Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Marilyn, for her part, wrought a transformation in Arthur Miller. ‘Miller was in love, completely, seriously,’ Norman Rosten would say. ‘It was wonderful to behold.’

  Miller told Time reporter Robert Ajemian, ‘She is the most womanly woman I can imagine. Being with her, people want to die. This girl sets up a challenge in every man. Most men become more of what they are natively when they are around her: a phoney becomes more phoney, a confused man becomes more confused, a retiring man more retiring. She’s kind of a lodestone that draws out of the male animal his essential qualities.’

  Miller was persuaded that Marilyn’s reputation for promiscuity was vastly exaggerated. ‘Sure, she had her men,’ he said, ‘but not from couch to couch, man to man. Any relation she ever had was meaningful to her, built on a thread of hope, however mistaken. I’ve known social workers who have had a more checkered history than she has.’

  The playwright in Miller admired the honesty in Marilyn, thought her ‘literally incapable of saying anything unless it was the truth.’ He said that as an actress, ‘she’ll either do the truth or go on strike. There’s something in her that’s looking for the basic reality of a given situation. In acting, of course, this is a terrific thing. It enables you to get to the core.’

  Miller talked of Marilyn’s obsessive worry about her lack of education. ‘She’ll come to me and say, “I heard a new word the other day, what does it mean?” The other day she asked me about the word “impermeable.” She often mispronounces a word — perhaps she will say “intraveniously” instead of “intravenously.” But she wants to learn.’

  Miller said Marilyn had recently been reading a book on the art of Goya. ‘When I talked to her on the phone she said to me, “I haven’t got to the good part yet.” Next time I called her she said, “I’m two-thirds through and I still haven’t hit the good part.” The truth was, of course, that the book was mostly surmise, not positive fact. When Marilyn reached the end of the book she said to me, “Well, I finished it and there’s still nothing. Why did they write it?” It was a good question. That’s the way a book ought to be read.’

  Miller told Time, ‘Instead of becoming a disbeliever in life, which she had every reason to become, she kept her ability to feel and search for a genuine relationship. She has stopped wanting to throw herself away. She was preached to so much that she was a bad girl, not worth anything, that she developed an enormous self-destructiveness. She’s coming out of it now.’

  Miller was utterly smitten. So, thought their mutual friends, was Marilyn. She, however, was pursued by familiar ghosts — and new temptation.

  In the early months of 1955 Joe DiMaggio had still not given up his pursuit of Marilyn, and she had not yet cut herself entirely free of him. Ironically, he reached her most through the family of the most important love in Marilyn’s youth, Fred Karger. Fred’s sister, Mary, had by now moved to New Jersey with her children, and Marilyn, sometimes accompanied by DiMaggio, visited often.

  To the Kargers, Marilyn and DiMaggio now seemed to be on good terms. DiMaggio played golf with Mary, and Marilyn delighted the children with her eccentric diets and sense of fun.

  Mary’s daughter Anne recalled an afternoon when the neighbors, knowing Marilyn was next door, pulled an effective practical joke.

  ‘Their son was in the Fire Department,’ Anne recalled, ‘and he called in a false fire alarm. Maybe ten trucks appeared in front of our house — someone told the firemen Marilyn was there, and they all insisted on meeting her. And she went out and talked to them; she was very sweet about it.’

  In New York City, however, DiMaggio continued to show his jealous streak. He cast around pathetically, begging help and counsel from outsiders, even journalists. He asked columnist Earl Wilson and his wife for advice on how to get Marilyn back. Marilyn told her longtime New York friend, Henry Rosenfeld, that one night DiMaggio ‘came into the Waldorf and almost broke the door down. Police had to be called to calm him down. He was very, very jealous.’

  On June 1, 1955, Marilyn’s twenty-ninth birthday, Marilyn arrived on DiMaggio’s arm for the premiere of Seven Year Itch. He gave a party for her afterwards at Toots Shor’s, but the mood quickly soured. The couple had a row at the supper table, and Marilyn left with her photographer friend, Sam Shaw.

  Jim Haspiel told the saddest story of Joe DiMaggio’s tormented persistence. Haspiel himself kept vigil for Marilyn at all hours of the day and night, and more than once spotted DiMaggio ‘literally standing in a doorway near her apartment, in the late evening, just as any fan might stand on the street waiting to catch a glimpse of her. That was the extent of his need.’

