Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (77 page)

There was another matter to be adjudicated more immediately: Marilyn’s divorce from Arthur. Through their lawyers, they reached a swift settlement. The Roxbury house would be Arthur’s, since it had been purchased with proceeds from the sale of his previous home, and there would be no alimonies on either side; there remained only the exchange of a few personal items. Arthur signed a waiver of his rights to contest a unilateral filing for divorce.

And so on Friday, January 20, 1961, Pat Newcomb accompanied Marilyn and her attorney, Aaron Frosch, on a swift mission to Mexico. At Pat’s suggestion, the day of Kennedy’s inauguration was deliberately chosen “because the press and the whole country would be looking at that, and we could slip away and return unnoticed,” which indeed they did. On Friday evening, the trio arrived in El Paso, Texas, crossed the border into Juárez, and before Judge Miguel Gómez Guerra Marilyn pleaded “incompatibility of character” and requested an immediate divorce. This was granted forthwith, and they were back in New York by Saturday evening. Effective Tuesday, January 24, she was no longer Mrs. Arthur Miller.

Looking tired and depressed, she was blunt with reporters. “I am upset and I don’t feel like being bothered with publicity right now,” she said on her return—but then she tried to appear cheerful, adding with a rueful smile, “but I would love to have a plate of tacos and enchiladas—we didn’t have time for food in Mexico!” She was, as Pat recalled, trying valiantly despite her evident depression over the formal termination of the marriage. At the same time, Pat knew that “at the core of her, she was really strong, much stronger than all of us—and that was something we tended to forget, because she seemed so vulnerable, and one always felt it necessary to watch out for her.”

As for her comments on Arthur Miller, Marilyn displayed her customary dignity when publicly discussing former husbands or lovers. “It would be indelicate of me to discuss this. I feel it would be trespassing,” she said. “Mr. Miller is a wonderful man and a great writer, but it didn’t work out that we should be husband and wife. But everybody I ever loved, I still love a little.” Typically, there was no bitterness, no rancor toward those from whom she felt estranged, even from those she felt had in some ways abused, demeaned or been faithless to her. Marilyn confided only in friends whose discretion she could trust: she had no desire to justify herself before the press. To show her essential goodwill, she attended the New York premiere of
The Misfits
at the Capitol Theater on January 31. Montgomery Clift was her escort.

*    *    *

But beneath the brave, cheerful public exterior, Marilyn’s mood was as dark as the New York winter.
The Misfits
, like
Let’s Make Love
, was not well received by most critics, and audiences were puzzled by the story and disappointed with the leading players. By February 1, after the divorce, the failure of two films, the breakdown of negotiations for
Rain
and no prospects for the work that always somehow sustained her despite its anxiety-provoking aspects, Marilyn was able to find consolation in nothing, and so she told Marianne Kris as well as her friends. Except for her visits to Kris, she stayed at home in her darkened bedroom, playing sentimental records, subsisting on sleeping pills and rapidly losing weight.

Her condition alarmed Marianne Kris, who suggested to Marilyn that she check into a private ward of New York Hospital for a physical workup and a good rest, with meals served and every comfort provided.

On Sunday, February 5, Kris drove Marilyn to the vast Cornell University–New York Hospital complex, overlooking the East River at Sixty-ninth Street. After freely signing her own admission papers (as “Faye Miller,” to avoid publicity), Marilyn was taken not to a typical hospital room but—as Kris had arranged—to the Payne Whitney Clinic, the psychiatric division of New York Hospital. There, to Marilyn’s horror, she was placed in a locked and padded room, one of the cells for the most disturbed patients.

Such an incarceration might cause a perfectly healthy person violent upset and panic: for Marilyn, it was as if she had at last become the heir of the mental illness she believed had bedeviled her ancestors. It had all happened so quickly, as she later told Norman Rosten, Ralph Roberts and Susan Strasberg, that she was pitched into a state of extreme shock. She broke down weeping and sobbing, shouting to be released and banging on the locked steel door until her fists were raw and bleeding. She was ignored, and the staff reaction was that here indeed was a psychotic case, just as her physician had attested. Her clothes and purse were removed and she was put into hospital garb and threatened with a straitjacket unless she behaved.

