Marilyn Monroe (44 page)

But in spite of her outward confidence, being in the house she had shared with Miller all those years was a painful experience and, at the end of the meeting, she appeared to stall her departure. Getting into the car, she sat back in her seat and waved silently goodbye not only to Miller but to the place she had once thought would make her happy. She had dreamed of raising children there, of living a quiet life in the country, but it was not to be; and as she was driven past the trees and flowers she had once helped to grow, she knew she would never return to Roxbury again. It was time to move on.

By the time Marilyn had fully recovered from the gallbladder operation, it was time for Berniece to return to Florida and Marilyn’s thoughts returned once again to work. She refused Twentieth Century Fox’s requests for her to do
Loss of Roses
(which later became
The Stripper
with Joanne Woodward) but they did insist she star in
Something’s Got to Give,
a George Cukor-directed film, which was a remake of the 1940 movie,
My Favourite Wife.
This, along with a desire to see therapist Ralph
Greenson, prompted a return to Los Angeles in September where she settled into 882 North Doheny Drive, the apartment she had lived in before her marriage to DiMaggio in 1954.

On 22 September Marilyn returned briefly to New York, only to encounter problems during take-off, which forced the plane to return to Los Angeles. The episode disturbed her and, as soon as she touched down, she sent a telegram to Joe DiMaggio, informing him that she would be leaving again at 5 p.m., and confiding that when the plane was in trouble, the two things she thought about was, ‘you, and changing my will,’ before adding, ‘Love you, I think, more than ever.’

On 5 October, Patricia Newcomb sent an internal memo to her own boss, the publicist Arthur P. Jacobs, informing him of Marilyn’s new Los Angeles address, and urging that all mail should be addressed to Marge Stengel (a woman who had acted briefly as Marilyn’s assistant). To Jacobs she urged that Marilyn’s name not be put on any envelopes, and that even the street must remain secret; Marilyn was back in Los Angeles, but this time her main concern was most certainly her privacy.

But one person who did know her address was friend Ralph Roberts, whom Marilyn asked to drive cross-country to join her in California, in order to give her massages and act as something of an unofficial chauffeur. Together they enjoyed eating steaks on the barbecue, and talking quietly into the night, until it all came to a sudden halt when Marilyn told him something quite disturbing: Dr Greenson was urging her to drop old friends and, as a result, Roberts found himself travelling back to New York.

This has also been confirmed by Whitey Snyder, who told the ‘All About Marilyn’ club: ‘Marilyn mentioned several times that Greenson often suggested there were many of her so-called friends that were only using her and she should only trust him. She laughed and said that she often trusted her so-called friends more than him. I am sure Dr Greenson did everything to keep Marilyn under his thumb.’

Much has been made of Greenson’s treatment of Marilyn during her last few months, and the relationship is still shrouded
in mystery today. Marilyn became Greenson’s most famous client but his family now refuse to talk about her. We may never know the full extent of his control over her life, but what we do know is he did something very few doctors have done before or since – welcomed her into his home and into the bosom of his family.

The children of former therapist Marianne Kris were not involved with Marilyn in any way, but Greenson’s children, Joan and Daniel, became friends with their father’s patient, walking with her and sharing friendly chit-chat. It was a strange way of doing things, but he was hopeful of a successful outcome, confiding to friends that she was showing some improvement though admitting to Anna Freud that he had improvised in her treatment, often wondering where he was going yet knowing he had nowhere else to turn.

Dr Greenson discovered that Marilyn took a variety of pills including: Demerol – a narcotic analgesic; the barbiturate Phenobarbital HMC; and Amytal. She also had a unique knack of being able to get large doses of drugs from a variety of different doctors, never informing them of each other, or of other pills and prescriptions. He was concerned, especially about her use of Demerol, which was believed to be dangerous if used on a regular basis.

To Freud he described Marilyn as a sick, borderline paranoid addict and expressed how hard it was to treat someone who had such severe problems but who was also incredibly famous yet totally alone. To this end he hired a housekeeper for Marilyn: a middle-aged woman called Eunice Murray, whom he had known since he purchased her former home in Santa Monica.

