Marilyn: A Biography (21 page)

To a newspaper circuit which had her fighting
with her studio again — she would not do
How to Be Very, Very
Popular
— and in new romances with Milton Greene, Jacques
Sernas (“the libidinous Lithuanian”), Mel Tormé, Marlon Brando, and
Sammy Davis, Jr., the disappearance was dramatic, an interruption
of the national soap opera. There was natural consternation when
she reappeared in three weeks as the head of Marilyn Monroe
Productions before a press conference of a hundred reporters.

“What makes you think you can play serious
roles?”

“Some people have more scope than other
people think they have.”

She had been living in seclusion in Weston,
Connecticut, with Milton and Amy Greene, and the picture of those
few weeks, when it is told by the Greenes, is not far from idyllic,
for Marilyn’s friendship with Milton speaks of some wistful longing
of the past, as if he is the friend she never had in the orphanage,
and she and Amy act like finishing-school girls on a romp. It is
not an automatic picture to make of a fashion photographer, a movie
star, and a wife who is Cuban, patrician, and a New York model; we
are hardly ready to picture all three in some wicked pie of
absolute glee at the thought of celebrities, business types,
lawyers, agents, press, and half the thunderheads of Hollywood all
busily trying to locate Marilyn while the three of them get ready
to sail across the financial seas in a washtub. Yet the recollected
tone is of just such happiness, and images are offered of the two
women rolling in maniac mirth on the carpet — “we wet our pants” —
while Milton assures Bob Hope on the phone that he doesn’t have any
idea where Marilyn can be found, and so she won’t be able to go
along on Mr. Hope’s trip to visit the troops in Alaska, no sir.

Amy Greene and Marilyn steal out from the
house in Weston with Marilyn dressed in a brown Prince Valiant wig
with a pillow stuffed under an old dress. She is pregnant! They go
shopping for antiques. Another time and still another Amy takes her
out in costume. By the fourth occasion, Marilyn demurs. “She was
tired of looking pregnant. She
wanted
to be recognized,”
laughs Amy.

So they go out dressed in casual wear. An
adolescent in a drugstore spots Marilyn and goes to get his
friends. When Amy returns to the car, she hears a thump behind the
rear seat. Marilyn has hidden in the trunk. A picture of pillow
fights, hoots, screams, and hours of playing with the Greenes’ boy,
Josh, is offered. Marilyn buys him a pajama bag called Ethel and a
huge stuffed bear named Socko.

Guiles, however, presents Amy as a hint
disturbed by Marilyn’s sudden entrance into the Greenes’ life. In
turn, Marilyn is not comfortable with Amy, who

was the most organized human being she had
ever encountered. Even the simple act of emptying a brimming ash
tray was transmuted to a graceful act. . . . Marilyn was to come to
a conclusion which she later confided to Miller that Amy’s
subterranean strengths had a tinge of the devious.

Of course, this is the picture Marilyn gave
to Miller, who was implacably opposed to the Greenes and so would
be likely to recall every negative remark. In turn, Amy Greene
would speak with malicious delight of Marilyn’s remarks about
Arthur. After they were married, Marilyn showed Amy a book of love
poems in Moroccan binding with gold edges and said, “Arthur paid
for this with his own money.” It is obvious, if indeed we did not
have other evidence, that Marilyn was inclined to throw herself
positively into each relation, and save negative reactions for
another friend, hostile to the first, who would be happy to hear
them. It is characteristic of those with little identity.

Zolotow gives, however, another portrait. “‘I
got the feeling,’” he has a woman witness say,

“
that Amy looked down on Marilyn Monroe as
a stupid little bitch. Amy was better dressed, more chic, more
sophisticated, and much cleverer than Marilyn. She even looked
better. In fact, you couldn’t believe that this queer little duck
you saw sitting around the Greenes’ was really Marilyn Monroe. I
remember we played charades, the girls against the men. We went
into a bedroom to select the sentences. We had some quotations from
poetry and things like that, and then somebody said how about the
title of a book, and Amy looked over at Marilyn and said, ‘Come on,
Marilyn, give us a book title, will you? You’re always reading all
those books.’ I got the feeling that Amy was implying that Marilyn
was a phony about being intellectual and didn’t read any of the
books she pretended to read and that Marilyn knew Amy had this low
opinion of her mind. Or maybe it was that Amy resented all the
gossip going around that Milton was having an affair with Marilyn
and she wanted to show us that she was in command of the
situation.