  The Seven Year Itch also gave Marilyn the opportunity to mount a somewhat devilish practical joke against the lover she had so much wanted to marry in 1948, Fred Karger. He was by now embroiled in marital problems with his second wife, actress Jane Wyman, and Marilyn delighted in reminding Wyman that she had once enjoyed Karger’s love.

  When Seven Year Itch was playing in Los Angeles Marilyn and two friends — one of them Karger’s first wife, Patti — ventured out in the dead of night to Grauman’s Theater to steal a cardboard blow-up of Marilyn in the famous skirt-blowing scene. They took the life-size likeness to Holmby Hills, and planted it on Jane Wyman’s lawn. She failed to see the joke.

  In the summer of 1955 Fred Karger found himself staying at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Marilyn was living on one of the upper floors, and he called to invite her down for a drink. When she failed to appear, Karger called again, and this time Marilyn sounded drunk. Later, when he went up to her apartment, she was lost in a haze of alcohol and — an ominous new factor in her life — sleeping pills.

  Marilyn did not see only Arthur Miller in the early months of their relationship. Dress manufacturer Henry Rosenfeld had been instrumental in arranging for her suite at the Waldorf, and loaned her a good deal of money. From then on, Marilyn consulted him about her financial affairs, and would one day propose that he take all the proceeds from one of her movies in exchange for paying her a guaranteed thousand dollars a week for life. Rosenfeld gently declined, explaining that he would make far more on the capital than was fair. He himself became deeply involved with Marilyn and, Marilyn told one close friend, even proposed marriage.

  The year 1955 also saw an embryonic scheme to marry Marilyn off to the head of a European royal family — an idea supported by Aristotle Onassis. The millionaire was concerned because one of his favorite watering holes, the principality of Monaco, was going through a slump. The fashionable set had started going elsewhere. Onassis thought they might return if Prince Rainier married a suitably glamorous foreigner, and asked a friend, George Schlee, to cast around for brides in the United States. Schlee consulted Gardner Cowles, publisher of Look magazine, who happened to be a neighbor of Milton Greene in Connecticut.

  ‘I suggested to Schlee that it might be a good thing to marry off Rainier to a movie actress,’ Cowles said. ‘He asked if I had anybody in particular in mind. I said, “Well, Marilyn Monroe is at the peak of her fame, and she’s staying nearby. Let’s put the idea to her.”’

  So it was that Marilyn and the Greenes were invited to meet Schlee at the Cowles’ country home. Cowles said, ‘We didn’t beat about the bush. When I told Marilyn, she said the idea appealed to her, but she didn’t even know where Monaco was. She said she’d be glad to meet the prince.’

  Princess Marilyn of Monaco? That night, as the Greenes and Marilyn drove home, the atmosphere was one of huge hilarity tinged with the realization that the proposition was serious. For a while there was much chatter about Prince Rainier, who was quickly dubbed ‘Reindeer.’

  The idea fizzled altogether when Monaco’s royal household announced that the prince was going to marry another actress, Grace Kelly. Marilyn added her own postscript. She telephoned Kelly with congratulations, adding, ‘I’m so glad you’ve found a way out of this business.’

  Arthur Miller may have thought Marilyn was not promiscuous, that she wa
s now less insecure. However, just as she had been during the DiMaggio courtship, Marilyn was a less than constant lover. During 1955 she drew close to Marlon Brando.

  Brando was Hollywood’s most celebrated product of the Actors Studio, and Marilyn had long admired him. The previous year, after his triumph in On the Waterfront, she pressed Sam Goldwyn for a part in Brando’s next film, Guys and Dolls. In New York, Marilyn hoped that one of her first independent projects would star Brando and Charlie Chaplin.

  Asked to define sex appeal, Marilyn said, ‘There are people to whom other people react and other people who do nothing for people. I react to men, too … personally, I react to Marlon Brando.’ Marilyn never did achieve her ambition to work with Brando, but in 1955 they had an affair.

