Marilyn Monroe (43 page)

Journalist and author Peter Evans, who had met Marilyn several times during the making of
The Prince and the Showgirl,
was also staying at the same hospital, suffering from dehydration. As he later recalled: ‘All outside calls to her room had been blocked by the switchboard on the orders of Joe DiMaggio, but I discovered it was possible to dial her room directly from my room. I got the number of her room from a friendly nurse, and tried my luck. Marilyn Monroe answered in her unmistakable voice. “Oh,” she said when I told her who I was and how I got through to her. But she didn’t seem to mind. She sounded frail, but was absolutely friendly.’

She told him, ‘They won’t let me listen to the radio. The news is always so disturbing. Tell me, what’s happening in the outside world?’

Evans told Marilyn that he had met Arthur Miller several days before, and she asked how he was. She was concerned with his living arrangements, observing that she’d been told he wasn’t comfortable living in a hotel. Evans told her that Arthur was thinking of moving out, though felt the Connecticut house was too large just for him. ‘He said he didn’t like being alone,’ Evans remarked.

‘Oh my God,’ Marilyn replied. ‘He should get another wife.’

Later in the conversation Evans told Marilyn that Arthur was bemoaning the loss of a button on his overcoat. ‘I must get somebody to sew a button on this coat. It’s been off for weeks,’ he had said.

According to Evans there was then a silence on the line before Marilyn eventually spoke. ‘That is so poignant,’ she said. ‘That
is beautiful. It says so much about the end of a marriage. I want to cry. I will write a poem about that missing button.’

‘I wondered whether she ever wrote that poem,’ Peter Evans later recalled.

On Tuesday, 7 March, having been out of hospital for just two days, Marilyn attended the funeral of her former mother-in-law, Augusta Miller, who had suffered a fatal heart attack the day before. Arriving unexpectedly, Marilyn put her own problems to one side and comforted Arthur and Isidore Miller, before leaving quietly to return to her apartment. Then on 10 March she attended a fundraiser for the Actors Studio and appeared to be feeling much better.

However, just days later, publicist Rupert Allan sent some newspaper clippings to John Springer, which implied that once again Kay Gable was blaming Marilyn for Clark’s death. The story was once again untrue, but knowing Marilyn’s fragile state of mind, Allan instructed Springer not to bring the clippings to her attention. On 17 March, Springer forwarded the comments to lawyer Aaron Frosch, where Marilyn accidentally saw them, sending her into a furious rage. She immediately wrote a note to May Reis, demanding she get Frosch on the telephone so that she could discuss the issue with him, and expressing her anger at Allan for trying to keep ‘this kind of thing away from me’.

‘I must know my own business, so I can protect myself. Keeping things from me is no protection,’ she told May Reis.

By this time, a production schedule for
Rain
had been compiled, and Marilyn had been due to start pre-production on 13 March, with one week of shooting beginning 27 March. However, because of her illness, NBC took any definite dates off the table. In order to take her mind off this, Joe DiMaggio asked Marilyn if she would like to travel to Florida with him instead. She agreed, and checked into the Tides Hotel at St Petersburg Beach. On her arrival, Marilyn declared, ‘I came down here for some rest, some sun and to visit Joe,’ though it was also an opportunity to regain her strength and recover from the trauma of the past months.

Always a fan of ‘the man or woman on the street’, whilst staying in St Petersburg Marilyn began a friendship with Lynn Pupello, a teenage reporter who in 1961 won an award for best writer for the American Newspaper Association. ‘I sat near her [on the beach] and struck up a conversation as if she wasn’t famous,’ she remembered. ‘At first she was shy but my enthusiasm won her over.’

For Marilyn, talking to the young woman was a welcome diversion, though Joe DiMaggio at times seemed to resent her presence, as remembered by Pupello: ‘I wasn’t nervous being with Marilyn. She had a loving nature and ability to put you at ease. Joe DiMaggio was aloof with me; he said “Hello” but wanted to be alone with her, quietly talking. She smiled occasionally but told me she would not reconcile with him because of his bad temper during the night of the skirt-blowing scene in New York City.’

According to Pupello, during their long conversations Marilyn admitted to having met John F. Kennedy: ‘She said she had been in South Florida before, visiting the President. She lit up speaking of him and said, “he has always been very kind to me.”’ Marilyn had shown an interest in Kennedy during her conversations with W.J. Weatherby, but had not mentioned a meeting, so her comment is an interesting one. She did not make any suggestion to Pupello or Weatherby (at that particular time) that she thought of him in a romantic way, but made no secret of the fact that she was a huge supporter of Kennedy both as a person and a politician.

