Marilyn Monroe (66 page)

When Marilyn was able to go out again, her masseur, Ralph Roberts, carried a favorite chair of Arthur’s down to a station wagon. He also loaded two beds from the guest room, and drove the sisters to Connecticut. Marilyn wanted Berniece to see the white colonial farmhouse on Tophet Road. Roxbury was another world from the life Marilyn had re-entered with Sinatra. She was immensely proud of the improvements she had made to the property. She pointed out the dormer windows, the room she’d added over the kitchen. Sadly, Marilyn had never lived in the finished house, as the carpenters had hammered in the last nail as
The Misfits
was being completed. She loved the old place. Yet she had signed it over to Arthur, insisting that that seemed appropriate.

In the sunroom, Arthur served the two women tea. He puffed on his pipe. After four years of Marilyn Monroe, he craved stability. Friends knew of his happy relationship with Inge.
The Misfits
had been a critical and commercial disappointment, and he had recently sold a number of his manuscripts in order to pay taxes. He was under pressure to come up with a new play for Kazan to direct at Lincoln Center. Yet he indicated that he was not actually writing at the moment, just thinking a lot.

In the distance, Maf and Hugo played together, darting past Arthur’s studio on the way to the pond. The sight encapsulated the recent changes in Marilyn’s life. Maf, small and light, was portable. The miniature poodle could easily be taken on an airplane. Evidently, that’s the sort of existence Sinatra saw Marilyn as having from now on. Hugo,
long and heavy, was very much a house dog. Marilyn had loved and fretted over the basset hound. She had searched for him when he wandered off. She had fed him brandy when he seemed depressed. But Hugo was Arthur’s now. Roxbury was his home.

Marilyn collected some cheap glasses, and took a television set from the second floor. As she picked up an old coat she’d left behind, an unfamiliar perfume filled her nostrils. When Marilyn first came to Roxbury in 1956, she had taken possession of another woman’s house. Mary Miller had not actually been there, of course, but her traces were everywhere. Now, Marilyn realized that a new woman had come onto the scene. Upset, she threw the coat in the trash.

On August 8, she returned to Hollywood. Though she kept her rented Manhattan apartment, her base of operations shifted. As Norman Rosten perceived, she went back because she had nowhere else to go. She stayed temporarily in Sinatra’s Los Angeles house, while he was in Europe, and during that time she learned about a vacancy in the small, white apartment house on Doheny, where she used to live. On one side lived Sinatra’s secretary; on the other was an apartment Frank kept for his personal use. Marilyn signed a lease and prepared to move into the tiny apartment. The gesture, like scratching out the images of herself and Arthur in the
Misfits
contact sheets, appeared to be an attempt to revise the past. As Marilyn re-entered the iron-gated courtyard lined with black-enameled doors, it was almost as though she had never left. In her desperation, perhaps it seemed less painful to pretend that her lost dreams of the years in New York had never existed at all.

Marilyn’s stated reason for moving to California was that she owed Twentieth a film. But she hated the studio. The great victory her contract had once represented meant nothing to her now. If she had triumphed over Twentieth in December 1955, she had long ago lost the upper hand. By and large, Marilyn was treated less respectfully there than ever. The general perception at the studio was that her money-making days were grinding to a halt as she moved into her late thirties, prematurely aged by drugs, drink, and pain.

Taking more drugs and drinking more heavily than she ever had in the past, Marilyn seemed to be chasing death. Yet, after a lifetime of struggle against Gladys’s judgment, part of her still refused to give up. The war between Marilyn’s will to live and her desire to die had always
been intense. Though the latter seemed more powerful at the moment, Marilyn’s decision to seek help from Dr. Greenson suggested a wish that she might yet survive. In the months that followed, the psychiatrist would become Marilyn’s lifeline, the single most important force connecting her to the possibility of going on.

