Dr. Feelgood (14 page)

The lingering question is whether Mick’s records should be altered to reflect that he was taking performance-enhancing drugs, steroids, and methamphetamines. If Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa’s records record their use of performanceenhancing substances, should not Mantle’s? Especially in the wake of stories of Lance Armstrong’s use of drugs and his confession to television personality Oprah Winfrey, sports fans have become more conscious of the effect that steroids and other substances can have on a user’s performance. Is Mickey Mantle immune from the same kind of scrutiny?

Mickey Mantle was indeed an American legend. Like President Kennedy, he was a hero for an entire generation, even though that public perception of heroism tends, sometimes, to obscure real facts about the human being himself. Also, just like President Kennedy, Mickey Mantle was a victim of a powerfully addictive drug that held out the promise of superhuman energy, but in the end sapped the very energy it was intended to enhance.

Screen legend Marilyn Monroe had a very troubled childhood, sought father figures throughout her life, and had numerous affairs with the men who guided her career. She died in her Brentwood home in 1962 under what Los Angeles coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi said were suspicious circumstances. Had she committed suicide by overdosing on chloral hydrate and Nembutal, despondent over her failed love affairs with president John F. Kennedy and his brother, attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, or her failed marriages to New York Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller? Or had she been murdered, or, rather, “suicided” by mysterious agents of the government because she was an embarrassment to the Kennedys and simply knew too much? And what was that strange bruise on her hip, noted by Dr. Noguchi, indicating that she might have been bleeding subcutaneously shortly before her death? What was known for certain was that Monroe had been one of Dr. Max Jacobson’s regular patients, kept stimulated by regular injections of methamphetamines that Jacobson supplied to her friends in Frank Sinatra’s celebrated Rat Pack.

We know from stories told about Jacobson that he not only had an affinity for famous and powerful people, but he also was fascinated by beautiful women and said so himself. Jacobson was obsessed with control—control of others exerted by his distribution of the pathogenically addictive methamphetamine he supplied. He used his drugs to entice high-profile, fashionable women into his “harem.” He had already hooked Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Ingrid Bergman, Hedy Lamarr, Arlene Francis, Rosemary Clooney, and countless other admired women of that generation and was hoping to add Marilyn Monroe to the top of his list.

By the 1950s, Monroe was already an iconic film star and had surpassed her idol Betty Grable when she took up residence in a three-room suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. She had married, and then divorced, Yankee baseball star Joe DiMaggio. In New York, she soon became fast friends with Truman Capote.

Capote claimed he made two important introductions for Monroe. The first was to Cheryl Crawford, who was one of the founders of the Actors Studio. Marilyn had already met Paula Strasberg and her daughter, Susan, on the set of
There’s No Business Like Show Business.
Marilyn was a great admirer of Lee Strasberg, the director of the Actor’s Studio, and wanted to study with him. Crawford introduced Monroe to Strasberg, and she began taking private lessons with him. Although Marilyn was already an iconic American movie star, she soon entered a class with such beginners as Julie Newmar and Jane Fonda. There were also several young actors at the Actor’s Studio during this period, including Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, Martin Landau, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Neal, Paul Newman, Eli Wallach, Ben Gazzara, Rip Torn, Kim Stanley, Anne Bancroft, Shelley Winters, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward, and others. It was as if Marilyn had entered into a future pantheon of some of America’s greatest actors.

In his
Vanity Fair
article, “Marilyn and Her Monsters,”
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Sam Kashner wrote:

Monroe was also encouraged by Strasberg to be treated by Dr. Margaret Hohenberg as often as five times a week. . . . The psychiatrist, an acquaintance of Strasberg’s, was a Brünnhilde type, a fifty-seven-year-old Hungarian immigrant complete with tightly wound braids and a Valkyrian bosom. Strasberg strongly believed that Monroe needed to open up her unconscious and root through her troubled childhood, all in the service of her art. Between her sessions with Strasberg and with Dr. Hohenberg, she began recording some of those raked-up memories, including a devastating incident of sexual abuse.

It was during this period that Capote introduced Marilyn to Dr. Max Jacobson, who had been lobbying Capote to bring his new friend to his office. While Monroe’s psychological well-being was being treated by Dr. Hohenberg, Capote told her how Jacobson’s vitamin shots could help her with her lack of energy, as they had with his writer’s block.

