Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (32 page)

The termination of Marilyn Monroe’s agreement with Milton Greene ended his brief film career. He went back into magazine photography. For all intents and purposes, it likewise marked the end of Marilyn Monroe Productions.
According to Amy Greene, Marilyn told her that Milton had been “the only man she ever trusted, and she regretted that she hadn’t had the strength to stand up to her husband.” Indeed, Marilyn’s main impetus at this stage may well have been directed at trying to save her shaky marriage. Prior to the dissolution of MMP, Marilyn and Milton Greene had been exploring the possibility of doing a production either of
The Brothers Karamazov
or
The Jean Harlow Story
, neither of which came to pass.

In subsequent years, Joshua Greene, Milton and Amy’s son, offered a similarly slanted comment defending his father’s honor: “Arthur Miller wanted my father out of the picture so he could have all the money. My father was the only man in Marilyn’s life that never took her for granted and never took things from her.” Apparently Milton Greene’s son never heard of Joe DiMaggio.

The only residual connection between the Greenes and Joe DiMaggio involved the $225 outfit Marilyn wore in January 1954, when
she and Joe married in San Francisco. While staying with the Greenes at their Connecticut home in early 1955, Marilyn let Amy Greene’s mother borrow the outfit for a special occasion. Forgetting to return it, Amy’s mother stowed it away in her wardrobe closet, where it remained until 1999, thirty-seven years after Monroe’s death. In September of that year, Amy Greene found it and sold it at auction at Sotheby’s for the considerable sum of $33,350. Although Milton Greene and his family no doubt benefited financially from their association with Monroe, it can be argued that not only did he recognize Monroe’s undeniable talent but he also put his own career on the line in order to help the actress further her own cause. “Milton Greene may have been a charlatan,” said Truman Capote, “but at least he was an honest charlatan.”

•  •  •

In mid-1957 Marilyn gave up her sublet at 2 Sutton Place and purchased a much larger thirteenth-floor cooperative apartment at 444 East Fifty-Seventh Street, not far from her previous apartment building. Her new apartment consisted of a master bedroom, guest bedroom, living room (with a working fireplace and floor-to-ceiling bookcases), a small study, dining alcove, three bathrooms, and a modern kitchen. Over time Marilyn fashioned the apartment according to her own taste. She carpeted the residence in white, brought in the white-lacquered baby grand piano her mother had given her as a child, acquired a mirrored table for the dining area, a pair of off-white love seats, a white tub chair, a large white sofa, a rare oriental vase painted with white flowers, white draperies, and other select pieces of furniture for the living room. She owned a small bust of the ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and soon bought a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec and a black metal female nude sculpted by William Zorach. She tore down several walls and built several new ones. On one of the living room walls she mounted an enlarged photograph Cecil Beaton had taken of her the year before. She placed Marlon Brando’s jocularly inscribed photo of Albert Einstein atop her baby grand. On the nightstand next
to her queen-sized bed sat two photographs: Abraham Lincoln and Marilyn’s mother. Also perched on the nightstand was a first edition of Carl Sandburg’s 1926 biography of the sixteenth president. Despite her work on the apartment, she was never satisfied with the results, and for the rest of her life she constantly changed furniture, furnishings, ornaments, and accessories. Although she’d insisted on sharing a bed and bedroom while married to DiMaggio, she gave Arthur Miller the guest bedroom, which later doubled as a laundry and sewing room. Arthur also had full run of the study, though by his own admission he got little work done in it.

Patricia Rosten, the then eleven-year-old daughter of Norman and Hedda Rosten, had vivid memories of Marilyn and the apartment. “The guest bedroom and bath had lovely white porcelain doorknobs with flowers painted on them,” she noted. Marilyn’s bedroom, on the other hand, “was kept dark, slightly mysterious,” and everything in shades of beige: “rugs, curtains, bedspread. She had a champagne-colored quilt on the bed, which I used to flop on when I visited.” Patricia remembered diving into Marilyn’s makeup box. “She used to act like it was the most natural thing in the world to find me there. She plunked me down at her vanity table, and since I was intrigued by the art of makeup, she would show me how to do the job right. For the next twenty minutes, I was in a dream as I watched her skillful hands transform my kid’s face into something glamourous. She made my eyelids glimmer, my cheekbones appear accentuated, and my mouth rosy. She also arranged my hair into an elegant French twist.”

