The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (43 page)

Escorted by Montgomery Clift, Marilyn attended the New York premiere of
The Misfits
at the Capitol Theater on January 31. She hated the film. She hated her performance. She hated the way she looked—the wig, the black and white. She hated the story. She hated the memories.

The critics didn't hate it quite as much as Marilyn.
The Misfits
received mixed reviews. Viewers found the story puzzling and abstract—a cowboy story told within the proscenium archness of Group Theatre. It was an eastern western. Viewing
The Misfits
threw Marilyn into a deeper vale of depression. In her visits to Marianne Kris she expressed suicidal thoughts. Subsisting on barbiturates for several days, she stayed in her bedroom, didn't speak to anyone, and stopped eating. Alarmed, Kris suggested that she check into a private room at a New York hospital where she could rest, withdraw from the barbiturates, and have every comfort provided.

On Sunday, February 5, Marilyn was driven by Dr. Kris to New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, where she was admitted under the name of “Faye Miller.” Expecting to be consigned to a conventional hospital room, she was escorted to the Payne Whitney psychiatric ward, where she was locked in a padded cell reserved for the most critically disturbed patients.

For Marilyn, it was Kafkaesque. It was the true nightmare that had often precipitated her night terrors—the repetitive nightmare of her childhood that she had once related to photographer David Conover: “I'm screaming, ‘I'm not crazy! I'm not crazy!' They p-put me in a bare room with bars on the windows and they go out and lock the iron door, leaving me in a strait jacket. ‘I don't belong here!' I scream and scream again, until I have no more breath…”

But the nightmare was real. The fear that she would end up like her mother was suddenly coming true. Becoming hysterical, she screamed and shouted. Demanding to be released, she pounded on the locked steel door
until her hands bled. Throwing a chair across the room, she smashed the small window on her locked door.

To the nursing staff, she indeed appeared to be a seriously disturbed psychiatric case, and they proceeded to put her in the dreaded straitjacket. Relating her horrifying experience to Gloria Romanoff months later, she said, “It was like a nightmare…. They had me in a restrainer. They had me sedated, but not so sedated that I didn't know what was going on…. At night there was a steady procession of hospital personnel, doctors and nurses, coming to look at me. There I was, with my arms bound. I was not able to defend myself. I was a curiosity piece, with no one who had my interests at heart.”

She spent forty-eight hours in a padded cell, unable to communicate with the outside world until a sympathetic nurse's aide supplied her with paper and pencil and agreed to deliver it to the Strasbergs' apartment. It was received on Wednesday, February 8:

On Thursday the ninth, Marilyn was allowed to make one call. It was to the person she could always rely on—Joe DiMaggio. He arrived in New York that evening and went to Payne Whitney, where he demanded that Marilyn be released into his custody. The doctors refused, saying that Marilyn couldn't be released without the approval of Dr. Kris. Joe telephoned Kris and told her that if Marilyn was not released by Friday he would “take the hospital apart brick by brick.”

Stating that Marilyn needed hospitalization to withdraw from barbiturates, Kris agreed to release her from Payne Whitney—if Marilyn would agree to enter a hospital more to her liking. To avoid the press, Joe waited in Marilyn's apartment while Ralph Roberts and Dr. Kris picked Marilyn up at Payne Whitney, where she exited from the delivery entrance. After the car pulled away from the hospital, “Marilyn began screaming at the doctor as only she could,” Roberts remembered. “She was like a hurricane unleashed. I don't think Dr. Kris had ever seen her like that, and she was
frightened and very shaken by the violence of Marilyn's response at their meeting. I wound up driving the doctor home, and Dr. Kris was trembling and kept repeating over and over, ‘I did a terrible thing, a terrible thing. Oh, God, I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to, but I did.'”

Marilyn never saw Marianne Kris again. Ironically, Kris remained a beneficiary in Marilyn's will, which had been signed only the previous month.

On the afternoon of Friday, February 10, Joe DiMaggio helped Marilyn check into a more accommodating room at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where he visited her daily during her three-week stay.

After twenty-three days of rest and rehabilitation at the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, Marilyn Monroe returned to her Fifty-Seventh Street apartment. One of the first things she did was to call the “Prez.” While the cold war raged, men raced for the moon, and fallout shelters were being built, JFK was kept within arm's reach of the nuclear apocalypse phone—and apparently instructions were left at the White House switchboard that all calls from “Miss Green” be put right through to the Oval Office.

