Marilyn's Last Sessions (22 page)

Marilyn, who had disappeared again after filming had started on
Something’s Got to Give
, reported back for work for three and a half days at the start of May. Then, on the
seventeenth, she left the studio in mid-filming. She was due to sing two days later at an event at Madison Square Garden celebrating the President of the United States’s forty-fifth –
and last – birthday. Fox’s executive committee had begged her not to leave the set to go to New York. Ignoring the incredible publicity such a performance by one of its top stars would
bring the film, the studio sent her lawyer Mickey Rudin a two-page letter threatening her with dismissal: ‘In the event that Miss Monroe absents herself, this action will constitute a wilful
failure to render services. In the event that Miss Monroe returns and principal photography of the motion picture continues – such re-commencement will not be deemed to constitute a waiver of
[Fox’s] right to fire Miss Monroe as stated in her contract.’

Henry Weinstein, however, realised that Marilyn was determined to go New York, come what may. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘here’s a girl who really did come from the streets, who
had a mother who wasn’t there, and a father who had disappeared, a girl who has known all the poverty in the world. And now, she is going to sing “Happy Birthday” to the President
of the United States in Madison Square Garden. There’s no way for her to resist that.’ But no one listened to him.

It was around this time that Norman Rosten sent Marilyn a half-hour tape of him reading his poetry on a local radio station. He knew she’d like the poems, but mainly he
wanted her to know he was thinking of her. She was very alone. It was like in chess, she said, it was like what they call
Zeitnot
: the agony of knowing you’re running out of time to
decide your next move. Any moment now, you won’t have any time to think of anything, even your agony. Rosten thought of the poems as his emissaries; perhaps they’d help. When he arrived
in Hollywood shortly afterwards, Marilyn’s secretary told him she took the tape with her in her bag everywhere she went, like a good-luck charm, and that she had bought a new tape recorder
specially.

One evening, she invited Norman over to listen to the poems. She’d get everything ready, she said on the phone. He’d arrive early, Eunice would make coffee, then they’d listen
to them together. Lying on the bed, she could use the rewind or fast forward as much as she wanted, skip forward or back and, knowing the recorder would stop automatically, she wouldn’t have
to worry about falling asleep – but only if he had to leave before the end, of course, she added. When he got there, she was already in her pyjamas. The coffee was made. They drank it and
talked about her work and plans, about his projects, his wife and daughter, his work in Hollywood, when he was leaving. She said she hoped her film would go well. She felt nervous but determined.
Then she got into bed and Norman sat on the floor by the tape recorder. ‘I took a sleeping pill just before you got here,’ she said, ‘so maybe I’ll fall asleep listening to
your voice. Is it OK if I slip away before the end?’

A deafening whine announced the arrival of an enormous helicopter on the Fox heliport near Soundstage Fourteen. Peter Lawford leaped from the pride of Howard Hughes’s
fleet, hurried to Marilyn’s dressing room and escorted her to the royal blue vision that was going to convey her to Inglewood. Two hours later Marilyn took off from Los Angeles for what was
still to be named JFK. The presidential gala was going to be her first appearance on stage in front of a large audience since her legendary performance before thousands of GIs in Korea. Full of
nervous energy, she sang her contribution, ‘Happy Birthday’, on the plane. Like the gala’s seventeen thousand spectators, she’d had to pay a thousand dollars for the
privilege of attending. ‘That figures,’ she had told Joan Greenson. ‘I’ve been paying to talk to your father for years. So now I have to pay to sing.’ With
Joan’s help, she had been rehearsing for days.

She was going to be reunited with John Kennedy, her occasional lover. Six days earlier, with oppressive symmetry, it was her ex-husband, Arthur Miller, who had been placed on Kennedy’s
wife’s right at a banquet for André Malraux. The top table included writers Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson and Robert Penn Warren, painters Andrew Wyeth and Mark Rothko, the composer
Leonard Bernstein, and from the world of the theatre and performing arts, George Balanchine, Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg. Marilyn was conspicuous by her absence, as if the
Kennedys were bent on confirming the split marked out by her destiny that her move to New York and marriage to Miller had been attempts to overcome: words and culture on the one hand, the body and
images on the other.

