The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (38 page)

“Well, I think that's his problem,” Marilyn responded. “If I have to do
intimate love scenes with somebody who really has that feeling toward me, then my fantasy has to come into play—in other words, out with him, in with my fantasy. He was never there.”

Many years later Tony Curtis stated that the “Hitler” remark was taken out of context. They were on take forty-seven of the kissing scene before Wilder gave up and let Marilyn do it her way. When the company was watching the dailies in the projection room, Curtis made the remark, “You know, after take forty, kissing Marilyn is like kissing Hitler.”

For many working on the set of
Some Like It Hot
, it seemed that there was no rational basis for Marilyn to constantly blow her lines. In one scene she enters the “girls'” hotel room in quest of some booze. As she opens and closes bureau drawers in search of a hot-water bottle filled with booze, her line was “Where's the bourbon?” Wilder wanted her to play it frantic. But frantic wasn't the way she felt it should be played. He kept calling “cut!” and insisting on a wacka-doo urgency. She gave him twenty-seven frantic takes, but never got the line right—“Where's the whiskey?” “Where's the bureau?” “Where's the booze?” “Where's the bonbons?” “Where's the bottle?” “Where's the bromo?” Wilder resorted to posting the line “Where's the bourbon?” on the back of the door and inside each of the bureau drawers. Still she went up on the line. Finally, when everyone was exhausted and Wilder was getting spasms, she did the scene her way, got the line right, and Wilder said, “Good—that's a print.” The scene is on the screen for perhaps fifteen seconds and took half a day to shoot.

Wilder, of course, knew what she was doing, but didn't believe she was right. She knew she was right and believed that a star of her stature had the prerogative of playing a scene the way she felt it. There was a method to her madness, but unfortunately cinema mythology preferred to repeat the myriad stories of Marilyn Monroe's inability to remember a simple line—a myth that was unearthed once again during the debacle of
Something's Got to Give
.

Marilyn was frequently late in arriving at the studio. Sometimes very late. If she had a 9
A.M.
set call, it meant getting up at 5
A.M.
to get to the studio by six-thirty and go through hairdressing, makeup, and wardrobe by nine. But she couldn't sleep, and she didn't want to take sedatives during her pregnancy. Sometimes it would be 2 or 3
A.M.
before she fell asleep, and if she got up at five she'd be no good on camera. So she would sleep the sleep of exhaustion. And she would be late. Quite late. I. A. L.
Diamond, who cowrote the screenplay with Billy Wilder, ascribed Marilyn's lateness to an attempt by the star to throw around the power she had gained following her Fox walkout. “Having reached the top she was paying back the world for all the rotten things she had had to go through,” said Diamond. “There were mornings when nine
A.M.
rolled around and Marilyn was not on the set or anywhere near it. Ten
A.M.
comes—no Marilyn. She is now in makeup. She is now in hairdressing. Ten forty-five
A.M.
and she walks in. Everybody has been waiting all morning. Not a word of greeting. Not a word of apology. She's carrying a copy of Thomas Paine's
Rights of Man
, personally given to her by Arthur to read while she's keeping us waiting. Billy waits some more and finally sends the assistant director to her dressing room to knock on the door, and she yells out, “Fuck you!”

Not everybody who worked with Marilyn knew the private ordeal she went through to make the metamorphosis from Norma Jeane to Marilyn Monroe to Sugar Kane. It was a transcendental trick that didn't happen instantaneously. Not only did the Marilyn Monroe image depend on the meticulous way she looked—her makeup, her hair, her wardrobe—but she also had to make up her inner psyche and steel her concentration to fend off the director.

Twenty-nine days over schedule,
Some Like It Hot
completed filming on November 6, 1958. Marilyn got the “fuzzy end of the lollipop” and wasn't invited to the wrap party Wilder gave for the cast and crew. But Marilyn had won the battle. Sugar Kane was etched in silver, and there was nothing Wilder could do about it. The animosity and bitterness would one day be forgotten, but what was on film would endure. The heartfelt and seamless performance of Marilyn Monroe was the substance that glued the film together and kept it from falling into the kinetic mayhem of Wilder's subsequent farce
One, Two, Three
.

