philosophically and cryptically, ‘I don’t go in for this entire American pace. I take my time and I try to care and take effort about things. I take care to be a human being.
That
is important,
not
being a human being.’

One day later, on Thursday 12 July, Fox summoned Marilyn to a second official meeting to discuss her reinstatement on
Something’s Got To Give
. The actress arrived at the studio to be greeted by the sight of the lot still resembling a ghost town. Just one of the studio’s 16 sound stages was occupied, for the shooting of the new Joanne Newman movie,
A Woman Of July
(a film originally intended for Monroe when, at the start of 1961, it was called
Celebration
). No one could disguise the fact that the studio was in decline, its glory days seemingly behind it.

In the build-up to the 3.30pm conference, Monroe called on Sydney Guilaroff and Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder to create a startling, severe look for her. Dressed in a conservative, beige Norman Norell dress and horn-rimmed spectacles, the actress turned up looking the antithesis of America’s dumbest blonde. It worked. She walked away from the meeting with a verbally agreed $1,000,000 deal; $500,000 to complete
Something’s Got To Give
and a further $500,000 for one additional movie. The long-mooted musical comedy,
What a Way to Go
(also known as
I Love Louisa
), featuring production by Marilyn’s publicist Arthur P. Jacobs, was the leading contender.

As she anticipated, provisos were to be inserted into the pact. Fox demanded that Paula Strasberg and Pat Newcomb be banned from the set of
Something’s Got To Give
and Ralph Greenson be excised as her negotiator on the movie. In addition, they insisted that she relinquish all rights to her say as to the director, cameramen and co-stars employed on the picture. Their demands did not end there. Insistences that she give up her rights to script approval and desires to view the ‘dailies’ were also heaped upon her.

However, aware that it
was
after all included in her December 1955 contract with the studio, Marilyn shrewdly counteracted by exercising her right of director approval, insisting that George Cukor be supplanted by Romanian-born Jean Negulesco. (The latter had successfully directed her in the 1953 smash
How to Marry a Millionaire
.) An agreement to tailor the screenplay to meet her specifications was also begrudgingly approved by the studio.

There was one final proviso up Fox’s sleeves. They wanted Marilyn to sign a highly embarrassing, pre-prepared public apology letter. On Tuesday 10 July, two days before the meeting, at the behest of Charles Enfield and Phil Feldman, the heads of promotion and business relations at the studio respectively, one of the secretaries in the legal and publicity department typed a grovelling admission-of-guilt note from the actress, in which she apparently acknowledged her ‘barbiturate habit’ and begged for ‘forgiveness’ for her ‘tardiness and lack of discipline’ during the previous period of filming. Realising the intensive nature of it, on Sunday 22 July Fox publicist Jack Brodsky drafted a second, less austere note of excuse. (Although it still resides on microfilm in the 20th Century-Fox archives, it was highly doubtful that Monroe was ever made aware of this rather malicious piece of underhanded spin-doctoring.)