Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (78 page)

The first day I
did
mingle with a patient. She asked me why I looked so sad and suggested I could call a friend and perhaps not be so lonely. I told her that they had told me that there wasn’t a phone on that floor. Speaking of floors, they are all
locked
—no one could go in and no one could go out. She looked shocked and shaken and said, “I’ll take you to the phone”—and while I waited in line for my turn for the use of the phone, I observed a guard (since he had on a gray knit uniform), and as I approached the phone he straight-armed the phone and said very sternly,
“You
can’t use the phone.” By the way, they pride themselves in having a home-like atmosphere there. I asked them (the doctors) how they figured that. They answered, “Well, on the sixth floor we have wall-to-wall carpeting and modern furniture,” to which I replied, “Well,
that
any good interior decorator could provide—providing there are funds for it,” but since they are dealing with human beings, I asked, why couldn’t they perceive the interior of a human being?

The girl that told me about the phone seemed such a pathetic and vague creature. She told me after the straight-arming, “I didn’t know they would do that.” Then she said, “I’m here because of my mental condition—I have cut my throat several times and slashed my wrists,” she said either three or four times.

Oh, well, men are climbing to the moon but they don’t seem interested in the beating human heart. Still, one can change them but won’t—by the way, that was the original theme of
The Misfits
—no one even caught that part of it. Partly because, I guess, the changes in the script and some of the distortions in the direction.

Later:

I know I will never be happy but I know I can be gay!

Remember I told you Kazan said I was the gayest girl he ever knew and believe me, he has known many. But he
loved
me for one year and once rocked me to sleep one night when I was in great anguish. He also suggested that I go into analysis and later wanted me to work with Lee Strasberg.

Was it Milton who wrote: “The happy ones were never born,”? I know at least two psychiatrists who are looking for a more positive approach.

This morning, March 2:

I didn’t sleep again last night. I forgot to tell you something yesterday. When they put me into the first room on the sixth floor I was not told it was a psychiatric floor. Dr. Kris said she was coming the next day. The nurse came in after the doctor, a psychiatrist, had given me a physical examination including examining the breast for lumps. I took exception to this but not violently, only explaining that the medical doctor who had put me there, a stupid man named Dr. Lipkin, had already done a complete physical less than thirty days before. But when the nurse came in, I noticed there was no way of buzzing or reaching for a light to call the nurse. I asked why this was and some other things, and she said this is a psychiatric floor. After she went out I got dressed and then was when the girl in the hall told me about the phone. I was waiting at the elevator door which looks like all other doors with a door-knob except it doesn’t have any numbers (you see, they left them all out). After the girl spoke with me and told me what she had done to herself, I went back into my room knowing they had lied to me about the telephone and I sat on the bed trying to figure that if I was given this situation in an acting improvisation, what would I do? So I figured, it’s a squeaky wheel that gets the grease. I admit it was a loud squeak, but I got the idea from a movie I made once called
Don’t Bother to Knock
. I picked up a light-weight chair and slammed it against the glass, intentionally—and it was hard to do because I had never broken anything in my life. It took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass, so I went over with the glass concealed in my hand and sat quietly on the bed waiting for them to come in. They did, and I said to them, “If you are going to treat me like a nut, I’ll act like a nut.” I admit the next thing is corny, but I really did it in the movie except it was with a razor blade. I indicated if they didn’t let me out I would harm myself—the farthest thing from my mind at the moment, since you know, Dr. Greenson, I’m an actress and would never intentionally mark or mar myself, I’m just that vain. I didn’t cooperate with them in any way because I couldn’t believe in what they were doing. They asked me to go quietly and I refused to move, staying on the bed so they picked me up by all fours, two hefty men and two hefty women and carried me up to the seventh floor in the elevator. I must say at least they had the decency to carry me face down. I just wept quietly all the way there and then was put in the cell I told you about and that ox of a woman, one of those hefty ones, said, “Take a bath.” I told her I had just taken one on the sixth floor. She said very sternly, “As soon as you change floors, you have to take another bath.” The man who runs that place, a high-school principal type, although Dr. Kris refers to him as an “administrator,” he was actually permitted to talk to me, questioning me somewhat like an analyst. He told me I was a very, very sick girl and had been a very, very sick girl for many years. He looks down on his patients. He asked me how I could possibly work when I was depressed. He wondered if that interfered with my work. He was being very firm and definite in the way he said it. He actually stated it more than he questioned me, so I replied, “Don’t you think that perhaps Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin and Ingrid Bergman had been depressed when
they
worked sometimes?” It’s like saying a ball player like DiMaggio couldn’t hit a ball when he was depressed. Pretty silly.