A young psychiatric intern, visiting her cell (it can only be called that) on Monday morning, evaluated her as “extremely disturbed,” which in a sense she was, and as “potentially self-destructive,” a judgment
he made after Marilyn smashed a small window on her locked bathroom door in an effort to get to the toilet. As she told the doctor, she was upset and humiliated—not to say betrayed, as she later told her friends. But the intern merely asked repeatedly, “Why are you so unhappy?”—as if she were at a luxury resort and not confined against her will in a lunatic asylum. Quite rationally, Marilyn answered, “I’ve been paying the best doctors a fortune to find out why, and you’re asking
me
?” Such a logical counter is often taken as a challenge, not the sort of contradiction most professionals wish to hear.

For two days and nights, she endured this frightening situation. Marilyn, who since childhood hated locked doors and never barred her own bedroom, was almost in a state of total nervous breakdown, and from this point in her life never locked her bedroom door nor permitted a key or latch to operate it. Susan Strasberg agreed with Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan that Marilyn “always had a means of making a fast getaway even from a studio soundstage whenever she felt the walls were closing in on her. She hated to feel closed in,” at work or at home.

Finally a sympathetic nurse’s aide agreed to give her notepaper and then to deliver a message to Lee and Paula Strasberg, who received it on Wednesday, February 8:

Dear Lee and Paula,

Dr. Kris has put me in the hospital under the care of two idiot doctors. They both should not be my doctors. I’m locked up with these poor nutty people. I’m sure to end up a nut too if I stay in this nightmare. Please help me. This is the last place I should be. I love you both.

Marilyn.

P.S. I’m on the dangerous floor. It’s like a cell. They had my bathroom door locked and I couldn’t get their key to get into it, so I broke the glass. But outside of that I haven’t done anything that is uncooperative.

But the Strasbergs were only friends, powerless to help, much less to order or obtain Marilyn’s release. They may well have contacted Kris, who would not have provided any details of Marilyn’s condition.

When there was no reply from the Strasbergs by the morning of Thursday the ninth, Marilyn was permitted to make one telephone call. Frantic for help but managing to affect calm, she tried two or three friends but received no answer at their homes. At last she reached Joe DiMaggio in Florida.

Joe and Marilyn had not met for almost six years, but during that time she had remained in contact with his family and asked about his welfare. Since 1958, Joe held a $100,000-a-year job as a corporate vice-president for V. H. Monette, Inc., a supplier for military posts. For this company, Joe was essentially a goodwill ambassador, traveling to army bases worldwide and presiding at exhibition baseball games. During the training season, he coached the Yankees in Florida.

As for his private life, Joe had come close to marrying a woman named Marian McKnight in 1957, but this relationship ended when she was crowned Miss America; otherwise, there was no serious romance in his life. He was, according to family and friends, never out of love with Marilyn: “He carried a torch bigger than the Statue of Liberty,” according to his close friend, the Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams, whose testimony was typical. “His love for her never diminished through the years.” And so it was to Joe that Marilyn now turned for help. “He loved her a great deal and they had always remained in contact,” agreed Valmore Monette.

DiMaggio arrived that evening from St. Petersburg Beach and demanded that Marilyn be released from the clinic into his custody the following day. Informed that this would have to be approved by Dr. Kris, he telephoned her and said that if Marilyn were not discharged by Friday he would (his words, according to Marilyn) “take the hospital apart brick by brick.” Kris suggested that Marilyn enter another hospital if Payne Whitney were not to her liking; Joe replied that would be discussed in due course.

Things then happened quickly.

First, to avoid even the possibility of unwelcome publicity, it was arranged for Ralph Roberts to deliver Marilyn back to Fifty-seventh Street, with Kris literally along for the ride. As Ralph recalled, Marilyn unleashed a storm of protest and criticism against her therapist, and after Marilyn was safely returned home (where Joe awaited), Ralph drove Kris back to her residence. En route, as he recalled, she was trembling with remorse, repeating over and over, “I did a terrible
thing, a terrible, terrible thing. Oh, God, I didn’t mean to, but I did.” It may have been the most accurate statement of her therapeutic relationship with Marilyn; in any case, it was the last time she had anything to say, for Marianne Kris was dismissed that day and never saw Marilyn Monroe again.

