Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (39 page)

Ralph Roberts joined Marilyn on location in Reno, Nevada, on July 18, the day production began on
The Misfits,
another aptly titled cinematic endeavor, considering the chaotic events that would shortly ensue. The title, in fact, actually alluded to the film’s plot: a plan on the part of several modern-day Nevada cowboys to rope mustangs—known as misfits, because they’re too small to ride—and sell them to a company that would process them into dog food.

Arthur Miller had arrived on location a few days before, while Marilyn was still at the Democratic National Convention in LA, spending time with Jack Kennedy. Miller and Monroe shared a two-bedroom suite at the Mapes Hotel and Casino in Reno; their marriage in tatters, they occupied separate rooms and were rarely seen together. When they were seen together, the spectacle wasn’t always pretty. Monroe delighted in humiliating and embarassing her husband before cast and
crew alike, as when she climbed into a car and then slammed the door in his face before he could climb in behind her. Marilyn spent the majority of her spare time with her entourage, of which Ralph Roberts was the newest member; others in the group included Paula Strasberg, May Reis, Agnes Flanagan, and Whitey Snyder.

Whitey remembered the tension between Monroe and Miller. “She felt,” he said, “that Arthur had written dialogue for her that was totally insignificant and extraneous to the film. She complained that the movie had to do with cowboys and their horses, and had nothing to do with her character in the film. ‘I don’t believe he ever wanted me in it,’ she said. She remarked that Arthur often complained about her to John Huston, and that’s why Huston treated her like a jerk. One day in her dressing room, she exploded at Arthur, accusing him of having forced her to get rid of Milton Greene. ‘You’re an evil bastard!’ she yelled. ‘I should’ve stayed with Joe.’ ”

The same problems existed that had undermined all of Marilyn’s other recent films. John Huston became as frustrated as had the other directors with whom she had worked. “You’ve got to get your wife off those pills,” the director told Arthur Miller. “They’re going to kill her.” Contrary to Dr. Ralph Greenson’s suggestion that she limit her consumption of drugs, Marilyn did just the opposite.

Arthur Miller and Paula Strasberg walked into Marilyn’s bedroom one night in time to see a local doctor searching for a vein in her arm so he could inject her with Amytal. Monroe ordered her husband to get out. Feeling that he should do something, Miller called the head of the UCLA Medical School; the doctor advised the playwright to place his wife in a drug rehab program.

Finally, taking matters into his own hands, Miller threw away all the drugs he could locate in their suite, and for a day or two, the tactic worked. However, within forty-eight hours, Monroe managed to replenish her supply of prescription medication by turning to the same physician who’d injected her with Amytal and who, it turned out, had been recommended to her by Montgomery Clift, her
Misfits
costar.
Between takes on the set, Clift and Monroe would frequently huddle and compare notes on drugs and pharmaceuticals. Monty, like Marilyn, was the consummate insomniac.

Miller’s confiscation of Marilyn’s cache of drugs so annoyed her that she moved out of their two-bedroom suite and into a similar suite with Paula Strasberg. In 1967, five years after Monroe’s death, Miller informed a
New York Times
reporter that while he’d known of
Monroe’s addictions, he hadn’t realized the severity of her habit. “Marilyn’s addiction to pills and drugs ultimately defeated me,” he admitted. “If there was any key to her despair, I never found it. I didn’t realize her addiction was at the center of her problem. The psychiatrists thought it was a symptom. Regardles of their intentions, in the end they actually prescribed more pills.”

Well into production, John Huston suspended work on the film. He’d reached the same conclusion as the head of the University of California Medical School: Marilyn needed to enter a drug rehabilitation facility. She seemed to be walking around in an utter daze, a trance. Her words were garbled; her eyes didn’t focus. She’d stopped functioning. Once again she’d tried to end it all by swallowing too many pills.

Flown to Los Angeles, MM was admitted to Westside Hospital, a private, high-priced clinic that catered primarily to victims of drug and alcohol abuse. Dr. Kris arrived from New York to oversee Marilyn’s treatment program. To avoid unwanted publicity, Frank Taylor announced that Monroe had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. Aside from Dr. Kris, Dr. Greenson, and Paula Strasberg, Marilyn’s only visitor during her ten days in the unit was Joe DiMaggio, who’d read about her hospitalization and marital problems.