By the way, I have some good news, sort of, since I guess I helped. He claims I did: Joe said I saved his life by sending him to a psychotherapist. Dr. Kris said that he is a very brilliant man, the doctor. Joe said he pulled himself by his own bootstraps after the divorce but he told me also that if he had been me he would have divorced him, too. Christmas night he sent a forest-full of poinsettias. I asked who they were from since it was such a surprise—my friend Pat Newcomb was there and they had just arrived then. She said, “I don’t know, the card just says, ‘Best, Joe.’ ” Then I replied, “Well, there’s only one Joe.” Because it was Christmas night I called him up and asked him why he had sent me the flowers. He said, “First of all, because I thought you would call me to thank me,” and then he said, “Besides, who in the hell else do you have in the world?” He asked me to have a drink some time with him. I said I knew he didn’t drink, but he said occasionally now he takes a drink, to which I replied then it would have to be a very, very dark place! He asked me what I was doing Christmas night. I said nothing, I’m here with a friend. Then he asked me to come over and I was glad he was coming, though I must say I was bleary and depressed, but somehow still glad he was coming over.

I think I had better stop because you have other things to do, but thanks for listening for a while.

Marilyn M.

Joe visited her every day at the hospital, and before her release he went ahead to Florida, whence she had agreed to join him for a few weeks’ rest.

On March 5, Marilyn left Columbia-Presbyterian after a twenty-three-day rest and rehabilitation. Six security guards escorted her through a mob of four hundred fans and dozens of photographers and reporters crowding round the hospital entrance; present to help were May Reis (still willing to be helpful in such circumstances), Pat Newcomb and her colleague John Springer, from the New York office of Arthur Jacobs. “I feel wonderful,” she said. “I had a nice rest.” Smiling “as radiantly as an Oscar winner” (thus one reporter on the scene), Marilyn also appeared healthier than ever: she had lost most of the fifteen pounds she had gained during the unhappy summer of 1960 and sported an elegantly casual new champagne-colored coiffure that matched her beige cashmere sweater and skirt and her identically dyed shoes.

Three days later, she attended the funeral of Arthur’s mother at a Brooklyn funeral chapel, where she comforted her former father-in-law and offered condolences to Arthur. “She had just been discharged from the hospital,” Isadore Miller told a writer later, “and I was about to enter one myself. When I did, she called me every day after my operation, wiring flowers and phoning my doctor.” Their affection was unaltered by the divorce from Arthur.

By the end of March, Marilyn was with Joe, who left the Yankees in St. Petersburg and took her to a secluded resort in Redington
Beach, Florida. Here they relaxed, swam, combed the shore for shells, dined quietly and retired early. Once or twice, they drove to St. Petersburg and watched the Yankees train, and Marilyn thrilled the team simply by being there and cheering them on; Joe was very proud of her indeed. Said his friend Jerry Coleman, “Joe DiMaggio deeply loved that woman”—an attachment that was quickly becoming mutual once again. Lois Smith: “The attraction to Joe remained great. Marilyn knew where she stood with him. He was always there, she could always call on him, lean on him, depend on him, be certain of him. It was a marvelous feeling of comfort for her.” DiMaggio was, as Pat Newcomb said years later about that year, “a hero. Marilyn could always call on Ralph, who was generous with his time and the best friend she ever had. But Joe had the power to come to get her released from the hospital.”