She had paid a price. She was suffering from exhaustion and checked into Cedars-Sinai Hospital. A week later she traveled by ambulance to the airport, “so as not to jar the baby,” and flew back to New York with Miller.

Some Like It Hot
was sneak-previewed at the Village Theater in Westwood on December 17, 1958, and the audience started laughing in the first scene and didn't stop until the fade-out gag when Joe E. Brown discovers that the girl he wants to marry (Jack Lemmon) is not, after all, a girl. He shrugs off the dilemma with the remark, “Nobody's perfect.” Audiences have continued laughing ever since, and to date
Some Like It
Hot
has grossed over $47 million and earned over $4,500,000 for Marilyn Monroe's heirs—the majority of it going to Ana Strasberg, a woman Marilyn never knew.

We watched and bought her anguish with our coins
.

 

On the day of the hilariously successful preview, December 17, Marilyn had a miscarriage. She went into a period of deep mourning. Her sessions with Dr. Kris offered little comfort, and over the Christmas holidays she lapsed into a depression which she tried to alleviate with sedatives. She blamed losing the baby on
Some Like It Hot
, on Billy Wilder, and on Miller. She felt she never would have made the movie if Miller hadn't encouraged her. According to her maid, Lena Pepitone, she was terribly upset.

It was shortly after the miscarriage, while she was trying to recuperate, that an interview with Billy Wilder written by Joe Hyams appeared in newspapers across the country. Criticizing Marilyn's lateness and lack of professionalism, Wilder stated, “I'm the only director who ever made two pictures with Monroe. It behooves the Screen Director's Guild to award me a purple heart.” Complaining that her behavior had made him ill, Hyams inquired whether Wilder's health had improved after completing
Some Like It Hot
. “I'm eating better,” Wilder replied, “My back doesn't ache any more. I am able to sleep for the first time in months, and I can look at my wife without wanting to hit her because she's a woman.” Asked if he would like to do another picture with Marilyn Monroe, Wilder replied, “Well, I have discussed this with my doctor and my psychiatrist, and they tell me I'm too old and too rich to go through this again.”

When Marilyn read the syndicated interview, she was furious. She couldn't believe that Wilder would publicly joke about her in the press. Lena Pepitone recalled her shouting, “I made
him
sick?” as she shredded the newspaper into tiny pieces. “I made
him
sick!!” She leapt out of bed and ran into Miller's study screaming, “It's your fault! It's your damn fault!” Pepitone could hear her shouting at Miller from the far end of the apartment, “You damn well better do something about it, you bleeding-heart bastard! Now everybody in the world'll take me as a fool—a joke! You've got to say something! People'll listen to
you. You've
got respect!”

Miller suggested she forget about it.

“Forget it?
Forget
it!” she shrieked. “I'll never forget it! How could I ever forget my baby?…My
baby
!”

Marilyn began crying hysterically, and Pepitone recalled that Miller helped her back to her room. He couldn't deal with noise and arguments, and he hoped she would take a sedative and go to sleep and forget the whole thing. But several times that day she became hysterical once again and ran to his study screaming, crying hysterically, and pulling at her hair. Miller retreated to the farm. Several nights later Norman and Hedda Rosten received a phone call from May Reis at 3
A.M.
Marilyn had overdosed.

Pepitone found her unconscious on the bedroom floor, her face caked with vomit. Unable to awaken her, Pepitone called the doctor whose number was on the emergency list in May Reis's office. The doctor rushed to the apartment, pumped Marilyn's stomach, and put her in bed. When May Reis arrived, she called Miller and then the Rostens.

