The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (32 page)

The Fox gossip centers crackled with Black Bart and Grushenka stories, and La Monroe became the favorite conversation hors d'oeuvre at Hollywood cocktail parties. It was said that the Fox star had changed and was throwing her newfound power around. Now that she was queen of the lot, it seemed that her attitude toward all the “little people” on the set had changed. She was showing her true colors. No longer friendly with the grips and electricians and the crew who waited endlessly for her to get ready, she was said to treat coworkers with an air of disdain. The new Monroe was “cold and rude.”

But the new Monroe was fighting off the demons of “indicating”—that fatal actor's flaw of performing rather than
being
. It took extraordinary concentration. While Paula was supportive, she also forced Marilyn to reach for concepts in her portrayal that seemed beyond her experience. Only with determination and a focused will could she dance on the high wire and never fall despite the emotional strain and exhaustion it entailed.

The trick, of course, was concentration—a transference by immersion into character, and she was often so into her character and prepped for the moment when the director said “Action” that all else around her was oblivion. Conversation was distraction. To those on the set who had known the old Marilyn, she seemed “cold and aloof.” But the truth was that Cherie didn't know they were there.

Billy Wilder had said that Marilyn was one of the few stars who possessed “flesh impact,” that there was an immediacy to her image on the screen that made the audience look at Marilyn no matter who she was playing a scene with—whether it be Tom Ewell, Jane Russell, Cary Grant, dogs, babies, or the Marx Brothers. It was Marilyn who commanded the frame. But it wasn't just “flesh impact,” it was “body and soul impact.” It was the totality of her being that projected its curious immediacy.

This magic trick of transference, however, went beyond will and concentration. Her performance was drawn intuitively from the well of her secret depths. It has often been said that her concentration was poor, that she frequently forgot her lines or missed her marks. Her concentration was, in fact, extraordinary, but born in the realm of intuition and emotion rather than deliberation. Paula was often mystified that Marilyn would forget her lines during a take, when Paula knew she had known the lines cold for days. Actors would fulminate in their dressing rooms that she hadn't arrived prepared. But it wasn't the lines she forgot—it was the character. She'd lose touch with Cherie, and just stop. The immersion had to be total to get through a take, and with each take she got closer to Cherie. In
Bus Stop
she
was
Cherie.

Joshua Logan said, “Marilyn is as near a genius as any actress I ever knew. She is an artist beyond artistry…. From the start, she visualized playing Cherie in a tender area that lies between comedy and tragedy. This is the most difficult thing for an actor to do well. Very few motion picture stars can do it. Chaplin achieved it. Garbo, too, at times, in
Cam-ille
and
Ninotchka
. And you know, I believe Marilyn has something of each of them in her. She is the most completely realized and authentic film actress since Garbo. Monroe is pure cinema.”

It had been a bumpy ten-year ride from blond Betty's “Hi, Rad!” in front of the church in Paducah to Cherie's memorable soliloquy on the bus to Phoenix:

A
ccording to Arthur Miller, there came a juncture when Marilyn became interested in time as a concept—or perhaps a curiosity. She began wearing a watch as a locket around her neck as well as two wristwatches—one set for West Coast time, the other for New York time. But this was like collecting encyclopedias in the hope that their voluminous presence would impart knowledge: the watches didn't improve her ability to cope with time. On March 12, she missed the plane by twenty minutes when the
Bus Stop
company flew from Los Angeles to Phoenix, Arizona, where the annual rodeo was to be held on March 15. She did manage to arrive on time, however, for Logan to shoot the location sequences amid the crowd of twenty-five thousand people who attended the street parade and rodeo.

As a rule it is more difficult for actors to work on location than in the studio, but directors found that Marilyn worked better al fresco. Like a flower, she did better in the sunshine and fresh air than in the artificial light of Hollywood's soundstage hothouses. In the sunshine her energy and concentration were always up. She'd usually appear on the set on time and things went smoothly. Logan could get his print on the first or second take when she was working in the sunlight.

The press was kept at bay during the filming of
Bus Stop
, and few interviews or photos were allowed. Only Milton Greene seemed to have free access to Marilyn with a camera. When she accidentally fell from a rodeo-stadium ramp, Milton Greene, who was standing nearby with his Rollie, took pictures of her writhing in pain on the ground rather than rushing to her aid. When Logan asked why he hadn't helped her, Greene said, “Look, I was a photographer before I was a producer!”

Billy Woodfield, who was then a photographer for
This Week
magazine, recalled that Greene wouldn't let him get near Marilyn. He commented, “During the rodeo location it got so bad that we were all hiding out and taking pictures with telephoto lenses from under the stadium stands. I got some pictures of Marilyn throwing up under the bleachers. I had the pictures printed, set them down in front of Milton Greene, and said, ‘This is what we have to go with unless you let us take some pictures!' Finally he broke loose, and I got my shots.”