At the end of April, Marilyn was back in Los Angeles and feeling so well (except for a nagging pain in her stomach and right side) that she told columnists and friends she would soon be back at work on a new film, although what that might be she had no idea. At first she accepted an offer to live briefly at the home of Frank Sinatra, who was away on a European tour; then Marilyn contacted Jane Ziegler, the daughter of Viola Mertz, her former landlady at 882 North Doheny Drive at the corner of Cynthia Street. As it happened, an apartment had just become available in this same complex where she had rented in 1952. Marilyn moved in some hastily bought furniture—bookcases, a large bed she put in the living room and a vanity table and wardrobe in the small bedroom.

Visitors like Ralph Roberts and Susan Strasberg saw that the place could have been a hotel room: it lacked personal touches, there were no photographs or awards, merely a few books, a suitcase of clothes and a makeup box. The apartment seemed to be merely a base from which she would dash out to a waiting limousine for errands, for visits to Dr. Greenson or Dr. Engelberg, or for meetings with an agent, a publicist, screenwriter or producer. As sensitive as ever to ambient noise, Marilyn depended on Nembutal to sleep.

In May, she was happy to receive from Clark Gable’s widow an invitation to attend the christening of the baby John Clark; this was a reunion that killed the occasional rumor that Kay Gable believed Marilyn’s
tardiness was the cause of her husband’s death. Then, within days of that happy event, she was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where Dr. Leon Krohn again operated to relieve her agonizing, chronic endometriosis.

Back home by June 1, she dined with a few friends on her thirty-fifth birthday and met with a London reporter. “I’m very happy to have reached this age,” she said. “I feel I’m growing up. It was wonderful being a girl, but it’s more wonderful being a woman.” On June 7, she attended a party in Las Vegas, given by Frank Sinatra for Dean Martin’s forty-fourth birthday; also present were (among others) Elizabeth Taylor and her husband Eddie Fisher.

The reason for her presence was simple. It is unclear exactly when Marilyn began a brief, intermittent romance with Frank Sinatra (perhaps as early as two or three rendezvous in 1955 in New York), but the liaison was resumed that June and lasted until late that year. Frank, apparently the more smitten, met Marilyn at his home in Los Angeles, and occasionally in Las Vegas or Lake Tahoe.

“There’s no doubt that Frank was in love with Marilyn,” said the producer Milton Ebbins, who knew them both well that year. Ebbins, a friend of Sinatra and vice-president of Peter Lawford’s production company, recalled an incident that revealed Sinatra’s infatuation for Monroe. After accepting an invitation to a luncheon for President Kennedy at the oceanfront home of Lawford (who was then married to the president’s sister Patricia), Sinatra failed to arrive.

“He has a terrible cold,” said his secretary Gloria Lovell, telephoning the singer’s last-minute excuse. (By coincidence, Lovell lived in the same apartment complex as Marilyn.)

“Oh, Gloria, come on, this is hard to believe,” replied Ebbins, who took the call. “Tell him he’s
got
to come. He can’t do this to the president!” But the secretary was adamant: Sinatra would not appear. Later, Ebbins learned from Lovell and from Sinatra himself the real reason for the astonishing absence: “He couldn’t find Marilyn!” Ebbins recalled. “She had been staying at his house for a weekend, and she had gone out for something—shopping or a facial or whatever—and he couldn’t find her! It wasn’t worry for her safety, he was just that jealous of her whereabouts! To hell with the president’s lunch!”

Marilyn resented this proprietary attitude. She liked and admired Frank and felt safe in his company. She would not, however, be possessed
by him, for by 1961 Joe really had no competition; Marilyn also knew that despite their involvement Frank followed his own romantic inclinations elsewhere. “I think he might have married Marilyn if he had the chance,” according to Ebbins. “After all, for Frank to break an engagement with the president of the United States—and I can assure you how badly he wanted to go there—that was a major thing for him! He could have come to the lunch, departed and found her later. I tell you, he was hung up on this girl!” Rupert Allan, Ralph Roberts and Joseph Naar (a close friend and agent-manager for Lawford) also knew of Sinatra’s deep feelings for Marilyn.