Marilyn Monroe (71 page)

In the middle of all this, Marilyn had a call from Milton Greene. Their partnership had ended badly, but Marilyn was thrilled to hear from him. She and Greene talked for some ninety minutes. They shared a sense of disappointment. Marilyn, a wonderful light comedienne, longed to do serious roles. Greene, a gifted photographer, dreamed of being a film producer. Neither seemed to value what he or she could actually do so well. Perhaps, as Biff Loman says of his father Willy at the end of
Death of a Salesman
, they had “the wrong dreams.” Marilyn reviewed her circumstances. She said it was as though the past ten years had never happened. She said she was right back to where she didn’t want to be.

On July 12, Marilyn returned to Twentieth. Fifteen out of its sixteen sound stages were dark. Twentieth, eerily deserted, resembled a ghost town. A single picture,
A Woman in July
, was in production.

The classic studio era had come to an end. Time had passed Twentieth by. While in recent years other major companies had concentrated on the distribution of independently produced films, Twentieth had struggled to go on producing most of its own pictures. Competitors called Skouras a dinosaur from the pre-television period. In a sign of the times, the day before Marilyn came in, Levathes had announced plans to modernize by renting space to independent film and television producers.

But the current administration did very much want to resume
Something’s Got to Give.
George Cukor was off the film, having agreed in the interim to direct Audrey Hepburn in
My Fair Lady
for Warner Bros. It was a break for Cukor, whose career had been waning. He certainly had no complaint about missing a chance to be reunited with Marilyn.

The studio brought in Jean Negulesco to direct a mildly revised version of Nunnally Johnson’s script. On the face of it, she seemed to
have won. But that was hardly the case in view of the numerous conditions she was required to accept. Once Twentieth had her signature, it could change its mind about Negulesco. It could substitute a different screenplay. It could do almost anything and Marilyn would be powerless to object. As she told Milton Greene, Marilyn Monroe Productions might never have existed.

Twentieth persisted in demanding an apology. Marilyn knew that if she didn’t do the picture, she would be sued. So she agreed to go in sackcloth and ashes. One might have thought the studio, eager not to lose a $2 million investment, would leave matters at that. But this wasn’t strictly about money. It was about looking tough. It was about machismo and menace. It was about bringing a recalcitrant star to her knees.

Jack Brodsky, in the New York office, was asked “very confidentially” to draft Marilyn’s apology. Even if the words weren’t her own, at least they’d be the right words. The publicist crafted a mild document that permitted Marilyn to save face. The studio, displeased, removed Brodsky from the assignment. Clearly, the intent was to humiliate her. A leak was given to
Time
magazine: “No public apology, no Marilyn.”

Meanwhile, something unexpected happened. Skouras threw his chips in with Zanuck. And those chips were valuable indeed, Skouras holding some 98,000 shares of Fox stock. Suddenly, the presidency seemed very much within reach for Zanuck, who had approximately 110,000 shares of his own. It was a curious alliance, there being no love lost between the men once known as New York and the Coast. More than anything, the Old Greek wanted to frustrate the board members who had toppled him.

And so he did. After Zanuck became president on the 25th, two prominent enemies of Skouras resigned. Skouras was appointed board chairman. “I believe the president of a motion picture company today should be its production head as well as its administrative head,” Zanuck said. His election put everything at Fox on hold—including Marilyn Monroe’s talks with the previous administration. Zanuck evicted Skouras. Out went the slab-like marble desk, the beige club chairs, and the gallery of family photographs. Skouras’s office became the new boardroom. A broken man, he moved to humbler quarters near the elevators.

Many people believed it was Zanuck who had once made
Twentieth great. Some studio veterans predicted (erroneously) that he would usher in “a new Golden Age.” For Marilyn, he had no such happy associations. He had never liked her. He’d always treated her disrespectfully. He’d once threatened to destroy her. Zanuck, complaining about the power of stars and their agents, had left in 1956 as Marilyn was about to start
Bus Stop
, new contract in hand. Now that she seemed to have lost everything, Zanuck was back. The timing may have been coincidental, but it was ominous all the same.