Other pressing White House matters at the time included planning for the assassination of Fidel Castro and the Bay of Pigs invasion. President Kennedy had confided to aide Tad Szulc that “he was under terrific pressure from advisors to okay a Castro murder,” and the president asked, “What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?” But, according to the records of the Church committee, the plan had already been put in place. It was a disturbing subject that JFK debated with Bobby Kennedy and other confidants. Senator George Smathers and Jack Kennedy were discussing the subject of Castro and the Cuban problem at the dinner table in Miami and Smathers recalled, “I remember that he took his fork and just hit his plate and it cracked, and he said, ‘Now, damn it, let's quit talking about this subject. Do me a favor—I don't want you to talk to me anymore about Cuba!'”

But it was a subject destined not to go away.

Pierre Salinger referred to the Bay of Pigs disaster as “the least covert military operation in history,” and added, “The only information Castro didn't have was the exact time and place of the invasion.” However, there's every indication that Castro did. Fidel Castro seemed to know far more about the invasion plans than many people in the White House who were close to the president. Adlai Stevenson, the United States delegate to the United Nations, was among many of the top government officials taken by surprise. However, as early as January 1961, shortly after
Kennedy's inauguration, Castro had denounced the American invasion plans and was making diligent preparations. Castro knew that an attempt would be made on his life shortly before the covert invasion was to take place. Frank Sturgis, a.k.a. Frank Fiorini, testified to the Church committee in 1975 that a Mafia/CIA assassination plot involving Santo Traficante, Sam Giancana, and Johnny Rosselli had arranged for Castro's mistress, Marita Lorenz, to drop botulism tablets supplied by Giancana into Castro's drink. Shortly before the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961, the Havana press reported that Castro was “seriously ill.” Castro suddenly vanished from public view, and the CIA concluded that their efforts may have met with success. However, Castro was in hiding as he prepared to rout the invaders.

Another person who may have known of the invasion plans and assassination plot was Marilyn Monroe. In July 1962, Marilyn showed her red diary or “book of secrets” to Robert Slatzer. In the diary were notes regarding her early knowledge of the CIA plot to kill Castro, and a statement that Bobby Kennedy was adamant about withdrawing United States military support from the Bay of Pigs invasion forces.

Marilyn had kept a daily diary and memo book for many years. Reporter James Bacon recalled her keeping a diary back in the 1950s and was amused to see her scribbling notes about what he said. Susan Strasberg remembered her as “a great note taker.” Amy Greene confirmed that Marilyn kept a notebook when she was a patient of Dr. Margaret Hohenberg. Many psychoanalysts ask patients to keep a journal, and according to Janice Rule and several other former analysands of Dr. Ralph Greenson, it was something Greenson requested of his patients. The analyst would then review the journal notes during the analytic session.

Being the analyst to an intimate of the president of the United States put an apparatchik of the Comintern in a unique position. On the analyst's couch was a source of compromising secrets regarding the private life of the President of the United States as well as insights into world matters discussed with “the Prez” and recorded in his patient's journal—the same journal, or “book of secrets,” that became a matter of concern to CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton. (See CIA document in Appendix.)

According to Lena Pepitone, Marilyn spent long hours with her unfailing friend, the telephone, talking to Dr. Greenson. Pepitone sensed that Marilyn was becoming “completely dependent upon him. It was like an
addiction,” she said. “And she never talked of being well, so that she wouldn't need him again.” Marilyn told Pepitone that Dr. Greenson had made her realize that her marriage to Miller was the cause of many of her problems. “As a great intellect and playwright, he was too big a challenge for her,” Greenson told Marilyn. “In trying to win his [Miller's] respect, she had become obsessed with the ‘serious dramatic actress' goal. This was false, it wasn't her. She should continue her acting lessons, and gradually improve her skills, but the movies she should concentrate on now were those that came most naturally to her—comedies, musicals, ‘fun' movies, nothing too serious.” Greenson had told her, “Above all, she had to be herself.”

“Whoever that is,” Marilyn added with a giggle and a slightly puzzled look.

Marilyn told Pepitone that Greenson was by far “the nicest, kindest doctor she had ever had.” He believed in her, buoyed her self-confidence, and she believed in him.

Marilyn took frequent weekend flights to the West Coast for sessions with Greenson and dates with Frank Sinatra. On one of the return trips Marilyn brought back a white French poodle Sinatra gave her. “This is my baby, mine and Frankie's,” Marilyn exclaimed to Pepitone as she cuddled the dog in her arms. Marilyn named the poodle “Maf,” short for Mafia; and, indeed, “Maf” witnessed many clandestine events and kept the Sicilian code of
omertà
.

