Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (40 page)

The playwright shed few tears over the woman
Newsweek
proclaimed “the most famous female on the planet.” He’d already become involved with Inge Morath, a Magnum Agency photographer he’d met on the set of
The Misfits
and then met again when both were back in New York. Tall, dark haired, and slender, the Austrian-born Morath would become, in February 1962, Miller’s third and last wife. Unhappy with the scorn Monroe that had heaped upon him during the final phases of their marriage, the usually discreet Miller told the press, “If I’d known how we would end up, I would never have married her.”

Marilyn’s only public comment had it that “Mr. Miller is a great writer, but it didn’t work out for us as husband and wife.” Other than that, she told reporters she was upset and didn’t wish to be “bombarded with publicity right now.”

Miller reserved the brunt of his bitterness for future consumption. He depicted her as a crazed, tyrannical bitch-goddess in
After the Fall,
a poorly received play he wrote about Marilyn less than a year after her death. In
Timebends,
his somewhat vindictive autobiography, he said of Marilyn:
“I could not place her in any world I knew—like a cork bobbing on the ocean, she could have begun her voyage on the other side of the world or a hundred yards down the beach.”

M
ARILYN MONROE’S FIVE-YEAR MARRIAGE TO
Arthur Miller may have lasted longer than her union with Joe DiMaggio, but it was no more successful, and in a sense, was actually far less satisfying because it ended on dire terms. There was no residual friendship, nothing further to discuss, whereas the relationship between Joe and Marilyn never really ended. “Marilyn and I are back in business,” the Yankee Clipper told Toots Shor.

“In fact, they’d never been out of business,” said Paul Baer. “They’d been away from each other for a few years, but they were sleeping together again long before she and Miller were divorced. There was a real, long-lasting, almost unspoken intimacy between Joe and Marilyn, which is something she had with no other man.

“Still, there was the realization on Monroe’s part that none of her three marriages had endured. Nor had she been able to have children. And then, too, she had this terrible addiction to drugs and alcohol, which to a greater or lesser extent had never been addressed by any of her psychiatrists, all of whom knew each other. They’d take her off one drug and put her on another, and this lamentable practice went on for years. It was a conspiracy of shrinks. Whenever Joe asked her about the drugs, she’d tell him she knew more about pills than any doctor, so he needn’t worry.”

After officially reuniting in early January 1961, Joe DiMaggio gave Marilyn a gold necklace from which hung his diamond-encrusted 1951 World Series ring. She wore it at home whenever she and Joe were together. Ironically, DiMaggio’s other World Series rings were stolen from his hotel room in 1960. Marilyn’s ring was the sole survivor, until years later, when future Yankees owner George Steinbrenner gave him a replica set of the rings that had been stolen.

On February 1, Marilyn—accompanied by Montgomery Clift—attended a New York preview of
The Misfits.
Arthur Miller was there with his children. He couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge Marilyn. After the film ended, she passed him on the way out of the theater. “Hello, Arthur,” she whispered. He gazed in her direction and gave a vague nod. The only other interaction between them took place some weeks later when Marilyn attended his mother’s funeral. She went, she told Paula Strasberg, to console Isidore Miller, Arthur’s father, with whom she remained on close terms and continued to call “Dad.”

Whether because of her divorce from Miller, the termination of her affair with Yves Montand, the death of Clark Gable, or simply her reimmersion in the culture of barbiturates, the week that followed, much of it spent at the Strasbergs, nearly did Marilyn in. When she wasn’t with Lee and Paula, according to Lena Pepitone, she would lie in bed (in her darkened bedroom) in a drug-induced stupor, not eating, not sleeping, and not talking. Her daily
therapy sessions with Dr. Marianne Kris provided her only excuse to climb out of bed.

Joe DiMaggio, still with the Monette Company, had agreed to serve as a batting instructor at the New York Yankees’ spring training camp in St. Petersburg, Florida. Had he been present, he surely would have prevented Marilyn from agreeing to Dr. Kris’s recommendation that she voluntarily check into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, a few blocks from her apartment.