The day Zanuck became president, Marilyn had two sessions with Dr. Greenson, one in his office, the other at her home. Dr. Engelberg sedated her by injection. Greenson, hoping to wean Marilyn off drugs, had appointed the Beverly Hills internist to supervise her medication. In the light of her history of suicide attempts, the doctors had an arrangement. If in addition to an injection Engelberg prescribed Nembutal, he would inform Greenson. Since the analyst had returned from Europe, he’d seen Marilyn almost daily. She was constantly on the phone to him. It was not unusual for her to call in the middle of the night, often at 2, 3, and 4 a.m.

Marilyn also phoned Bobby Kennedy a good deal in this period. Unlike the President, he almost always took her calls. For Marilyn, it was a way of maintaining a Kennedy connection despite the President’s decision to cut her off. Besides, the Attorney General had a reputation for being “a good shoulder to cry on.” Marilyn wasn’t the only Hollywood actress to reach out to him. Judy Garland often phoned, Edwin Guthman recalled, “just to have someone to talk to.” When Bobby was unavailable, Marilyn chatted with his secretary, Angie Novello. On several occasions she talked to his wife, Ethel. At the time of her firing, Marilyn had declined an invitation to a party for the Lawfords at Hickory Hill, Bobby and Ethel’s estate near McLean, Virginia. Since then, Bobby had seen Marilyn at a dinner party at the Lawfords’ on June 26. At her request, he had stopped by to inspect her new home the following day. He knew firsthand that she was on edge.

Marilyn was often enraged at others, and at herself. She knew what she wanted. But she also knew she had done much to sabotage her own dreams. In a telling gesture, when the nudes she had drunkenly posed for at the Bel Air Hotel were sent for her approval, she slashed the color transparencies with a hairpin.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Greenson insisted that Marilyn was much better. This may have been his way of dealing with the guilt of knowing that his absence had led to her dismissal. It may also have been a way of reassuring himself that she would eventually improve, freeing him from being on call seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, indefinitely. He saw himself as the prisoner of a method of treatment that, however necessary for Marilyn, had proven nearly impossible for him. Marilyn, sensing his need to see improvement, may sometimes have pretended to be getting better. She was an actress, after all. She knew how to play a happy girl, even with her doctor. The important thing was not to be left.

There was a very real threat that might happen again soon. Greenson planned to go away as early as next month. When he interrupted his vacation, he had canceled a stop in New York to see his publisher. Now, he intended to go east sometime in August, September or October. Work on
The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis
proceeded slowly, as so much of his time and emotion was devoted to Marilyn. Greenson wanted to coordinate his travel plans with Anna Freud. His mentor was about to come to the United States, and he hoped to be invited to join her at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka.

As August began, the central drama of Marilyn’s life was being played out with her analyst. Her other saviors had abdicated in one way or another. Though he wanted to direct her in
Macbeth
at the new Actors Studio Theater, Lee Strasberg, Marilyn believed, had ceased to pay enough attention to her. Miller, of course, had a new wife and was soon to be a father. Joe DiMaggio was away on business. So Greenson was all Marilyn had left. On Saturday, August 4, he had a call from her at approximately 4:30 in the afternoon. Dr. and Mrs. Greenson were going out that night. Still, Marilyn sounded depressed, so he agreed to visit her at home.

There was something he did not know. One day previously, on August 3, when Engelberg came to sedate her, she lied that Greenson had approved her being given some Nembutal. Assuming he was acting on instructions from Greenson, Engelberg neglected to tell his colleague about the prescription he gave Marilyn for twenty-five capsules. Marilyn had it filled immediately. On Saturday, when Greenson arrived, she had enough drugs in the house to take her own life.

The rooms at Fifth Helena remained bare; the pieces Marilyn ordered in Mexico had never been delivered. A
Cosmopolitan
photographer who’d recently worked with her had preferred not to shoot in her home because, with so little furniture, the place had a depressing air. Marilyn had spent much of Saturday in bed. Lately, she had been reading the book
Captain Newman, M.D.
, a thinly fictionalized account of Ralph Greenson’s World War II experiences. The rickety wooden night table overflowed with plastic pill bottles, though the Nembutals were nowhere in sight. Shopping bags and dirty clothes littered the floor.

