The Genius and the Goddess (39 page)

Now, Bobby was a different story. He was sweet, cute and
playful, and he really cared about Marilyn. . . . I think he was
in love with her, in his own little way.

When John sent his brother to break off his affair with Marilyn,
Robert quickly succumbed to her charms and had his own affair
with her. In this negative version of vicarious courtship, the envoy
replaced the lover he was supposed to represent. Since Marilyn could
no longer have John, she maintained her glamorous connection to
Washington by taking Robert as his surrogate. The young attorney
general, the nation's chief prosecutor and notable family man, was
equally dazzled by the Hollywood star.

Marilyn first met Robert at Peter Lawford's house of assignation
on February 1, 1962. The next day she sent Miller's teenage son a
girlishly enthusiastic letter describing how she had spoken up for the
"youth of America":

Oh, Bobby, guess what. I had dinner last night with the Attorney
General of the United States,
Robert Kennedy, and I asked him
what his department was going to do about Civil Rights and
some other issues. He is very intelligent, and besides all that, he's
got a terrific sense of humor. I think you would like him. Anyway,
I had to go to this dinner last night as he was the guest of honor,
and when they asked him who he wanted to meet, he wanted
to meet me. So I went to the dinner and I sat next to him, and
he isn't a bad dancer, either. . . . He asked if I had been attending
some kind of meetings (ha ha!). I laughed and said, "No, but these
are the kind of questions that the youth of America want answers
to and want things done about." Not that I'm so youthful, but I
feel youthful. But he's an old 36 himself, which astounded me
because I'm 35. It was a pleasant evening, all in all.

Their sporadic affair lasted only a few months, though Robert saw
her on the last day of her life. A friend later recalled that in January
1964 Robert "handed me a packet of letters – maybe a dozen or so
– and told me to 'get rid of them.' . . . He admitted to me later that
they were love missives both he and Jack had received from Marilyn
Monroe."
¹³
She undoubtedly wrote to the Kennedys, but it seems
highly unlikely that Robert would give the volatile letters to a friend
instead of simply destroying them himself.

The FBI – along with the Kennedys, the corrupt union leader
Jimmy Hoffa and the executives at Fox – had all wired Marilyn's
house and tapped her phone. In January 1965, the FBI (run by Robert's
fierce enemy, J. Edgar Hoover) turned up some evidence about the
liaison: "An alleged relationship between the Attorney General and
Marilyn Monroe had come to the Bureau's attention previously." After
Fox cancelled her contract, Marilyn Monroe phoned Robert Kennedy
at the Department of Justice "to tell him the bad news. ROBERT
KENNEDY told her not to worry about the contract – he would
take care of everything. When nothing was done, she again called him
from her home to the Department of Justice, person-to-person, and
on this occasion they had unpleasant words. She was reported to have
threatened to make public their affair."

Marilyn never quite understood, even after three divorces, that many
men wanted to sleep with her but very few wanted to marry her.
Miller had left his wife for Marilyn; Montand and the Kennedys would
not. (Jackie Kennedy's imitation of Marilyn's breathy, whispering voice
may have been an attempt to make herself more attractive to her
husband.) These sophisticated men had casual affairs with Marilyn and
then abandoned her. She fell in love and expected them to marry her.
When they rejected her and told her the affair was over, she pursued
them and made her wound more bitter. Complaining to Lawford about
a recurrent pattern in her life, she said angrily that the Kennedys "use
you and then they dispose of you like so much rubbish." The superstar
also told another man that she'd been treated like a whore: "I feel
passed around! I feel used! I feel like a piece of meat!"
¹⁴

Marilyn's last project,
Something's Got to Give
, was the greatest disaster
of her career. The shooting began on April 23, 1962, and recapitulated
in a more intense way all the problems of her previous movies. It was
a remake – almost always worse than the original – of the Cary
Grant-Irene Dunne comedy,
My Favorite Wife
(1940), in which a female
explorer, presumed dead seven years after her shipwreck, suddenly
turns up on the day her husband has finally remarried.