Almost immediately on her return to New York, rumours began to circulate that Frank Sinatra had been in Florida at the same time as Marilyn, and that she was in love with him. This is intriguing since on 2 March 1961, whilst staying at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, she wrote a letter to Dr Greenson, admitting to a ‘fling on a wing’ affair with an unnamed man, possibly Sinatra. Marilyn described the lover as being very unselfish in bed, but also admitted that she knew Greenson would not approve of him.

Marilyn had encountered Sinatra several times over the years, and actress Annabelle Stanford remembers her as being a little less than enamoured with him during a trip to Palm Springs in the late 1940s. ‘A group of us were doing a photo shoot with Bernard of Hollywood, and afterwards we were all having dinner. Frank Sinatra was there and having something of an argument with a male friend. I remember Marilyn looking over, shaking her head and throwing her arms in the air. She was not happy and when the argument continued she left.’

As a result of a possible romance with Sinatra, any plans DiMaggio may have had to reconcile with Marilyn were put on hold. He was not at all happy that his old friend was being seen around with his ex-wife, but he continued to see Marilyn on a social basis and even attended a baseball game with her at Yankee Stadium on 11 April.

Ten days before that, on 1 April, Kay Gable wrote a letter to Marilyn, asking when she planned to go to Los Angeles to meet her baby son, John Clark. She told her that she still missed her husband each day but planned to spend the summer at their ranch, where she hoped Marilyn and Joe would visit. The letter was friendly and informal; and as a result any thoughts Marilyn may have had that Kay blamed her for Gable’s death were finally dispelled.

In need of a break, Marilyn travelled to Los Angeles in April where she enjoyed going on dates and lying on her private patio at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She even took time to speak with Hedda Hopper about the
Rain
project, explaining, ‘I’ve been looking forward to doing ‘Rain’ on TV for a long time. We expect to have Fredric March and Florence Eldredge playing the Rev Davidson and his wife.’ However, it didn’t all go to plan. Firstly, Marilyn began to learn that the stalled negotiations for
Rain
were forcing co-stars to pull out of the project, and then she was admitted to hospital for a minor gynaecological operation on 24 May. Marilyn later told her half-sister, Berniece, that during her time in the facility her father, Stanley Gifford, arrived to visit her. They sat for some time talking, though she felt the meeting
lacked the affection she had always craved and found the whole episode extremely hard to process.

If this meeting took place, Gifford never publicly talked about it, not even to his son, Charles Stanley Gifford Jr, who always had a very hard time believing that Gifford Sr could be the father of Marilyn Monroe. During a 2001 conversation between Gifford Jr and Mary Sims, president of the ‘Immortal Marilyn’ fan club, Mary expressed how proud he must be that his father was believed to be Marilyn Monroe’s father too. ‘Proud of what?’ Gifford Jr asked, ‘That he walked out on Norma Jeane and never acknowledged her or admitted he was her father?’

‘I got the distinct feeling that his concern was the perception that his father didn’t do right by Norma Jeane, and the disgrace that comes down on the family name because of it,’ remembered Sims. ‘I said he wouldn’t be the first man to have done that in history; he agreed, and then we both said at the same time “That’s life.”’

Declaring to Earl Wilson, ‘I like my freedom; I like to play the field,’ Marilyn lost weight, cut her hair short and bought a wardrobe full of new clothes. ‘I’m very glad to be free again; this is the happiest I’ve been in a long time,’ she told Hedda Hopper. She also upped her social life, too: meeting poet and idol, Carl Sandburg; travelling to Palm Springs (where she spent time with Sinatra); then dashing to Las Vegas to see him perform with Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr at the Sands Hotel.

Marilyn became something of a mascot for the ‘Rat Pack’, as Sinatra’s posse were labelled. She spent time with Dean Martin and his wife in Newport Harbor; discussed making a film with Sinatra; and surprised herself by quite happily settling into life in Los Angeles. ‘I’ve never had such a good time ever – in Hollywood,’ she confided to Louella Parsons. ‘For the first time in many years I am completely free to do exactly as I please. And this new freedom has made me happier. I want to look for a home to buy here; I think I’ll settle in Beverly Hills.’