Greenson conferred with Marilyn in her room, while Eunice Murray and Pat Newcomb waited in the living room. Marilyn struck him as despondent and disoriented. Once, perhaps twice, the doctor, absorbed in thought, wandered out into the hall. Greenson was quite tense himself, for reasons having nothing to do with Marilyn. He was trying to give up smoking.

It was certainly a bad sign that Marilyn had failed to take Isadore Miller’s call on Saturday morning. She was invited to dinner at Peter Lawford’s that evening, but she was in no shape to go. The previous day she’d asked her publicist, who had bronchitis, to stay in the spare room. But the fact that her guest slept soundly until noon seemed to enrage Marilyn, who had lain awake all night. As was frequently the case, Marilyn’s anger was irrational. Still, in the interest of peace, Greenson asked Newcomb to leave. He arranged for the housekeeper to stay instead.

After Greenson had been there for about two and a half hours, Marilyn did seem calmer. Inevitably, the moment approached when he would have to go home and change for his dinner party. He left at seven, telling Marilyn to call when she got up in the morning. Greenson, mindful of her fears of abandonment, reassured her that he’d be available again in a few hours.

Marilyn couldn’t wait that long. She appeared to focus all of her anxiety about his impending trip east on the prospect of his being out of reach this evening. She seized the first opportunity to connect with him again. Hardly had Greenson arrived home when the phone rang. It was approximately 7:40 and he was shaving. Marilyn excitedly announced that Joe DiMaggio’s son had just called. Joe, Jr., serving in the Marine Corps, was stationed in San Diego. She assumed Greenson would want to know he’d broken off his engagement.

“Isn’t that great?” asked Marilyn, who believed that Joe, Jr., at twenty-one, was too young to settle down. Her high spirits contrasted with the bleak mood Greenson had observed less than an hour ago. She would have known a tearful call would irritate him after he’d just spent a good deal of time with her. The news about Joe, Jr. offered a pretext to talk happily, as though that were what this desperate call were really about. Marilyn did, however, provide one important clue to what was on her mind, though Greenson failed to notice at the time.

“Did you take away my bottle of Nembutal?” Marilyn asked. The question signaled two things. She was informing him that she had a supply of the dangerous barbiturate, and she was warning that she intended to use it. Greenson, unaware of the prescription, assumed she must be mistaken. As far as he knew, Marilyn couldn’t possibly have any Nembutals in the house.

By the time Marilyn’s phone rang about twenty minutes later, she may already have begun to swallow the yellow capsules. When she was finished, the Nembutal bottle would be empty. And only ten green chloral hydrate capsules would remain in a container that held fifty.

Why did Marilyn take an overdose? A. Alvarez has compared the triggering event in certain suicides to “a trivial border incident which triggers off a major war.” The event may seem insignificant to us, but not to the person in pain. One can never know exactly why someone takes her own life. In Marilyn’s case, the triggering event, the specific incident that pushed her over the edge, seems to have been nothing more than her doctor’s having gone to a dinner party with his wife. Earlier, Marilyn had been frantic at the prospect. By now, it would have become a life-and-death matter, his absence on a par with all the abandonments she had suffered, beginning with her father. Perhaps she thought she would punish Greenson for having left her tonight. Perhaps she thought she could force him to return. Perhaps she thought that, as others had done, he’d rescue her before it was too late.

Marilyn picked up the phone. It was Peter Lawford calling about dinner.

“Hey, Charlie,” he asked, “what’s happened to you?”

The party was already under way. Lawford’s pals chattered in the background. Marilyn, in a dozy voice, said she couldn’t come. He’d heard
her like this before. Her thick, halting speech meant she was drunk or drugged, perhaps both. No matter; she’d be perfectly welcome like that. He shouted into the receiver, hoping to revive her.

Then she said something that brought him up short. Lawford had a hard time hearing over the din at the beach house, but he was sure Marilyn said, “Say goodbye to Pat. Say goodbye to Jack. And say goodbye to yourself because you’re a nice guy.” Silence followed. Had she fallen asleep? Had the receiver slipped out of her hand to the white rug? Had she hung up? Had the phone gone dead? Lawford called back repeatedly. Confronted with a busy signal, he couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that Marilyn had just said goodbye.