“When Marilyn returned to Reno,” said Ralph Roberts, “she told me Joe DiMaggio had paid her a surprise visit at the hospital. ‘How did it go?’ I asked. With a big smile, she said, ‘Not bad—he spent the night. But when he wanted to leave in the morning, all the nurses and hospital aides started bothering him for his autograph.’ ‘What did he do?’ I asked. ‘He sighed and signed,’ she answered.”

After her brief abstention from pharmaceuticals, and despite DiMaggio’s unannounced visit, it didn’t take Marilyn long to revert to her former drug obsession and her narcotics-crazed behavior. One evening the phone rang in Marilyn and Paula Strasberg’s suite.
Paula answered. It was Arthur Miller, whose waking hours were now spent working on endless script rewrites for the next day’s shoot.

“Believe it or not,” Paula said into the phone, “Marilyn’s asleep.”

“It’s you I wanted to speak to,” said Miller. “Have you been keeping an eye on Marilyn?”

“As much as possible. Why do you ask, Arthur?”

“Because I heard she’s been running around the hotel in the nude.”

“I’m afraid it’s true,” admitted Paula. “She was in the hotel elevator, traveling up and down, completely naked. She wandered into the casino. She was high as a kite.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Miller. “
Last year the wife of the owner of the Algonquin Hotel in New York bumped into Marilyn on Fifth Avenue. Marilyn had on a new mink coat. The woman asked what Marilyn was wearing with it, and she replied, ‘Nothing,’ and opened the coat to prove it.”

A few days after Miller’s phone call and the nude elevator episode, Marilyn left a note for Paula next to the phone:
“Oh Paula, I wish I knew why I am so anguished. I think maybe I’m crazy like all the other members of my family.”

Once more in the care of Dr. Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s ongoing drug involvement led the psychoanalyst to bring in a colleague, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, an internist and “physician to the stars,” whom Greenson had consulted about Monroe during her stay at Westside Hospital. Greenson first met Engelberg while an intern at Cedars of Lebanon. Born in New York in 1913, a graduate of the Cornell University School of Medicine, Engelberg shared with Greenson a profound interest in left-wing politics.

In overseeing Marilyn’s drug regimen, Engelberg placed the actress on chloral hydrate, a sedative she’d sampled previously with mixed results.
Ralph Roberts recalled a meeting he attended with Doctors Greenson and Engelberg, Marilyn, and Paula Strasberg, at which he was put on a massage schedule related to MM’s intake of the sedative. “I gave her four massages a day,” he said. “I massaged her in the morning before she left for the set, again during her midday break, then twice at night—once before dinner and then before she tried to fall sleep. I’d massage her in the near dark. Her body seemed to give off light. She’d take the chloral hydrate with the final massage. If she woke up during the night, she’d call me and I’d go to the front desk and pick up a chloral hydrate pill left there earlier in the evening by Dr. Engelberg. Marilyn wasn’t permitted to keep any other sedative in her suite or dressing room.”

The plan enabled Greenson and Engelberg to monitor what she took and when she took it. Her disposition and demeanor improved, even more so when Engelberg began giving her injections of multivitamins and liver extract. Clark Gable took her aside and told her she was the best-adjusted person connected to the film. In a more positive frame of mind, she told Dr. Greenson that she’d heard about plans to make a movie in Hollywood based on Sigmund Freud’s life. She wondered what he thought of her participation in such a project. Greenson communicated Marilyn’s inquiry to Anna Freud, who instantly rejected the offer. “We’ll find you another role,” Greenson assured her.

In early November 1960 the production finally drew to a close, forty days late and millions of dollars in the red. “But at least it’s done,” said an exhausted John Huston. Marilyn and her entourage celebrated by spending a weekend in San Francisco. “Joe was, I think, in New York,” said Ralph Roberts, “so Marilyn went down to the wharf and visited some of his brothers and sisters at the family-owned restaurant. Evidently they were thrilled to see her again. Next she dropped in on Lefty O’Doul at his bar. He didn’t recognize her at first. She wore a kerchief over her hair, dark glasses, a loose-fitting blouse, and pants. When he realized it was Marilyn, he went bananas. She said she had a wonderful time with Lefty. He kept saying to her, ‘You’ve got to come home again, Marilyn. You’ve got to come home.’ ”

That night the group—Marilyn, Paula, May, Agnes, Agnes’s husband, and Ralph Roberts—went to the Blue Fox for dinner. “The hostess threw her arms around Marilyn,” said Roberts, “practically crying with joy. She was a cousin of Joe’s, and she seemed genuinely touched by Marilyn’s presence. Monty Clift joined us for dessert. After dinner, we went to Finocchio’s, a famous nightclub featuring female impersonators. We all wore dark glasses, with the agreement that if anyone recognized either Monty or Marilyn, we’d all rush out. We were seated at a big table in the second row and, amid much giggling and merriment, ordered our drinks.”

