The Genius and the Goddess (38 page)

In her long, sad and brave letter to Greenson, Marilyn also described
how she sought but failed to find some consolation in nature.
Unconsciously alluding to her doctor, she contrasted the "promise"
and "hope" of the
green
grass, bushes and trees, as they lay under a
shroud of snow and bare branches. Suspended in an unreal state, she
lost track of the time, and ended with bitter tears and troubled insomnia:

Just now when I looked out the hospital window where the
snow had covered everything, suddenly everything is kind of a
muted green. There are grass and shabby evergreen bushes, though
the trees give me a little hope – and the desolate bare branches
promise maybe there will be spring and maybe they promise
hope. . . .

As I started to write this letter about four quiet tears had
fallen. I don't know quite why.

Last night I was awake all night again. Sometimes I wonder
what the night time is for. It almost doesn't exist for me.
⁶

Marilyn's letter to Jack Cardiff was the most revealing of all.
Exploring her deepest fear about the very core of her identity –
whether she was really mad – she mentioned the history of insanity
in her family, and repeated that her harsh confinement might actually
drive her crazy: "I was
afraid
– I still am. . . . There's my mother
– paranoid schizophrenia . . . and
her
family – all destroyed by the
same thing – insanity. Was I a nut, after all? There I was, in a cell like
I was mad. . . . I was hysterical – who wouldn't be? And they were
going to put me in a straitjacket. I knew that if I stayed there for
long, I really would be mad." Dr. Kris later confessed, "I did a terrible,
terrible thing. Oh God, I didn't mean to, but I did." But Marilyn was
the one who suffered for her doctor's mistake.

After four days in Payne Whitney, Marilyn was finally rescued by
Joe DiMaggio, who'd come back into her life after her divorce from
Miller. Storming the citadel with his intimidating physical presence
and barely restraining his fury, he threatened the hospital authorities
by shouting, "I want my wife. . . . And if you do not release her to
me, I will take this place apart – piece of wood, by piece . . . of . . .
wood."
⁷
This was a long speech for the laconic athlete, who meant
what he said. The administrators, afraid of provoking a violent
confrontation that would attract a storm of unfavorable publicity,
agreed to his demands – though Marilyn was not, of course, his wife.
She was transferred to the Neurological Institute of Columbia
University Presbyterian Hospital, on West 168th Street in Morningside
Heights, and recovered there from February 11 to March 5.

DiMaggio was a frequent visitor when Marilyn returned to her
apartment on East 57th Street. Her half-sister described his angry reaction
to an incident that would also have exasperated Miller. She noted
that DiMaggio was still looking after Marilyn's interests – though he
could not contain her extravagance – and that she must have resented
his discovery of her habitual carelessness:"Joe spies a discarded bill and
idly fishes it out [of the trash bin]. He scans over the list of household
supplies and wines that have been delivered in the afternoon. He
grumbles loudly, 'This bill is not right! It's added up nearly double!
Doesn't someone check these things when they are delivered?'"
DiMaggio gave a great deal to Marilyn and took nothing from her.
In her last, unfinished letter to DiMaggio, found after her death, Marilyn
wrote, "If I can succeed in making you happy, I will have succeeded
in the biggest and most difficult thing there is – that is, to make
one
person completely happy
. Your happiness means my happiness, and . . . "

She continued to be plagued by medical problems. On June 28, 1961,
still only thirty-five years old, Marilyn entered the hospital for the fifth
time in the last ten months. She'd had a nervous breakdown during
The
Misfits
in August 1960; been confined in Payne Whitney and in Columbia
Presbyterian in February – March 1961; had a second (unavailing) operation
for chronic endometriosis in May; and had her gallbladder removed
in June. When she left the Polyclinic Hospital on West 50th Street in
New York on July 11, she was assaulted by devoted and deranged fans
(short for "fanatics"). "It was scary," she wrote. "I felt for a few minutes
as if they were just going to take pieces out of me. Actually it made me
feel a little sick. I mean I appreciated the concern and their affection
and all that, but – I don't know – it was a little like a nightmare. I wasn't
sure I was going to get into the car safely and get away!"
⁸

