The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (30 page)

N
orma Jeane was nineteen when she moved into a room in Hollywood to live by herself, because “I wanted to find out who I was.” She never did. Instead she became Marilyn Monroe. In the kinetic whirlwind of becoming a movie star—the acting lessons, modeling, photo sessions, interviews—much had been postponed. Marilyn later said of Norma Jeane, “This sad bitter child who grew up too fast is hardly ever out of my heart. With success all around me, I can still feel her frightened eyes looking out of mine. She keeps saying, ‘I never lived, I was never loved.'”

She was twenty-eight when she arrived in New York, and the person who stepped off the plane was still the shy and frightened girl who looked out of Marilyn Monroe's eyes. She needed to find out who she was.

Milton and Amy Greene were waiting at LaGuardia Airport and drove Marilyn to their eighteenth-century farmhouse in Weston, Connecticut. It was rumored in the gossip columns that she had flown to the East Coast, but a baffled press searched for her in vain. “Where's Marilyn?” queried Walter Winchell. Marilyn was in the Greenes' little purple guest quarters, where she sat in a tub full of bubbles. It was the Christmas season and everybody came to the Greenes' on the weekends. The en
trance was a revolving door full of visitors like Joshua and Nedda Logan, Gene Kelly, Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Truman Capote, Richard and Dorothy Rodgers, and Mike Todd. They knew that Marilyn was the hush-hush house guest, but she seldom appeared.

“When do we get to see Marilyn?” they asked.

“Oh, she's very nervous about new people,” Amy would say. “She's shy and afraid to come out. She's been in the bathtub for an hour.”

One of the Greenes' guests, Joyce Saffir, recalled, “She finally did come out. She didn't wear any makeup, I remember. She was scrubbed clean and looked like a child. She was just beautiful in pants and a sweater. She sort of sat off in a corner and didn't speak. While the others were gossiping, laughing, catching up on the latest nonsense, she would go off by herself and sit on the stairs, kicking her leg, just sitting there. I thought, frankly, there was something wrong with her. I started thinking she was out of it.” Indeed, Christmastime brought painful memories to Norma Jeane. It was exactly twenty years since Gladys's breakdown. Marilyn confided to the Greenes' cook, Kitty, that her mother had been institutionalized. “She used to tell me how her mother was sick, and that used to touch my heart,” Kitty said. She remembered Marilyn frequently talking about her days in foster homes. Being in another strange place with a surrogate family brought back painful memories. Kitty recalled that Marilyn would go to the kitchen and help her snap beans and peel potatoes. She would take the Greenes' children out for walks and baby-sit when Milton and Amy went out. When Marilyn lamented to the cook about the breakup of her marriage to DiMaggio, Kitty said, “Well, look how lucky you are, Marilyn. You got to be a star!”

“Yeah, Kitty,” Marilyn responded, “but there are other things in life, too, that you need while you're getting to be a star. And if you don't get them, you'll miss them.”

Marilyn frequently ventured forth from the little purple guest room to browse through the Greenes' extensive library, where she began reading about Napoleon and Josephine. “She was fascinated by women who made it,” recalled Amy Greene. “We had a number of volumes about Emma, Lord Hamilton's mistress. She was intrigued by the story of the servant girl who became Lady Hamilton.” Amy Greene remembered Marilyn keeping a diary, which she carried around the house, making notes on conversations and subjects that interested her in her reading. In the afternoons she would go for long walks alone in the woods surrounding the farmhouse.

Shortly after her arrival on the East Coast, Marilyn appeared on Edward R. Murrow's
Person to Person
, telecast from the Greenes' farmhouse. She seemed overcome by shyness and spoke in monosyllables, interrupted by an effusive Amy Greene, who delighted in explaining to America what Marilyn was trying to say.

“With us she had something entirely new,” Amy Greene observed. “She had a structured life in an organized house. She had her own little room. But soon we were in the New York social whirl. We were invited everywhere and were doing everything. She wanted to become an educated lady, but she also wanted to be a star! That was a conflict, but in the beginning she was very happy—functioning well, fighting with Zanuck, feeling her oats.”

On Friday, January 7, 1955, a press conference was held at the residence of lawyer Frank Delaney and the incorporation of Marilyn Monroe was announced. “I feel wonderful! I'm incorporated,” said Marilyn, who was to be president of Marilyn Monroe Productions.. “We will go into all fields of entertainment,” Marilyn stated. “I'm tired of the same old sex roles. I want to do better things. People have scope, you know….”