It had been another close call. Norman Rosten recalled that toward dawn she regained consciousness and began weeping quietly in her bed. As Rosten leaned over in the half-light, he asked, “How are you, dear?”

“Alive…bad luck,” she weakly replied. “Cruel, all of them
cruel
, all those bastards. Oh, Jesus…”

T
hough he hadn't completed a play in five years, on January 27, 1959, Arthur Miller was awarded one of the nation's most prestigious literary awards, the gold medal for drama of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Marilyn Monroe, on the other hand, thought some of his writing on
The Misfits
was “dreck.”

Norman Rosten observed, “The pupil/student had now become a critic. The shadow that had fallen between them in England was increasing, deepening. Their evenings with friends were often played out in a facade of marital harmony. Miller was more and more living with her in the third person, as it were, an observer.”

Miller looked down on screenwriting, and he insisted that writing
The Misfits
was a sacrifice on his part, made for Marilyn. Yet Marilyn wasn't at all sure she wanted to appear in
The Misfits
. “She would read parts of
the screenplay and laugh delightedly at some of the cowboy's lines,” Miller stated, “but seemed to withhold full commitment to playing Roslyn…. I was constructing a gift for her. In the end, however, it was she who would have to play the role, and this inevitably began to push the project into a different coolly professional sphere. If my intention was as authentic as I wished to believe it was, she had a right to decide not to play the part—after all I was not writing it to enslave her to something she had no excitement about doing. Nevertheless, her caution had to hurt a bit.”

Arthur Miller was to receive $250,000 from Marilyn Monroe Productions in compensation for the “gift” of
The Misfits
, which he wrapped in bright ribbons: Arthur brought in John Huston as the director, the part of Gay was written especially for Clark Gable, and Marilyn's friends Montgomery Clift, Kevin McCarthy, and Eli Wallach would be included in the cast.

Lena Pepitone reported, “Marilyn was getting a terrible chip on her shoulder against her husband and she said, ‘All he cares about is himself, his own writing…and money—that's all!'” According to Lena, it never occurred to Marilyn just how much money was necessary to keep the two households going: the staff, the rent, the attorneys, the clothes, the beauticians, and the doctors—Miller was undergoing psychotherapy with Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein, while Marilyn was having almost daily sessions with Marianne Kris. “Marilyn assumed that plenty of money was there,” Lena recalled. “If she was so famous how could she be poor, she thought. ‘I worried about money for too long,' she said. ‘I'm sick of it. I'm never going to worry about it again.'” When Arthur, or Mr. Montgomery, or May Reis tried to discuss finances with Marilyn, she would put her hands over her ears and turn away. “I don't want anything. Not money! Not things! I've got things,” she said. “I just want to act. I want friends. I want to be happy! I want some respect! I don't want to be laughed at. Doesn't anyone understand?”

Jack Kennedy understood. Gene Tierney had once said, “I'm not sure I can explain the nature of Jack's charm. He made you feel very secure. He gave you his time, his interest.” Kennedy's attentiveness, wit, and directness, along with his ability to make you feel secure, were certainly not lost on Marilyn.

Peter Lawford and others observed that Jack Kennedy merely regarded Marilyn as another trophy to be added to his extensive collection, but Kennedy and Marilyn had a unique relationship that ultimately endured for over a decade. Few of his casual affairs with women could claim such
longevity. Unlike his relationships with Inga Arvad and Gene Tierney, the relationship with Marilyn endured despite geographic separations, marriage, and other inconveniences, and when all hope of her relationship with Arthur Miller came to an end, she continued seeing Jack Kennedy.

 

Lena Pepitone, who was at the Manhattan apartment from 9
A.M.
to 6
P.M.
, said that Marilyn spoke much more about Jack Kennedy than Bobby Kennedy, and “referred to him as ‘that big tease.' He was always telling her dirty jokes, pinching her, squeezing her, she said. She told me that he was always putting his hand on her thigh. One night, under the dinner table, he kept going. But when he discovered she wasn't wearing any panties, he pulled back and turned red. ‘He hadn't counted on going that far,' Marilyn laughed.”