Eunice seems to have been a jack of all trades, turning her hand to many different skills: dressmaking, cooking, landscaping, interior design, bookbinding and even psychology. She had worked with several psychiatrists and their patients, helping in their homes to give support of whatever nature was required. Greenson believed Murray to be an ideal choice as companion for Marilyn and so it was that in November 1961, she began
work at Doheny Drive, chauffeuring Marilyn around town, helping with the groceries and performing simple housekeeping errands such as washing and cleaning. ‘I was everything Marilyn needed,’ Murray later said, as she recalled the vast number of tasks she undertook for the actress.

But even though Murray believed herself a trustworthy companion, this thought was not reciprocated by Marilyn’s friends, with many of them wondering why she was there and what were her real motives. ‘My impression of Eunice Murray was that she couldn’t be trusted and that every move Marilyn made was reported immediately to Dr Greenson,’ commented Whitey Snyder to the ‘All About Marilyn’ club. ‘She was extremely quiet, secretive, and always hovering around Marilyn.’ He also wondered if Dr Greenson’s treatment was at all beneficial: ‘As the months went by it was obvious his influence was becoming stronger and stronger,’ he said. Furthermore, he felt that the frequency of visits and his twenty-four hour availability to her was ‘unprofessional and greedy’.

During this time Marilyn was still extremely busy, getting ready for her next Fox production, contributing to articles for
Paris Match, Tempo
and
Redbook,
and giving interviews to Vernon Scott, Joe Hyams and Henry Gris. But one project was to leave a lasting impression, when photographer Douglas Kirkland was assigned to do a portrait of Marilyn for the twenty-fifth anniversary special edition of
Look
magazine.

Arriving at the small Doheny Drive apartment, his first impressions were positive: ‘She was amazingly pleasant and playful like a sister and not at all intimidating as I had imagined her to be,’ remembered Kirkland. ‘She sat beside me, laughed easily and made small talk, putting me at ease. I was young and did not know how to ask her to pose for the sexy images I hoped to get, but she simplified it all by suggesting she should get into bed with nothing on but white silk. We discussed the details and Marilyn said she wanted Frank Sinatra music and chilled Dom Perignon.’

On the day of the photo shoot, she arrived very late and when she stepped into the room Kirkland was amazed to discover that
she was now Marilyn Monroe, the superstar. He remembered: ‘It was an extraordinary photo session. She was wonderful; luminous as she floated under that semi-transparent silk sheet. She arrived with her hair and make-up already done and an assistant carrying various changes of clothes although they were not really needed. She told everyone in the room, “I’d like to be alone with this boy. I find it usually works better that way.” There was sexual tension in the air and it reflected in the resulting photos.’

However, the next afternoon, when Kirkland took the transparencies to Marilyn’s department, there was a distinct difference in her demeanour: ‘She seemed depressed. She was wearing dark glasses and might have been crying, but she eventually brightened up and decided she loved the pictures.’

Another photographer who had the opportunity of working with Marilyn in late 1961 was Eric Skipsey, who took photos of her with Maf, her small puppy. He remembered: ‘Marilyn was a friend of mine but I only had one occasion to do a portrait sitting which was a success. It was a bit complicated in that the publicist was three-quarters of an hour late in arriving, during which time we talked and joked and even had a small taste of champagne to pass the time away. When the female publicist finally arrived she turned to me and said, “You have ten minutes Mr Skipsey,” and Marilyn immediately said, “You have as long as you wish Eric, they are my pictures, not hers.” We worked together for another hour and in fact Marilyn said I could have more time if I wished. This attitude was typical of her: she did not behave like a superstar; she was a nice and considerate person.’

By December 1961 Marilyn’s therapy with Greenson was having its ups and downs, though she was committed to it, despite the pain it was causing. One aspect of the treatment – that of Greenson’s desire to get Marilyn working and studying once again – inspired her to write to Lee Strasberg on 19 December. In the letter, she informed her coach that through the absence of his lessons, she felt as though only half of her was
functioning. She had big plans for the future and was desperate for Strasberg to move to California to work as part of a new independent production unit she was hoping to form; so determined was she that she even wrote to Marlon Brando asking for his opinion on how best to get Lee to Los Angeles, declaring that ‘time is of the essence’.

