The Genius and the Goddess (40 page)

Marilyn, used to getting her way with everything, was devastated.
She and everyone else thought her career was ruined. She spent hours
and hours staring at herself in the mirror, looking for telltale wrinkles
and signs of old age. Like the bosomy Hollywood columnist
Sheila Graham, she slept with her bra on to prevent her breasts from
sagging. Being fired made her even more unsure of her identity. When
the photographer
George Barris introduced Marilyn to his maid, who
said, "I can't believe it. Are you really Marilyn Monroe?" she replied,
"I guess I am. Everyone says I am."
¹⁹

Marilyn was replaced by Lee Remick. But Dean Martin, who had
a contractual right to approve his co-star, said "no Marilyn, no picture."
Then, on July 25, the executives at Fox, who still didn't know what
they were doing, suddenly changed their minds. They dropped the
lawsuit and asked, even begged Marilyn to come back. On August 1,
only four days before her death, she signed a new contract for $250,000
– two-and-a-half times her original fee. Marilyn, insecure as ever, was
still in a precarious emotional state, but the new contract seemed like
a second chance, a promising turn of events.

In 1962 Marilyn's physical and mental health was deteriorating, her
personal and professional life was failing, and she was increasingly
lonely, ill and frightened. The circumstances of her death were muddled
and mysterious, and people inevitably speculated on its causes. Who
or what destroyed her – the men who abused her, the doctors who
bungled her care, or her own craving for release? She may have died
of an accidental overdose, she may have been a deliberate
suicide or
(as some think) the victim of a politically motivated homicide: we'll
never know for sure.

Richard Meryman, who interviewed her for
Life
magazine the
month before her death, recently wrote, "I do not believe that she
deliberately killed herself. There was no indication of such a degree
of despair. It is my strong opinion that her death was an involuntary
overdose of narcotics." Several circumstances suggest that her death
was accidental. She did not seem depressed and did not alarm most
friends who saw her during the last days of her life. She loved her
new house and was absorbed in decorating it. She was still, as her
last photos show, luminously attractive. She had contracted with Fox
to resume work on
Something's Got to Give
. There was a vague possibility
of remarrying DiMaggio, though they had still not resolved the
essential conflict between her domestic life and her career. She also
had a high tolerance for drugs and thought she could handle them.
After muddling her brain with barbiturates, she may have forgotten
how many pills she'd already taken.

But the evidence suggests that Marilyn did in fact commit suicide.
Her emotional difficulties – sexual frigidity, insomnia, drug addiction
and depression – were getting worse. She feared yet another mental
breakdown and permanent insanity. More immediately disturbing
factors were Kay Gable's accusation that Marilyn was responsible for
Clark's death;Marilyn's third divorce, from Miller, and the disconcerting
news that his new wife,
Inge Morath, was pregnant; the failure of her
third operation for endometriosis and inability to have children of
her own (Murray told the FBI that Marilyn felt like a "negated sex
symbol"); the failure of her psychoanalysis; her cruel rejections, within
a few months, by Sinatra and both Kennedys; her persistent anxiety
that she was growing older and losing her looks; her fear that she'd
never be able to change from comedy to drama, and that, despite the
new Fox contract, her career was (or soon would be) over.

The process of aging – as the Gloria Swanson character revealed
so memorably in Wilder's
Sunset Boulevard
(1950) – is especially hard
for a once gorgeous and idolized woman. For an actress who derives
all sense of self-worth from her looks, it is tragic. When Clara Bow,
for example, failed to make a comeback, she gained weight and grew
reclusive, became depressed and suffered a series of breakdowns. Joseph
Mankiewicz noted, as early as Marilyn's appearance in
All About Eve
,
how she obsessively examined her face in the mirror. When she looked
at herself in 1962 and saw a spot, a sag, a deepening of wrinkles, she
knew her days as a beauty were ending. After her latest film fiasco,
many male stars (and some outstanding directors) were unwilling to
work with her. As Robert Frost wrote in
"Provide, Provide": "No
memory of having starred / Atones for later disregard / Or keeps the
end from being hard."
¹