Peter Levathes, the new head of production at Fox, came (like
Skouras) from a Greek background. A lawyer, formerly head of the
television department of a New York advertising agency, he'd replaced
Zanuck and was supposed to reverse the studio's alarming financial
decline. The director
Jean Negulesco described him as "a tall, dark
man, nervous and with the faraway look of a man with responsibilities
beyond his understanding or ability." Hoping to prevent Marilyn's
notorious lateness, Levathes instantly met all her demands. At her
insistence, he dismissed the producer David Barry and replaced him
with Harvey Weinstein, a New York stage and television producer
who (under Greenson's guidance) was supposed to be able to control
her. Levathes agreed to have the script extensively rewritten. He also
hired Marilyn's first choice, Dean Martin, as her leading man, but this
too caused conflict. Martin (who spent most of the time practicing
his golf strokes) made $300,000 plus 7.5 percent of future profits.
Marilyn, still under the stringent Fox contract, got only $100,000.
When she became dissatisfied with the director Frank Taschlin, Levathes
– at a cost of $250,000 – replaced him with George Cukor, who'd
directed
Let's Make Love
.

Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the fatuous scripts of Marilyn's
We're
Not Married
and
How to Marry a Millionaire
, completed the screenplay
and left for Europe. In true Hollywood style, six other writers then
worked on the script, constantly changing but never improving it. To
conceal their handiwork and deceive Marilyn, they had the secretaries
retype the pages on white paper instead of the blue normally
used for rewrites. In the end, there were only four pages left of
Johnson's screenplay. Marilyn, naturally confused and upset by all the
changes, was angry about not being consulted or respected.

Finally,
Walter Bernstein, a bright Dartmouth graduate and once-blacklisted
writer, was brought in to do a "final polish" – or revive
the corpse. As he discussed the script with Marilyn, Bernstein found
"her manner at once tentative, apologetic, and intransigent." When
they disagreed about a scene, she exclaimed, "Don't be such a
writer
."
She thought that Bernstein, like Miller, was too defensive about his
script and too unreasonable in expecting the words to be spoken as
he'd written them. She also, playing the operatic diva and repeating
Paula Strasberg's grandiose notions, referred to herself in the third
person: "Remember, you've got Marilyn Monroe. . . . You've got to
use her." Glad to have the job, Bernstein added one scene in the
bedroom. But he thought Johnson's original script was fine and that
there was no real reason for all the changes. They merely made Marilyn
even more insecure and unhappy.
¹⁵

When shooting finally began, Marilyn, pleading poor health, turned
up for only thirteen of the first thirty work days. "If she did show
up," Bernstein recalled, "it was like the Second Coming. Everybody
bowed down and genuflected." In six weeks, Cukor, running a million
dollars over budget, managed to turn out only seven-and-a-half minutes
of usable film. From her infrequent appearances it was clear to him
that she could no longer function as an actress.
Something's Got to
Give
(in its few completed scenes) is an awful movie and Marilyn is
quite awful in it. She's stiff and unnatural with her "cute" Hollywood
children, who are playing in the pool when she returns home as a
stranger and is reunited with them.

Marilyn's megalomania was combined with – perhaps stimulated
by – her feelings of fear, inadequacy and worthlessness. Without Miller
to reassure and restrain (if not control) her, she was now even more
difficult to deal with. Bernstein said the studio had a big investment
in Marilyn, one of the very few stars who could "open a picture"
and draw an audience to see
her
movie. But no one knew how to
handle her. Levathes was weak, Weinstein weaker. Everyone was scared,
and Marilyn filled the power vacuum. Fox conceded too much and
gave in for too long. Like a child with a loaded gun, Marilyn was
out of control and got away with outrageous demands. Zanuck, much
tougher than his successors, would never have indulged her.
¹⁶
Yet once
more, production halted because she was sick.

In the midst of this crisis, Marilyn suddenly recovered her health
and flew to New York to appear at
President Kennedy's forty-fifth
birthday party. She was thrilled to know that her idol, Jean Harlow,
had attended President Roosevelt's birthday ball in 1934. But Levathes,
furious at her absence, failed to see that this extraordinary event –
which combined politics and power with celebrity and fame – was a
superb opportunity to publicize her latest picture. On May 19, in
Madison Square Garden – along with Maria Callas, Ella Fitzgerald,
Peggy Lee, Henry Fonda and Jack Benny – Marilyn performed before
15,000 faithful Democrats, who contributed a million dollars to the
party. As she was being sewn into her shimmering, skin-tight dress, the
actor Peter Lawford, punning on her habitual fault and foreshadowing
her fate, introduced her as "the late Marilyn Monroe." She turned
"Happy Birthday, Mista Pwes-i-dent" into a breathy, even orgasmic
tribute, rated PG for parental guidance, not suitable for children's parties.

