Marilyn Monroe

by Charles Casillo

  But Marilyn wanted Strasberg to direct, something NBC would not approve because of his lack of experience. Negotiations for the project would continue for months to come, and whenever interviewed, Marilyn would confidently proclaim that the role of Sadie Thompson in Rain would be her next project.

  * * *

  Although the public was aware that Marilyn was troubled, they had no idea just how ill—emotionally and physically—she was in 1961. The death of Clark Gable certainly had a great deal to do with her emotional distress. But there were many other contributing factors to her downward spiral—the end of her marriage to Miller and the hopeful affair with (and ultimate rejection by) Montand.

  The release of The Misfits also devastated her. Before its premiere she had tremendous hopes that this performance might be the start of a turning point in her career. So much effort had gone into it. So much was riding on it.

  Glamorous, dressed to the nines in black, smiling radiantly, hopefully, and escorted by Montgomery Clift, Marilyn attended the premiere on January 31. Arthur Miller was there, but he and Marilyn didn’t acknowledge each other and sat at opposite sides of the theater. There was a small party set up after the screening, but when the movie ended, Curtice Taylor, the son of the film’s producer, Frank Taylor, remembers Marilyn rushing out of the theater with Clift without saying a word to anyone: “Clearly she was distraught and not happy with the film.”

  The reviews echoed her opinion. In spite of the many months of anticipation and hoopla building up toward the world’s greatest sexpot finally proving herself a serious dramatic actress, the finished picture was a letdown. Despite a few excellent reviews, the critics’ opinions leaned toward the negative.

  Bosley Crowther, in the all-important New York Times, said: “Miss Monroe—well, she is completely blank and unfathomable as a new divorcée who shed her husband because ‘you could touch him but he wasn’t there.’” He went on to say, “There is really not much about her that is very exciting or interesting.”

  Now Marilyn’s dreams of being taken seriously as an actress seemed as far away as ever. She had let down the Strasbergs. She had let down her fans. She had let down herself.

  She confided to Ralph Roberts that her smothering depression made her feel as if she couldn’t go on any longer. Citing her guilt feelings regarding her possible contribution to Gable’s heart attack, Marilyn looked out the window of her thirteenth-story apartment. She considered hurling herself to the pavement.

  “I remembered reading somewhere that people who fall from heights lose consciousness before they hit the ground,” she remarked. The thought of a loss of consciousness and then oblivion seemed welcoming to her. She climbed out on the ledge. She was going to throw herself down. It would have only been a matter of moments before someone looked up and noticed her there. But just before she made the plunge, she saw a woman wearing a brown dress walking on the sidewalk.

  Marilyn recognized her. The woman stopped and waited for the bus. “I was afraid if I jumped, I could splatter all over her. So I couldn’t,” she said. The attention to detail and the sudden reality of such a messy death in front of someone she knew snapped her out of the fantasy of jumping.

  At their next appointment, Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Kris, was disturbed by the drug-addled, washed-out-looking woman who sat before her. In a tiny voice Marilyn recounted the suicide attempt. Dr. Kris was alarmed. Like most people who were close to Marilyn, the doctor was well aware of her famous patient’s preoccupation with suicide. Arthur Miller once confided to Pat Newcomb that Marilyn had tried to jump out of that same window on Fifty-seventh Street during their marriage, and that “he pulled her in.”

  Dr. Kris made the decision that Marilyn should be hospitalized. She assured Marilyn that the best thing for her would be some rest and relaxation under medical supervision. Undoubtedly thinking of the pampering she had been given while hospitalized in Los Angeles when The Misfits shut down, Marilyn thought that perhaps it was a good idea.

  TWENTY-TWO

  NIGHTMARE

  On February 7 Dr. Kris herself drove Marilyn to New York Hospital. Although the staff knew who their new patient was, the just-divorced Marilyn Monroe signed herself in as “Miss Faye Miller,” so it wouldn’t be leaked to the press that she was being hospitalized.

