Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (31 page)

Then, in the midst of the tumult, a potentially disastrous situation developed. Marilyn spotted her husband’s journal on top of the kitchen table. It had been opened to a passage relating to Marilyn. In a moment of doubt, with tension and strife engulfing the production of the film, the playwright expressed his dismay with Marilyn, asking himself how he could have made the same marital mistake twice, further pointing out that he could think of no “legitimate response” to Laurence Olivier’s burgeoning “anger and resentment” toward the actress. The passage went on to say that he found Marilyn difficult to deal with, unpredictable, at times “out of control,” a forlorn “child-woman” whose endless emotional demands were more than he could handle. He feared his own creative efforts would be thwarted in the process of looking after her. He brought up one particularly painful incident: a recent suicidal threat Marilyn had made one night while inebriated and high on drugs—drugs that Milton Greene made available to her by the bucket-load. And when Greene couldn’t produce the desired pharmaceuticals, she could always count on Paula Strasberg, to whom Miller referred as “a walking apothecary.”

Arthur’s journal entry came as a shock to Marilyn. She felt betrayed,
stabbed in the back by one of the few people she thought she could trust. Lee Strasberg recalled a sobbing Marilyn calling him at three in the morning to report what she’d read.
“It was something about how disappointed he was with me, how he thought I was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong—that his first wife had let him down, but I had done something wrong. Olivier was beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch, and Arthur no longer had a decent answer to that one.”

The following day, after Laurence Olivier viewed rushes of the film to date, he told Marilyn her teeth looked yellow and advised her to brighten them by brushing with lemon and baking soda. Marilyn fumed and walked off the set. Olivier called her “a professional amateur.” She mockingly referred to him as “Mr. Sir” and told Paula Strasberg she wouldn’t continue filming until he offered her an apology. She told Hedda Rosten she wouldn’t continue her marriage unless Arthur Miller gave her a suitable explanation for the comments he’d written about her. When Marilyn left Parkside House, she checked into the London Hilton, where she proceeded to wash down half a bottle of tranquilizers with a half dozen glasses of champagne. She returned to the Georgian mansion the following day and confronted her husband. Unable to respond, he withdrew. Marilyn asked Milton Greene to call Dr. Hohenberg. Greene not only phoned Hohenberg, he coaxed her into boarding the next flight for London. It marked the second time in as many films that Marilyn’s psychoanalyst had been summoned to restore Monroe’s equilibrium. The difference on this occasion was that Hohenberg had to return to London a second time. Two round-trip cross-Atlantic journeys—Arthur Miller termed it “mail-order psychoanalysis”; he might just as well have called it “checkbook psychoanalysis”—the two visits combined cost MMP in excess of $20,000.

On her first visit, Hohenberg found Marilyn in a state of deep depression. As she told Iselin Simon, Marilyn hadn’t slept in days. She’d been threatening to walk out on the film as well as on her husband. She’d removed Arthur Miller’s photo from her dressing room and
replaced it with a snapshot of Joe DiMaggio. Hohenberg managed to calm the patient, but after the therapist returned to New York, she again heard from Milton Greene. Arthur and Marilyn had argued, and Marilyn had suffered a setback. Could the good doctor kindly return?

On her second visit, Dr. Hohenberg listened as Marilyn read excerpts from her notebooks. Monroe’s written musings reflected the depth of her despair. Arthur Miller’s “betrayal,” she noted, what she’d
“always been deeply terrified of, to really be someone’s wife, since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.” From another page, she read: “And I in merciless pain . . . but we must endure, I more sadly because I can feel no joy.” She read Hohenberg a letter she’d written to Lee Strasberg in which she said: “I’m embarrassed to start this, but thank you for understanding and having changed my life—even though you changed it I still am lost. I mean I can’t get myself together.”