One of the first performers was dressed and made up to look like Marilyn. The performer had captured her mannerisms, movements, and voice to an impressive degree. Marilyn whispered to Roberts that she felt as if she were looking at herself in one of her movies. At the end of the entire show, as the various performers lined up for a company call, Roberts noticed that the Monroe impersonator was staring straight at the real Marilyn. “I’ll never forget the electric shock that came into her eyes when she realized that Marilyn was in the audience,” said Roberts. “She started frantically whispering to the performer that stood next to her, and the word spread down the line like wildfire. We’d paid and were about to leave. Marilyn blew her impersonator a kiss, and we hit the street. The next day Marilyn and I attended an Ella Fitzgerald concert. After the concert, we went to her dressing room, and Marilyn regaled her with the story of her impersonator from the night before.”

By early November 1960, Marilyn had returned from California to her apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street in New York. Arthur Miller had flown back by himself and moved into the Hotel Adams on East Eighty-Sixth Street. The newspapers were filled with reports of their impending divorce. One person who read the breakup news with avid interest was Joe DiMaggio Jr., currently a freshman at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

“I hadn’t spoken to Marilyn in a while,” said Joe Jr. “After I finished up at Lawrenceville, she mailed me a check for a thousand dollars as a
graduation present. I used the money to sail to Holland in June 1960 with Barrett Price, the son of Vincent Price. We bought bikes in Rotterdam and spent a couple of months touring Europe. When I got back, I tried out for the position of placekicker on Yale’s junior varsity football team, but there was this Hungarian soccer player who regularly booted fifty-yard field goals—and he did it barefoot, no less. So that didn’t work out.

“Marilyn called me in late November. Her first concern was my happiness. How did I like Yale? I told her the truth: I didn’t, and I liked New Haven even less. What I didn’t mention was that I’d basically stopped attending classes. The only reason I’d been admitted to Yale was my family name, not because of my high school grades or college entrance exams. Of course, Marilyn had her own problems. She and Arthur Miller were about to get divorced. In addition, Clark Gable had just suffered a fatal heart attack, and apparently his widow, Kay, who was pregnant at the time, blamed Marilyn’s antics during
The Misfits
as the cause of Gable’s sudden death. Later they made up, and Kay invited Marilyn to the infant’s christening. Marilyn told me that the day Gable died, she called my father, and he arrived at her apartment and spent the night with her, and they talked about death. ‘I was amazed your father believes in an afterlife,’ said Marilyn. In later years, I thought to myself how odd it seemed that
The Misfits
marked not only Clark Gable’s last film but Marilyn’s, too.”

Not long after Joey’s telephone conversation with Marilyn, the dean of students at Yale contacted Joe DiMaggio to report that his son had more or less dropped out of school. They didn’t want to expel him, but unless he began attending classes again, they would have little choice. “Treat my son as you would any other student,” DiMaggio responded. At the end of the first semester, Joe DiMaggio Jr. received a letter expelling him from the university. “Marilyn seemed more disappointed about it than my father,” said Joey. “I figured at least I’m saving him some money!”

Joe DiMaggio spent Christmas of that year in San Francisco but sent Marilyn a huge basket of poinsettia. He flew to New York to
celebrate New Year’s with Marilyn. Joining them for dinner, Lena Pepitone prepared a meal of spaghetti with sausage followed by a roast chicken. At midnight, Joe gallantly kissed both ladies. Marilyn wouldn’t allow Lena to clean up. She sent her home by taxi with a $200 tip. The next morning, Lena served the two lovers breakfast. They held hands across the table and called each other “Darling.” Marilyn wore a white terry cloth robe; Joe wore a white dress shirt and tie.

On January 19, 1961, Marilyn Monroe, accompanied by her latest New York attorney, Aaron Frosch, and Pat Newcomb, a publicist who’d taken the place of Rupert Allan, traveled to Juárez, Mexico, to finalize divorce proceedings against Arthur Miller. The divorce was granted a day later by Judge Miguel Gomez Guerra on uncontested charges of “incompatibility of character.”