Marilyn Monroe (68 page)

Marilyn flew to New York. She conferred with Lee Strasberg about
Something’s Got to Give.
While Johnson finished the script, she planned to go to Mexico in search of furniture and art for her new home. She seemed to be feeling pretty good about herself. Then she heard something that plunged her into despair. Arthur was to be married on February 17. Apparently, only a few people had been invited. The ceremony was to take place in a model home in New Milford, Connecticut, part of a development built by his cousin Morty. Arthur and Inge had been travelling in Europe together. She was now two months pregnant.

Marilyn fired off a telegram to Miami Beach, asking Isadore to meet her at the Eastern Airlines terminal that very evening. When she arrived, it was evident that he did not know his son’s plans. They dined at the Fountainbleau and took in a show at the Sea Isle. They strolled crowded Collins Avenue, her arm locked tightly in his. On Saturday, Marilyn took Isadore and a few of his friends to dinner. Afterward, she arranged to be alone with him in her suite at the Fountainbleau. They’d been sitting comfortably for a while when she disclosed that Arthur was getting married today. Marilyn, realizing the old man was upset, added that a letter must be on the way. She was there to comfort Isadore. She was there to seek comfort. But in spending the evening with Arthur’s father, she was also inserting herself, however indirectly, into his wedding.

Four days later, Joe, then at the Yankee training camp, escorted Marilyn to Miami International Airport for her flight to Mexico. By the time she came home on March 2, she was in dreadful shape again. Only a few weeks before, buying and decorating her own house was supposed to have marked the start of a new life. In the aftermath of Arthur’s marriage, her attitude changed. Marilyn swallowed too many pills the night before she was to leave Mexico. At the airport, she had liquor on her breath. As she made her way to the plane, she could barely walk straight.

She was still unsteady on her feet three days later at the Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles. She arrived drunk, a Mexican lover in tow. She wore a backless, green beaded gown. When it was time to collect a gold statuette as the World’s Favorite Female Star, she could scarcely get to the podium. Her acceptance speech was boozy and indistinct. The sight of her like this at a major industry event led some people to say Marilyn was finished. Yet the next afternoon, she kept an
appointment with Peter Levathes at Fox. After the Golden Globes, the production chief had reason to be concerned. He asked if she was “with us.”

“I guess I’m reporting back,” Marilyn replied.

It was hardly an enthusiastic statement, but as far as Frank Ferguson was concerned, it meant that on March 6 Marilyn Monroe had reported ready, willing, and able to work. It meant that she had agreed to do
Something’s Got to Give.
At least, everyone at Twentieth hoped it did. Just to be sure, studio wardrobe people were sent to Marilyn’s apartment. They took her measurements so a form could be made to create her costumes. Marilyn seemed cooperative. But was she in any condition to work? The studio attorney, for his part, viewed the situation as precarious.

Under the circumstances, Dr. Greenson had to rethink his own plans. Before Marilyn’s calamitous trip to New York, he had been looking forward to a trip of his own. In the spring, Hildi intended to visit her mother, who had recently suffered a mild stroke, in Switzerland. The Greensons hoped to do a bit of traveling in Europe together. On the way back, he planned to stop off in New York to see his publisher.

Two days after the Golden Globes, however, he was not sure he should leave. Hildi had to go in any event. He still very much wanted to meet her there, but whether that could be arranged was another matter. Greenson, having diagnosed Marilyn as a borderline personality, was well aware of her fears of abandonment. Though his reasons for going abroad had nothing to do with her, how would she react to his departure? Her dependence seemed to have intensified. Marilyn had transferred certain of her feelings about her former husband to her doctor. Now it was Greenson whom she idealized and cast in the role of savior. Coming on top of Arthur’s marriage, Greenson’s departure could prove devastating.

He kept changing his mind. Now he planned to go, now he did not. The trip seemed to be on again after Marilyn reacted favorably to Johnson’s script. She stipulated that it needed additional comedy. Otherwise, she was quite pleased. Greenson had reason to think everything was finally going to be all right. On March 21, he seemed utterly confident that he would be able to get away. Hildi was to leave in the middle of April. He intended to follow in May. He particularly looked forward to seeing Anna Freud in London.