  Once the forms were signed, however, everything changed. Marilyn immediately knew something was wrong. It was as if the staff, the doctors and the nurses, had been told some inside information about her condition that she wasn’t aware of. They took her by the arms and, in a fast-moving blur, she was escorted down an ominous system of hallways through New York Hospital to a psychiatric wing known as the Payne Whitney Clinic.

  Because she was admitted as a patient who had threatened suicide and could possibly harm herself, she was locked in a bare, cell-like room. It was only moments until she realized she was in a psychiatric ward. “Cement blocks and all,” Marilyn later revealed to Dr. Greenson.

  What had haunted her all her life had become a reality—the fear of the fate of her mother’s insanity, the terror of a madhouse. There were bars on the windows. Patients were locked in their rooms—but there was a window on every door so she could be gawked at by any passerby like a bug under a magnifying glass. Marilyn would be allowed no privacy—and thus no dignity.

  Stripped of any power, stripped of her clothes, it was as if she had signed away her rights as well as her identity. “I felt I was in prison for a crime I hadn’t committed,” Marilyn stated. As a child she had often been placed in situations where she was at the complete mercy of those around her. Panic was gripping her, but—like a child, like an orphan, like a ward of the state—she sensed that her best defense was to try to remain calm, follow orders, and respond rationally.

  The first thing she was ordered to do was bathe. She took her bath under supervision. Afterward a psychiatrist whom she did not know arrived to give her a full physical examination, including a breast exam, checking for lumps. Marilyn attempted to explain that she had been given a complete physical less than a month before. Without comment the psychiatrist continued his probing. She felt violated but was afraid to be perceived as violent, so she allowed the examination to proceed.

  In her locked room she noticed the markings on the wall, scratchings, cries for help, from patients who had inhabited the room before her. She would not scratch. She would remain calm. Finally a nurse entered; it was she who confirmed to Marilyn that she was on a psychiatric floor for very disturbed and depressed patients.

  Meanwhile the screams of other patients echoed through the halls. “They screamed out when life was unbearable for them, I guess,” Marilyn mused. Even amid this chaos, Marilyn’s mind was churning with empathy and compassion, sympathizing with the confined women around her. “I felt an available psychiatrist should have talked to them. Perhaps to alleviate even temporarily their misery and pain—I think they [the doctors] might learn something even—but all are only interested in something from the books they studied.… Maybe from some live suffering human being they could discover more.”

  Eventually several doctors came in to evaluate Marilyn’s state of mind.

  “Why aren’t you happy here?” she was asked.

  “Well,” Marilyn replied reasonably, “I’d have to be nuts if I liked it here.”

  Since it was the part of the day when occupational therapy took place—when some of the patients mingled—they urged Marilyn to socialize. Marilyn wondered out loud what she could possibly do. They suggested she knit, or play cards or checkers. The absurdity of a panicked Marilyn Monroe playing cards with mental patients was lost on these professionals, although it was not lost on Marilyn.

  “The day I do that you will have a nut on your hands,” she retorted.

  “Why do you think you’re different?” she was asked, as if she were the average woman on the street. Later Marilyn would say of the Payne Whitney doctors, “They should all have their heads examined.” For now, still playing along, she
said simply, “I just am.”

  They had misunderstood. She didn’t think she was better than anyone else, or deserving of special treatment—Marilyn was simply very much aware that she wasn’t regarded as the average person. Still, she did try to socialize a bit and soon encountered a woman who described herself as having a “mental condition,” confiding that she had tried to cut her throat and slash her wrists “either three or four times.”

  This piteous woman observed that Marilyn “looked sad.” She suggested that Marilyn call a friend—maybe it would make her feel less lonely. Marilyn explained that she had been told that there were no phones on this floor. The woman led Marilyn—shaken that the staff had lied to her—to a phone, but as Marilyn started dialing, a security guard grabbed the receiver from her hand. “You can’t use the phone!” he snapped.