Marilyn Monroe signed into Payne Whitney in early February, under the alias “Miss Faye Miller,” and was placed in a kind of interrogation room. For the next three hours, a procession of doctors, their
arms folded in front of them, entered the room to observe Marilyn and fire off what she considered a volley of meaningless questions. She was then placed in a locked ward for the mentally ill. Once in, as Marilyn quickly learned, there was no way out.

Although Marilyn had entered Payne Whitney of her own volition, it had been Dr. Kris who filled out the admissions papers, characterizing the patient as “potentially self-destructive, even suicidal.” Kris later claimed she had no idea the ward was locked and that Monroe couldn’t leave whenever she pleased. In any event, everything the actress brought with her, including her pocketbook and clothes, was confiscated. A nurse handed her a towel and washcloth, a baggy brown jumpsuit, and a pair of slippers. Her closet-sized room, also locked, had cement-block walls, a narrow bed with a rubber sheet, a lightweight metal chair, and a wash basin atop a small, round wooden table; a miniscule bathroom in a corner of the room contained a sink and a toilet. A pane of one-way mirror glass, cut into the room’s steel door, enabled hospital personnel to peer in on Marilyn without their being seen. The bathroom door had a built-in mirror of its own. The wails, moans, and cries of Marilyn’s fellow “inmates” could be clearly heard throughout the ward. The iron bars across the windows lent credence to what had always been Marilyn’s worst fear: that of ending up locked away and left to rot in a lunatic asylum. The question had crossed her mind a thousand times: Had she inherited the same schizophrenic blood virus that festered in her mother’s delusional brain?

In a
seven-page letter that Marilyn addressed to Dr. Ralph Greenson on March 2, 1961, she described the harrowing experience in all too graphic detail, including her failed efforts to get out. For hours she had begged them to release her. She had stripped naked and stood in the middle of the room screaming. They threatened to put her in a straitjacket. She went into the bathroom and turned on the water faucet and let it run until she’d created a flood. They entered her room and locked the bathroom door, at which point Marilyn reportedly picked up a chair and slammed it against the bathroom mirror. As she explained
in her letter to Greenson, “If they were going to treat me like a nut, I’ll act like a nut.” She then threatened to do herself harm, which, she is reported to have said, “is the furthest thing from my mind . . . since you know . . . I’m an actress and would never intentionally mark or mar myself. I’m just that vain.”

When an earlier broken-glass suicide attempt failed to elicit the desired reaction, Marilyn went on a hunger strike; she began to eat only after they advised her that if she didn’t eat, they would have to give her intraveneous nourishment. When she refused to bathe, she was carried face-up into a shower room and was hosed down, after which she was made to sit in a bathtub. She cursed the nurses when they tried to force her to go to occupational therapy. When she again insisted they release her from the hospital, they informed her that only Dr. Kris could sign her out.

Unable to reach Kris by phone (she was permitted one call per day), she decided to write to Lee and Paula Strasberg:
“Dr. Kris has had me put into the New York hospital . . . under the care of two
idiot
doctors. They
both should not be my doctors
 . . . I’m locked up with all these poor nutty people. I’m
sure
to end up a nut if I stay in this nightmare, please help me, Lee, this is the
last
place I should be . . . I love you both. Marilyn. P.S. . . . I’m on the dangerous floor! It’s like a cell.”

As with Dr. Kris, Marilyn couldn’t reach the Strasbergs by telephone. And probably for good reason: as she eventually learned, it had been Lee who’d first suggested to Dr. Kris that Marilyn, “for her own good,” be sent to Payne Whitney for observation. When she finally learned of the Strasbergs’ involvement in the “plot” to put her away, Marilyn accused them (in her words) of “treason and treachery.”

On her third day at Payne Whitney, Marilyn asked the nurse to place a long-distance call to Joe DiMaggio in Florida. Nearly hysterical, Marilyn implored Joe to help her get out. He promised to be there the following day.