Three days later, Marilyn turned up at her doctor’s home. It was
early Saturday morning, long before she customarily awakened. A water heater was being installed in her house, and the plumber had informed her that there would be no hot water for thirty minutes. Marilyn wanted to wash her hair at the Greensons’. Greenson was happy to accommodate her, but bemused as to why she was up so early, and in such a rush. She told him that Peter Lawford was coming to pick her up to take her to Palm Springs.

President Kennedy was spending the weekend there, though not at the Sinatra compound, since in his brother’s view it would be inappropriate for the President to accept Sinatra’s hospitality at a moment when the Justice Department was engaged in a crackdown on organized crime. Sinatra, informed by a nervous Lawford that Chicky Boy would not be his guest after all, flew into a temper and wrecked his new concrete helicopter pad with a sledgehammer. Lawford, in the meantime, drove Marilyn to Bing Crosby’s house, where it had been arranged for Kennedy to stay instead. She spent the night in the President’s quarters.

If Marilyn wanted to prevent Dr. Greenson from “abandoning” her, she could hardly have come up with a more effective scenario. The desert weekend was precisely the sort of situation that set off alarm bells, concerned as Greenson was about her being hurt and exploited. And that may have been very much Marilyn’s intention, in choosing Greenson’s house to wash her hair on Saturday morning before she left. She may have been playing the happy girl, but whether consciously or not she was letting her doctor know she was in trouble. Indeed, he was soon lamenting to Anna Freud that he was no longer certain he could break free.

He had reason to be worried. Marilyn, from the start, regarded her relationship with Jack Kennedy as a good deal more serious than it actually was. “Well, it wasn’t a big thing as far as he was concerned,” said Senator George Smathers of his close friend’s involvement with Marilyn. According to Smathers, Marilyn was “like a lot of the pretty girls who had fallen very much in love with the Kennedys just by being around him a little bit.” But Marilyn wasn’t like most other women. She had known the most extravagant of her fantasies to come true. On the basis of only a few days’ acquaintance in 1951, she had captured Arthur Miller’s imagination, and eventually the great writer had left his wife for her. Now, she
seemed to assume she’d have a similar effect on the President. Therein lay the seed of disaster.

Arthur and Inge, who had been on honeymoon in Europe, came home on April 10. That night, Marilyn could not sleep. Her house was empty, the furniture and art not yet having arrived from Mexico. The living room had a chair and a low coffee table. Maf, never properly housebroken, had already stained the new white carpet. In the kitchen, cabinets, fixtures, and wiring were in the process of being ripped out. According to a nightly ritual, two phones, one white, the other pink, both with long cords, had been smothered with pillows in a guest bedroom. Shopping bags, a record player, and records littered the floor in Marilyn’s own bedroom. Marilyn once told Dr. Greenson that she did not know what nights were for. On this particular night, she tried Nembutal. She tried Librium. She tried Demerol. She tried chloral hydrate.

A studio limousine came for her in the morning. The house, which had barred windows in front, looked deserted. No one answered the door. Afterward, Greenson discovered Marilyn, under her white satin comforter, in a drug coma.

Two days later, she flew to New York to confer with Strasberg. She and Cukor were already at odds, the director having brought in yet another writer. Marilyn had agreed to do
Something’s Got to Give
strictly on the basis of Johnson’s draft. Her only stipulation had been that it needed some funnier lines and more comical situations. Strasberg concurred. Cukor and his writer Walter Bernstein pressed ahead anyway, and some forty blue pages of changes materialized. Marilyn found them unacceptable. Nunnally Johnson, she believed, had written first-rate “Marilyn Monroe.” The rewrite, in her view, failed to accomplish that.