This was backed up by make-up artist ‘Whitey’ Snyder, who commented, ‘Since her divorce from Arthur Miller she’s been in her best condition for a long time. She’s happy! I’m amazed at how well she is.’

In June 1961, Marilyn was thrilled to visit Kay Gable and meet her son, John Clark. Talking into the night with Kay, she later described the meeting as ‘Wonderful . . . kind of sad too,’ and declared John Clark as ‘My real love; he’s the big man in my life, even if he is a little young for me.’ Shortly after she was honoured to attend the baby’s christening, where she gleefully posed for the cameras and later mingled with guests at the Gable family home.

Marilyn seemed perfectly happy with her life in Los Angeles, but she was still desperate to get the
Rain
project off the ground. Letters had been going back and forth between parties for the past six months, and finally on 13 June a tentative production schedule was again drawn up, with Marilyn due on set from 27 July to 19 August. She returned to New York and once there held various meetings with her lawyer Aaron Frosch and NBC. She also met writer Rod Serling at her East 57th Street apartment, where they spoke about the script until the early hours. The meeting went well but Serling was furious to discover later that Marilyn was privately rehearsing a 1923 version of the play, and not the one he had written himself.

As a result of a meeting with Lee Strasberg on 21 June, Marilyn decided that he should get more control of the project and on 26 June told NBC of her plan. It was rejected immediately. However, on 27 June it was decided that Marilyn would only sign for
Rain
if she could have Richard Burton as a co-star and George Hill as director. Once again NBC refused and wrote to Marilyn to inform her of its decision to cancel the project completely.

Marilyn was disappointed but executive producer Ann Marlowe was even more so. She immediately wired the actress, declaring: ‘I would like to again offer you ‘Rain’ for television . . . Lee Strasberg told me you were a superb Sadie Thompson.’
The telegram didn’t work, however, as Marilyn replied saying she would only consider the project if Lee Strasberg was hired as the director, a request that nobody wanted to fulfil.

On 28 June the entire correspondence was filed away, with Marilyn’s representatives noting that unless something new was to occur, ‘this is the kiss-off’. A statement was prepared which said that Marilyn had been advised not to take part in the programme and later that day she was rushed to Polyclinic hospital suffering from what her spokesman described as ‘a mild intestinal disorder’. However, it was quickly determined that there was much more to her pain than that, and a two-hour operation was performed on the evening of 29 June to remove the entire gall bladder.

The operation was a success, though Marilyn was in some considerable discomfort, especially after her departure from the hospital: ‘Right after I had my gall bladder operation the crowds in the street pushed at me so hard that it opened up the incision again,’ she said. She required a great deal of convalescence on her return to 57th Street, but Joe DiMaggio was on hand and Marilyn’s sister, Berniece, travelled from Florida to look after her, sleeping in what was once Arthur Miller’s study, helping around the house and walking Marilyn’s new dog, Maf, a present from Frank Sinatra. But something was troubling Marilyn, and Berniece became worried not only about her intake of prescription pills, but also by the problems she continually seemed to encounter.

There were worries about money; anxiety over the will she had signed in January (but apparently disapproved of); concern for her career; and stress over the letters of complaint she was receiving from her mother, Gladys, who continued to live at Rockhaven Sanitarium.

Perhaps with her mind on family connections and relationships, Marilyn invited her friend from Florida, Lynn Pupello, to stay with her during the summer. To the young woman Marilyn told something she would never forget: ‘She said that if she could pick out someone to be her daughter that it would be
me; she liked the fact that I was a professional writer on an important newspaper; someone interested in and knowledgeable about archaeology, art history, architecture, film, theatre, literature and fine arts. She talked to me for hours about how depressed she was about her divorce [but also] talked about moving back to LA, so she gave me some of her nightgowns and jewellery, which she said I should wear whenever the time came later in life to marry.’

Other erstwhile close relationships came to the fore when, together with Ralph Roberts and Berniece Miracle, Marilyn travelled to Roxbury in order to sort out some personal items which had been overlooked during the separation and divorce. Marilyn seemed in good spirits, introducing her new dog Maf to her old love Hugo. She smiled continually as if the whole meeting had been well rehearsed. She was even cordial to Miller, and while he asked about her health and poured her a cup of tea, she took delight in showing him her gall-bladder scar, as if to prove the point that she really had been ill all those years.