Being back in New York filled Marilyn with the delight of a child let loose in an adult world. She raced all over town in a cab, not asking to go downtown or uptown, just saying, I’m going
this way or that way. The city was a carnival and she was its queen, its streets and city blocks a chessboard she could dominate with the strength and beauty of her moves. The white king, the key
to the game, was missing. Her mother was the black queen, she the white; Greenson was the white knight – or maybe the black – and the Kennedys were the two black bishops. Manhattan
avenged her for everything Hollywood had taken from her.

Some cities are like special languages: no matter how beautiful they seem, you know you’ll never learn them. The names in Los Angeles had ceased to mean anything to her. She’d see
the signs – ‘SUNSET STRIP’, ‘ANAHEIM’, ‘EL PUEBLO’ – and all they’d evoke would be an indeterminate colour or an ethnic marker, a sense of
freeways turning back on themselves
ad infinitum
. They were like names in dreams. She saw them – strange or familiar, beautiful or terrifying – but they made no sense. In
Manhattan, it was the opposite. Marilyn became the link between everything she saw, the thread that bound time together. Although she didn’t talk to anyone, she felt a part of everything. New
York was the city of connections and it made her forget the city of thin partitions with its boundless distances between people, its virtual equivalence between reality and fiction.

She returned to her apartment on East 57th Street late in the evening. When she got up the next morning, she found a letter had arrived from Fox terminating her contract. For
a minute she thought it wouldn’t have happened if Greenson had been there, but then she was seized by doubt. Wasn’t it the other way round? Hadn’t her psychiatrist, who was so
close to Weinstein and Rudin that the studio called them ‘Marilyn’s team’, left the country because he wanted to send Fox a message that her fate was of as little concern to him
as the film itself? Deeply disturbed, she laboured through the final day of rehearsals. In the evening, working together at her apartment, the composer Richard Adler had an uphill struggle getting
her to go over the words of ‘Happy Birthday’ for the thirtieth time. He was afraid of the pain he heard welling up inside her, her breathy whisper, the halting way she sang the lyrics.
As the hours passed, her enunciation gradually softened to an exhalation, a sensual caress. Her rendition steadily became more and more sexually charged until, by the time she finally came on
stage, after Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Maria Callas, Marilyn Monroe had become a parody of herself.

Bobby Kennedy has come to the Democratic Party fundraiser with his wife but Jackie Kennedy has not seen fit to attend, so JFK is on his own. The compère for the
evening, JFK’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford, introduces Marilyn: ‘Mr President, on this occasion of your birthday, this lovely lady is not only pulchritudinous but punctual.’
After a long wait in the wings, she emerges unsteadily from the darkness like a flickering blue flame, a vision of skin and rhinestones. Sewn into her dress, she tiptoes on stage with the tiny
steps of a geisha, as if the body she’s parading before the thousands of spectators is a burden to her. ‘The
late
Marilyn Monroe,’ Lawford puns – or perhaps
it’s a Freudian slip – and the audience laughs in the shadows. Marilyn has kept the promise she and Truman Capote had made: to be late for their own funeral. Imprisoned by her dress,
which glitters like fallen snow, she teeters a little on her high heels, shrugs the white ermine wrap from her shoulders, brushes the microphone with her fingertips, gestures to the president
somewhere out there in the dark, and then closes her eyes, runs her tongue over her lips and starts to sing. Drifting out over the crowd, her husky voice seems to say: ‘They’ve all left
me because I was bad, Joe, Frank, Arthur, Romeo. Now forty million other Americans will see how bad I really am.’