Marilyn declared she could not do the part as it had been revised. She was to play a wife believed to have been dead for seven years. She objected to the character’s going after her husband when he remarries. Marilyn preferred to encounter him by chance. “Marilyn Monroe” would never pursue a man, she insisted; men pursue “Marilyn.” There was some puzzlement about Marilyn’s speaking of herself in the third person. Of course, she wasn’t really. She was talking about a comical character she had created, much as Charles Chaplin might have talked about the Tramp. It was the character Billy Wilder had once urged her not to
abandon. At the time, she had rejected Wilder’s suggestion. Now, she seemed to have had second thoughts.

Though Marilyn did not have script approval, Rudin informed Levathes that she would film only those portions to which she had no objection. So before the picture even began, Marilyn and Cukor were at war. At times, Cukor insisted that he liked Marilyn. But the fact was he loathed her. He described her as erratic, inconsiderate, ruthless, tough, and willful. In speaking of her, Cukor used language that, said Nunnally Johnson, “would have brought a blush to Sophie Tucker’s cheeks.”

Suddenly, there were hints that Marilyn might not do the film after all. Rudin revived the claim that she was no longer under contract, since Cukor had not signed in time. The lawyer insisted that if Marilyn appeared in
Something’s Got to Give
, it was merely in an effort to compromise. Far more alarming to Twentieth was her lawyer’s refusal to bill the studio for Marilyn’s services. Ostensibly, she preferred to be paid in a lump sum, along with the bonus Levathes had discussed. But there were fears that the real reason was to avoid compromising the claim, should Rudin decide to press it, that her contract had expired.

Cukor started shooting on Monday, April 23. The night before, he received word that Marilyn would be unable to work. Apparently, she had caught a cold from Lee Strasberg. Rudin told Levathes that she had a fever. She failed to come in for the rest of the week. Cukor, forced to shoot without her, was exasperated.

So was Dr. Greenson. He adored Marilyn. He sincerely wanted to lessen her pain. At the same time, as he never tired of pointing out, he was only human. She’d exhausted him. He craved peace and relaxation, and needed a vacation for his health. His wife’s departure had been delayed until May 1, and he wanted to meet her in Rome on the 10th. He had been invited to Jerusalem to deliver a paper on transference, a subject with which he’d had a good deal of experience lately. He longed to visit some of the Greek islands. He longed to spend some quiet time with his Swiss in-laws. Yet, as he growled to Anna Freud, there would be uncertainty about his trip until he left.

On the eve of the second week of filming, Greenson reviewed the situation for Anna Freud. Marilyn was either teetering on the edge of establishing her independence, or of regressing and wrecking his vacation. He insisted Marilyn would probably succeed in living without him.
But, he said, probably only half in jest, he wasn’t sure he himself would survive the turmoil. Thus the analyst expressed his fear that Marilyn—a borderline personality, after all—might react to his departure with a suicide attempt. Greenson desperately wanted to believe that she was no more likely to die as a result of his trip than he was. But he was aware that might not be true. He was overwhelmed by the responsibility and more than a little resentful.

Marilyn wanted to please her doctor. She could never bear to leave matters between them unresolved. On Monday, April 30, she arrived at the studio twenty-five minutes early for a 6:30 a.m. makeup call. She worked until 4 p.m. It was a different story the next day, however—the day Hildi left for Switzerland. Marilyn, upset by the prospect of Greenson’s following his wife to Europe, could hardly work. Thirty minutes after she arrived at Twentieth, she collapsed and had to be taken home. She called in sick for the rest of the week.

On the night of Sunday, May 6, Marilyn notified the studio that she couldn’t come in on Monday morning. By that time, Cukor had run out of material to shoot without her. He closed down the production, resuming on Wednesday with a bit of location work. Greenson, due to leave the next day, could put off a decision no more. After months of intense daily contact with Marilyn, he believed he had earned a rest. After months of storm and stress, he was even looking forward to a little boredom. Perhaps he told himself that if he did go, Marilyn’s reason for staying in bed would vanish. On Thursday, May 10, Greenson flew to Europe, leaving Marilyn in the care of an associate. It was a decision he would never entirely forgive himself for having made.

SEVENTEEN