According to Pepitone, Marilyn thought that Jack Kennedy had married Jacqueline Bouvier “because their families made them…. I feel sorry for them, locked into a marriage I bet neither of them likes. I can tell he's not in love—not with her.”

Jack Kennedy had told Marilyn that he was in love with
her
, and she revealed to Bob Slatzer, who had visited her in New York, that she and Kennedy would one day be married. Kennedy had led Marilyn to believe he would seek an annulment of his marriage with Jacqueline.

According to Susan Strasberg, “Marilyn seemed bored with the part-time role of country housewife,” and in 1959 she seldom visited the Roxbury farm, where Miller was preoccupied with
The Misfits
. In March the Millers attended the New York premiere of
Some Like It Hot
. Newspaper photos taken of Marilyn on Miller's arm at the premiere party show her radiant and smiling, giving no hint of domestic discord or her intense dissatisfaction with any aspect of
Some Like It Hot
. Uncharacteristically, she went to Chicago on a promotional tour—something she had not done since
Love Happy
.

Jack Kennedy was another visitor to the Windy City at the same time. In meetings with Sam Giancana and Mayor Daley, JFK was soliciting assistance for his forthcoming election campaign. According to Sam Giancana's brother, Chuck, meetings were held at the Ambassador East and both Sam Giancana and Mayor Richard Daley were there. FBI surveillance confirms that a deal was struck in which the Mafia would assist JFK's campaign. One of Mayor Daley's aides was surprised to find that Marilyn Monroe was also a guest at the Ambassador.

 

Returning to New York, Marilyn resumed her classes with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and while Miller was preoccupied with the cinematic iconography of his wife, she was pursuing her own literary interests: lunching with Carson McCullers at her Nyack home, having poetry discussions with Isak Dinesen, visiting with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Profiles in Courage
at the Carlyle, and having literary discussions with Carl Sandburg, who became an occasional visitor at the Fifty-Seventh Street apartment. Sandburg found Marilyn to be “warm and plain” and asked for her autograph. “Marilyn was a good talker and very good company,” he stated. “We did some mock play acting and some pretty good, funny imitations. I asked her a lot of questions. She told me how she came up the hard way, but she would never talk about her husbands.”

Marilyn's contract with Fox required her to fill a studio commitment before she could proceed with the MMP production of
The Misfits
. Fox producer Jerry Wald had suggested
Let's Make Love
, a Technicolor musical comedy written by Norman Krasna, which was to be directed by George Cukor and costar Gregory Peck.

Though the script had obvious problems, Marilyn agreed to do the film in order to fulfill her Fox commitment, and Miller agreed to rewrite the screenplay. Miller recalled, “I had all but given up any hope of writing: I had decided to devote myself to giving [Marilyn] the kind of emotional support that would convince her she was no longer alone in the world—the heart of the problem, I assumed. I went so far as to do some rewriting on
Let's Make Love
to try and save her from a complete catastrophe, work I despised on a script not worth the paper it was typed on.”

In September, Marilyn flew to the West Coast for studio conferences on
Let's Make Love
and met Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a reception held at Fox Studios. “You're a very lovely young lady,” Khrushchev said. Her response made newspaper headlines around the world: “My husband, Arthur Miller, sends you his greetings. There should be more of this kind of thing. It would help both our countries understand each other.” And in a rare tribute from the gentlemen of the fourth estate, as she boarded the plane to return to the East Coast the crush of reporters broke into applause instead of bombarding her with questions.

While Marilyn was in Hollywood, Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, had arrived in New York, where Montand was to open his highly successful one-man show at the Henry Miller Theater. Marilyn went to
the opening night with Montgomery Clift and was so impressed by Montand's performance that she returned the next night with Miller and Norman and Hedda Rosten. Rosten recalled that the audience snickered at unlikely moments because it was obvious Montand's pants were unbuttoned—a recurring problem.