Another version of the Marilyn-to-Jacobson story was told by singer Marian Marlowe, from the old
Arthur Godfrey
television show. She and Marilyn had been roommates as early as 1954, and she said that she had brought the young actress to visit Max Jacobson even before Marilyn married Arthur Miller and met Truman Capote. Either way, whether in 1954 or in 1956, Marilyn became Dr. Max Jacobson’s patient and became addicted to his methamphetamine injections.

By 1956, Monroe had come under the control of what amounted to four Svengalis—Strasberg, Hohenberg, Jacobson, and her new husband, Arthur Miller. Each fought for control over her professional and personal life. Strasberg sought the spiritual, Hohenberg wanted the mind, Jacobson sought her soul, and Miller wanted her allegiance. For a woman who had unresolved father and authority issues, Marilyn was constantly in a state of conflict. Her search for a father figure played out again and again in her relationships with men and those in authority. Accordingly, it makes perfect sense that Monroe would have responded to Max Jacobson, a domineering figure whose magic elixir could bestow on her the ability to feel good, physically and emotionally.

Jacobson, however, was not a benevolent father figure. He was angry with Monroe not only because of her drinking, but also because he suspected that she took barbiturates while she was on amphetamines. He told his patients that if they drank or took barbiturates, he could not be responsible for them because of the cross-reactions between methamphetamines and other mood-altering substances. Yet he was not so quickly dismissive of Monroe because he considered her a conquest, and Jacobson wanted her dependent on him.

Monroe was an infrequent visitor to Jacobson’s renowned after-hour office gatherings of his literary and artistic patients. While there is no record of whether Arthur Miller attended these get-togethers, other artists certainly did, such as Tennessee Williams, Alan Jay Lerner, Carson McCuller, Zero Mostel, Leonard Bernstein, and Gypsy Rose Lee. There was always a specially prepared syringe of Jacobson’s special vitamin stimulant cocktail loaded with meth for those who stayed after three o’clock in the morning.

When Monroe returned to Los Angeles to shoot
Bus Stop
and
Some Like It Hot
, she received her medications from Max’s son, Dr. Thomas Jacobson, who was then a successful physician in Los Angeles.

Of those early days, Dr. Tommy Jacobson recalled, “I was separate from my father; however, I began to treat several of his patients who were in Los Angeles, such as [Eddie] Fisher and Monroe. There were times that my father sent his prepared mixtures to be administered to them. My father called his mixture ‘miracle tissue regeneration.’”
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In reality the mixture was a blend of amphetamines, vitamins, painkillers, steroids, and human placenta. These ingredients were itemized in a Freedom of Information Act document that resulted from Bobby Kennedy’s test of Jacobson’s formula by the Drug Enforcement Administration and a later report by the Bureau of Narcotic and Dangerous Drugs.

By the early 1960s, Monroe was under the constant care of a new psychiatrist named Dr. Ralph Greenson. She was struggling with depression and with drug and alcohol dependency. Despite the critical success of Billy Wilder’s
Some Like It Hot
, according to actor Tony Curtis, with whom she had an affair during this period, she was still suffering.

After the grueling production of the film
The Misfits
, in which Monroe starred with Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, and which Arthur Miller had written for her, she separated from Miller. Marilyn had troubles on the set; she was often late, difficult to work with, and unpredictable in her behavior because she resisted John Huston’s direction of the film. She returned to New York in March 1961, and the world came crashing down around her. She committed herself to the Payne-Whitney psychiatric ward at the New York Hospital. It was a horrible, confining experience that lasted three days, until ex-husband Joe DiMaggio rescued her. She returned to Los Angeles and continued receiving her treatments from Jacobson through his son. But her life was about to take another dramatic turn when her friend, actor Peter Lawford, invited her to his brother-in-law’s birthday party, saying that he wanted to introduce her to his brother-in-law, who was turning forty-five.

Lawford’s brother-in-law was none other than President John F. Kennedy, and the party would be a star-studded Democratic Party fundraising event at Madison Square Garden televised before a national audience on May 19, 1962. The “Who’s Who” of show business would be there to pay homage to Kennedy. Among them were singers Harry Belafonte, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee, comedian Jack Benny, actor Henry Fonda, and opera diva Maria Callas. Lawford, who was to serve as the master of ceremonies, wanted Monroe to perform the pièce de résistance by singing the finale.