In April 1961 the center of Marilyn Monroe's life moved from right to left. After more than six years as a New Yorker, she moved back to Los Angeles. In a sense the move was a defeat—a retreat from a dream. As early as the days at the Hollywood Actors Lab she had dreamed the dream: “All I could think of was this far, faraway place called New York…. It seemed so exciting to me, and I wanted to be part of that life.” She had become a part of the life she had longed for—studied with Strasberg, married one of America's leading playwrights, became a consummate actress. But she hadn't found happiness, or friends, or herself.

In New York there were too many painful memories. In Hollywood there was Sinatra, film work, and her “Jesus.” She saw her salvation in Dr. Ralph Greenson.

And so Marilyn returned to the land of sunshine, swimming pools, and Cadillacs—where she had once walked languorously on the sands of Ocean Park and imagined herself walking “proudly in beautiful clothes
and being admired by everyone and overhearing words of praise.” It was where dreams took on the illusion of reality, and where loves had been met and lost. It was where Ana Lower and Aunt Grace lay in their graves. And it was where the “night people” took away children who vanished with the dawn.

Zelda Zonk was going home.

H
ollywood had changed considerably since Marilyn Monroe had last lived there as one of its celebrated residents. She returned as a displaced person at a time when the studio star system was a thing of the past and the industry was in disarray. Many of the great screenwriters had done their last fade-out, tycoons' heads were rolling, and the cinema was being captured from the Hollywood ruling class by Wall Street tyros. More and more of the business was being commissioned by agents with new faces and old cunning.

Zanuck was having a midlife crisis on the Riviera with Juliette Greco, and his replacement at Fox, Buddy Adler, had dropped dead when he saw the dismal second-quarter studio earning reports. The aging Spyros Skouras selected Robert Goldstein to step into Adler's warm executive-elevator shoes. But Goldstein, who had been in charge of Fox's London office for four solid years, had little experience as a Hollywood tycoon. His background had been primarily in exporting the Group Theatre; his claim to fame was producing Clifford Odets's play
Golden Boy
in London with a cast that included Lee J. Cobb and Elia Kazan.

Goldstein was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1903, and it was in London
that he met displaced fellow traveler and theater buff Henry Weinstein, who ultimately became the producer of Marilyn Monroe's final, uncompleted film
Something's Got to Give
. Henry Weinstein had journeyed to London with his cousin Hannah Weinstein, a Comintern operative who, as chairman of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Committee in New York, was the organizer of the Waldorf Peace Conference.

Following the HUAC witch-hunts of the mid-fifties, Hannah Weinstein moved to London, where she produced the television series
Robin Hood
. The production company became a haven for many refugees from the Hollywood blacklist. Among the blacklisted writers and directors who found gainful employment on “Little Red
Robin Hood
” were Ring Lardner, Jr., Waldo Salt, Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield, and Walter Bernstein, who would later be called in to bedevil Marilyn with last-minute rewrites on
Something's Got to Give
.

When Robert Goldstein arrived at Fox in mid-July of 1960, David O. Selznick was already in preproduction on
Tender Is the Night
, which was to star his wife Jennifer Jones. F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel about a psychoanalyst whose life is destroyed after he marries a beautiful but deeply disturbed patient had been a pet project of Selznick's for years. But with the arrival of Goldstein at Fox, David O. Selznick—producer of
Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Spellbound
, and
The Third Man
—was replaced by Goldstein's London comrade, Henry Weinstein, who had never produced a motion picture before.

When Weinstein arrived in Hollywood, he stayed at Shelley Winters's house at 711 Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills, where actress Celeste Holm, a patient of Dr. Ralph Greenson's, was a frequent guest. Greenson and Henry Weinstein had many political and cultural interests in common, and Henry attended “cultural commission” meetings and chamber music recitals at the Greenson house on Franklin Street. Weinstein made Dr. Greenson a technical advisor on
Tender Is the Night
, which nevertheless became a box-office basket case. The Selznick papers include many memos written to Weinstein in a desperate attempt to save the film from Weinstein's “pathetic yessing sessions with Bob Goldstein.” At a press conference Goldstein stated, “Money by itself cannot make a successful movie. If it could the studios would never make a bad picture.” He then went on to launch Walter Wanger's money-eating monster
Cleopatra
.

In the spring of 1961, when Marilyn returned to the rolling hills of Fox, it looked the same, but the studio would never return to the glory days when Norma Jeane first tripped into the 20th Century-Fox lobby.