At the after-show party at New York theatre magnate Arthur Krim’s apartment, Robert Kennedy dodges around Marilyn, like a moth around a flame. The president and Bobby usher her into a
quiet corner at one point, where they have an animated conversation for a quarter of an hour. Marilyn is then seen dancing five times with Bobby as his wife Ethel looks on aghast. In the early
hours of Sunday morning, the president and Marilyn leave the party and take a private elevator to the basement of Krim’s building. From there they walk through the tunnel leading to the
Carlyle Hotel and go straight up to Kennedy’s suite.

She never saw John Kennedy again. After that night, the president decided to break off all contact between them and deny the rumours that were starting to circulate about their relationship.
Even though a number of photographs were taken of Marilyn with the two brothers, there is only one still in existence. Secret Service agents came the next morning to seize the remaining negatives
from
Time
magazine’s photo lab.

When she’d gone to see Marilyn just before she left for New York, Joan Greenson had found her heavily sedated, as floppy and lifeless as a rag doll. She had given her a
children’s book,
The Little Engine That Could
, for the trip – ‘for your ordeal’, as she whispered in her ear. But when the moment had come for the translucent star to
go on stage at Madison Square Garden, she had to leave it and the chess piece behind. Fortified by tranquillisers and champagne, she had ventured out into that great black mouth and those blinding
lights with a chill in her heart, trailing the shadow of her fear behind her. When she got back to Los Angeles, she described the terrible moment to Joan: ‘Everyone talked about my
transparent six-thousand-dollar dress that was so tight Jean Louis had to sew me into it. But they didn’t understand. My dress wasn’t a second skin, it was my skin that was another
layer of clothing, my skin that has always kept me from being naked.’

Ralph Greenson’s papers, archived at UCLA, include the rough drafts for a book he was planning called
Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation
. Chapter 12 contains
this passage:

Her psychoanalyst had left, and so had she. He hadn’t come back but she had. Racing on amphetamines, Marilyn reported for work at six-fifteen a.m. on Monday, 21 May, thirty-three hours
after the New York gala. She had sent word to Cukor that she was prepared to film all the scenes scheduled for the day except for close-ups. She was obviously ill and Whitey Snyder realised no
amount of make-up could hide the evidence of fatigue from her weekend. For her body, he used a special preparation of a litre of Max Factor suntan cream, as base, with half a cup of ivory white and
a little clown white.

On Wednesday, she finally shot the nude swimming-pool scene in which her character lures Dean Martin from Cyd Charisse’s bed. Normally, an actress or her body double would wear a body
stocking for a scene like this; no one expected her to do it naked. So when they saw her emerge from the water after slipping out of her bathing suit, the reaction was incredible. Everyone wanted
to be on set. Weinstein called for security to bar the stage entrance. Dosed up on amphetamines for her fever and Demerol for her headaches, Marilyn was in the water for four hours while the
shutters clicked and the cameras rolled. Like Pat Newcomb, Marilyn’s press attaché, Cukor knew no one in their right mind could miss such an incredible publicity opportunity.

Most of the following day’s filming was sacrificed to another photo-shoot. Cukor invited three photographers, William Woodfield, Lawrence Schiller and Jimmy Mitchell, on set and the
pictures they took were immediately flashed all over the world. Fifty-two shots appeared in seventy magazines in thirty-two countries, grossing a total of $150,000. Marilyn had done her fair share
of nude scenes as a starlet and subsequently appeared as naked as the censorship laws would allow in
Niagara
,
Bus Stop
and
The Misfits
. So this scene caused her hardly any
anxiety. The opposite, if anything: she felt reborn in that pool, and not just because she had lost fifteen pounds in a matter of weeks. She always felt the same: she had no shame about her body,
only about having to talk. Unbeknown to her, Natasha Lytess had written a poisonous article after they’d gone their separate ways in 1956, in which she’d described Marilyn’s
complete ease with her nudity as a sign of mental instability. ‘Being naked seemed to soothe her,’ Natasha wrote, ‘almost hypnotise her.’ She’d endlessly dissect her
reflection sitting or standing in front of a full-length mirror, pouting, half closing her heavy-lidded eyes, totally absorbed by what she saw.