Arthur Jacobs's Beverly Hills office was handling the publicity for Marilyn Monroe Productions, and while Rupert Allan was Marilyn's personal publicist, Pat Newcomb was sent along with other members of the Jacobs staff to Phoenix. Only twenty-five years old at the time, the spin doctor was merely an intern in the practice she would soon master. Margaret Patricia Newcomb was born and raised in the shadow of the Capitol, and her grandfather had been a prominent Washington judge. Her father, Carmen Adams Newcomb, was a lobbyist for the coal industry, which included the Great Lakes Coal and Coke Corporation, owned by Ethel Kennedy's father, George Skakel, Jr.

After living in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Pat Newcomb moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1946, when her father became West Coast representative of the extensive Skakel family real estate holdings in Southern California. Pat attended Immaculate Heart High School in Hollywood, and in 1948 she enrolled at Mills College, an exclusive girls' school in Oakland, where she took a liberal-arts course, majoring in psychology.

One of Pat Newcomb's lecturers at Mills College was Pierre Salinger, who would later become President John Kennedy's press secretary. In the early fifties Salinger was an investigative journalist for the
San Francisco Chronicle
. When Newcomb graduated from Mills in 1952, she became a researcher for her mentor, Salinger, who was writing a series of articles on corruption within the Teamsters Union. Three months were spent researching the articles, first at Dave Beck's union headquarters in Seattle, and then in Detroit, where Jimmy Hoffa ran the affairs of the Central
States Conference of Teamsters. Salinger uncovered incidents of corruption and brutality and found that Beck was lining his pockets with union funds, while Hoffa was recruiting ex-convicts and racketeers to enforce his policies.

When Salinger learned that Arkansas Democratic Senator John L. McClellan was preparing to convene a Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor and Management Field, it was through Pat Newcomb and her father, Carmen, that an appointment was made for Salinger to meet the chief counsel for the committee—Ethel Skakel's husband, Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother of Senator John F. Kennedy, who also served on the committee.

“I shall never forget my first meeting with Bob,” Pierre Salinger stated. “It was a two-hour lunch in the Senate dining room. Although I was there as a reporter to interview him, I spent most of the time answering his questions on Beck and Hoffa…. Bob and I hit it off from the very beginning.”

In 1956 Pierre Salinger was asked by Bobby to become an investigator for the McClellan Committee, and in November they set up shop in Los Angeles while investigating Teamster activities on the West Coast. In
The Enemy Within
, Bobby Kennedy wrote, “We arrived in Los Angeles on November 14, 1956, and got in touch with Captain James Hamilton of the Intelligence Division of the Police Department. We interviewed union officials, employers and employees and several confidential informants.”

According to former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, “At the invitation of Chief William Parker, Bobby Kennedy set up his offices in the LAPD Intelligence Division. Their desks were next to Captain James Hamilton's. Bobby Kennedy and Hamilton became close friends, and Bobby often relied upon Hamilton for information and guidance during the Select Committee investigations.” Two of Hamilton's most trusted officers, the detectives Archie Case and James Ahearn, were assigned to assist Bobby in the investigations.

 

Pat Newcomb decided that show business was her field, and it was through an intimate friend that she joined Arthur Jacobs Public Relations. However, her first assignment, on
Bus Stop
, proved to be short-lived. On the location in Phoenix she had a conflict with Marilyn Monroe, and Arthur Jacobs told her to return to Los Angeles. When questioned by Anthony Summers about the conflict with Marilyn, Newcomb stated,
“We had this terrible falling out almost immediately. I didn't know why for years, but it turned out to be over some guy that Marilyn thought I liked, someone I didn't have any interest in at all. I didn't know how to cope with it, and Arthur Jacobs told me I'd better get out of there at once.”

The truth was that Marilyn had heard rumors that the spin doctor was a lesbian and having an affair with another woman connected with Arthur Jacobs. According to Rupert Allan, who had been in Phoenix when Newcomb's proclivities were called to Marilyn's attention, she telephoned Arthur Jacobs and requested that Newcomb be taken off
Bus Stop
. The moral climate was quite different in the fifties, and Allan observed that Marilyn didn't want a situation that could indirectly involve her in scandal. Several years after
Bus Stop
, Newcomb would become Marilyn's publicist and one of the last people to see Marilyn on the day she died—a day on which they were to have another “terrible falling out.”

When the
Bus Stop
company returned to Los Angeles, Marilyn moved from the Beverly Glen house to the Chateau Marmont on the Strip, where she stayed in the former Jean Harlow suite. Manager Corrinne Patten recalled that Arthur Miller was a frequent weekend visitor: “His weekend visits to the Marmont were
very
hush-hush. He was supposed to be in residence in Reno, obtaining his divorce. Instead, he was sneaking away to be with Miss Monroe.”

