Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (57 page)

*    *    *

As the year drew to an end, there was a major snowfall in New York and wild flurries of activity in the offices of Milton Greene and of his attorneys. For one thing, Frank Delaney left the services of Milton and MMP when he sensed Marilyn’s inexplicable loss of confidence in him. Irving Stein added Delaney’s duties to his own.

On another issue, Marilyn’s occasional hairdresser Peter Leonardi falsely claimed that she and Milton had promised to set him up in business at his own salon; he brought the matter to deposition and then foolishly tried to bribe a settlement out of court by taking as hostage several of Marilyn’s fur coats. Irving Stein’s corporate notes from October 6 through November 9, when the matter was resolved, record significantly that the entire matter—more reminiscent of a Feydeau farce than a serious corporation—was to have been adjudicated not by attorneys or police, but by Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hohenberg. Stein referred to her in his notes as “Marilyn’s psycho.”

The influence of Dr. Hohenberg on the day-to-day decisions of Marilyn’s business life seems to have grown like Topsy: “Milton telephoned to say the psychiatrist vetoed Marilyn’s seeing Peter [Leonardi] . . . and that Marilyn should not submit to the demands of everyone who insisted upon seeing her.” Why it should have been necessary for Greene or anyone else to obtain Dr. Hohenberg’s approval, or even to involve her in business and legal matters, is not easy to know, but that she made herself virtually indispensable to Milton and Marilyn was obvious. And that they were in no position to act independently—much less to regulate their mutual, increasing reliance on barbiturates—further suggests that perhaps they required treatment other than what Margaret Hohenberg was prepared to provide.

But the principals of Marilyn Monroe Productions were to end 1955 and begin 1956 in good spirits, whatever the attendant psychological problems. After all the fussing and feuding between Fox and MMP—much of it merely keeping lawyers and agents busy with reams of paper—a contract was ready for Marilyn to sign.

Its principal provisions provided at last the tardy bonus for
Itch
, plus $100,000 per upcoming film and $500 weekly during production for maid service and other expenses. She had to appear in only four films for Fox over the next seven years, and they would be projects whose subject, director and cinematographer she could approve; she
could make one picture at another studio for each she made with Fox; and she could record, be heard on radio and appear on a half-dozen television programs annually; she would also have the benefits of a tax shelter, for her own corporation would pay out her salary.
⁴
In regular monthly checks to MMP, Fox would pay Marilyn a gross annual salary of $100,000, and Milton would receive $75,000.

The year ended as it began, with a champagne party—this one held privately and quietly, at the Greenes’ home as midnight tolled on December thirty-first. To make it altogether a happy new year, they had just decided on the company’s first two projects ahead, each based on a play. Marilyn was to appear in a film of William Inge’s Broadway hit
Bus Stop
for Fox, and with Laurence Olivier in a movie version of Terence Rattigan’s
The Sleeping Prince
, to be produced in London.

“I’m beginning to understand myself now,” she said that season. “I can face myself more, you might say. I’ve spent most of my life running away from myself, but after all, I’m a mixture of simplicity and complexes.” There would be ample and dramatic opportunities offstage, during the coming year, for all this to be tested.

1
. For all the boldness and the ambiguity of her adoption of disguises, there was still the fundamental crisis of identity, to which Marilyn even referred jokingly. When Susan Strasberg once said she was in conflict about something and that she felt she had another voice clamoring inside her head, Marilyn remarked, “You have only one voice? I have a whole committee!”

2
. However much Hollywood marketed Marilyn and sex, it continued to reward elegance: the Oscars in 1953 and 1954 were handed to Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. Even later, her extraordinary work in
Bus Stop
and
The Prince and the Showgirl
was ignored by colleagues: Marilyn, who had the temerity to have spent a year away from Hollywood, was not even nominated for an Academy Award.

3
. Curiously, however—perhaps because it had to be done with the express approval of the attorney general—there was no extensive security check conducted on Marilyn during 1955.

4
. At the time, the top corporation tax was fifty-three percent, while the top personal income tax was eighty-eight percent.

Chapter Sixteen

1956

T
HERE IS PERSUASIVE EVIDENCE
that Marilyn Monroe is a shrewd businesswoman,” proclaimed
Time
magazine on January 30, 1956, detailing the terms of her new contract with Fox, as if it had been the easy victory of a one-woman operation.
Time
also reported that she would soon be on her way to Hollywood to begin
Bus Stop
.