Her announcement caused shock waves on Pico Boulevard, where there was a sudden run on legal pads. Fox was under the impression that Marilyn Monroe was contractually obligated to the studio for four more years. Zanuck was furious. Marilyn was ecstatic. That night she invited the Greenes and a party of friends to celebrate at the Copacabana, where Frank Sinatra was entertaining.

“We won't be able to get a table at the Copa,” Amy Greene warned. “It's been sold out for weeks.”

“Don't worry,” Marilyn said. “If you want to hear Frank, follow me.”

Sinatra's show had already started when they arrived, but the maître d' recognized Marilyn and had extra tables and chairs brought in and placed on the dance floor in front of the stage. Sinatra stopped the show, smiled, and winked at Marilyn while the crowd stared in hushed amazement. Looking astonishingly lovely in a borrowed white ermine stole, Marilyn took her place at the table with the party of celebrants.

“She knew precisely the power and influence she had,” Amy Greene recalled.

With the help of Joe DiMaggio, who had followed her to the East Coast, Marilyn became an official New Yorker when she moved into the Gladstone Hotel on East Fifty-Second Street. Sparking speculation that she and DiMaggio were reunited, Marilyn stated that they were separated,
but still friends. “I'm madly in love with New York,” she exclaimed. “This will be my home from now on!”

She was enchanted by the city. Removing all her makeup and putting on a black wig, she explored Manhattan as Zelda Zonk. Friends and acquaintances often commented on Marilyn's special beauty when she was without makeup, and how different she appeared. There were multiple personalities at large within her that she could seemingly bring to life at will.

Eli Wallach was amazed by the metamorphosis that could turn Zelda Zonk into Marilyn Monroe. Wallach described walking down the street in midtown Manhattan with her: “Nobody noticed who she was because she was just being herself—suddenly her walk, attitude and appearance would change and in moments everyone would be ogling her and asking for autographs. ‘I just wanted to be Marilyn Monroe for a moment,' she said.”

On the streets of New York she liked exploring the possibilities of being an ordinary human being. After years in the Hollywood dream factory, she wanted to close the doors on the past and live like a normal person. Brooklyn poet Norman Rosten described his first meeting with this ordinary human being. She was brought to his Brooklyn apartment by a mutual friend, Sam Shaw.

Rosten related that later in the evening they took her to a neighborhood party where few people recognized her. “She was totally, mysteriously unrecognizable, as if she had stepped into the reality of her true self.”

Norman Rosten and his wife were among the few friends she acquired on the East Coast who weren't interested in Marilyn Monroe the actress. They appreciated her for herself. “We didn't really give a damn who she was,” Rosten said. “With us she was herself and she was thoroughly enchanting—such an odd human being….”

For a brief period of time she studied with Constance Collier, to whom she was introduced by Truman Capote. Constance Collier had become a unique drama coach, who worked only with stars, such as Audrey Hepburn and Vivien Leigh. She took on Marilyn Monroe as “my special problem.” Reporting to Truman Capote on Marilyn's progress, she said, “Oh, yes, there is something there. She is a beautiful child…. I don't think she's an actress at all, not in any traditional sense. What she has—this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence—could never surface on the stage. It's so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera. It's like a hummingbird in flight: only a camera can freeze the poetry of it.” And in a prophetic moment she said to Capote, “Somehow I don't think she'll make old bones. Absurd of me to say, but somehow I feel she'll go young. I hope, I really pray, that she survives long enough to free the strange lovely talent that's wandering through her like a jailed spirit.”

 

Marilyn met Broadway producer and Actors Studio cofounder Cheryl Crawford at a dinner party in March. Together they discussed the Actors Studio, and Cheryl Crawford suggested that Marilyn meet with the Actors Studio artistic director, Lee Strasberg, to discuss her acting problems. Marilyn first met Strasberg in his book-lined apartment at Broadway and Eighty-Sixth Street. After a brief conversation he agreed to take her on as a private pupil. Strasberg was fascinated by Marilyn, and at times his enthusiasm would rise to a high hyperbolic boil. “She was engulfed in a mystic-like flame,” he exclaimed, “like when you see Jesus at the Last Supper and there's a halo around him. There was this great white light surrounding Marilyn!” Lee Strasberg was broke at the time, and may have been speaking in the unconscious metaphor of mendicancy when he exuberantly stated, “It was almost as if she had been waiting for a button to be pushed, and when it was pushed a door opened and you saw a treasure of gold and jewels!” Strasberg pushed the button, and Marilyn's arrival at the Actors Studio proved to be an “open sesame” that ultimately led to riches beyond Strasberg's dreams.