  Amy and Milton Greene, who still saw Marilyn regularly, became aware by the summer that she was involved with Brando. Other friends and colleagues confirm the relationship. Brando, famous on screen and off for arrogance and a tendency to violence, was also loved by intimates for his gentleness and loyalty. Marilyn spoke of him to Amy Greene as ‘sweet, tender.’ She referred to him by the code-name ‘Carlo,’ and relished the fact that most people had no idea whom she was talking about. A photograph taken of them together in December 1955, at an actors’ benefit, shows Marilyn and Brando looking dreamily happy together.*

  The Brando affair, which had remained secret, faded as Marilyn prepared for a public involvement with Arthur Miller. The friendship, however, endured. In 1962, in the last days before her death, Marilyn would spend hours talking on the telephone with Brando. Contacted in connection with this book, Brando responded with a rare personal call. Speaking with evident emotion, he said, ‘I did know her, and out of that sentiment for her, I could never talk about her for publication. I think you can understand that.’

  Throughout 1955 Marilyn contrived, for once, to keep her private life, if not entirely hidden from the press, at least indecipherable. Toward the end of the year, in a long interview with columnist Earl Wilson, she danced around cunningly baited questions. Asked who her favorite actor was, Marilyn named Brando — then quickly added a few others. Who was her favorite playwright? Marilyn said Arthur Miller — and Tennessee Williams. Asked if she had any love interests, her answer was classic Monroe: ‘No serious interests, but I’m always interested.’

  In January 1956, Earl Wilson broke the story that Arthur Miller and his wife were planning to divorce. In private, Miller and Marilyn were now talking about marriage. In public they stonewalled for five more months, but Marilyn had effectively fulfilled the wish callously expressed to Sidney Skolsky at the end of her honeymoon with DiMaggio — the hand of Arthur Miller in marriage. The New Year, it seemed, was awash with success, and not only in love.

  After nearly a year Lee Strasberg had decided Marilyn was ready to perform before an audience of her peers at the Actors Studio. She and Maureen Stapleton worked for a while on a scene from Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels, gave up, then settled on the opening scene from Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, which Marilyn had once done as an exercise with Natasha Lytess. Marilyn played Anna.

  Maureen Stapleton remembered that ‘she had terrible trouble remembering lines. I said, “Look, it’s not as though it’s some damn opening night. We’ll just put the book in front of us on the table — lots of people do it.” Marilyn refused to do that, and we never did get through it in rehearsal with her knowing the lines. Then when we did the scene she was fine, didn’t forget a line in fifteen minutes. That exceedingly wispy voice of hers seemed to carry all right, for all her worrying about it. Afterwards we went out to a bar on Tenth Avenue, and celebrated having cheated death one more time.’

  Some of the skeptics’ voices were now stilled. ‘She was wonderful,’ said actress Kim Stanley. ‘We were taught never to clap at the Actors Studio — it was like we were in church — and it was the first time I’d ever heard applause there.’

  Others retained their doubts. The triumph, some felt, was that Marilyn had managed the scene at all. Lee Strasberg’s success was that he had got her to do it competently, not that she had done it brilliantly. Marilyn herself sensed this reaction, and played down the praise.

  In early 1956, however, Lee Strasberg offered this accolade: ‘I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of actors and actresses,’ he told director Joshua Logan, ‘and there are only two that stand out way above the rest. Number one is Marlon Brando, and the second is Marilyn Monroe. …’

  Meanwhile, on top of such acclamation and her engagement to Arthur Miller, Marilyn had won her battle with Twentieth Century-Fox.

  For a year now, ever since Marilyn’s flight to New York, the studio had kept her Hollywood dressing room undisturbed. The cleaners still walked around a mountain of unanswered fan mail to dust the jumble of makeup, the false eyelashes, the bottles and boxes of pills, the discarded book of love poems — and a photograph of Joe DiMaggio. Now Milton Greene’s gamble paid off. In the absence of any replacement for Marilyn, the studio struck a deal.

  On New Year’s Eve 1955 Marilyn signed a new contract with Fox, giving her uniquely favorable terms. She was required to make only four films for the studio over the next seven years, and would be free to make one film a year for a different studio. Marilyn Monroe Productions would receive $100,000 in salary for each film made for Fox, plus a percentage of the profits. It was an excellent deal by 1955 standards, and promised a potential income of some $8,000,000 over the full contract period.