Ralph Greenson kept a rowboat in his swimming pool, and there he liked to sit for hours. He fondly referred to the spot as Lake Greenson. The gentle, hypnotic rocking motion put him at peace. Roses and camellias scented the air. He read. He meditated. Sometimes he smoked a cigar.

Greenson was fifty on September 20. He saw the day as a turning point. A heart attack six years previously had left Greenson acutely aware of his own mortality. He told Anna Freud that he did not really feel older; he felt more serious. He viewed time as precious and longed to concentrate on his own creative work. He was in the throes of writing
The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis
, and had just completed a 105-page chapter on resistance. He was about to begin a chapter on transference: the transfer of feelings about a person in the past to someone in the present. Anticipating that this chapter would be even longer than the previous one, he was eager to confer with his publisher on the east coast.

Greenson, determined to finish his book by the end of the academic year, worried about devoting too many hours to patients. He resigned as dean of the training school and chairman of the education committee at the Los Angeles Institute for Psychoanalysis. He also limited his professional activities. He was weary of meetings. He was weary of speaking and of delivering papers to groups of psychoanalysts. Though he had long been active in the American Psychoanalytical Association, he planned not to attend this year’s midwinter meeting. His time, he declared, would be better spent writing.

Yet he did not hesitate to take responsibility for Marilyn’s treatment. Greenson, for all his stridency, was a decent, compassionate man. He liked Marilyn and sincerely wanted to help. He recognized that she was painfully alone in the world, and admitted he had a weakness for damsels in distress. He hoped he might be able to defeat what he saw as
the destructive forces life had stirred up in her. He believed he might actually learn something in the process. Still, at a moment when Greenson was very much clearing his plate, he remained ambivalent. From the first, Marilyn was exceptionally demanding of his time and emotions. He had to improvise, since Marilyn, as he told Anna Freud, was too sick to begin psychoanalysis.

His task was not made easier by the Lawfords’ return from Europe. Her visits to their house often seemed to undo everything the doctor hoped to achieve. Soon after they arrived back in Los Angeles, they invited Marilyn to a dinner party in honor of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy on October 4, 1961. Kennedy planned to be in town to confer with local law-enforcement officials about mob activity in Los Angeles, as part of the Justice Department’s crackdown on organized crime.

The dinner would be Marilyn’s first chance to meet one of the Kennedy brothers, and she intended to make herself the center of attention. She gave her dressmaker precise instructions for the dress she wanted to wear that night. Marilyn saw herself in a slim, floor-length column of black that would set off the whiteness of her skin. But it was the top of the dress that was to be its most strategic component. For the strapless bodice, she selected an openwork fabric of black eyelet that would permit her bare nipples to stick out. Marilyn, giggling wickedly, described her plan: At the dinner table, she would make sure the President’s younger brother noticed as she casually played with the hair on her exposed left nipple.

This was the sort of self-destructive behavior Dr. Greenson was then fighting to persuade Marilyn to stop. She certainly didn’t have to do this sort of thing anymore to attract attention. Marilyn had once worked hard never again to have to do anything she was ashamed of. Yet, self-loathing as she now was, she seemed intent on degrading and punishing herself. She acted in this manner precisely because she believed it was wrong. It was as though Marilyn were trying to prove—to others and to herself—why her dreams had failed. Once, in a more hopeful time, it had meant everything to her to make sex appear innocent and fun. That had been the basis of her immense appeal. But that refreshing innocence no longer reflected how she felt, or even hoped to feel, about herself.

According to plan, on the evening of October 4 Marilyn arrived at the Lawfords’ in her new peekaboo dress. One of Marilyn’s proudest
hours had been her behavior during Arthur’s political troubles, and now again she found herself in a political context. Clearly distressed, Marilyn proceeded to get more and more drunk. The brave, dignified person she had been five years previously had vanished. By the end of the evening, it became obvious that she was in no condition to get home by herself. Kennedy and his press aide, Edwin Guthman, offered to drive her back.