Marilyn consented to be an usherette at the Actors Studio's benefit and
world premiere of
East of Eden
, starring James Dean, With the news of Marilyn's participation the benefit was an instant sellout. The magic name of Monroe caused a run on tickets, which were being scalped at triple their sales price. One of the crowd at the Astor Roof who was anxiously waiting to see the usherette was Arthur Miller, who had attended the Actors Studio benefit with his sister, actress Joan Copeland. Marilyn had been very much on Miller's mind. He stated, “I no longer knew what I wanted—certainly not the end of my marriage, but the thought of putting Marilyn out of my life was unbearable.”

T
hey painted the elephant pink, and Marilyn was to ride it around the arena in Madison Square Garden for Mike Todd's Celebrity Circus benefit on March 30. A dazzling circus costume of feathers and spangles was made for Marilyn, but it didn't fit properly and had to be resewn at the last minute. The costume was ready only moments before she was to make her appearance. She hurriedly put it on and quickly climbed the scaffolding to mount the elephant for her entrance. Ringmaster Milton Berle announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and goils, here comes the only goil in the world who makes Jane Russell look like a boy!”
Ta-dum dum
!

Grabbing the rope harness, she sat down bareback on the elephant, and suddenly felt a sharp pain in her derriere. As the circus band played a fanfare and the spotlights illuminated the beautiful blonde on the pink elephant, it lurched forward and began circling the packed arena to thunderous applause, cheers, and whistles. Effervescently beautiful, Marilyn smiled and waved at the jubilant crowd. But with each step the elephant took, she suffered a searing pain. A pin left in the costume had sunk deep into her flesh. It took twenty minutes for the elephant to parade around the arena, and Marilyn smiled and waved to the ecstatic crowd for the
full distance. No one was aware of what happened until she dismounted backstage in agony, her costume blotched with blood.

Another pain in the derriere proved to be Walter Winchell. Winchell had discovered that Marilyn was seeing Arthur Miller, and he planted a blind item in his column, “America's best known blonde moving picture star is now the darling of a pro-lefto….”

Marilyn had moved to suite 2728 in the Waldorf Towers, where Arthur Miller became a frequent visitor. Arthur observed, “I would be with Marilyn in her subleased apartment high up in the Waldorf Tower, while below in the streets the
Daily News
, the
World-Telegram
and the
Journal-American
, each running all the pictures of her they could as many times a week as they could get them, were indignantly calling me a subversive, un-American.”

In order to avoid discovery by the press, Marilyn and Arthur met in obscure places—bicycling in Coney Island, walking in Battery Park, or spending quiet evenings in Brooklyn at Rosten's poetry readings. Arthur Miller reminisced, “She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence. Sometimes she seemed to see all men as boys—children with immediate needs that it was her place in nature to fulfill. Meanwhile, her adult self stood aside observing the game…. She had no common sense, but what she did have was something holier, a long reaching vision of which she herself was only fitfully aware: humans were all need, all wound. What she wanted most was not to judge but to win recognition from a sentimentally cruel profession, and from men blinded to her humanity by her perfect beauty. She was part queen, part waif…. For myself it was beyond rationalizing—she was finally all that was true. I was in a swift current, there was no stopping or handhold.”

Only Winchell seemed to be on to their romance, and when it was later revealed that J. Edgar Hoover often fed information to Winchell for his column, some suspected that Winchell's source was the FBI chief, who by 1955 had both Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe under surveillance. Another friend of Winchell's who was keeping an eye on Marilyn was Joe DiMaggio. He was carrying the torch in dark doorways on the wintry streets of Manhattan. Jimmy Haspiel, who with a half-dozen avid Monroe fans dubbed “The Monroe Six” stood vigil awaiting her appearance, often spotted DiMaggio keeping watch on “Mazzie”—their code name for Marilyn.