“
What happened later convinced me of this.
About half past twelve we all got hungry — oh, there were about ten
of us — and Amy turned to Marilyn and ordered her — she didn’t ask
her, she ordered her, the way you would a servant — ‘Marilyn,’ she
said, ‘Marilyn, go in the kitchen and make sandwiches.’ And Marilyn
obeyed her. She went into the kitchen and made sandwiches and
coffee and served them to us.”

Of course, in the next paragraph, Zolotow has
Milton Greene subleasing a three-room apartment for Marilyn in the
Waldorf Astoria Towers, mortgaging his home, cashing his
securities, and borrowing to the end of his credit to support
Marilyn’s expenses, which come to $1,000 a week, of which $500 goes
for “beautification” — a personal hairdresser on salary,
podiatrists, manicurists, masseuses, and fifty dollars a week for
perfume. Three thousand dollars are spent for clothes in two months
during the spring of 1955. Since Greene is obviously taking the
largest gamble of his life, and looking to jump from years of
sinecure as a high-paid fashion photographer to a producer who will
be able to make films that appeal to his good taste, Zolotow’s
account of Amy Greene could only suggest that she was trying to
spike his gamble. But Amy Greene would argue the opposite. “My God,
she was so beautiful, and I was just a couple of years out of a
convent.” Amy tells a story about one night in New York when she
happened to mention that she would love to see Sinatra, who was
appearing then at the Copacabana. Marilyn said, “Get dressed. We’re
putting on our best.” An account ensues of the two women readying
themselves over the next couple of hours. Then Marilyn, made up
with all her skill, in white dress and white furs, goes with the
Greenes to the door of the Copacabana. “We had no reservations, of
course, not even a phone call for warning, and Marilyn smiled at
the dragon who was standing at the door and he fell back, and we
just moved forward through Mafia bouncer after Mafia bouncer until
we got to the room where Sinatra was singing, and of course there
wasn’t a seat available or even an
aisle
for that matter,
and Marilyn just stood at the rear of the room not moving and one
by one the customers turned to look at her and the show slowly
stopped and Sinatra finally saw her, and said, ‘Waiter, bring a
table here,’ and we were conducted, we were virtually
carried
through these nightclub
gargoyles
at their
tables with their wives and their mistresses after they’d schemed
and begged for reservations and of course we were put directly
under Sinatra and his microphone, there could not have been a space
closer to him, God knows what they did to the people they pushed
back, and then Milton, Marilyn, and I were sung to by Sinatra, he
sang the entire set to us alone, and in the middle, Marilyn kicked
me in the foot and said, ‘You like the table?’ ‘Bitch!’ I whispered
back.”

Later, after Sinatra has joined their group,
they start for his dressing room. Four bouncers form a diamond
around them, one to the front, one to the rear, and two on the
flanks, and they try to proceed, but the crowd is reaching in on
all sides. “I panicked,” said Amy. “Marilyn was very calm and kept
saying to me, ‘Just keep moving and don’t be afraid,’ but I was
hysterical. You see, they couldn’t get past the bouncers, but they
could reach in with their arms, and they would, until they got to
Marilyn, and then they’d stop and pull short as if she were some
sort of divinity and they were afraid to touch her. Of course, I
was getting buffeted in the process. Those faces reaching in were
the worst I ever saw. But Marilyn wasn’t fazed.” Amy Greene looks
up from the memory. “No,” she says, “I didn’t look down on Marilyn
at all.”