  A special clause, really important to Marilyn, gave her the right to reject any film she deemed not to be ‘Class A,’ and to reject directors or cameramen who did not meet with her approval. She submitted a list, largely concocted for her by Milton and Amy Greene, of sixteen directors with whom she was prepared to work. Twentieth Century-Fox did not argue.

  In the flush of victory, Marilyn greeted 1956 with a barrage of plans. She would return to Hollywood to make Bus Stop with one of her chosen directors, Joshua Logan. She stood side by side with Sir Laurence Olivier to announce that they would soon work together on a film version of Terence Rattigan’s play, The Sleeping Prince.

  The world’s most distinguished actor pronounced a benediction. Marilyn was, Sir Laurence told the press, ‘a brilliant comedienne and therefore an extremely good actress.’ He watched in astonishment as 150 newsmen jostled for photographs, then became frenzied when the shoulder strap broke on Marilyn’s dress.

  Something about Marilyn bothered Sir Laurence. Away from the microphone, and in the limousine that bore him away, he said to producer Saul Colin, ‘Saul, I wonder if I’ve made a mistake?’ Sir Laurence would find out later that year.

  Meeting Marilyn now was a confusing experience. Writer Dorothy Manning at first had the impression that ‘gone was the shy, tense, little-girl voice, the slow groping for just the right word. … In its place was a poised woman. Gay, relaxed, less self-conscious, she came up in a few minutes with sprightlier conversation than most stars can manage in hours.’

  The same day, meeting Marilyn a second time, Manning was startled by the abrupt change in her. She wrote: ‘In the air was the feeling that Marilyn was again troubled, shrinking back into the shadows, anxious, still unsure. Now she was a strange, bewildering girl, one whose defenselessness caught at your heart.’

  Manning was finding a kind way to express what Sir Laurence Olivier had glimpsed. Later, recalling their first meeting, Sir Laurence was to write, ‘You would not be far out if you described her as schizoid.’

  Even before she left Hollywood, Marilyn was no stranger to the psychiatrist’s office. It was the heyday of the couch psychiatrist, especially in California. As one doctor who knew Marilyn put it: ‘At that time out here, you could get psychoanalysis and a high colonic under the same neon sign. It was a time of fraudulence. A lot of questionable doctors had come here and succeeded just because they were glib and good at promoting themselves. They had a ready market — a lot of highly neurotic actors and actresses.’

  The
first record of Marilyn seeing a psychiatrist is in 1954, during her marriage to DiMaggio. She saw an analyst, identity unknown, for some six months.

  Marilyn’s medical doctors had no doubt she needed psychiatric help. Dr Milton Gottlieb, who gave Marilyn gynecological care, said, ‘She was insecure, frightened of the reality of life. A very disturbed young woman.’

  Dr Elliott Corday, Marilyn’s physician from 1948 till the mid-fifties, says, ‘I eventually withdrew from the case because she would not employ a decent psychiatrist. People would understand her death better had they been listening to her in my office back then. There had been many suicide attempts, more than were known. And by 1954 she was using drugs — I think the hard stuff as well as the sleeping pills. In the end I told her I was not going to be around to witness what was going to happen.’

  Evidence of hard drug use by Marilyn is meager. Joe DiMaggio’s detectives, appointed to investigate Marilyn’s personal life, had reported finding ‘hypodermic syringes, two or three vials containing some kind of powder, and other paraphernalia,’ in Marilyn’s apartment. Whatever their significance, the woman who fled Hollywood for New York needed help.

  Marilyn told Milton Greene she had stopped having psychiatric treatment. Greene said she should continue, and promised to find her a top-flight analyst. Greene, who himself gradually came to consider Marilyn ‘schizo,’ sent her to see Dr Hohenberg, a female psychiatrist practicing on New York’s East Side. Marilyn saw this doctor five times a week during much of 1955.

  At the Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg thought Marilyn’s sessions with the psychiatrist ‘freed’ her for the rigors of his ‘total immersion’ acting technique. Arthur Miller was to say, after she had undergone a year of treatment, that psychiatry had helped Marilyn a good deal. ‘She is seeing the issues more clearly now,’ he said, ‘discovering that in so many situations in her life she was not the one who was wrong. She feels psychiatry has made a big difference to her.’