Lack of true friends and soul-piercing loneliness also contributed
to Marilyn's suicide. Even when living with a husband and working
with colleagues, she tended to exist in a self-enclosed world of her
own. Abandoned in childhood by her parents, she was finally abandoned
by her friends. She felt she could buy rather than earn
friendship, and therefore had no one to rely on. She was a beautiful
woman who couldn't keep a man and didn't have a date on her last
Saturday night. Peter Lawford called her at 7 p.m. to invite her to a
dinner party, but she refused, in a voice that was thickened and nearly
inaudible from drugs. Her last, foreboding words to him were, "Say
goodbye to Pat [his wife]. Say goodbye to Jack. And say goodbye to
yourself because you're a nice guy." There was no need to say goodbye
to Bobby: she'd just seen him. Naturally alarmed about Marilyn,
Lawford called his manager, who advised him not to get involved.
So Lawford ignored the danger and did nothing to help her. His last
wife (also named Pat), wrote, "He was haunted by her death, maintaining
a sense of personal responsibility for her loss for the rest of
his life. . . . If anyone 'killed' Marilyn Monroe, it was Peter and his
manager, who failed to act in a constructive manner."

Many people not only claimed that they'd phoned Marilyn on her
last day, but also insisted that they were the last one to speak to her.
Peter Lawford, Ralph Greenson, Sidney Skolsky, Joe DiMaggio, Jr.,
Ralph Roberts, the New York businessman Henry Rosenfeld, her
hairdresser
Sidney Guilaroff, Jeanne Carmen (who called, she said, to
arrange a golf date!), her Mexican lover
José
Bolaños and Norman
Rosten all seemed to be worried about her, but none of them assuaged
or responded to her solitude, depression and despair. Rosten retrospectively
realized that she was deceiving herself and living in a dream
world:"[Marilyn said] she was in great shape (not true); she was planning
to begin a film in the fall (fantasy); her house was almost furnished
(never to be); . . . she was getting film offers from all over the world
(doubtful)." Rosten wondered if there could be "a life for her outside
the dream? Marriage and motherhood – that crucial reality – had
faded away. Was there any other for her? It seemed improbable that
a new life could be found in the land of the scorpions."
²

After severing ties with most of her family, ex-husbands, friends
and employees, Marilyn had almost no one left. Lawford had pimped
for the Kennedys, who'd jilted her. Pat Newcomb was apparently
following their orders, and Eunice Murray spied on her. Greenson
exploited his celebrity patient. DiMaggio was in San Francisco. Her
New York friends were too distant or too self-absorbed to help. That
great portrayer of solitude, Joseph Conrad, described her condition
when he wrote, "We live, as we dream – alone."

Like Sylvia Plath, Marilyn had narrowly survived several suicide
attempts, from her late teens until the year before she died (see
Appendix). Her marriage to Miller did not prevent her from attempting
suicide, but did prevent her from succeeding. After he cut loose from
her, she was on her own and heading for the rapids. Overwhelmed
by her psychological crises, Marilyn was now willing to destroy her
beauty and talent. Ever since she'd posed for photographers as a pretty
teenager, she had learned to become "Marilyn Monroe" and had lived,
in a strange dissociation, as two women. One was the ordinary girl
who wanted a stable domestic life, with friends, marriage and children;
the other was the movie idol and sex goddess, with the hourglass
figure, glistening lips and crown of blond hair. She no longer wished
to maintain her unreal self, and may have thought, at the end: whoever
finds my body can do whatever they like with it. I don't want it any
more.

Finally, she took control of her life by ending it. Her suicide was
a form of revenge against the living, a tacit accusation that the survivors
had not done enough to save her, a way to punish the false friends
and treacherous lovers who'd failed and abandoned her. She wanted
to make them feel guilty about her death and to take her suffering
seriously. As she sadly prophesized in her memoir, "I was the kind of
girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of
sleeping pills in her hand."
³

Marilyn's doctors were partly responsible for her death. Well aware
of the danger, Greenson said he wanted to make "a drastic cut in
Marilyn's use of drugs . . . and keep strict control over the medication,
since [he] felt she was potentially suicidal." Greenson also said
that he brought in the internist Hyman Engelberg to help Marilyn
reduce her dependence on drugs, and that the two doctors promised
to keep in close contact about the dosage. In fact, as Greenson's wife
revealed, the doctors gave her whatever she wanted: "The idea was
that she was never to be said no to when she wanted a prescription,
because the only thing that would happen was she would procure
medication elsewhere and not inform her primary physicians about
it. So whenever she asked for a drug she would usually get it." Both
Greenson and Engelberg, without consulting each other, recklessly
prescribed potentially fatal drugs for her, and were willing to risk her
suicide rather than lose her as their patient.