Before leaving London following her second visit, Hohenberg contacted Anna Freud, whom she’d known in Vienna, and asked the eminent psychiatrist to meet with Marilyn during her absence. An appointment was arranged. High on the sedative Dexamyl, Marilyn drove to Dr. Freud’s home office at 20 Maresfield Gardens.
Paula Fichtl, Anna Freud’s housekeeper, recalled Monroe “arriving in a black Rolls-Royce, wearing white slacks and a plain blue gabardine jacket with its collar up. No makeup. A soft white hat covered her platinum blonde hair, and her large, dark sunglasses rendered her almost unrecognizable.

“Before their session, Dr. Freud took Miss Monroe next door to the nursery school she helped run and where she conducted much of her research, children being a key [according to Sigmund Freud] to an understanding of the development of the adult psyche. Marilyn played with the children for nearly an hour. She then returned with Dr. Freud to her office. She came every day for more than a week.”

Anna Freud’s diagnosis, as recorded in her clinical files, indicated a far more serious condition than that which Hohenberg had previously rendered. Freud described Monroe as “emotionally unstable, highly
impulsive, and needing continuous approval from the outside world. She cannot bear solitude and gets profoundly depressed when faced with rejection. She is paranoid with schizophrenic undertones, in other words a paranoid schizophrenic.”

Schizophrenia: the term terrified Marilyn. Her mother suffered from schizophrenia. Other forebears on her mother’s side of the family had been similarly afflicted. Thankfully, Freud didn’t disclose her diagnosis to Marilyn, though she sent a copy of her report to Dr. Hohenberg in New York. After receiving the report, Hohenberg phoned Milton Greene, her other “celebrity” patient, and advised him that he’d made a mistake to go into business with Monroe. Hohenberg said she didn’t know how long the arrangement could continue under the present circumstances. Eventually learning of the conversation, Marilyn used it to terminate her treatment with Hohenberg, citing it as an example of unprofessional conduct, a violation of her right to privacy. Hohenberg’s harsh words following the breakup with Monroe turned out to be prophetic.
“When she left me,” she said, “I knew sooner or later she would kill herself.”

For the moment, matters grew worse before they got better. In mid-August, after she’d returned to work on the film, Marilyn learned from a British gynecologist that she was pregnant. Above all, Milton Greene thought it necessary to keep the pregnancy from Laurence Olivier. Greene needn’t have concerned himself. On Saturday, September 8, Marilyn miscarried, enduring the same fate purportedly suffered by Vivien Leigh. Monroe later told Lotte Goslar she was extremely disappointed because she’d hoped, despite her earlier sense of betrayal, to show Arthur she could be a devoted wife and a good mother. Starting a family, having a baby, would rectify everything that wasn’t right in their marriage.

Somehow
The Prince and the Showgirl
neared completion but not before Hedda Rosten and Paula Strasberg returned to New York, and Marilyn spent additional time with Anna Freud. When filming finally ended, Monroe distributed a letter of apology to the entire cast
and crew, including Laurence Olivier: “I hope you will all forgive me. It wasn’t my fault. I’ve been very sick all through the picture. Please, please don’t hold it against me.”

There was a light moment, one of the few, when Marilyn Monroe met Queen Elizabeth. In October the Queen walked down a reception line of twenty international actors at the Empire Theatre in London, greeting each in turn as they performed the usual bow or curtsy. Included in the group were Brigitte Bardot, Victor Mature, and Joan Crawford. Arriving late, Marilyn stood at the end of the line. When the Queen reached Marilyn, she stopped and stared. Wearing an off-the-shoulder gown that left little to the imagination, Monroe once again became the talk of the town.

That same month, Monroe accompanied her husband to the London premiere of
A View from the Bridge.
Following the performance, Miller proudly wrote Norman Rosten that Marilyn had worn
“a garnet-colored velvet gown, halting traffic as far north as Liverpool, and had conquered everyone.”

Five weeks later, the Millers were back in the United States. Browsing through a stack of back-issue magazines, Marilyn came across a Newsmaker item in a three-month-old issue of
Time
that caught her attention. Joe had been spotted playing in the annual Old Timers’ Day game at Yankee Stadium, which amused Marilyn. She sent a handwritten note to George Solotaire:
“George, sweetie—Please tell Joe congratulations on his gargantuan homer this past August at Yankee Stadium. Also please tell him that as far as I’m concerned, he’s no Old Timer! Love, Marilyn.”