Patricia Rosten went on to say that she adored Marilyn because the actress “had real empathy” for children and thought nothing of “breaking the rules,” and she also believed that young people love adults who aren’t afraid to break the rules.

She recalled her visits to Arthur Miller’s Roxbury, Connecticut, farmhouse, which Marilyn had decorated and where the couple often spent their weekends. In an article Patricia Rosten wrote concerning her childhood experiences with Marilyn, she observes that the star
“would not hesitate to allow Hugo,” Arthur’s dog, to come into the house “rain-soaked and muddy” from the garden. “She would let the front part of him in and carefully wipe off his front paws, then, coaxing in the rest of him, she would carefully wipe off the back ones.” When Hugo needed a soft bed, Marilyn gave him the best, most expensive wool blanket she owned.

Marilyn once rescued a “small half-starved beagle-type puppy that staggered in out of the woods.” She “nursed it back to health, brought it to New York,” and gave it to Patricia.

Reiterating her point about Marilyn’s natural love for children, Patricia Rosten ventured the opinion that Marilyn might have been happier with a child or children of her own. “When Marilyn touched me or held me,” she wrote, “I felt a warmth and softness (dare I use the word maternal in relation to her?) that was very reassuring. It was not unlike falling into that champagne-colored quilt that graced her bed. She, who was so much like a child herself, always had a sympathetic word or touch for ‘another’ child, and it was this that endeared her to me.”

So far as children were concerned, Jane and Robert Miller, Arthur’s offspring by his first wife, visited their father and glamourous stepmother on alternate weekends, usually in Connecticut, and sometimes in Amagansett, Long Island, where the couple rented a cottage from early 1957 to July 1958. There Marilyn enjoyed nothing more than to take long walks along the beach or to play tennis at a nearby court.

Rupert Allan, originally a West Coast editor of
Look
and later a publicist with the Arthur Jacobs firm, reflected on Monroe’s relationship with the two children, acknowledging that while she felt close to both, she felt closer to Robert. “In 1957 the boy was about ten, and his sister was three years older. So the girl, being around thirteen and very sensitive, felt a trace of resentment toward Marilyn. She liked Marilyn, but I imagine she regarded her as the person most responsible for breaking up her parents’ marriage.”

Monroe told Allan that one day in Amagansett, she found Robert
wearing his sister’s clothes, while Jane was dressed in clothing that belonged to her father. “Marilyn, a most understanding woman when it came to such matters, nevertheless found the cross-dressing a wee bit unusual,” said Allan. “The kids told her they didn’t like their own clothes, so she took them shopping and bought each a new wardrobe. A few weeks later, she told Robert, ‘Your birthday’s coming up—I’m going to throw you a party.’ He said he’d never had a birthday party before. So Marilyn went all out. She gave it at her Manhattan apartment, inviting all his friends, hiring a caterer, buying him all sorts of great presents. His father popped his head out for a minute or two, then locked himself in his study and stayed there for the rest of the afternoon. Marilyn ran the whole show herself. She could be very nurturing. When Jane and Robert weren’t around, she’d write letters to them pretending to be Hugo, the basset hound. She most definitely had a way with young people. And I recall even after she and Arthur divorced, she kept pictures of his children on display with photographs of all the other children she’d known. Of all the children, the one she most cherished, I believe, was Joe DiMaggio’s son. She spoke about him all the time, wrote to him, called him, sent him gifts, did all the little things his father evidently didn’t do.”

•  •  •

Tired of Monroe’s perpetual lateness, though she’d often promised to be more punctual, Lee Strasberg gave one of his students, actor Delos Smith Jr., the job of seeing to it that Marilyn got to class on time. Delos soon learned from Marilyn that the main reason she indulged herself with long baths before going anywhere was that at the orphanage as a child, she could only shower; when she lived with foster families, she was forced to bathe in water they’d already used on themselves. But what Smith also observed is that when she finished bathing, she’d come out and get into bed to lie down, and after that it became impossible to get her moving. So when she was in the bath, Delos would climb into her bed and be lying there when she came out. The maneuver worked.
Marilyn would immediately dress, and the two would head out for class. The problem is that when Delos wasn’t present, the actress would revert to her old habit and once again be late.