When Jackie Kennedy learned that Monroe would perform, she became a last-minute participant in the Loudoun Hunt Horse Show at Glen Ora, her weekend home. Jackie knew her husband’s propensity for beautiful women, and that he was fascinated with Marilyn Monroe, and she was not about to be humiliated in front of a national audience.

Monroe was wild for Kennedy, too, and she accepted the invitation, even though it was in violation of her performance contract with Twentieth Century Fox. Marilyn was in a narcotics and booze nosedive and living on impulse. She was in hot pursuit of Jack Kennedy, and nothing would get in her way. “A manic energy propelled her,” wrote Barbara Leaming in
Marilyn Monroe
.
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“All weekend, the white-carpeted, unfurnished rooms at Fifth Helena [Monroe’s home in Los Angeles] echoed with Marilyn’s whispery voice. She lay in the tub singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ She sat on the living room floor, endlessly tape-recording and listening to herself.”

Ignoring her studio’s stern warning, Monroe flew from Hollywood to New York with Peter Lawford. She continued to practice the song in her New York apartment. Those who listened said that her interpretation grew sexier and more and more outrageous. Friend Paula Strasberg warned that her performance was verging on self-parody.

On the night of party, Monroe got into her flesh-toned slip of a dress by Jean-Louis. The gown was so snug that she literally had to be sewn into it. Suddenly, she became paralyzed with stage fright. Monroe was never a stage actress and had very little experience performing live. Fortunately, Dr. Max Jacobson was there with his medical bag. Mike Samek was backstage with Jacobson, and witnessed his exchanges with Kennedy and Monroe:

I had followed Max backstage to meet with the president . . . . I stood by as Max prepared a syringe and injected the president. We turned around and saw Marilyn Monroe behind us, and she was absolutely shivering. She saw Max and smiled. Without saying one word, Max went into his bag, prepared another syringe, and injected Monroe in the neck. She gave Max a peck on the cheek, and we went back to our wives and our seats.
³⁹

At first Monroe ignored her cue to appear on stage, waiting for Max’s injection to take effect. Then Milt Ebbins shoved her onto the stage, and Jacobson remembered, “She walked like a geisha.” The 15,000 people in Madison Square Garden that night couldn’t believe what they were seeing. As Sally Bedell Smith describes in her book
Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House
,
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“Onto the stage sashayed Marilyn Monroe, attired in a great bundle of white mink. Arriving at the lectern, she turned and swept the furs from her shoulders. A slight gasp rose from the audience before it was realized that she was really wearing a skintight, flesh-toned gown.” Hugh Sidey of
Time
magazine noted, “When she came down in that flesh-colored dress, without any underwear on, you could just smell lust. I mean, Kennedy went limp or something. We all were just stunned to see this woman. ‘What an ass . . . what an ass,’ whispered Kennedy.”
⁴¹

Monroe began to sing in a hushed voice, sometimes barely above a whisper, “Happy . . . Birthday . . . to you.” She was soft, seductive, under the influence of Max’s powerful drugs, as she desperately reached out across the audience for the love of just one man. The wig she was wearing was slipping off, and her eyes had a dreamy quality as she looked at the president. Some called it a brilliant performance. Others thought it was pathetic. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen at the time suggested that it looked like Marilyn was “making love” to JFK in front of a viewing audience of forty million Americans.
⁴²

Afterward, President Kennedy spoke to the audience. He was noticeably embarrassed and announced disingenuously, “I can now retire from politics after having had Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.” It was clear that Marilyn and the president were more than just passing friends.

During the last months of Monroe’s life, she was passed from JFK to his brother Bobby and watched over by Peter Lawford while the CIA was tapping her phone. By the beginning of August 1962, however, her affair had soured. Both Kennedys had broken up with her, and she became angry and out of control. According to an authenticated CIA transcript of a CIA wiretap, Monroe left a phone message for Bobby Kennedy on August 3, 1962, demanding to speak to Jack Kennedy and threatening to reveal her affair with the president, classified intelligence regarding bases in Cuba, the president’s plans to kill Castro, and the president’s revelation of a secret air base where he saw artifacts from outer space. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen speculated that Monroe was referring to the Roswell incident and that this could be a huge embarrassment for him. Worse, the existence of the Nevada airbase, now referred to as Area 51, was beyond top secret. Clearly, the president had been pillow talking out of school.