It was indeed a busy season. On February 5, Laurence Olivier, his agent Cecil Tennant and playwright Terence Rattigan arrived in New York to meet with Marilyn about
The Sleeping Prince
, which Olivier had played in London with his wife Vivien Leigh in 1953. In 1954, Hugh French had suggested to Marilyn that the role of an American chorus girl who falls in love with a Middle European royal roué was perfect for her. As she began to choose her own projects, Marilyn had kept Rattigan’s play in mind and wanted no other than Olivier for her prince—precisely, she said, because it was so wildly improbable a pairing of actors and because it might help her achieve greater respectability as an actress. For his own benefit, Olivier asked to co-produce, direct and act as co-star, a demand to which MMP finally yielded after an avalanche of cablegrams between them and Olivier that winter.

On Tuesday, February 7, Olivier, Tennant and Rattigan met Marilyn at Sutton Place, after waiting the usual hour and a half. “But then she had us all on the floor at her feet in a second,” recalled Olivier, for
whom punctuality was indeed the courtesy of theatrical kings. “She was so adorable, so witty, such incredible fun and more physically attractive than anyone I could have imagined, apart from herself on the screen.”

Two days later at noon, a press conference was held in the Terrace Room of the Plaza Hotel, where over one hundred fifty reporters and photographers gathered. As if this was to be the announcement of a presidential candidacy or a papal election, the event had something faintly surrealistic about it: not for this group the attitude that “it’s only a movie,” as Alfred Hitchcock so often said. No, this would be more than that: it would be an
event
uniting a great English classical actor with America’s (indeed, the world’s) greatest sex symbol—an unlikely alliance indeed.

At last there arrived the solemn, dark-suited Olivier; the quiet, dignified Rattigan; and Marilyn, in a low-cut, black velvet dress designed by John Moore. Only two shoulder straps, thin and frail as cooked spaghetti, kept her from sudden indecency.

The questions were typically tiresome:

“Sir Laurence, what do you think of Miss Monroe as an actress?”

Olivier: “She is a brilliant comedienne, and therefore an extremely good actress. She has the cunning gift of being able to suggest one minute that she is the naughtiest little thing, and the next minute that she is beautifully dumb and innocent.”

“Marilyn, how do you feel about working with Sir Laurence?”

“He has always been my idol.”

“Is it true you want to play
The Brothers Karamazov
? Do you think you can handle it?

A flash of irritation crossed her face. “I don’t want to play the brothers. I want to play Grushenka. She’s a girl.”

“Spell that name ‘Grushenka,’ Marilyn,” someone dared.

“Look it up,” she snapped.

The reporters turned back to Olivier, asking two or three more prosaic questions about Hollywood, his salary, his control over American stars.

And then it happened. As if to smile for a photographer, Marilyn leaned forward and one of the straps of her dress broke. There was a moment of silence, then the popping of enough flashbulbs to blind an army in battle. She smiled, calmly asked for a safety pin and then bent
forward while the strap was re-attached to the back of her dress. “Shall I take my coat off, boys?” Olivier asked. “Does anybody care?” The strap broke twice more before the conference was disbanded.

“The strap breaking was deliberately, brilliantly pre-arranged and carefully maneuvered in advance while she was dressing,” recalled designer John Moore. Eve Arnold, photographing Marilyn that day, agreed: “Before we went downstairs, she said to me, ‘Just wait and see what’s going to happen.’ ” The result was another Monroe coup—and her picture on the front page of several New York dailies. She may never have needed publicists.

But less risky and risqué photographs were also rendered that winter. Cecil Beaton arrived from London, following her around her apartment with a camera while she romped, squealed with childish delight, leaped onto a sofa, put a flower stem in her mouth and puffed on it as though it were a cigarette. He found her “artless, high-spirited, infectiously gay.”

Otherwise, for the first two months of the new year, Marilyn continued her wintry New York retreat, touring the streets of Brooklyn Heights with Arthur Miller, visiting the old haunts of writers and artists and listening adoringly as Arthur told stories of his boyhood. That season, according to Sam Shaw (who photographically documented the lovers’ New York itineraries), “Brooklyn became Nirvana to her, a magical place, her true home.” But Nirvana is a fantasy, and magical places are generally restricted to venues like Disneyland. The Monroe-Miller association, which she deemed “heavenly,” had to be lived out firmly on earth, and from the start it was burdened with terrible disadvantages.