  Marilyn grew more desperate. She returned to her room and sat on the bed trying to think of what to do next.

  Her fame could not shield her here. Nor could her beauty or wit. It was a defenselessness she hadn’t experienced for a long time. Marilyn went into panic mode. She sat on the bed for the moment, her thoughts divided between trying to continue to cooperate and play along or doing something dramatic as a way to force them to let her out of there. Marilyn asked herself: “What would Marlon [Brando] do if he was put in my position? That kept my sanity because I knew he’d do a lot more.”

  She decided to turn to her career—which was a success—to help her get out of the situation. She would approach the experience as an improvisational acting exercise. Her Method-trained mind went back to Don’t Bother to Knock, the film she had made just when she was on the brink of superstardom. In the movie she portrayed a troubled young woman who, when confronted by the authorities, held up a razor, threatening to hurt herself. Marilyn acknowledged to herself that the idea to try that in this place was “corny”—but she couldn’t see any other way to get them to listen to her.

  In order to get a piece of glass, she picked up a chair and threw it against the window. To her surprise the glass didn’t shatter. It was thick, unbreakable. It would take a lot of work—but she was determined. With all her strength she kept at it, hurling the chair against the glass until a small, sharp shard cracked off.

  When two burly doctors, along with two hefty nurses, arrived at her room, she startled them by holding up the glass, threatening, “If you are going to treat me like a nut I’ll act like a nut.” Marilyn had no real intention of cutting her skin or harming herself. She was, after all, an actress.

  But they took the threat seriously. She told them to let her out of there. They refused. The situation became surreal. They asked her to come with them quietly, but since she had no reason to trust that they had her best interests in mind, she refused to cooperate. Marilyn continued to sit there, broken glass in hand. The four of them pounced and seized her by the wrists until she dropped the glass. They then grabbed her arms and legs and carried her—facedown and sobbing—to the elevator.

  She was brought up to the ominous seventh floor—reserved for patients who were violently disturbed and dangerous. The first thing she was ordered to do by the nurse was to disrobe and take a bath. She was growing suspicious and upset about the focus on her body. Marilyn explained that she had already been given a bath on the sixth floor. She was told sternly that every time a patient changed floors they were required to take a bath.

  After her second bath, a dour hospital administrator—Marilyn wasn’t even sure if he was a doctor—began questioning her about her movie work. “How can you work when you’re depressed?” he wanted to know.

  She tried to articulate that depression was not so cut-and-dry, black-and-white. Many artists suffer from depression from time to time and still manage to create. “Didn’t he think that perhaps Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin perhaps and perhaps Ingrid Bergman they had been depressed when they worked sometimes but I said it’s like saying a ball player like DiMaggio if he could hit a ball when he was depressed. Pretty silly.”

  “You are a very sick girl,” he informed her, based on their short exchange. “And you have been for a very long time.”

  * * *

  By now word had leaked out to the media that Marilyn had been hospitalized, but no one on the outside was quite sure why. Her hospitalization caused widespread speculation, and reporters camped out in front of New York Hospital. Her press rep, John Springer, released a benign statement allowing that Marilyn had been admitted “for a period of rest and recuperation following a very arduous year in which she completed two films in rapid succession and in which she has had to face marital problems.”

  That explanation satisfied no one, and the media kept their vigil outside the hospital. Lewd stories were being leaked out: Marilyn had ripped off her hospital gown in front of gaping doctors and nurses.

  A resourceful journalist, Chiari Pisani, an American correspondent for the Italian publication Gente, called a doctor she knew at the hospital and asked him if he could possibly get her any information on Marilyn’s condition. Pisani soon heard a physician from the clinic give his diagnosis of Marilyn: “Miss Monroe does not have any symptoms of schizophrenia—she is only psychiatrically disconnected in an acute way because she works too hard—two movies in one year—and the recent divorce.”

  * * *

  Pisani discovered that Marilyn had been placed in a padded room—and, for a time, in a straitjacket—where she was kept in a trancelike sleep for three days.

