The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (47 page)

To a perplexed Norman Rosten, a hidden drama was exploding. She was demanding an answer. Like a child locked in the dark, she was crying out to the man who held the key.

Later they returned to her home and placed the Rodin on a living room table. The next day Rosten returned to the East Coast. It proved to be the last time he saw her alive.

T
he filming of
Something's Got to Give
was scheduled to start on April 9, and Marilyn was fully prepared for the start of production; however, director George Cukor insisted on additional rewrites and the start was delayed until April 23. Marilyn wanted to go to New York during the delay. Henry Weinstein had a premonition of disaster and pleaded with Marilyn not to go.

“She went east for one of those superprivate fund-raisers for the rich and beautiful of Manhattan—a ten-thousand-dollar-a-plate affair,” said publicity consultant Rupert Allan, who dined with Marilyn in New York on April 14. “The president had promised his well-heeled supporters that Marilyn would attend.”

The affair was a black-tie dinner party in the president's honor given by socialite Fifi Fell in her Park Avenue penthouse. Among the invited were Peter Lawford and Milt Ebbins. Around 7
P.M.
, Ebbins was to pick up Marilyn at her Fifty-Seventh Street apartment, but when he arrived she wasn't ready. The dinner was scheduled for eight. At ten minutes after eight, Marilyn's phone rang and Ebbins picked it up. It was Lawford, “Where is she? The president's here—everybody's waiting.”

“She's not ready yet. I'm sitting here waiting,” said Ebbins.

“C'mon,” Lawford said. “Get her over here. She's holding up the dinner!”

At eight-thirty, Marilyn's maid, Hazel Washington, announced that she would be out shortly. By nine there was still no Marilyn. Lawford called again. “You son of a bitch!” Lawford screamed. “Get her over here—they're still waiting dinner!”

By nine-thirty, Ebbins couldn't take it anymore. He opened the door to Marilyn's bedroom and pleaded with her to hurry. He saw her sitting at her vanity table, naked, staring at herself in the mirror. “Marilyn, for God's sake,” he said. “Come on! The president's waiting—everybody's waiting!”

Marilyn looked at him dreamily. “Oh,” she said. “I'm glad you finally showed up. I need someone to help me put on my dress.”

Marilyn arrived at the party some time after ten, according to Ebbins, “and did she look sensational—like a princess. Marilyn sashayed over to the president and said, ‘Hi Prez!' He turned around, smiled at Marilyn, and said, ‘Hi! Come on, I want you to meet some people.'” As they walked away, Marilyn looked back at Ebbins and winked. He later learned that dinner was never served. Everybody feasted on hors d'oeuvres and got blind drunk. Nobody cared about dinner after a while, and Marilyn, of course, was the hit of the party.

Before Marilyn's return to Hollywood, she met with Lee Strasberg. Despite warnings that he was sick with a bad cold, they had several sessions together discussing
Something's Got to Give
, scene by scene. Over dinner on April 18, she convinced Paula Strasberg to return to Hollywood at a salary of three thousand dollars a week and, for the fifth time, become her private coach during production. On the way to the airport on April 19, Marilyn told Paula, “I think I'm coming down with Lee's cold.”

When Marilyn returned to Los Angeles, she was met by a surprise. The Nunnally Johnson script she had memorized and gone over scene by scene with Lee Strasberg had been totally rewritten by Walter Bernstein, the blacklisted writer Henry Weinstein had brought back from London.

On Sunday, April 22, one day before her first day of shooting, Marilyn became wracked with chills and fever. Virtually unable to leave her bed, she picked up the phone and called Weinstein. “I wanted to tell you as early as possible,” she whispered, “I'm not going to be able to be on the set tomorrow.” Weinstein listened with growing alarm. Marilyn's illnesses and problems had caused costly delays on
Some Like It Hot, Let's Make Love
, and
The Misfits
, but this would be the first time she had shut down
a production on the first day. On Monday morning at Fox on Stage 14, there would be the cast and 104 crew members waiting and ready to roll, and no leading lady.