Attempting to achieve a sense of stability and security, Marilyn bought
her first house in February 1962 for $77,500, paying half in cash and
taking out a mortgage for the rest. 12305 Fifth Helena Drive was on
a short cul-de-sac off Carmelina Avenue, between Sunset Boulevard
and San Vicente, in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles. Unlike
the glamorous houses of most Hollywood stars, it was a modest,
personal refuge. Marilyn bought some essential furniture on shopping
trips to Tijuana and Mexico City: tiles for the kitchen, tin masks
and mirrors for the walls, and textiles depicting Aztec figures. But the
house was sparsely furnished and her phonograph remained on
the floor. The small, 2,900-square-foot, one-story, L-shaped, Spanish-colonial
home had adobe walls and a red-tile roof, and was protected
by a high wall. It had two bedrooms, a small guest house, an oval
swimming pool and a large garden. The interior had white stucco
walls, white carpeting, cathedral-beamed ceilings, and tiled fireplaces
in both the living room and master bedroom.

She called it "a cute little Mexican-style house with eight rooms,"
and regretfully added, "I live alone and I hate it!" She loved animals
and had always been fond of pets, who soothed her loneliness. She
had had Tippy, the stray puppy of her childhood, who was shot by a
neighbor; Josefa, a Chihuahua, named after its donor Joseph Schenck;
and Hugo, Miller's basset hound, who helped pass her idle hours in
Roxbury. Frank Sinatra now gave her a poodle called Maf (short for
"Mafia"), whose name recalled his mob connections. Proud of the
house and the improvements she made, she keenly showed visitors
around and called it "a fortress where I can feel safe from the world".

After her divorce from Miller, Marilyn attempted to fill the emotional
emptiness in her life with a number of love affairs – all of them unhappy.
She'd met the attractive and electrifying Frank Sinatra, a familiar mixture
of vulgarity and glamor, through his friend Joe DiMaggio. When
DiMaggio broke with Sinatra after the farcical Wrong Door Raid,
Marilyn became sexually involved with her favorite singer. Sinatra loved
luxury, was a lavish spender and tried to live up to his romantic reputation.
But his seductive promises about marriage had recently deceived
the sophisticated Lauren Bacall. She "said that she 'loved' her good times
with Frank but that he could become 'ice cold'; she admitted that it
was 'quite terrifying to be a victim of that.' . . . At a New Year's Eve
party, Bacall said, Sinatra got drunk and became abusive, bringing her
to tears."
⁹
Resenting the pressure to marry, Sinatra publicly dumped
Bacall when he got fed up with her. Notorious for his abrasive personality,
Sinatra could be equally cruel with Marilyn. When she was talking
to friends and dramatizing her orphaned childhood, Sinatra interrupted
her by exclaiming, "Oh, not that again!" His boorish comments recalled
Fred Karger's cruel put-downs. When she bored him, Sinatra (no great
brain himself) would shout: "Shut up, Norma Jeane. You're so stupid
you don't know what you're talking about."

In January 1962, Sinatra discarded her and became engaged to the
dancer Juliet Prowse. As usual, Marilyn hopelessly pursued the man
who'd jilted her. The following month, Eunice Murray told the FBI
that Marilyn was "very vulnerable now because of her rejection by
ARTHUR MILLER and also by JOE DiMAGGIO and FRANK
SINATRA. She telephoned SINATRA to come and comfort her and
he would not do it." Marilyn would spend the last weekend of her
life at Lake Tahoe in Sinatra's Cal-Neva Lodge, where the line dividing
the two states cut through the public rooms and swimming pool. She
was invited by the actor
Peter Lawford to hear Sinatra sing and
discussed future projects with
Dean Martin. But she spent most of
her time (quite separate from Sinatra) with DiMaggio.
¹⁰

With Ralph Roberts banished and Eunice Murray hostile, Marilyn
turned for comfort to her West Coast publicist, Pat Newcomb. Four
years younger than Marilyn, she came from a wealthy and prominent
Washington, D.C. family – her father was a judge, her mother a psychiatric
social worker – and had graduated from Mills College in Oakland,
California. Blond and attractive, she had the classy look of the
Kennedy
sisters. Marilyn's maid described Newcomb as "an eager, efficient
college girl who didn't threaten Marilyn at all. Pat was all business,
seeing her role as mainly one of shielding Marilyn from the press,
setting up interviews and photography sessions, making sure all her
travel plans went smoothly." Newcomb accompanied Marilyn to
Mexico for her divorce from Miller, and helped her find and furnish
her new house. On the last day of Marilyn's life, Newcomb unintentionally
infuriated her insomniac boss by sleeping overnight in
the house for twelve long hours.

