Marilyn: A Biography (33 page)

On Friday, June 1, she is given a birthday
party on the set — cake, sparklers, candles, flashbulbs, and tears.
She laughs at George Cukor for the camera as he is caught with a
wedge of cake she has inserted in his mouth, and has a bottle of
Dom Perignon with friends in her dressing room. But on Monday she
does not come to work. She is under too much strain (as she easily
convinces her doctors). On Tuesday she is not there either. That
night the movie is suspended; Wednesday the producer is quoted as
saying, “There has to be an agonizing reappraisal of the
situation.” (John Foster Dulles has not used his command of
language in vain.) On Thursday night she is fired from the film,
and spends the next day locked in her room weeping, while Pat
Newcomb sends a statement to
Variety
: “Miss Monroe is ready
and eager to go to work on Monday.” Later, on Friday, Levathes will
announce that she is discharged for “willful violation of
contract,” and Fox is ready to file suit against her production
company “for half a million dollars. We may have to increase that
figure to a million.”

She is triumphant and crushed. She is a
female Napoleon, but only for one pride. The other soul, more timid
than ever, is a virus-ridden orphanage mouse. It is as if she has
spent her life installing victories in all the psychic furnishings
of one personality, while assigning all defeats to the other. So we
are at the seat of complexity in such a view of her person. For if
she is living with the full equivalent of two people within her, it
is equal to saying that she will undertake many an action that
benefits one at the cost of the other, and in turn like a
frustrated general must retire from the action while her
other
mends. It is why so much of her life consists of stops
and starts, and why so many of her affections are replaced by hate.
Few are the activities she can perform where both of her selves can
participate: it is the harshest irony of her life that this
collaboration works best every time she disrupts a movie set, for
then everything in her of raw and buried force can enjoy the
discomfiture of the company – she is forever marching through
Hollywood – yet these massive disruptions, all to the tuneless
flute of a lingering virus and a slight fever, are precisely able
to employ that other part of herself which is sick, weak, wounded,
miserable, stunned, and near to used up. At last such weakness and
void is finally employable! It is a method that has worked for
years. Now, however, she is in the psychological midnight of being
unable to know is she really wished to end the filming, or simply
miscalculated what stress the studio could bear. In the weeks
ahead, one more of the loveless comedies of her life is played out
as studio heads on their side react to the displeasure of
stockholders in New York at her irreplaceable loss, while she,
swallowing her detestations of the script, is brought by her
lawyers to agree that she must go back to the picture in September,
when Dean Martin’s nightclub tour is over, “in order to reinstate
herself as an insurable property for films.” What an eternity to
contemplate, but she does not have the finances or the desire to go
off into litigation.

Commiseration pours in, of course. She is
welcomed back to New York by the Strasbergs. She says, “I’ve got to
start thinking about the stage.” Quickly they give her an
opportunity to do Blanche DuBois in
Streetcar
for
Strasberg’s class, and she turns in an electrifying piece of work,
so nervous her body is trembling from the effort. When she is done,
the seat of her dress is wet. She has urinated upon herself in some
whole anguish of the part. It is an incredible and unforgettable
performance, but her farewell to theatre. How could she ever do
this every night? No, she is not in New York for long before she
must rush back to the coast, as if in panic for being away too long
from her analyst, back to their walled-in hacienda and swimming
pool with one acre on Helena Drive, back to her half-furnished
house with its paucity of closets and piles of records sitting in
the corners with bales of magazines, cartons of books, all the
unshelved collection of a life sitting in the corners. She is back
to her analyst, Dr. Greenson, approaching the last couple of weeks
of her life, and yet it is as if the ambiguity of her presence will
travel with her even into the last romances of her life, the
debatable condition of her health, and the mystery of her death.
For there were many who thought she was even getting better. She
has told her masseur, Ralph Roberts, that she is finally taking
nothing more than a little chloral hydrate: “They’ve got me back,”
she says proudly, “to World War I stuff.” (Of course, chloral
hydrate is just as powerful as any other sleeping pill.)
Nonetheless, it is Roberts’ impression that she is in better health
this last summer than she has been in several years, and her muscle
tone is no longer flabby.