Kennedy, with ironic wit, said he was pleased that "Miss Monroe
had sung happy birthday to him in such a wholesome way." Few
people in the wildly enthusiastic audience knew that Marilyn had
been Kennedy's mistress and was publicly expressing her love.
Adlai
Stevenson, echoing Arthur Schlesinger and perhaps in the know, wrote
a friend about his " 'perilous encounters' that evening with Marilyn,
'dressed in what she calls "skin and beads." I didn't see the beads! . . .
Robert Kennedy was dodging around her like a moth around the
flame.'"

Marilyn was eager for even more publicity to strengthen her hand
in the struggle with Fox. On May 28 she posed for nude photos in
the swimming pool on the set, which was modeled on Cukor's luxurious
house. The photos showed that her body was still sensuous and
beautiful. But all her serious ambitions, all her lessons at the Actors
Studio, had led to a rotten movie and another display of her body.

Speaking of disputes during production, Billy Wilder once told me,
"If there's a serious conflict halfway through a film, the actor stays,
must stay, and the director must go." Cukor, increasingly bitter and
angry about Marilyn's behavior, urged the studio to replace her. Instead,
he was replaced by Jean Negulesco, who'd directed
How to Marry a
Millionaire
. When asked by the critic Kenneth Tynan what food Marilyn
resembled, Cukor unkindly compared her to "a three-day-old Van de
Kamp Bakery angel cake."
¹⁷
Interviewed later on, he repeated the
"under water" image that had struck previous colleagues, blamed yet
pitied Marilyn and admitted that the whole project had been a disaster:

Monroe had driven people crazy with her behavior during filming
and had finally gone "round the bend." We have shot for seven
weeks and we have five days' work. And the sad thing is that
the five days' work are no good. She's no good and she can't
remember her lines. It's as though she were under water. She's
intelligent enough to know it's no good. And there's a certain
ruthlessness, too.

The studio has given in to her on everything. She's tough
about everything. She's so very sweet with me. I am enormously
sorry for her. Even her lawyer is baffled. She's accusing him of
being against her. I think it's the end of her career.

Cukor (contradicting his statement about her sweetness) also resented
Marilyn's "plotting and bullying everybody with her outrageous
demands" and concluded, "Fox was weak and stupid and deserved
everything it got."
¹⁸

The crises on
Something's Got to Give
coincided with Fox's even
more disastrous production in Rome of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard
Burton in
Cleopatra
. Fox had lost $61 million in the past three years;
and
Cleopatra
, budgeted at $5 million, eventually cost $25 million. The
studio, inextricably committed to
Cleopatra
, could not afford the
excesses of both Elizabeth and Marilyn. On June 7, ten days after she
posed for the nude photos, Marilyn was fired for her absence, lateness
and impossibly poor performance. Fox also sued her to recover
$750,000 in excessive costs. Like the hostile crew at the wrap-party
of
The Prince and the Showgirl
in England, the Fox crew felt that
Marilyn had neither appreciated their work nor treated them with
respect. They placed an ad in
Variety
that sarcastically thanked her for
the loss of their jobs at a difficult time.

Fox had always treated Marilyn maladroitly. Schenck and others
had forced her into couch casting; Zanuck, slow to recognize her
talent, gave her many mediocre parts; the executives dropped her
when her first contract expired; denied her a star's dressing room;
kept her to an extremely unfair contract when she earned more than
anyone else for the studio; suspended her in 1954 for refusing to
appear in the inferior picture,
The Girl in Pink Tights
; and failed to
exploit the publicity value of her birthday tribute to President Kennedy.
They also did more harm than good by indulging her. They tolerated
her drama coaches on the set, put up with her lateness, failed
to give her the proper treatment for drug addiction and waited far
too long to fire her from
Something's Got to Give
. Walter Mirisch, the
experienced producer of
Some Like It Hot
, thought Marilyn was clearly
not well enough to perform, and that the studio should have shut
the picture down in less than thirty days.