She once told reporters that, ‘I seem to be a whole superstructure without any foundation,’ and as 1961 rolled into 1962, she said that she was now ‘working on the foundation’. At her side once again was Joe DiMaggio, shopping with her for Christmas presents on Olvera Street, buying her a little Christmas tree for her apartment, and even attending a seasonal dinner with the Greenson family and their friends. But the event wasn’t altogether successful, when the men at the house gathered around DiMaggio and bombarded him with baseball questions. Marilyn laughed when it was commented that the men were paying no attention to her at all but, in reality, she did not find it particularly funny.

In January 1962 Marilyn’s relationship with the Strasbergs started to cool slightly when she discovered that a television project was being planned about the Actors Studio and that Lee initially did not want her to know about it, changing his mind only at the last moment. She then received a letter from Paula, asking her to sign a statement so that work could begin, which left her ‘confused by the entire situation’. Writing to Lee in mid-January, Marilyn demanded to know what her part would be in the television programme; what the idea and purpose was behind the project; and made it clear that there was no way she could possibly become involved when there were so many unanswered questions.

Another difficult friendship was the one she had with Frank Sinatra, which went off the boil one day when Marilyn started telling him about her childhood. ‘Oh not that again,’ he exclaimed. Marilyn was not pleased by his rebuttal of her woes, and shortly afterwards she surprised friends by refusing to give him copies of photos from a recent boat trip. ‘I’ve already given him enough,’ she told them.

Marilyn was a warm-hearted person to people she liked, but she could also be something of a ‘monster’, as she admitted to reporter W. J. Weatherby in 1961. One person who saw this side of her was Michael Selsman, who worked with her through the Arthur P. Jacobs agency. ‘She was Pat Newcomb’s client,’ said Selsman, ‘but Pat was frequently busy with some of her other clients, so I was detailed to cover certain PR functions for her. It was always difficult to work with Marilyn – sometimes unpleasant. I had other “difficult” clients but they were also kind and generous, which Marilyn was not. She made it hard for me (and others around her) to do our jobs – just because she could. It’s tempting to say she was a spoiled brat, but it went deeper than that. She could be mean, spiteful, threatening and duplicitous; to the point I dreaded having to see her.’

On one occasion in January 1962, Selsman and his wife Carol Lynley travelled to the Doheny Drive apartment for a meeting with Marilyn: ‘Carol was nine months pregnant, due any moment now. I couldn’t and didn’t want to leave her at home by herself, so I took her along to Monroe’s apartment, where Marilyn was to look at negatives from a photo shoot she had just done with the hot new photographer, twentyone-year-old Doug Kirkland, for
Look
magazine. I knocked on her door, as Carol stood shivering beside me. Marilyn opened the door and looked at Carol, whom she knew, since they had adjacent dressing rooms at the studio, and said, “You come in,” motioning to me, “but she can wait in your car.” This was unexpected and I was momentarily stunned. Carol and I exchanged glances, and I assured her I’d be out in fifteen minutes. I was frankly scared. Monroe was one of our biggest clients and I did not want to confront her, or lose my job.

‘Every other actor I worked with would use a red grease pencil to put an X through the negatives they didn’t like, but not Monroe. She took scissors and cut out every one she did not like, then cut those into tiny splinters and threw them in the wastebasket. This laborious process took three hours, during which I repeatedly got up to leave. Marilyn kept ordering me
to sit down. To be young is to be stupid, someone said, and if I were ever in a situation like that again, I might be out of a job, but I might have still had a wife. It was my first evidentiary of Marilyn Monroe’s capacity for cruelty.’

Despite suffering from flu, Marilyn continued with her own projects, among them getting out of her contract with MCA; and hiring a new lawyer, in the shape of Milton ‘Mickey’ Rudin – Greenson’s brother-in-law. On a creative level she attended a meeting with Alan Levy from
Redbook
on 25 January and then another with Richard Meryman, who wished to do an interview for
Life
magazine. According to memos from the Arthur P. Jacob’s agency, Marilyn reacted very well to Meryman, though less so with a reporter who was also in attendance and apparently a little drunk. Constantly interrupting both Marilyn and Meryman, the reporter spoke to the actress as if she were ‘underprivileged’ and became absolutely hysterical when told that all photos not approved by Marilyn would be destroyed. ‘How can you dare such a thing?’ she demanded, to which a surprised Marilyn replied, ‘You’re giving me a fishy-eyed stare but I love you anyway.’