* * *

Marilyn will be in New York more than a year
before she goes back to Hollywood. From the end of 1954 until the
beginning of 1956, her career if at all analogous to a river is
most certainly going around its major bend. Perhaps 1955 in New
York is the happiest year of her life.
The Seven-Year Itch
will come out to rave reviews and movie crowds waiting in line,
thereby demonstrating to Twentieth how desperate they had better be
to get her back. As the year goes on, she and Milton Greene will
develop a clear sense that they are going to win. She will not only
have her production company actually producing a film, but will
work out a new and much improved contract with the studio. She is
in the position of tasting victory over a powerful enemy — how many
ever reach such vengeance? But then she is like a Shakespearean
hero in those middle acts when good fortunes accumulate. Her love
affair with Arthur Miller is begun — in the most confident part of
her personality can she fail to see it as destined? How can the
greatest playwright in America (or at least the greatest by her
devout measure) not naturally be wed to the most exciting actress
in the land? With her infallible instinct in publicity — as superb
in its readiness for bold lines of play as the most unorthodox
grand master of chess — she springs out of the divorce from
DiMaggio into the added velocity of a romance with Miller. Yet as
if the success of her career and the promise of fulfillment to her
dream of love are but two enrichments, and she is meant for more,
she begins to study with [Lee] Strasberg who is impressed, indeed
enchanted, with her talent — he will later tell Joshua Logan “that
he had encountered two film personalities of really great potential
in his work at the Studio, Marlon Brando, and quite as good as
Brando is Marilyn.”

Some hint of the confidence she feels in the
middle of this period is suggested by a story of Gardner Cowles,
who was then publisher of
Look
magazine. He was approached
by the distinguished George Schlee, known as the lover of Greta
Garbo, but also functioning as a species of superior troubleshooter
for Aristotle Onassis. Since this was in just the period before it
became known that Prince Rainier of Monaco wanted to marry Grace
Kelly, it had apparently been decided quite separately by Onassis
(who owned half of Monaco), that Rainier ought to marry some movie
star of vast renown in order to improve the glamour of Monte Carlo,
which was in this year near to moribund. If very little in the
world of finance could be shown to work in functional relation to
publicity, the volume of gambling most certainly did, or so Onassis
must have reasoned. Who would dispute the sociomathematical maxims
of our own Aristotle? His first choice evidently was Monroe, for
Schlee came to Cowles, who had become friends with Marilyn, and
asked the publisher to relay the message. Cowles discussed it with
her in Connecticut, where Marilyn was visiting the Greenes. Would
she be interested, he wondered, in marrying Prince Rainier?

What did he think she should do?

Cowles allowed that she might consider the
proposition. But, he inquired, “Do you think the Prince will want
to marry you?”

Her eyes were full of light. “Give me two
days alone with him, and of course he’ll want to marry me.”

The offer can prove no more than a two-day
sensation in her life, since not long after this weekend the news
will break that Rainier is going to be engaged to Grace — either
the Prince has worked out a line of action independent of Onassis,
or George Schlee is being cut off from information. But how
interesting to suppose Marilyn did dream of herself on the throne
of Monaco for a weekend, since it offers a hint of her buried
snobbery — an emotion to consider when she makes
The Prince and
the Showgirl
with Olivier. Besides, she was in the middle of
her affair with Miller. Perhaps they had had a fight that weekend.
How bizarre her life had become. She had so much power, and in such
a vacuum. No wonder three men, each possessed of his own artistic
integrity, would nonetheless compete over the next year to fill
that vacuum. A comedy sharp enough for the eye of Shaw must be
buried in the details of how Arthur Miller, Milton Greene, and Lee
Strasberg jockeyed with one another for control of her mind and
possession of her life, but the comedy is not that they were
meretricious small-minded studio producers, or like DiMaggio
without a talent to develop her talent, no rather it is how each
worked in his own way to
elucidate
her skills — they would
bring her
out
with a vengeance — and yet, so Shavian are the
properties of a power vacuum, were finally obliged, all three, to
go to war with one another. What compromise must each have made of
the subtlest reflexes of his private and artistic integrity! Yet
who is to judge them? We must conceive of her in 1955, the most
magical and marvelous heroine of New York — she is a movie star in
serious search of an education by which to develop herself. No
matter how the envy of New York was ready to deride her, confusion
had to collect. For who could comprehend her? No sex star had ever
left Hollywood before at the peak of a career. It was remotely
possible she was serious. Besides, few were ready for that shy waif
with a strangled little voice, that face close to plain in the
absence of makeup, her wholly insignificant presence when she was
not in a professional situation. Hedda Rosten, later to be her
close friend, describes their first meeting at her home in
Brooklyn. Sam Shaw, the photographer, dropped by to visit the
Rostens with a girl he had been photographing in the rain. She
looked like a high school kid. Her hair was down and soaked
through. She wore a black skirt and a cotton blouse. She had the
look of a very sweet seventeen-year-old, Hedda Rosten recalls, and
since she didn’t catch the name, they had the following
conversation.