At six in the evening on Friday, February 10, Joe DiMaggio stood in front of the nurses’ station on the sixth floor of the hospital and asked
to see his wife. A nurse’s aide recalled the occasion: “I immediately recognized Mr. DiMaggio,” she said. “He was a tall, handsome, imposing figure in a double-breasted dark blue suit, French-cuffed shirt, hand-painted tie, spit-polished shoes, and a designer overcoat on his arm. He was powerful-looking, with streaks of gray in his dark hair. I wondered how he’d gained access to the floor, since it was a locked ward. I soon found out. I went and located the head nurse, and she asked him how he’d gotten in. ‘I was let in by the chief of security for the hospital,’ he responded. ‘We’re buddies. He used to work security at Yankee Stadium.’ Then he repeated his request regarding Marilyn Monroe. She’d registered under a different name, but we all knew her true identity. The head nurse balked. She stated that the only person who had jurisdiction over Miss Monroe was Dr. Kris, her psychiatrist. In a very low, controlled but threatening voice, DiMaggio said to her, ‘I’ll give you five minutes to get her out here, or I’ll tear this fucking place apart brick by brick.’ So the nurse went and brought back Marilyn Monroe. ‘Now get me everything she had on when she checked in,’ ordered DiMaggio. The nurse said she would, but if he wanted her released, they needed Dr. Kris’s signature. He gave her Dr. Kris’s phone number. She answered. It seems DiMaggio had already spoken to her, because she said she’d be right over to sign the papers. DiMaggio told the nurse he’d send Dr. Kris upstairs when she arrived but, in the interim, he and Marilyn would wait in the lobby. Marilyn changed into her street clothes, and they left.”

Realizing that Dr. Kris’s signature would be required, DiMaggio had made prior arrangements with Ralph Roberts to pick up the psychiatrist by car and drive her to the hospital. Roberts remembered how upset Kris seemed on the way over: “She was crying. ‘I did a terrible thing,’ she said. ‘My God, I didn’t mean to, but I did. I should never have listened to Lee Strasberg.’ She must have repeated this mantra a dozen times. When we arrived at Payne Whitney, she went to sign the papers. Joe told Marilyn he’d head back to his suite at the Hotel Lexington and then join her later that night in her apartment. When Kris
returned, she began apologizing to Marilyn, but the damage had been done. Marilyn screamed at her in the car, threatened to sue her for malpractice, and told her she was done. She was like a hurricane. After that night, Marilyn never saw or spoke to Dr. Kris again.”

Joe DiMaggio understood that, whatever Marilyn’s condition before her hospitalization, she remained extremely upset, all the more so given her treatment at Payne Whitney. She agreed to enter a hospital in a more comfortable and less menacing setting, provided she could leave without having to go through a middleman and provided Joe be listed as her caretaker. In addition, DiMaggio promised to fly in from Florida to visit her whenever he had a day off. At five o’clock on February 11, having made arrangements through the team physician of the New York Yankees, Joe accompanied Marilyn to the Neurological Institute of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where she remained without incident for three weeks, until March 5. DiMaggio visited her on a half dozen separate occasions, flying in twice a week.

“Joe DiMaggio remained convinced that Marilyn’s career was slowly killing her,” said Ralph Roberts. “I tended to agree.”

•  •  •

In many respects Joe DiMaggio appeared to be a changed man, perhaps due to his limited exposure to psychotherapy but more likely the result of his realization that if he didn’t alter his personality, he and Marilyn could never work out their differences. He seemed more tender, gentle, and patient with her, less prone to fits of jealousy and anger, more understanding. They were closer now—and nicer to each other—than they’d ever been. He apparently told her that if he’d been married to his former self, he too would have sought a divorce. When he visited from St. Petersburg, they sat in her room at Columbia-Presbyterian and had long, heartfelt conversations—mostly the actress talking and the ballplayer listening. Marilyn introduced him to the doctors and nurses at Columbia-Presbyterian as “my hero—the man who rescued me from that utter hellhole.”