Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (46 page)

Marilyn turned him down, though not necessarily forever; she had to think about it. They argued. Joe told her she was killing herself, giving up all potential happiness, sacrificing all normal human emotions, and for what? For the sake of the studio dictators who’d imposed upon her the role of a super sex symbol and little else? “Now they’ve even got you posing in the nude!” he yelled, before slamming the door behind him.

She later admitted to Ralph Roberts that she’d been high on pot and LSD when Joe proposed to her, but even if she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have gone along with it. They had a good thing going now, so why ruin it by getting married again? They would only repeat all the same patterns and make the same mistakes that had befouled their first marriage.

According to Richard Ben Cramer, DiMaggio’s biographer, Joe boarded the next flight to New York and headed straight for Toots Shor’s. When he recounted his conversation with Marilyn for the saloon keeper’s benefit, Toots said something like, “Aw, Joe, what do expect from a whore like that?” DiMaggio told his longtime buddy to go fuck himself. He never spoke to Toots Shor again.

D
ESPITE A BIRTHDAY TO REMEMBER,
and despite the $1 million Marilyn Monroe had helped raise for the Democratic Party that night at Madison Square Garden, John F. Kennedy was done with the actress. Her erratic behavior—her letters, phone calls, and love poems, as well as her call to Jackie—no longer amused him. Too many people, including the Secret Service and FBI, knew of the affair by this time, and while the press in those days didn’t peer into the closets (or private lives) of politicians, there were those that did. The Kennedy clan’s list of perceived enemies—Fidel Castro, the Mafia, and Jimmy Hoffa, president of the largest union in America, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to name a few—was long and getting longer. The president was only too pleased to assign Bobby Kennedy the unpleasant (some might say pleasant) task of getting Marilyn off his back.

Bobby’s arrival on the scene came at a precarious point in Marilyn’s career. After Fox fired her from
Something’s Got to Give,
she suffered what Dr. Ralph Greenson described as a
“deeply paranoid and depressive reaction.” She placed some of the blame for her misfortune on George Cukor, stipulating that Cukor, an outspoken and admitted homosexual, had been jealous of her affair with Yves Montand during their joint appearance in
Let’s Make Love
. Cukor, she claimed, had
himself lusted after Montand despite the fact that the actor left little doubt as to his sexuality.

Against Dr. Greenson’s advice, MM turned to Bobby Kennedy for help, asking the attorney general to intervene on her behalf with Fox. RFK discussed the situation with Pierre Salinger and urged him to do what he could. “I didn’t know anyone at the studio,” said Salinger, “so I contacted Peter Lawford for advice. Peter loved Marilyn. He said she was having trouble and was more dependent than ever on barbiturates and probably ought to be placed in a detoxification unit if she hoped to get back to work. She was doing with RFK what she’d previously done with the president, besieging him with letters and phone calls, which in fact she’d been doing since first meeting him at Peter’s house. Jackie’s problem had now become Ethel’s. In any case, Peter gave me a list of names at Fox. I placed several calls. I have no idea how useful I might’ve been, but within days negotiations began between Mickey Rudin and Fox about resuming work on the film.”

Jeanne Carmen, an actress Monroe first met at the Actors Studio in New York and with whom she established a close friendship after both moved to Los Angeles, happened to see a good deal of Marilyn in 1962. “We were sleeping pill buddies,” recalled Carmen. “I wasn’t a big drinker, but Marilyn thought nothing of mixing booze and pills, and that’s where she got into trouble. We once did cocaine together and wound up bouncing off the walls. Neither of us liked it. We were both chronic insomniacs, and all we wanted to do was fall asleep. We took mostly Seconal and Nembutal, both very potent sleeping pills. They helped me a bit, but they did next to nothing for Marilyn. It amazed me how little her psychiatrist, Dr. Greenson, seemed to help her. Somewhere along the line he decided she was a waif in need of a family, so for a while he had her sleeping over and helping out in the kitchen by peeling potatoes and washing dishes, the same chores she’d performed as a child in the orphanage. During the period I knew Marilyn, she suffered from drastic mood swings. I’m no shrink, but to my mind she was bipolar, a manic-depressive. She saw Greenson practically
every day, but I can’t say I saw any improvement in her condition. If anything, her condition deteriorated, particularly near the end. I don’t believe Greenson had the faintest notion what to do with her other than medicate her to death.”