The photographs taken by George Barris almost
a month after she has been fired by Twentieth are hardly portraits
to reveal an abyss. No suicide is contemplated in her eye. Just a
sensitive and not unsturdy young woman sits in a sweater at the
beach and looks wistful and tough. But then the point to make is
that she hardly seems finished. The nude pictures of her swimming
have come out on the covers of the world’s magazines — she has
finally and triumphantly overtaken Elizabeth Taylor’s publicity on
Cleopatra
! — and in a spurt of activity over this, will have
her
Life
interview with Richard Meryman and a personal
meeting with studio heads at Twentieth where they will indicate how
much they want her back, and will also sit for a series of
photographs with
Vogue
,
Life
, and
Cosmopolitan
, will indeed have her famous nude studies with
Bert Stern. As if anticipating the big dinner at Peter Lawford’s to
honor the Attorney General, she has never looked more like a
Kennedy than in Stern’s pictures of her drinking champagne.

No, she does not seem ready to kill herself.
An underground of Hollywood gossip will wash over the end, and
accounts of the witnesses to her last day will not agree. Just as
the trail of Jack Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas may be lost
forever in the tracks of a thousand terrified moves by people who
crossed over that trail in fear others were implicated, so too will
her death be confused by every current of rumor until it is not
possible to decide if she was dead of a suicide by barbiturates
(after all the ones that failed). Or by the accident of taking, as
she had on many another night, more barbiturates than she could
carefully count, or whether she was even – thirty-five years late –
murdered, murdered again, and if that is the wildest of
suppositions, with the feeblest of evidence to support it, there
was motive nonetheless for murder and no weak motive.

So one could not dispense altogether with
such a thought. Let us try to find our way into the final confusion
of her death.

* * *

Her time, this last summer, is spent at home
around a pool in which she will not swim, although
characteristically she is offended if her friends won’t go in.
There is a guest cottage beyond that pool musty with dog smell. Old
friends like Norman Rosten come and visit, and once she goes out
with him to a gallery and buys a copy of a Rodin statue of a man
and woman in embrace. The man is fierce and the woman compliant. It
costs over a thousand dollars, which she cannot necessarily afford,
but she buys it in half a minute, pays by check, and takes it with
her. Of course that is less common than daily visits to her analyst
or staying at home. It is close to an ordered existence. She has
other old friends who visit, and takes a host of phone calls in
this place. Often she speaks to DiMaggio, and often Pat Newcomb
will spend the day with her. At night when she cannot sleep, Ralph
Roberts comes over to give her a massage. Over the years they have
become close, as close perhaps as orphans who have come to love one
another. Roberts is from a large and poor family in North Carolina
and was not able to speak until the age of eleven — how moving must
such a detail be to Marilyn. Then an operation freed his tongue
from his palate. That childhood infirmity could account for some of
his size and physical strength and certainly for his sense of touch
as a masseur. It could also account for his sensitivity to
Marilyn’s thoughts, as well as his earlier determination to be an
actor. Yet for two and a half years he has been submerging his own
career in order to be on call — Marilyn has such need of him. Often
she will phone at 2 a.m. when the pills she is using have failed to
work. “I feel terrible, Rafe,” she will say, “I’m about to jump out
of my skin.” He will come therefore in the middle of the night and
proceed directly to her bedroom, which is kept absolutely dark. The
heavy drapes are always drawn since she cannot sleep with the
faintest crack of light, indeed, the drapes are even stapled to the
frame. In the blackness of that room, he will locate his bottle of
rubbing oil, undo her brassiere (which she puts on every night in
compensation for not wearing anything during the day!) and massages
her until she is ready for sleep. Sometimes it will take an hour.
Then he hooks the brassiere and steals out. They have a psychic
communion that is obviously not ordinary. On the first occasion he
gave her a massage, back with Miller when she was getting ready for
Let’s Make Love
, Roberts, after a half-hour of such work,
was off in silent thoughts of Willa Cather. Then Marilyn asked,
“Have you ever read
A Lost Lady
?” He was not likely to
recover from such connection between book and author. Since her
skin may have been the most delightful he had ever touched, with a
rare underskin beneath the skin, or so he would describe it,
suspicion of an affair naturally has to arise, and in a hurry,
given a man as powerful in appearance as Roberts in a treatment so
sensuous as massage. While Miller had civilized faith in the
separation of sex and therapy, and was never overtly uneasy,
DiMaggio would prove jealous more than once, as if, final physical
connection or not, Roberts was still too close to his woman,
feeling too much of what might come off her body as love. DiMaggio
had an Italian sense of the whole when all is said – if it is mine,
it must be all mine! I do not need another man to fix the edges of
my work.