When Gregory Peck became aware that Arthur Miller was rewriting Norman Krasna's script for Marilyn, and his part was diminishing day by day, he dropped out of the film. Arthur suggested that Peck be replaced by Yves Montand, and Marilyn agreed. After Jerry Wald and George Cukor saw Montand's show, he was signed by Fox as Marilyn's costar, and Arthur began rewriting the Peck role for Montand.

In November and December, Marilyn commuted between New York and Hollywood for wardrobe fittings, color tests, and rehearsals of the musical numbers, which were choreographed by Marilyn's friend Jack Cole. According to the British singing star Frankie Vaughan, who played a supporting role, “She was always on time for rehearsals. There were none of those notorious late starts. When she arrived, everybody smartened up, as if her presence was the light that fell on everyone. Certainly she seemed to be very professional.”

By the end of 1959, many of Marilyn's dreams had become realities. Having received rave reviews in four successive motion pictures, she had earned the film industry's respect and had become the world's top box-office attraction—the most celebrated film star of the twentieth century. But when George Belmont of
Marie Claire
asked her if she was happy, she said, “If I can realize certain things in my work, I come the closest to being happy. But it only happens in moments. I'm not just generally happy. If I'm generally anything, I guess I'm generally miserable, but since I'm only thirty-three and have a few years to go yet, I hope to have time to become better and happier, professionally and in my personal life. That's my one ambition. Maybe I'll need a long time, because I'm slow. I don't want to say that it's the best method, but it's the only one I know and it gives me the feeling that in spite of everything life is not without hope.”

Though she knew her marriage to Arthur Miller was all but over, she had her career, and she dreamed that one day she might be Mrs. John Kennedy. “You have to remember that Marilyn worked and lived in a dream world,” confided her friend Henry Rosenfeld. “She began to live in her dreams, and her dream was to marry Jack Kennedy—and supplant Jackie.”

But during the holiday season of 1959, Marilyn's dream reached the rainbow's end. In December it was made clear that Jack Kennedy would never divorce his wife. Jack was going to run for president. Divorce was out of the question.

At a dinner party in Manhattan Norman Rosten noticed the sadness that enveloped her.

According to Dr. Ralph Greenson's correspondence with Marianne Kris, Greenson first met Marilyn in bungalow 21 of the Beverly Hills Hotel when the actress had a nervous collapse. Though it has been variously written that Marilyn's breakdown took place because she was distraught over her brief love affair with Yves Montand, Dr. Greenson's correspondence with Kris establishes that he first visited Marilyn Monroe in January 1960, which was prior to the affair with her
Let's Make Love
costar but soon after Jack Kennedy announced he was running for president.

According to Ralph Greenson's wife, Hildi, Marilyn's New York psychoanalyst had called Greenson to ask if he would see her patient for a few sessions to help her over a “difficult situation.” Dr. Kris explained that Marilyn was suffering “severe anxiety stress.” But there were unusual circumstances that brought Otto Fenichel's disciple, the former Romeo Greenschpoon, to Norma Jeane's door. When Greenson first visited Marilyn, he had become well established in the Freudian couch culture of Hollywood. Among his more illustrious clients were Peter Lorre, Celeste Holm, producer Dore Schary, Vincente Minnelli, Inger Stevens, and Frank Sinatra. When Sinatra had become despondent over the breakup of his
marriage to Ava Gardner and slashed his wrists, his lawyer, Mickey Rudin, suggested that Sinatra see Rudin's brother-in-law, Dr. Ralph Greenson. Rudin was an attorney for Gang, Tyre, and Brown, which often represented entertainment personalities under investigation by the Un-American Activities Committee, and insiders would joke as to which brother-in-law had the more star-studded clientele, the lawyer or the analyst. Dr. Greenson was on the Communist Party's secret list of analysts approved for party members, and often their clients overlapped.