Indeed, the idea seemed to be never to deny Marilyn when she wanted a prescription, because the only thing that would happen is she would procure medication elsewhere and not inform her primary physicians, in this instance Dr. Greenson and Dr. Engelberg. So whenever she asked for a drug, she usually got it. Daniel Greenson, Dr. Greenson’s son, noted that treating a celebrity of Marilyn Monroe’s magnitude was a complex and often thankless proposition. “She called the shots,” he said. “Because she feared not being able to fall asleep, she began medicating herself. If she had a ten-day supply of barbiturates, her tendency was to take them all in a day or two. There wasn’t much anyone could do about it. If my father had refused to renew a given prescription, she would’ve simply turned to somebody else.”

The problem was that Marilyn turned to both Greenson
and
Engelberg for prescriptions. Engelberg discussed the procedure he and Greenson followed in attempting to coordinate efforts: “I usually communicated with Dr. Greenson as to her sleeping medication, but I didn’t go over it with him if, say, I wanted to give her antibiotics for an infection. Nor would I tell him every time I gave her an injection of liver or vitamins. I also used to inject her with Heparin, a blood thinner which at the time was touted as a ‘youth drug’ and which helped stave off strokes and heart attacks. There were other exceptions. During the shooting of
Something’s Got to Give,
she developed sinus problems and the flu, which I treated without conferring with Dr. Greenson. Near the end of Marilyn’s life, there seemed to be a misunderstanding of sorts, and it appears Dr. Greenson and I were simultaneously prescribing sleeping medication for her. I didn’t know Dr. Greenson was supplying her with barbiturates at this juncture. Had I known, I obviously wouldn’t have given her the same drug. Judging from the volume and variety of drugs in her house at the time of her death, I realized
just how little control Dr. Greenson and I had over her. It appears that during her trip to Mexico, where you can procure every and any medication over the counter, she’d picked up a stash of sedatives and barbiturates. After her death, the police confiscated some fifteen bottles of pills from her house.”

Another subject that went unspoken between the two physicians was that in early June, two months before her death, Marilyn Monroe began an affair with Hyman Engelberg, adding the doctor’s name to a roster of lovers that included John and Bobby Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, and Joe DiMaggio. Marilyn’s liaison with her internist served to further complicate a life that long before had begun to spiral out of control.
Dr. Eric Goldberg, a Santa Barbara physician and Engelberg’s closest friend, was evidently the only person with whom the internist talked about the affair.

“I’d known Hy for years,” said Goldberg. “We used to play tennis together every weekend. I had three sons, and so did he. He treated any number of celebrity patients, among them Rita Hayworth, Burt Lancaster, and Danny Kaye. At the time of his affair with Marilyn, which, by the way, has remained secret until now, Hy was separated from his wife. They eventually divorced, and he remarried. But in mid-1962 he was living alone in a three-bedroom house just off Sunset. I once met Marilyn at his house. On the surface, she seemed to possess everything you would want in a woman, except that she was hooked on prescription drugs. Hy wasn’t in love with her, nor was she with him, which I suppose is why the relationship worked. He introduced her to his youngest son, an undergraduate at Columbia University, and one morning they all had breakfast together, which Marilyn prepared. During June and July, Hy saw her almost every day, mostly for medical reasons. He told me she used to complain about pain in her chest, so he began giving her shots of morphine. It occurred to me she might be sleeping with Hy in order to get whatever drugs she wanted, but then again there were any number of physicians in and around Los Angeles who would have been more than glad to prescribe medications for
her. After she died, Hy worried that she’d mentioned their affair to friends and that he could lose his medical license. Aside from the affair, there were questions as to the injections and medications he’d given her. What’s most bizarre, I suppose, is that she never mentioned the affair to Ralph Greenson. I can’t help but wonder what other secrets she kept from her psychiatrist.”