“You never quite knew what to expect from Marilyn,” said Delos Smith Jr. “She had wild, pendulum-like mood swings, and her moods determined her behavior. At her best, she was fantastic: sweet, funny, sexy, effervescent, creative, generous, and clever. At her worst, she was a total mental case: depressed, manic, tense, angry, insecure, worried about growing old, heavily addicted to pills and booze. The Strasbergs tried to be there for her when she wasn’t well and couldn’t cope. They coached her, shopped for her, counseled her, and stayed up with her when she couldn’t sleep. They would let her stay in their apartment overnight, and Lee would coddle her like a baby. There were times when she needed a twenty-four-hours-a-day nursemaid, and he would attempt to fulfill that function. Yet there were those who insisted that the Method the Strasbergs imparted had sinister and dangerous underpinnings when it came to Marilyn; that it was all geared to their own selfish needs, that they took advantage of her, lined their pockets at her expense. Arthur Miller came to feel that way, and nothing Marilyn said or did could ever change his mind.”

Nowhere were Marilyn’s mood fluctuations more apparent than in her own writings. Two diary entries related to Arthur Miller were excerpted in
Vanity Fair
in November 2010. In the first, she writes:
“I am so concerned about protecting Arthur. I love him, and he is the only person—human being—I have ever known that I could love not only as a man . . . But he [is] the only person . . . that I trust as much as myself.”

A second entry, written at the Roxbury farmhouse a short while later, demonstrates a complete change of heart: “Starting tomorrow I will take care of myself for that’s all I really have and as I see it now have ever had. Roxbury—I’ve tried to imagine spring all winter—it’s here and I still feel hopeless. I think I hate it here because there is no love here anymore.”

Further along in the same entry, she provides a painful self-image:
“I see myself in the mirror now, brow furrowed—if I lean close I’ll see—what I don’t want to know—tension, sadness, disappointment, my blue eyes dulled, cheeks flushed with capillaries that look like rivers on maps—hair lying like snakes. The mouth makes me the saddest, next to my dead eyes.”

In a continuing effort to contain her many personal problems and issues—and encouraged to remain in therapy by Lee Strasberg—Marilyn telephoned Anna Freud in England for the name of a psychoanalyst. She’d convinced herself that Dr. Hohenberg had betrayed her confidences and could no longer be trusted, particularly because Milton Greene remained her patient. Anna Freud recommended Dr. Marianne Kris, a childhood friend from Vienna who’d practiced psychiatry in New York since 1940. Oskar Rie, Marianne’s father, had been the Freud family’s pediatrician. By coincidence, Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein, Arthur Miller’s former psychiatrist, who’d met Marilyn on one occasion, also recommended Marianne Kris, the widow of his former colleague, Ernst. There existed one other notable coincidence. Dr. Marianne Kris lived and worked at the Langham, 135 Central Park West, the same prewar luxury apartment building into which the Strasbergs had moved the year before from their former residence at the Belnord, a fortlike structure at Broadway and Eighty-Sixth Street.

Most mornings after her psychoanalytic session with Dr. Kris, Marilyn took the elevator to the seventh-floor, nine-room Strasberg apartment for a one-on-one acting lesson with Lee. Or if she had an afternoon appointment with Dr. Kris, whom she saw five times a week, she would merely reverse the order. Arthur Miller had mixed feelings about Marilyn’s insistence on being in analysis. In his own case, he’d stopped, claiming it had inhibited his creativity. In Marilyn’s case, he initially supported the idea but subsequently changed his mind, asserting that Dr. Kris and Lee Strasberg both took advantage of Marilyn’s childlike dependence on anyone who showed her the slightest kindness, even if she had to pay for it.

Like Dr. Hohenberg, Kris was a recently widowed Jewish immigrant with a strong background in Freudian analysis. Unlike
Hohenberg, she had two children of her own. Also unlike Hohenberg, a large percentage of her patients were children, though she saw adult patients as well. In the mid-1960s, following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, she treated Jacqueline Kennedy. Here was yet another coincidence in the making. It is reasonable to assume that when Jackie began therapy with Dr. Kris, one subject she probably delved into had to do with her late husband’s frequent infidelities. No doubt Marilyn Monroe’s name came into play.