For one thing, Miller was entering on what would be a difficult time in his own creative life—just as Marilyn was about to re-enter her professional life with fresh and astounding success, giving that year the two great performances of her career. The situation was oddly reminiscent of her and Joe. Second, archconservative political groups, operating unchecked and at the instigation of some pressmen and under government sponsorship, were about to make their nastiest skirmishes against Miller.

“There are all sorts of police gazette stories about Marilyn and her ‘Red Friends,’ ” noted Irving Stein in his corporate notes for MMP on
January 6, 1956. Indeed, there were several right-wing writers hostile to anyone like Miller who had even a vaguely liberal spirit, and in 1954 he had been denied a passport to attend a production of one of his plays in Belgium. Columnist Louis Budenz often sniped at Miller, whom he labeled a “concealed communist,” and newsman Vincent X. Flaherty was even sillier: “Teenage boys and girls worship Marilyn. When Marilyn marries a man who was connected with Communism, they can’t help but start thinking Communism can’t be so bad after all!”

But the most vituperative voice against the playwright belonged to none other than Joe’s buddy Walter Winchell—who was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s friend and eager news-gatherer and the man to whom he regularly wrote friendly notes beginning “Dear John.” On February 12, days after Miller and his wife announced they were soon to be divorced, Winchell broadcast to the nation a story planted by Hoover himself—that “America’s best known blond moving picture star is now the darling of the left-wing intelligentsia, several of whom are listed as Red fronters.”

By this time, Arthur was among the two or three most famous Americans scrutinized (and soon to be indicted) by government subcommittees obsessed with rooting out the threat to national security, for a violent overthrow by Moscow-directed Communists was presumed imminent. Hoover’s men had kept a file on Miller since his college days, when he had liberal social interests: he then supported the American Relief Ship for Spain; he was classified as unfit for World War II military service because of an injury (which seemed unpatriotic to the Bureau); and he was a member of the American Labor party. By 1944, agents were frankly spying on Miller, and in 1947 they found most suspicious his weekly attendance at a seminar of writers organized by an editor at the venerable publishing house Simon & Schuster, where writers gathered to counterattack the extreme right-wing propaganda disseminated by the media.

Miller’s professional achievements did little to stem the FBI’s surveillance. His first Broadway success,
All My Sons
(1947), concerned an engine manufacturer who knowingly sells defective parts to the air force; this the FBI labeled “party line propaganda.” In 1948, a savagely Red-baiting newsletter called
Counter-Attack
openly called Miller a Communist, just as the FBI disapproved of his support for the new state of Israel. Even more absurdly, in 1949 the FBI became drama critics,
condemning
Death of a Salesman
as “a negative delineation of American life . . . and [a play that] strikes a shrewd blow against [national] values.” But most alarming of all for Hoover’s agents was Miller’s support of a Bill of Rights seminar that openly criticized “the police state methods of certain Army and FBI officials.”

When the Monroe-Miller marriage was subsequently rumored to be inevitable, Winchell went further: “the next stop [for Miller] is trouble. The House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena will check into his entire inner circle, which also happens to be the inner circle of Miss Monroe—and all of them are former Communist sympathizers!”

This sort of nonsensical vilification was common—symptomatic of the paranoia that swept America in the 1950s, washed into homes in regular waves of hysteria by vicious gossips like Winchell. At once the agents of the FBI grabbed their dark glasses and notebooks and began compiling data on the travels of Marilyn and her friends the Greenes, who were for a time seen as potential subversives, too. But government snoops could report only that “Miss Monroe, after completing her next assignment in the motion picture
Bus Stop
, will return to New York before her scheduled journey to England to make a motion picture with Laurence Olivier.” This they might have taken from Hedda or Louella—or even from those other meticulous but very different agents, the ladies and gentlemen at Arthur P. Jacobs Company, who issued regular statements of Marilyn’s departures, arrivals and professional plans. The only exclusive revelation provided in advance to Washington was erroneous, for they believed her Los Angeles address was to be the Chateau Marmont Hotel; by coincidence, that is where she installed Paula Strasberg during the production of
Bus Stop
(and where Marilyn had clandestine weekends with Arthur during April and May).