Asked to elaborate on his affair with Marilyn, Dr. Engelberg would say only, “It happened. We were both very lonely. Let’s just leave it at that.”

•  •  •

With negotiations still underway over a new contract for
Something’s Got to Give,
the actress continued to publicize the figure known to the world as “Marilyn Monroe,” a persona entirely invented, designed, created, and controlled by the former Norma Jeane Baker. During the last week of June, she participated in a three-day shoot with photographer George Barris for
Cosmopolitan
. While in her company, Barris noticed that Marilyn would lapse into an occasional depression, then bounce back to her former, more jovial self. In a serious frame of mind, she told Barrris she wanted to have children but didn’t feel she could raise a child properly so long as she remained alone.

She did two photo sessions with Bert Stern for
Vogue.
Stern had set up a makeshift studio at the Bel Air Hotel, supplying Marilyn with a case of Dom Pérignon and several bottles of vodka. After several hours of conventional shots, Marilyn asked Stern if he wanted to shoot her in the nude. She disrobed and donned a see-through bed jacket. Babs Simpson,
Vogue
’s photo editor, took one look at Monroe and said, “Oh, no! I don’t like that.” And Marilyn countered, “Well, I do.”

As she assumed a suggestive pose, Marilyn said, “How’s this for thirty-six?” Stern didn’t know if she was referring to her breasts or her age.

“I liked her . . . and I was also very attracted to her—like most guys,” admitted Stern. “She was very natural in a way that’s hard to explain. And she had a quality—like she was
willing to be yours.
She gave you the feeling it was okay to jump in a car and drive off with her.”

Pat Newcomb had arranged and attended the
Cosmopolitan
and
Vogue
photo feature shoots. In her typically overgenerous manner, Marilyn rewarded Newcomb with an array of offerings: a new car, a black mink coat, and the emerald earrings Frank Sinatra had once given her. Newcomb had also set up an interview for Marilyn with
Life
, to be conducted by Richard Meryman.

“We did it in two parts,” said Meryman. “We met at her Brentwood house on July 4 and then again about ten days later. Marilyn asked to have the questions in advance. Although she’d prepared for the interview, her answers seemed spontaneous. I sensed she gave the interview to rearrange an image of herself she didn’t like. She spoke from the heart. She was real. She was bright and businesslike. At one point during our July 4 interview, the telephone rang. Pat Newcomb, who was present the entire time, answered the phone. It was Joe DiMaggio. ‘Tell him to call back,’ said Marilyn.

“During our second interview, she seemed weary, less relaxed, more on edge. Her mood had changed a good deal from our first meeting. Where before she’d been energetic and positive, she now seemed sad and ill at ease. She complained about being alone in the world. One of her themes throughout our two sessions was the fickle nature of fame—she had it today, but would it be there for her tomorrow? Or as she put it, ‘Fame may go by and—So long I’ve had you, Fame.’ ”

Richard Meryman’s Q and A with Marilyn turned out to be the last interview she ever gave. It appeared in the August 3, 1962, issue of
Life
. She died the following day.

•  •  •

During the first week of July, Joe DiMaggio Jr., on leave from Camp Pendleton, his Marine base in San Diego, spent the afternoon with Marilyn at home in Brentwood. He told her his mother and her companion, Ralph Peck, had opened a supper club, Charcoal Charlie’s, outside Palm Springs. She sang, and he accompanied her on the piano. Joey
couldn’t bring himself to visit the place. He went on to discuss Pam, his girlfriend, and said he was thinking of marrying her. Marilyn told him that sometimes getting married merely made matters more complicated.