Living in her isolated, makeshift way in Brentwood, Marilyn was courted
and discarded by various unscrupulous men. In one of the most bizarre
episodes of her life, she became involved with the president of the
United States. Peter Lawford,
John Kennedy's brother-in-law, introduced
Marilyn to him and his brother Robert, the attorney general.
Their womanizing father, Joseph Kennedy, had had a well-known
liaison with the actress Gloria Swanson; Presidents Roosevelt and
Eisenhower both had mistresses. The youthful, handsome, wealthy
Kennedy, complete with elegant wife and pretty children, followed an
even more promiscuous path. A historian of Hollywood politics noted
that Kennedy's "dalliance with Marilyn Monroe chiseled into the culture
the assumption that power's rewards included access to the iridescent
life of the famous, with its code of license barred to ordinary men
and women." In those days the press protected the randy president,
who cavorted with naked beauties in the White House swimming
pool, and the public knew nothing about the private life of the remarkably
idealized man. But there was always the danger of scandal to add
drama and excitement to his seductions. He did not have much time
for protracted liaisons, but enjoyed flirting with his lovers on the phone.
The Oval Office telephone tapes recorded "much explicit talk of a
sexual nature with Monroe."
¹¹

The journalist
Seymour Hersh stated that the Marilyn–Kennedy
affair began in the mid-1950s and lasted into the presidency, and that
she once visited his family estate on Cape Cod. But their main venues
were Lawford's beach house in Santa Monica and the Carlyle Hotel
(Kennedy's favorite) in New York. Both Marilyn and Kennedy knew
how it felt to be irresistibly attractive and adored by millions.
Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., the Harvard historian and Special Assistant to the president,
revealed that Marilyn could seduce intellectuals as well as the
mass of ordinary men. He found her ravishing, but (like Natasha
Lytess, Nunnally Johnson and George Cukor) noted her remote, withdrawn
and detached "under water" quality:

The image of this exquisite, beguiling and desperate girl will
always stay with me. I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful;
I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so
masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible
unreality about her – as if talking to someone under water.
Bobby [Kennedy] and I engaged in mock competition for her;
she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me, but one never
felt her to be wholly engaged. Indeed, she seemed most solicitous
to her ex-father-in-law, Arthur Miller's father, a baffled and
taciturn man whom she introduced to the group and on whom
she constantly cast a maternal eye.

Like an overeager pupil, Marilyn may have bored Kennedy with
some liberal ideas that she'd picked up, second-hand, from Miller. The
FBI, without (as usual) establishing the reliability of its informant,
reported that Marilyn had met Kennedy at the Lawfords': "She
was very pleased, as she had asked the President a lot of socially
significant questions concerning the morality of atomic testing and
the future of the youth of America. She already had been asked by
LAWFORD to appear at the President's birthday party." Her maid
reported, more persuasively than the FBI, that Marilyn was completely
unaware of contemporary political events: "To Marilyn, Castro was a
convertible sofa, not a dictator. Because she didn't read the paper or
listen to the radio, she didn't know the Bay of Pigs invasion [of April
1961] ever occurred."
¹²

In any case, Kennedy had no time for sexual niceties, let alone
political pillow talk. When dallying with her, Marilyn said, "he wouldn't
indulge in foreplay, because he was on the run all the time." Her
sometime neighbor, the minor actress and trick-shot golfer Jeanne
Carmen, gave a crude but convincing account of Marilyn's galloping
connection with the president:

To John Kennedy, Marilyn was just another fuck. I don't think
he ever really cared about her the way Bobby did, and I don't
think she was ever really in love with him. And he wasn't even
good in bed; I can tell you that one firsthand, because I had
him too. I don't know too many women out here who
didn't
sleep with Jack. He was a two-minute man. I think sex to him
was just about another conquest.