“Easily the most curious personage standing out there on street corners and lurking in dimly lit doorways was none other than Monroe's recent ex, Joe DiMaggio himself!” Haspiel remembers. “Yes, on a number of occasions I observed Joe as he secretly watched Marilyn's comings and goings.” Marilyn told friends that one night DiMaggio “came into the Waldorf and almost broke the door down. Police had to be called to calm him down. He was very, very jealous.”

Marilyn was seeing many different men other than Arthur Miller. She was frequently in the company of Henry Rosenfeld, a wealthy dress manufacturer she had met in New York during the
Love Happy
tour. It was Rosenfeld who arranged for Marilyn to move into the Waldorf Towers, where she was also visited by a frequent date referred to as “Carlo”—Marlon Brando. Freddy Karger was also a suitor. After being divorced for the second time from Jane Wyman, Karger journeyed to New York and made a date with Marilyn at the Waldorf. Proving that timing is everything, she stood him up. Did she imagine Karger looking at the very expensive watch with the date 12/25/48 and wondering where the hell she was? Another visitor was Senator John F. Kennedy, whose father's apartment was conveniently located at the Waldorf. Rumors that Marilyn also visited Jack Kennedy at the Carlyle Hotel are supported by Anthony Summers's interview with Jane Shalam. The windows of Shalam's apartment looked down on the back entrance of the Carlyle, and she stated, “I saw Marilyn coming and going at that time, and she was certainly in and out enough to notice her. Most times people wouldn't know who she was—when she took her makeup off and had her hair back, you wouldn't know it was Marilyn Monroe.”

Having made the decision to move away from Hollywood, Marilyn couldn't go forward with another film until her legal position with Fox was resolved. In the meantime her living expenses were high. Milton Greene purchased a new black Thunderbird sports car for Marilyn, in addition to a new wardrobe. Among Marilyn's expenses were: $1,000 a week for the Waldorf apartment, $100 a week for Gladys's care, $125 a week for Marilyn's psychoanalyst, $500 a week for “beautification,” $50 a week for perfume, $200 a week for a private secretary, and $300 a week for her press agent.

It was costing over $100,000 a year to maintain Marilyn while Greene renegotiated her Fox contract. Somewhat in limbo, she did public appearances, studied at the Actors Studio, saw a number of Broadway shows, dated a number of men, took a number of pills, and drank too much champagne. Both the president and the vice president of Marilyn Monroe
Productions dabbled in pharmaceuticals. Marilyn's benefactor and vice president, Milton Greene, who had her hooked on the idea of producing her own pictures, was also known to be a pill pusher.

“It was an awful cycle,” Amy Greene revealed. “Milton's brother was a doctor, and we had tons of pills—anything we wanted, uppers, downers, it was all available.”

Marilyn's habit of taking barbiturates began early in her career when under-the-counter prescriptions at the Schwabadero were readily available and samples were freely handed out by drugstore journalist Sidney Skolsky. In the New York theater world, pharmaceuticals were relied upon to get through the day—up for performances or interviews when one was exhausted, hung over, or depressed; or down when the heart was racing at midnight.

 

Marilyn once said that she was all superstructure without a foundation, and she confided to Susan Strasberg that every day was an identity crisis. Susan replied that she, too, at times didn't know which person she was and sometimes heard another voice clamoring inside her head. Marilyn remarked, “You have only one voice? I have a whole committee!”

One day a member of the committee recalled that Norman Rosten had suggested a visit to the Rodin exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rosten sensed that Marilyn would have a special appreciation for Rodin, who also had an abstract sense of time (Rodin was always late). Several months after Rosten had suggested that they visit the Metropolitan, his phone rang:

“It's me,” said the breathless voice. “I'm ready, C.B., if you are…”

“Ready for what? And where? Not to mention with whom?”

“The Rodin. You promised, remember? I'm free this afternoon.”

So that afternoon they met at the museum. Norman recalled that she wore one of her disguises—dark glasses, crazy hat, no makeup, and a loose coat to uncurve her. He noted that she was awed by the exhibit of marble figures, which almost seemed to breathe. She found one Rodin particularly fascinating:
The Hand of God
, a dazzling white marble depicting a huge hand curving upward in which a man and woman are entwined in a lyrical and passionate embrace. Rosten remembered Marilyn walking around and around
The Hand of God
. Removing her dark glasses, she stared at it transfixed in wide-eyed fascination. Rosten realized that the entwined couple in
The Hand of God
had a special significance to her, a coded meaning that he hoped in time she would decipher.