Second, it was clear to Joe that, whatever her condition when she entered Payne Whitney, she was wretchedly unhappy, shaking and anorexic on her departure. She agreed to enter a far more comfortable and less threatening environment if he would stay at the hospital and be with her daily. At five o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, February 10, he helped her to settle into a private room at the Neurological Institute of the Columbia University—Presbyterian Hospital Medical Center. There she remained, regaining her strength, until March 5.

For years a letter from Marilyn Monroe to Ralph Greenson was believed lost—a document providing details of Marilyn’s state of mind and feeling and her assessment of her life that winter; in 1992, it was at last discovered. The letter was written on March 1 and 2, 1961, from Columbia-Presbyterian, and the sanity, sobriety, wit and maturity of the writer are everywhere apparent. If ever there was any doubt that Marilyn Monroe at this time was a woman who, despite problems, had a clear take on her life, a native intelligence and compassion, it is forever belied by her letter.

Dear Dr. Greenson,

Just now when I looked out the hospital window where the snow had covered everything, suddenly everything is kind of a muted green. There are grass and shabby evergreen bushes, though the trees give me a little hope—and the desolate bare branches promise maybe there will be spring and maybe they promise hope.

Did you see “The Misfits” yet? In one sequence you can perhaps see how bare and strange a tree can be for me. I don’t know if it comes across that way for sure on the screen—I don’t like some of the selections in the takes they used. As I started to write this letter about four quiet tears had fallen. I don’t know quite why.

Last night I was awake all night again. Sometimes I wonder what the night time is for. It almost doesn’t exist for me—it all seems like one long, long horrible day. Anyway, I thought I’d try to be constructive about it and started to read the letters of Sigmund Freud. When I first opened the book I saw the picture of Freud inside, opposite the title page and I burst into tears—he looked very depressed (the picture must have been taken near the end of his life), as if he died a disappointed man. But Dr. Kris said he had much physical pain which I had known from the Jones book. I know this, too, to be so, but still I trust my instincts because I see a sad disappointment in his gentle face. The book reveals (though I am not sure anyone’s love letters should be published) that he wasn’t a stiff! I mean his gentle, sad humor and even a striving was eternal in him. I haven’t gotten very far yet because at the same time I’m reading Sean O’Casey’s first autobiography. This book disturbs me very much, and in a way one
should
be disturbed for these things, after all.

There was no empathy at Payne Whitney—it had a very bad effect on me. They put me in a cell (I mean cement blocks and all) for
very disturbed
, depressed patients, except I felt I was in some kind of prison for a crime I hadn’t committed. The inhumanity there I found archaic. They asked me why I wasn’t happy there (everything was under lock and key, things like electric lights, dresser drawers, bathrooms, closets, bars concealed on the windows—and the doors have windows so patients can be visible all the time. Also, the violence and markings still remain on the walls from former patients). I answered: “Well, I’d have to be nuts if I like it here!” Then there were screaming women in their cells—I mean, they screamed out when life was unbearable for them, I guess—and at times like this I felt an available psychiatrist should have talked to them, perhaps to alleviate even temporarily their misery and pain. I think they (the doctors) might learn something, even—but they are interested only in something they studied in books. Maybe from some life-suffering human being they could discover more—I had the feeling they looked more for discipline and that they let their patients go after the patients have “given up.” They asked me to mingle with the patients, to go out to O.T. (Occupational Therapy). I said, “And do what?” They said: “You could sew or play checkers, even cards, and maybe knit.” I tried to explain that
the day I did that
they would have a nut on their hands. These things were farthest from my mind. They asked me why I felt I was “different” from the other patients, so I decided if they were really that stupid I must give them a very simple answer, so I said, “I just am.”