When Marilyn arrived, Frank Sinatra was in Hawaii, and she briefly stayed as a guest in his ring-a-ding-ding Coldwater Canyon pad before taking her “Charlies” back to the familiar surroundings of the apartment building at 882 North Doheny Drive. Visitors to the modern white-on-white triplex apartment building at the corner of Doheny Drive and Cynthia Street perceived it as a place of transition. Ralph Roberts and Susan Strasberg described Marilyn's apartment as resembling a hotel room, with modern, utilitarian furnishings and no personal touches—no photographs, no awards—just a few books, suitcases, and clothes.

It was well known within the Sinatra crowd that the apartment was managed by Sinatra's accountant, Harry Ziegler, and for years it was a way station for Sinatra's pals, broads, and business associates. Angie Dickinson and Betsy Duncun had been residents along with actor Brad Dexter, who had once saved Sinatra from drowning.

When Marilyn returned in 1961, Sinatra's secretary, Gloria Lovell, was living in one of the Doheny units and Jeanne Carmen, one of Sinatra's preferred blondes, was living in the other. According to Brad Dexter, Jeanne Carmen had known Sinatra and Johnny Rosselli for a number of years. Dexter, who first met Marilyn when he played a role in
The Asphalt Jungle
, recalled seeing Marilyn and Jeanne Carmen together at the apartment on several occasions.

“They were friends,” Dexter recently stated. “I'd see them at Pucini's with Frank, and sometimes at Palm Springs. Frank stayed in Marilyn's apartment for a while after she moved out, and Jeanne was still there in 1964.”

Marilyn and Jeanne Carmen had been acquainted since the early fifties. Carmen, like Marilyn, had started her career as a model and cover girl for girlie magazines, and she occasionally was cast in B movies, like
The Monster from Piedras Blancas
for Republic in 1959.

Jeanne Carmen was a night person, and when Marilyn couldn't sleep and Carmen wasn't busy they'd while away the night talking and drinking. They often talked about men, sex and drugs, and sex and men. “We became barbiturate buddies,” Carmen stated, and it was on one such occasion, she remembered, that Marilyn talked about the baby girl who had been taken from her. “We were having a drink together and talking one night, and I told Marilyn I had once become pregnant with Frankie's child and had an abortion. I was afraid it might happen again. And Marilyn said if I became pregnant I should have the baby no matter what Frankie said. Then she told me about the baby girl she had when she was
nineteen or twenty. The baby was taken away from her and she said she had always suffered from guilt. She'd see young girls on the street or children in the park that would be about the age of her daughter and she'd wonder where her baby was and what she was doing…. She wouldn't say who the father was. I was so astonished when she told me the story, and I think she must have seen the look of utter amazement on my face, because she suddenly stopped talking about it. We never discussed it again…. Marilyn had the characteristics a woman takes on around the tummy when she's given birth, and I'm sure she was telling me the truth. Marilyn just wouldn't make up things—not like that.”

At Marilyn's request, Ralph Roberts had followed her to the West Coast, and she leased a room for him at the nearby Chateau Marmont. “Rafe” helped her move in and installed the blackout curtains on her bedroom windows. She had learned the benefit of blackout curtains from Montgomery Clift, who found he couldn't sleep without them. Allegedly they kept out extraneous noise and light, but the curtains also fulfilled a sensitive celebrity's need for absolute retreat from the horrific monster that lurked just outside—the public.

Roberts became her companion as well as masseur, and because Marilyn no longer drove a car, Ralph drove her to Dr. Greenson's two or three times a week. Now that she was a Los Angeles resident again, the analyst extended himself in a doctor-patient arrangement that was unusually accommodating. Greenson told her that he would place himself on call, day or night, and gave her a special fee of fifty dollars per session. Frequently the sessions would be of two or three hours' duration. Later, as her problems seemed to grow worse, he saw her almost daily, sometimes twice daily. His final bill to Marilyn's estate, which was rendered prior to her funeral, was $1,450 for the month of July and the four days of August.

Greenson didn't approve of her relationship with Sinatra. In May 1961, he wrote to Dr. Kris: “Above all, I try to help her not to be lonely, and therefore to escape into the drugs or get involved with very destructive people, who will engage in some sort of sado-masochistic relationship with her…. This is the kind of planning you do with an adolescent girl who needs guidance, friendliness, and firmness, and she seems to take it very well…. She said, for the first time, she looked forward to coming to Los Angeles, because she could speak to me. Of course, this does not prevent her from canceling several hours to go to Palm Springs with Mr. F. S. She is unfaithful to me as one is to a parent….”