For several days, George Cukor shot around Marilyn, doing scenes involving Dean Martin, Cyd Charisse, and Tom Tryon. Suffering from high fevers, dizziness, and lethargy, Marilyn complained of “unbearable pain behind my eyes.” An acute viral cold had developed into a serious sinus infection. Dr. Engelberg diagnosed it as “sinusitis,” and tests at Cedars-Sinai showed that she had contracted “chronic sinusitis,” which usually required a month of massive antibiotic treatment to cure.

A parade of studio insurance doctors visited Marilyn's house. “Nobody believed she was really sick,” said production secretary Lee Hanna. New York executives were always skeptical of opinions by the private medical community and they sent their own studio doctor, Lee Siegel. Siegel, a tall, handsome man with a suave bedside manner, had been treating the actress off and on since 1951. He recorded her temperature at 101 degrees, described her respiratory tract as “badly occluded,” and noted that she had a serious secondary infection of the throat. “It will take weeks to cure this infection,” he wrote in a memorandum.

At Fox, the mood was grim. “Everyone knew that unless Marilyn felt in perfect condition, she couldn't come in,” said Weinstein. “We were now at the mercy of all these doctors.” The frustrated director, George Cukor, thought “she was malingering.” But Eunice Murray recalled that “Marilyn woke up each morning at three with a headache and a high fever.” Each day she tried to go to the studio, but wasn't able to make it. Studio logs show that Marilyn called for her limousine four times during the first seven days of her illness. On one of those days, chauffeur Rudy Kautzky was told by Mrs. Murray that Marilyn had passed out in the bathtub. “She knew she was sick, but was still guilty about not going in,” said masseur Ralph Roberts, who had returned to Hollywood at Marilyn's request, despite Greenson's misgivings.

On April 30, against Dr. Siegel's advice, Marilyn went to the studio and filmed for about ninety minutes before collapsing in her dressing room and being driven home. Though she made repeated efforts to work, she was confined to her bed again from May 5 to 11. While Marilyn tried to regain her health, and Cukor rooted around for sequences to film without her, fear was creeping into the Fox executive building. Fox was concurrently filming the ravenous cash-eating monster
Cleopatra
in Europe. Problems with both productions threatened to bankrupt the studio.

While Greenson had guaranteed Fox that Marilyn would be on the set each day and the film would be finished on schedule, he hadn't anticipated physical illness. Paranoid studio executives called Greenson at frequent intervals, reminding him of his assurances and seeking clues to her possible motivations in destroying the studio. Was she really sick? Was she sabotaging them because she was being underpaid? Had she had a mental collapse? Had she succumbed to drugs?

Inexplicably, Greenson departed from Los Angeles on May 10 for four weeks. His disappearance at this very critical time in Marilyn's life remains a mystery. He told Fox that his wife was ill and needed to be treated at a hospital in Switzerland. But that proved not to be true. He told Marilyn and several associates that he was going to Europe on a speaking engagement. In his absence he designated the analyst who shared his Beverly Hills office, Dr. Milton Wexler, to care for his patient. Dr. Wexler, who still practices from his Santa Monica home, refuses to discuss why Greenson left town, where he went, or anything relating to his own visits to Marilyn during Greenson's absence. But according to an associate who was close to the psychoanalyst at the time, Greenson went to Switzerland and on to Germany, where he attended a conference at the Frankfurt School.

In his textbook
Explorations in Psychoanalysis
, Dr. Greenson discussed Marilyn and the problem of his departure. Without naming the patient, in the chapter “On Transitional Objects and Transference” Greenson wrote about an emotionally immature patient who used a chess piece as a talisman to get over his absence at a time when she was making a public appearance of great importance. Greenson wrote, “The young woman had recently been given a gift of a carved ivory chess set…. As she looked at the set through the sparkling light of a glass of champagne, it suddenly struck her that I looked like the white knight of her chess set. The realization evoked in her a feeling of comfort…. The white knight was a protector, it belonged to her, she could carry it wherever she went, it would look after her, and I could go on my merry way to Europe without having to worry about her.”

The public appearance, of course, was the president's birthday gala.

On May 14, Marilyn was finally feeling better and returned to the studio, but a rumor was spreading through the Fox corporate headquarters that Marilyn was planning to attend President Kennedy's birthday gala scheduled for Saturday, May 19, at Madison Square Garden.