In March of 1956, Arthur Miller had traveled to Reno to establish a six-week residency for his divorce. He stayed in a small motel cottage at Pyramid Lake, fifty miles northeast of Reno. While waiting for his divorce he frequently visited the Stix house, which was in nearby Quail Canyon. The Stix house had been rented to an attractive divorcee who had befriended two cowboys. They were itinerants who made their living by searching the surrounding mountains for wild mustangs and selling them for dog food. Both were confirmed bachelors and heavy drinkers and fancied themselves lady-killers. Miller became intrigued with these two Wild West throwbacks to a vanishing frontier, and they would evolve into the central characters of
The Misfits
.

“Once a week I would fly into Los Angeles, a technical illegality, since my period of residency in Nevada had to be unbroken,” Miller remembered. “Marilyn's coach, Lee Strasberg's wife, Paula, had the next room in the Chateau Marmont and was acting as Lee's proxy, with daily phone calls to him in New York on Marilyn's problems.”

Amy Greene recalled that Joshua Logan began dreading Mondays at
the studio, knowing that Marilyn would have difficulty getting back in touch with Cherie after a weekend with Arthur. “She was a wreck after those weekends,” Amy Greene reflected. “She couldn't bring Arthur to see us, he couldn't leave the hotel, and then suddenly on Sunday night or Monday morning, he skipped back to Nevada. This left her confused, guilty, lonely—and all that brought on a cycle of pills and sickness.”

Marilyn didn't get along well with her leading man, Don Murray, who was appearing in his first film. But Marilyn's problem with Don Murray was on a professional level, not a personal one. An accomplished stage actor, Murray was a bright, well-educated, cultured young man, whom Logan had spotted on Broadway in the ANTA revival of
The Skin of Our Teeth
. In
Bus Stop
Murray had trouble in reaching for Bo's crude behavior toward Cherie. His gentle approach worked against the animalistic sexual tension between Cherie and Bo—so essential to the thin story.

Logan often sided with Murray in his less aggressive concept of the character, and Marilyn found herself alone in her struggle to uncivilize Murray while Cherie was trying to civilize Bo. Don Murray, who never topped his performance in
Bus Stop
, apparently was totally oblivious of what Marilyn managed to accomplish.

“Like a child, she said and did things impulsively from a self-centered viewpoint,” according to Murray. “When she thought I'd ruined a scene of hers, she continued the action as rehearsed, taking her costume and hitting me across the face with it. Some of the sequins scratched the corner of my eye and she ran off. But she wasn't deliberately mean.”

The scene Murray was referring to was the first encounter in the Blue Dragon Café, when Cherie tries to escape Bo's advances and runs off the cabaret floor. Bo clutches at her costume and rips off the sequined train. Cherie grabs it back, angrily saying, “Give me back my tail,” and hits Bo across the face with it.

Cherie's spunky anger and the blow across the face are totally unexpected, and this shows in Bo's reaction. The scene proved to be essential in establishing the undercurrent of their relationship, but Murray hadn't wanted to play the scene that way. He felt that Bo should be playful, rather than “vulgar and aggressive.” He wanted to toy with the tail of her costume and have it come off accidentally rather than yank it off—and Logan was going along with him. Murray was so upset that Marilyn had struck him so hard with the tail that he went to Logan and said that he refused to work with her any longer unless she apologized. Logan took up the matter with Marilyn, who agreed to offer her apologies, but when the
moment came and the two were face to face at the end of the day, Marilyn burst into tears and said, “Damn it, damn it—I won't apologize to you, no,
no
!”

Cherie had her way, and that's what ended up on the screen—but Marilyn paid the price.

After the incident on the set with Murray, Arthur Miller was awakened in the middle of the night by his motel manager, who told him he was wanted on the phone. It was near midnight when Miller put on his robe and ventured forth to the phone booth outside the motel office. It was Marilyn. “Her voice, always light and breathy, was barely audible,” Miller recalled:

Miller had never heard her so unguardedly desperate before, and he tried to calm and reassure her.

“Oh, Papa, I can't fight them alone. I don't want this!” she sobbed. “I hate it! I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me, and be a good wife. I can't fight for myself anymore.”

She had never revealed this dependency before, and Miller recalled feeling the rush of trust she was expressing in him and their future together: “I suddenly saw that I was all she had, and then I realized that I was out of breath, a dizziness was screwing into my head, my knees unlocked, and I felt myself sliding to the floor of the phone booth, the receiver slipping out of my hand. I came to in what was probably a few seconds, her voice still whispering out of the receiver over my head. After a moment I got up and talked her down to earth, and it was over: she would try not to let it get to her tomorrow, just do the job and get on with it. Lights were still revolving behind my eyes. We would marry and start a new and real life once this picture was done.”