  The remoteness and secretive demeanor of the staff, the seclusion of her rooms, and the constant exposure of her body made each passing moment seem more sinister and dangerous to Marilyn. She was afraid to be left alone because some of the employees were not to be trusted. After she was sedated, they removed the straitjacket but restrained her arms.

  Marilyn would later reveal to her friend Gloria Romanoff, the wife of restaurateur Michael, that she was indeed kept semisedated—but not so medicated that she wasn’t aware of what was going on around her.

  Of course her presence in the sanatorium caused corruption.

  During the evening a procession of hospital personnel—doctors, interns nurses, orderlies—all in uniform, would come into her room, pull down the blankets, and, transfixed to be in the presence of this legend, violate her body. “There I was with my arms bound,” she told Gloria Romanoff. “And—you’ll find this hard to believe—they came into my room and touched my private areas. I was unable to defend myself. I was a curiosity to them, with no one defending me or having my interest at heart.” She felt that, knowing how people reacted to her, the hospital should have provided a guard at the door. Marilyn added that it was mostly the women who came in and probed her body. “Probably lesbians,” she added.

  Romanoff believed her completely, commenting that Marilyn had no reason to reveal this “except it was a bit of a nightmare for her.” She vividly remembered Marilyn quietly but intently telling the story. She told her about this horrifying episode at the hospital with stoic resolve, as if she were lecturing, “See? These are the things that can happen to you.”

  “It was a shattering thing to hear,” Romanoff recalled many years later. It enforced what Romanoff had always thought about Marilyn. That she really needed someone around to protect her at all times. “She was just so vulnerable to this kind of thing.”

  * * *

  Finally a sympathetic nurse managed to get a pencil and paper to Marilyn and allowed her to write a short letter. Out of all the people she knew in the world, it was the Strasbergs she reached out to for help. “I’m locked up with all these poor nutty people,” she wrote. “I’m sure to end up a nut too if I stay in this nightmare. Please help me. This is the last place I should be.”*

  At last Marilyn was able to get to a phone. The one person she could think of who might be able to help her was Joe DiMaggio. Joe was in St. Petersburg, Florida, sitting in front of the television when he received the call from a sobbing Marilyn. “That was all he needed to hear,” remembered
DiMaggio’s friend Stacy Edwards. “He jumped on the very next plane.”

  DiMaggio arrived at the hospital that very night. In the face of the staff’s formal, no-nonsense, unyielding demeanor, he was like a wild animal unleashed. “I want my wife,” he demanded at the front desk. Taken aback at the sight of an enraged Joe DiMaggio, no one dared remind him that Miss Monroe was no longer his wife and he had no authority to have her released.

  DiMaggio was informed, however, that he needed to get permission from Dr. Kris to have Marilyn released. “I don’t care who does it!” DiMaggio bellowed. “But if somebody doesn’t get her out of here I swear to Christ I’ll take this hospital apart brick by brick!”

  The next day Marilyn was taken to the hospital’s basement, where a labyrinth of passageways led to another door, outside which a car with Ralph Roberts and Dr. Kris was waiting for her.

  Once they were safely in the car, Marilyn released all the bottled-up anger and fear that had been festering in her for four days. “Marilyn began screaming at the doctor as only she could,” Roberts recalled. “She was like a hurricane unleashed. Dr. Kris was very frightened and very shaken by the violence of Marilyn’s response at their meeting. I wound up driving the doctor home. There was a lot of traffic, so we inched down the West Side Highway overlooking the river, and Dr. Kris was trembling and kept repeating over and over, ‘I did a terrible thing, a terrible, terrible thing. Oh, God, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to, but I did.’”

  Marilyn was transferred to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in upper Manhattan. This was the kind of hospital Marilyn had originally had in mind. She was allowed to have visitors and, after a while, was even allowed to leave on a pass for short periods of time. Most important, Joe DiMaggio promised to stay in town until she felt safe.