Marilyn's thirty-fifth birthday was June 1, 1961. That day she sent a
telegram to Greenson stating “Dear Dr. Greenson: In this world of people I'm glad there's you. I have a feeling of hope though today I'm Three Five.”

Marilyn also became increasingly close to Patricia Kennedy Lawford and frequented the Lawford beach house in the company of Frank Sinatra and Dean and Jeanne Martin. Neighbors of the Lawfords reported seeing Marilyn at the Lawfords' during Jack Kennedy's visit in June 1961. Ralph Roberts recalled her speaking of a visit with the president and saying, “I made his back feel a lot better.”

In mid-June, when Sinatra performed at the Sands in Las Vegas, Marilyn was there along with Peter and Pat Lawford and Jean Kennedy Smith. Eddie Fisher, who was there with Elizabeth Taylor, recalled, “Elizabeth and I sat in the audience with Dean and Jeanne Martin and Marilyn Monroe, who was having an affair with Sinatra, to watch his act. But all eyes were on Marilyn as she swayed back and forth to the music and pounded her hands on the stage, her breasts falling out of her low-cut dress. She was so beautiful—and so drunk. She came to the party later that evening, but Sinatra made no secret of his displeasure at her behavior, and she vanished almost immediately.”

She had become ill, and Sinatra may have attributed her illness to the mortal sin of not being able to hold her liquor. But Sinatra didn't know that the pain Marilyn suffered in her side for over a year had become tormenting. No amount of barbiturates or alcohol helped. Dr. Hyman Engelberg had been unsuccessful in diagnosing the problem until it became acute. She was finally told she had an inflamed gallbladder, and in the last week of June, Ralph Roberts and Pat Newcomb returned with her to New York, where she entered the Manhattan Polyclinic Hospital. Doctors discovered that she had impacted gallstones, and on June 29 she went into surgery for a cholecystectomy.

Marilyn was released from the hospital on July 11, and outside a crush of reporters, photographers, and fans waited with their questions, flashbulbs, and autograph books—screaming, trying to touch her, shouting questions, tugging at her sweater.
How are you feeling?…Smile…Sign this to David!…Do you miss Arthur Miller?…You killed Gable!…Please sign this, Miss Mansfield!…What's your next picture?…Is it true that you and Joe are getting back together?…Look over here!

There was an animalism and cruelty to the crowd Marilyn hadn't sensed before. “It was scary,” Marilyn said. “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 like a nightmare. I wasn't sure I was going to get into that car safely and get away.”

While she was recuperating in her New York apartment, Berniece Miracle arrived for a visit.

“For several months I had been aware of a transition in Marilyn's attitude,” Berniece stated. “New problems were coming at her from every direction. In our telephone conversations, her usual wistfulness about getting together had changed to strong invitations. ‘I need you to be with me,' Marilyn had said. ‘I
need
to talk to you, Berniece, and not over the telephone!'”

Though they had spoken on the phone and written frequently, Marilyn hadn't seen her half sister since the California visit in 1946, and the urgency mystified Berniece. There was an ecstatic reunion at Marilyn's apartment. Joe DiMaggio and his friend George Solotaire joined them for dinner. There was a lot of catching up to do, and late-night discussions about Gladys.

Following her separation from John Eley, Gladys had been confined for eight years in Rockhaven Sanitarium in Verdugo City, California, where she was officially diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. She had tried to escape several times, and there had been suicide attempts.

Through the years Marilyn had paid for her mother's care, and Gladys frequently wrote Marilyn letters of complaint that Rockhaven wasn't operated by members of the Christian Science faith. Marilyn received one of her mother's letters during Berniece's visit, and Berniece noted that Marilyn had difficulty reading it.

“I can't finish this letter now,” Marilyn said with tears in her eyes. “I just can't finish Mother's letter. I'll just put it away for a while.” With her eyes firmly closed, Marilyn continued, “I just get angry. I know it's irrational. I know that she didn't mean to turn her back on me. She didn't purposely get sick. I try and try, but I still get angry—even when she was with me, she wasn't
there
. God, poor Mother…”

Berniece recalled that she kept waiting for Marilyn to reveal the matter that was so important she couldn't discuss it over the phone. “I kept listening, trying to figure out what she wanted to say, and trying to figure out how I could help. I kept waiting for her to get around to exactly what was troubling her.” According to Lena Pepitone, Marilyn had invited Berniece to New York in order to give her a large sum of money, “so they can live better and educate their kids.”