Solotaire gave DiMaggio the letter and advised him to contact Marilyn. DiMaggio decided against it. “She’s impulsive,” he told Solotaire, “and often does things she later regrets. I’ll wait.”

E
NGLAND WITH MARILYN MONROE HAD
been an eye-opening experience for Arthur Miller. The couple had departed from the States only two weeks after their marriage. The trip constituted their first extended period together, the first time Miller had been exposed to the “real” Monroe as opposed to the fantasy figure he’d concocted for himself based on more than four years of letter writing and a year of informal dating. The journal entry that Marilyn had seen in London reflected Miller’s awakening; his having to deal firsthand with many of the same forces that had driven Joe DiMaggio half mad: her sleep deprivation, insecurities, anxieties, fears, paranoia, and increasing dependence on drugs and alcohol.

Looking back on his own growing addiction to Marilyn, Miller would assert that he hadn’t been
“sophisticated enough” to have recognized the multitude of issues that would ultimately destroy his marriage and then Marilyn herself.

Calling Marilyn “an
extraordinary child of nature,” Arthur Miller would say, “I began to dream that with Marilyn I could do what seemed to me would be the most wonderful thing of all—have my work and all that this implied, and someone I just simply adored. I thought I could solve it all with this marriage. She was simply overwhelming, as I guess I was to her, for a while. It was wonderful to be around her. Until she got ill.”

What seemed most disconcerting for the playwright—what the marriage to Monroe came to represent to him—was his inability to get any meaningful work done during that period. There was always something on his plate to distract him from his desk and typewriter. The distractions weren’t always related to Monroe.

When the couple returned from England, Joseph Rauh, Miller’s attorney, notified them that the FBI had launched a new investigation, partially aimed at Monroe but mainly directed at Miller. Identified in FBI files as the “darling of the left-wing intelligentsia,” Marilyn (and Miller) had been accused of diverting funds through Marilyn Monroe Productions into the coffers of several pro-Communist organizations, none of which were specified. In February 1957, after Arthur and Marilyn returned to New York from a vacation in Half Moon Point, Jamaica, the playwright was indicted by a federal grand jury for two counts of contempt of Congress. At a first hearing in March, Miller pled not guilty. In May, accompanied by Marilyn, he attended another hearing and this time was found guilty of contempt. The conviction carried with it a $500 fine, a thirty-day prison sentence, and the mandatory revocation (for a second time) of his US passport. A year later, his conviction was overturned by a court of appeals, which ruled that the chairman of HUAC had provided Miller’s attorney with misleading information. Marilyn helped pay her husband’s legal costs.

While all this went on, Miller and Monroe became embroiled in a legal skirmish with Milton Greene, who, they claimed, had “swindled” Marilyn out of thousands of dollars by his intentional mismanagement of Marilyn Monroe Productions. In addition, Miller questioned Greene’s artistic sensibility and credentials. “He may be a good photographer, but he knows nothing about filmmaking,” claimed Miller, citing as an example of Greene’s incompetence his selection of
The Prince and the Showgirl
as a vehicle for Monroe to demonstrate her acting skills.

After months of vituperative legal threats, conferences, and strategies, Milton Greene settled for a single lump-sum payment of $100,000
in exchange for his stock holdings in MMP. Eager to break her contract with Greene and thereby mollify her husband, Marilyn thoroughly embarrassed her former business partner by announcing publicly that he’d taken advantage of her. She told the press:
“My company wasn’t organized to parcel out nearly half of my earnings to Mr. Greene for seven years.” Arthur Miller, also quoted in the press, said, “Milton Greene . . . lived off my wife’s work. She prevented him from gaining majority control and then had to pay a hundred thousand dollars to rid herself of him. The company was doomed from the start. The contract my wife made with Mr. Greene was completely disadvantageous to her. Milton Greene thought she was working for him, instead of the other way around. He never separated his personal expenditures from company expenses. The finances were a mess. As for Mr. Greene’s work ethic, he was all talk and no action.”