At Doheny, Kennedy and Guthman carried Marilyn into her apartment. A queen-sized bed with a hideous electric-blue cover dominated the tiny, dark, depressing living room. Marilyn was on the point of passing out, so the men put her into bed, leaving her there to sleep it off. Guthman would later remember that both he and Bobby found her sweet that night—and very, very sad.

On October 16, Twentieth assigned Marilyn to be directed by George Cukor in
Something’s Got to Give
, a remake of the 1939 Irene Dunne comedy
My Favorite Wife.
The notice triggered what her doctor characterized as a severe depressive and paranoid reaction. After
Let’s Make Love
, Marilyn was convinced that Cukor had it in for her. She spoke of abandoning motion pictures altogether. She threatened to take her own life. Greenson believed she was potentially suicidal. She needed to be detoxified again. In light of the Payne–Whitney episode, however, he was wary of institutionalizing her. So he put her under round-the-clock nurses’ care in her apartment. The living room became Marilyn’s hospital, with heavy, blue, triple-lined curtains blocking out the sunlight.

If Marilyn was in turmoil, so was the studio that had ordered her back to work. Twentieth was no longer the great company Darryl Zanuck took pride in having built. It didn’t make great pictures anymore, and it certainly didn’t make money. In 1961 alone, Fox would lose more than $22 million. Much of that could be attributed to the deeply troubled production of
Cleopatra
in Rome. Skouras was the subject of a good deal of speculation. He was said to be gravely ill. He was said to be seeking a scapegoat for the studio’s operating losses. He was said to have been implored by Jerry Wald, George Stevens, and other Fox veterans to bring back his old adversary Zanuck as production chief. He was said to have been given an ultimatum by his enemies on the board to step down. But there were also those at Twentieth who believed that if
Cleopatra
were ready in time for the May stockholders’ meeting, Skouras might yet save his job.

On October 26, Fox executives met with the attorney Mickey Rudin about a proposed contract for his client Frank Sinatra. The studio contingent included the new production chief, Peter Levathes. Levathes, once thought of as Skouras’s protégé, was rumored to be a candidate for his mentor’s job. As the meeting drew to a close, Rudin made a surprise move. He brought up “the Monroe problem.” Rudin, as it happened, was married to Ralph Greenson’s sister. Greenson, concerned about Marilyn, had asked Rudin to get involved. The doctor believed it was in Marilyn’s interest to do the picture and get out from under the burden of her Fox contract.

Rudin cut to the heart of the matter. He suggested that Marilyn’s problem with Twentieth was psychological. It was not simply how much she was being paid or what approvals she had in her contract—though naturally he was very much concerned with these issues—but how Marilyn felt about her treatment by the studio. He emphasized the importance of their taking her opinion seriously. He urged them to come up with an arrangement that would permit Marilyn to feel that she had a degree of control over her work. For the first time in Marilyn’s tumultuous saga at Twentieth Century–Fox, someone had articulated what the fight had always been about. Charlie Feldman, for all his expert negotiations, had never understood that money meant little to Marilyn. He never saw that what really fueled her was a desire for respect. Rudin, with the benefit of his brother-in-law’s insights into her personality, had finally made that point clear. Twentieth might have everything in its favor legally and still not get a picture. Marilyn had to feel that she was being treated with dignity.

Rudin also dropped the bombshell that he knew Twentieth did not yet have a contract with Cukor when Marilyn was summoned. When Cukor was mentioned for
Something’s Got to Give
, Twentieth knew that he might be busy at Warner’s on
The Chapman Report
until as late as December 26, more than a month after the date by which Twentieth had to call Marilyn back to work. Her contract did not, however, require the studio to begin principal photography by then. So, rather than risk the last picture she owed, Twentieth decided to keep her on salary as long as Cukor took to finish
The Chapman Report.
The studio and the director came to terms verbally, but Cukor had yet to sign. The technicality—and that’s all it was—provided grounds to contend that Marilyn was no
longer under contract. Rudin made clear he had no interest in pursuing this avenue but would do so if Twentieth failed to consider his suggestions.