Greenson's forceful personality had made Marilyn slavishly
dependent on him, and he knew that she was "depressed and agitated,
i.e. rejected and tempted to act out" during her conflict with Fox
about
Something's Got to Give
. But he abandoned her by leaving on
May 10 for a five-week summer vacation in Europe, and placated her
with a new prescription. In his weirdly egotistic manner, he described
this treatment as a kind of pharmaceutical fellatio that would fill her
mouth with his essence:

I prescribed a drug which is a quick-acting anti-depressant in
combination with a sedative – Dexamyl. I also hoped she would
be benefited by having something from me to depend on. . . .
I felt that she would be unable to bear the depressive anxieties
of being alone. The administering of the pill was an attempt to
give her something of me to swallow, to take in, so that she
could overcome the sense of terrible emptiness that would depress
and infuriate her.
⁴

The autopsy report stated that Monroe, "a thirty-six-year-old,
well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female . . . had swallowed
forty to fifty Nembutals and a large number of chloral hydrate
pills. . . . The blood test showed 8.0 mg.% of chloral hydrate, and
the liver showed 13.0 mg.% of pentobarbital (Nembutal), both well
above fatal doses." The cause of death was "Acute barbiturate
poisoning. Ingestion of overdose." Barbiturates first numb the brain
and then shut down the respiratory system, and prevent the victim
from breathing. Engelberg insisted that he'd never prescribed chloral
hydrate, a hypnotic and sedative, which Marilyn could have bought
on her recent shopping trip to Mexico City. But he freely admitted,
without any sense of remorse or guilt, that he'd prescribed fifty
Nembutals on Friday August 3, knowing that if Marilyn took them
all at once, they would certainly be fatal. She bought the pills that
day, and the bottle was found empty beside her deathbed. John
Huston, who'd helped save her in Reno, stated the real cause of
Marilyn's death: "The star system had nothing to do with it whatsoever.
The goddamn doctors killed her. They knew the girl was a
pill addict."
⁵

The circumstances surrounding Marilyn's death have been fiercely
disputed, but it's possible to establish the basic facts about what actually
happened. In the afternoon of Saturday August 4, Robert Kennedy
apparently visited and quarreled with her. Greenson (who'd returned
from Europe on June 6) also saw her for several hours and found her
despondent. Between 10 and 11 p.m. Arthur Jacobs, Marilyn's chief
publicist and Newcomb's boss, was summoned from a concert at the
Hollywood Bowl – though it's not clear how he was found among
the thousands of people in the audience. Murray, who didn't usually
stay overnight, was the only other person in the house.

The accounts of both Murray and Greenson, who found the body,
were incongruous and inconsistent. At first Murray said she suddenly
awoke at midnight, saw a light shining under Marilyn's door and
found the bedroom locked. But the new thick carpet prevented any
light from being seen outside the room; and Marilyn, especially after
her forced confinement in Payne Whitney,
never
locked her door.
Murray said she then phoned Greenson, who told her to use the fireplace
poker to part the draperies through the grille of the open
bedroom window. In fact, the drapes were nailed across the window
to ensure darkness and had no parting in the middle. Yet, according
to Murray, she managed to see Marilyn's naked body (in a grotesque
parody of the nude calendar) sprawled prostrate and angled across the
bed. Greenson rushed over to the house from Santa Monica. With
the same poker, he broke an unbarred window at the side of the
house and climbed into the bedroom.

Marilyn's room looked like a cubicle in a cheap motel. There was
no furniture, apart from the bed, a simple mattress and box-spring,
with its twisted sheets. There was one light fixture on the wall and
a tiny lamp on the bedside table, which was full of empty pill containers.
Her few possessions, scattered around the carpeted floor, gave the
impression that she'd just moved in.

Marilyn's doctors did not call the police for several hours, and gave
Murray time to tamper with the scene. Greenson summoned Engelberg
who, at 3:50 a.m. on Sunday August 5, declared Marilyn dead – though
she probably died between 10 p.m. and midnight on August 4. The
police, finally summoned at 4:20 a.m., arrived ten minutes later. They
were surprised to find Murray cleaning up the bedroom and running
the washing machine in the middle of the night. After questioning
her and the two doctors, they searched for and failed to find a suicide
note. Murray – vague, evasive and contradictory – changed the time
she discovered the body, from midnight to 3 a.m., to explain the delay
in calling the police.
Inez Melson, Marilyn's business manager, then
arrived and removed her personal papers. Newcomb also appeared to
answer the numerous phone calls and help control the press and the
crowd that began to gather at the house.