By now, we should be able to suspect,
however, that Marilyn enjoyed looking on with detachment while her
body was manipulated by professionals. Perhaps she was even at her
best when her relations were not sexual. No woman could be more
charming than she will prove to be with Norman Rosten, and no woman
more honest than she is with Roberts, as over the years — they are,
after all, but a step away from Reichian analysis — she tells him,
as she will tell few others, of what is happening in her life.

If we enter her relation to Ralph Roberts
now, two and a half years after it is begun, it is because she
asked him one night out of a silence while he was massaging her,
“Have you heard the rumors about Bobby and me?”

“Heard them? Why, all Hollywood,” Roberts
told her, “is talking of nothing else.”

“Well, it’s not true. I like him, but not
physically.” Since she has begun to talk, she goes on to say that
she loves his mind, yet does not find him as attractive as his
brother.

She could, of course, have been lying to
Roberts — there is many a rumor to claim her affair with Bobby
began in the back seat of a car after they have both stolen out
from a party. Still, one has reason to believe her story. If the
thousand days of Jack Kennedy might yet be equally famous for its
nights, the same cannot be said of Bobby. He was devout, well
married, and prudent. If he was also a hardworking young man who
might wonder about sexual worlds he had never entered, such wonder
was hardly going to weigh in balance against his ambition. His
brother had managed miracles of indiscretion, but Bobby had a hard
enough attorney’s head to recognize that he was vulnerable to
scandal. Those who would not dare to attack the presidency could
fix upon the younger brother. Besides, his relation to his family
seems to be as deep as any public figure’s of our time. It may be
more comfortable then to assume that merry he might be, and as
wistful about Marilyn as a high school boy with forty cents for a
fifty-cent sundae split, cherries and banana! but finally his hard
Irish nose for the real was going to keep him as celibate as the
happiest priest of the county holding hands with five pretty
widows.

Still, what a flirtation! He would call her
when he came to stay at Peter Lawford’s house. She would come to
see him. Given the species of house arrest in which she lived, how
superb to see him, how absolutely indispensable to her need for a
fantasy in which she could begin to believe. (“Don’t meet Gertrude
Nissen,” she would say to Roberts as a standing joke, for he had a
crush on Gertrude Nissen.) Now, here at last was a fantasy where
the company was sensational. Bobby had a mind she may even have
seen as similar to her own mind – no matter his education, he had,
like herself, learned on the job. By getting the biggest jobs.

Of course, she was not only living in the
future, but in what she could retain of the past. Guiles, who
believes she did have an affair with Bobby, and therefore favors
him with an alias, has this interesting passage:

In late July, when word reached DiMaggio of
her interest in the Easterner, they had a bad row. . . . Possibly
afraid of permanently losing DiMaggio as her most valued friend,
she sat down and wrote him that if she could only succeed in making
him happy, she would have succeeded in the biggest and most
difficult thing she could ever imagine — that of making one person
completely happy. She concluded by informing him that his happiness
meant her happiness.