Henry Weinstein had given Marilyn tentative approval to attend, but this had been before the number of production delays caused by Marilyn's
illness. Marilyn had spent six thousand dollars on an incredible gown designed by Jean-Louis, and the arrangements for her appearance at the gala had been made through Peter Lawford, who was enthralled with the thought of having Marilyn sing “Happy Birthday” to the president.

Gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen had already reported to radio listeners that Marilyn was to be the centerpiece of the president's forty-fifth birthday celebration and that a “spectacular dress” had been created for the star.

Designer Jean-Louis recalled Marilyn asking him to create a dazzling gown for the occasion. He said, “It was made of flesh-colored silk gauze embroidered with rhinestones to reflect the spotlights. Each rhinestone was hand-sewn into place.” During one of the fittings Jean-Louis said there was a call from Hyannisport, which Marilyn took in the next room. When she returned she was singing, “Happy Birthday, Mr. Presi…”—stopped, and said with a wink, “Oops, I'm not supposed to say that.” Norman Jefferies remembered Marilyn letting him hold the gown when it first arrived at her home, and the entire silk gown could be held in the palm of his hand.

But word came from the New York office that Marilyn wasn't to attend the gala. Milton Gould, the lawyer who was head of the Fox executive committee, instructed Frank Ferguson, the studio's chief counsel, to warn Marilyn against leaving the set on Thursday for the flight to New York. Though the event was on Saturday, rehearsals were set for late Friday. While it seemed improbable that a major studio would pass up such a major publicity event for one of its top stars, a two-page letter threatening the star with dismissal if she left the set of
Something's Got to Give
was sent to Mickey Rudin. The letter stated, “In the event that Miss Monroe absents herself, this action will constitute a willful 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.”

When Marilyn heard about the letter from the Fox legal department, she called Bobby Kennedy, who knew Judge Rosenman and the top people on the Fox board of directors. However, Kennedy was concerned that factions within the Democratic Party would disapprove of her appearance, and he tried to discourage her from attending. Some leaders had previously expressed their concerns over JFK's association with Monroe. Soon there were private expressions of outrage. Richard Adler, a coordinator of
the event, recalled that key leaders called him the day before the gala and begged him to cut Monroe from the ceremony. Six congressmen and three senators, all Democrats, sent him telegrams to protest her appearance. At the time, Washington was awash with gossip about the president's affair with the Hollywood actress. Former CBS news producer Ted Landreth, who later produced the BBC documentary
Say Goodbye to the President
(1986), said that “highly placed political leaders knew of the affair. The Washington press corps knew about it, as well.” But either the president failed to perceive the dangers, or the reckless duality of his nature blinded him to the consequences.

Weinstein felt that Marilyn was determined to go in any event; “I mean, 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 had known all the poverty in the world. And now, she was going to sing ‘Happy Birthday' to the president of the United States in Madison Square Garden. There was no way for her to resist that.”

When the production company of
Something's Got to Give
broke for lunch on Thursday, May 17, a deafening whine announced the arrival of an enormous helicopter that set down on the heliport near soundstage 14. Borrowed by Peter Lawford from Howard Hughes, the space-age chariot had arrived to take the Lady of Shalott to Camelot. Leaping from the helicoptor, Lawford hurried to Marilyn's dressing room and escorted her to the waiting royal blue chopper. Following several steps behind them were Pat Newcomb and Paula Strasberg. As they boarded the helicoptor, Lawford glanced behind him, hoping he wouldn't see an enraged Cukor running after them. Before the frustrated director and the executives at the Zanuck building knew what happened, the helicopter rose quickly into the air and headed for the Los Angeles Airport.

Marilyn's appearance at the Madison Square Garden Presidential Gala on May 19, 1962, would be her first performance before a large audience since she had entertained the troops in Korea during her honeymoon with Joe DiMaggio. The gala was to be attended by fifteen thousand people and televised to the nation. In a sense, the event was the apex of a dream—the fulfillment of Norma Jeane's dream of attainment, of being accepted and wanted. One of the most popular and beloved film stars of Hollywood singing “Happy Birthday” to the most important man in the world, the president of the United States.