She stayed at the hospital for three weeks. DiMaggio, who had to return to Florida for business, flew in once a week to visit her for a couple of days. She received visitors, telegrams, flowers, and notes, one from her good friend and former lover Marlon Brando:
Dear Marilyn,
The best reappraisals are born in the worst crisis. It has happened to all of us in relative degrees. Be glad for it and don’t be afraid of being afraid. It can only help. Relax and enjoy it. I send you my thoughts and my warmest affections.
—Marlon
Marilyn made sure that everyone at Columbia Presbyterian knew she was coherent and sane. She did not emerge from her room without being properly groomed, coiffed, and made up. One doctor, who spoke with her often, found her “incredibly beautiful, but very troubled. I had no idea if what she told me was the truth or not. It was fascinating, but deeply disturbing.”
Time, on the other hand, was impressed with Marilyn’s public “nervous breakdown” and subsequent treatment and wrote, “In seeking help, she may have done more than the psychiatrists to win popular acceptance of a more modern view of mental illness and treatment for it.”
On March 5, looking rested and healthy, Marilyn checked out of Columbia Presbyterian and, supported by Pat Newcomb, emerged into the obligatory throng of waiting reporters—a greedy, aggressive, out-of-control mob. Amid the pandemonium she paused in front of the microphones being thrust at her, giving simple quotes like, “I feel wonderful, thank you,” before moving on to the safety of a waiting car.
* * *
Her loyalty to the Strasbergs remained strong. Marilyn still looked to Lee Strasberg as the link to an important dramatic career. He was her confidence. To show her allegiance to him, on March 13, just a week after her release from the hospital, she attended a benefit to raise money for the Actors Studio, held at Roseland Dance City in Manhattan.
The stress of the hardships of the previous year showed clearly on her face that night. She looked ravaged and empty, as if she had sent her tired body to attend the function without her soul inhabiting it. It was one of her few public appearances where nowhere in sight was her special spark, her magic. She drank continuously throughout the evening.
In photographs it looks as if she would prefer to be anywhere else. Especially considering the fact that sitting at her table briefly was, of all people, Vivien Leigh. The Gone with the Wind star had just finalized her divorce from Laurence Olivier, and surely she and Marilyn were looking back on their regrets and the misery of The Prince and the Showgirl shoot. Only one photo of this survives. At one end of the table there is Monroe, wrapped in her furs, pale, thin, lost. On the other end Leigh is smiling and smoking a cigarette. In the center is Susan Strasberg, staring straight into the camera, looking stunned.
* * *
At the end of March it was once more DiMaggio she turned to.* She decided to visit him for a recuperative vacation in a secluded resort in Redington Beach, Florida. Although she loved DiMaggio dearly, she was not “in love” with him any longer. They would have to settle on a special friendship for now. Their relationship had become what might be today called “loving friends with benefits.”
When Marilyn returned refreshed from her vacation with DiMaggio, she started seeing Frank Sinatra—who had begun to pursue her months before. She had known him through the years—they had a lot of conversations—but up to this point they’d never had an affair. Now she was excited, giddy, and nervous at the prospect of a romance with the legendary crooner. The only time Ralph Roberts saw Marilyn drink vodka was when she was going on her first real date with Sinatra, who was staying at the Waldorf. Marilyn asked Roberts to drive her there.
“I always had a flask of vodka in my glove compartment,” Roberts remembered. During the drive Marilyn started having an anxiety attack and finally asked him if she could take a sip. Roberts replied, “Sure, but I don’t have a cup.” Marilyn didn’t care. She took a sip from the flask and “almost vomited.” Roberts recalled that, most of the time, Marilyn couldn’t bear hard liquor. “It did something to her.”
The date, however, was a success, and they discreetly started seeing each other. Sinatra presented Marilyn with a white Maltese-poodle crossbreed so she wouldn’t feel so alone. Marilyn teasingly named the dog “Maf Honey” because of Sinatra’s alleged ties to the Mafia.
When Marilyn mentioned Sinatra’s name to Dr. Greenson, he frowned through his mustache and looked up at the ceiling. (Sinatra had been a patient of Greenson’s before Marilyn.) Obviously the doctor didn’t think that the singer would be a good influence on Marilyn, but she defended him in a letter. “He has been (secretly) a very tender friend,” Marilyn wrote. “I know you won’t believe this but you must trust me with my instincts. It was sort of a fling on the wing. I have never done that before—but now I have—but he is very unselfish in bed.”
The affair would go on to be more than a “fling on the wing” but Marilyn was hesitant to get involved seriously. She was still smarting from her divorce from Miller and hurting over the relationship with Yves Montand. In the letter to Greenson she added: “From Yves I have heard nothing—but I don’t mind because I have such a strong, tender, wonderful memory.”
Marilyn’s outlook seemed to be turning more positive. Directly quoting Brando’s note to her, Marilyn told Look magazine, “I’m not afraid to be afraid anymore.” The winter had been bleak; the gray weather, with a lot of rain and snow, had mirrored her moods. Now, more aware than ever of the passing of time, she decided to go back to the West Coast. She looked forward to getting back to the sunshine of Los Angeles, and to the business of being Marilyn Monroe.
TWENTY-THREE
MANIC-DEPRESSIVE
No one close to Marilyn in the last two years of her life doubts the importance of Pat Newcomb to Marilyn. “It’s Pat Newcomb who knows more about Marilyn Monroe than anyone else,” Jeanne Martin (Dean Martin’s wife) commented. “But one has never been able to get anything very revealing out of her.”
In Monroe biographies, the shadowy Pat Newcomb often comes across as being a not very forthcoming person, mostly because of her silences and dodges when it comes to discussing Marilyn in her very few interviews. Yet many people talk of her as being a very smart, loyal, and attractive woman with a marvelous sense of humor.
Newcomb and Marilyn had psychological traits in common. Jeanne, who socialized with both women, observed that Newcomb, like Marilyn, “had highs and lows.” Both of them used prescription drugs, especially sedatives. Both women relied heavily on their psychiatrists. Newcomb is an accomplished, complex individual who has had many decades to evolve after Marilyn’s death—it’s understandable that she doesn’t want her reputation to be associated only with Marilyn Monroe. But for the purpose of this biography she is examined in the framework of that relationship.
Newcomb was at Marilyn’s side at almost every major event in 1961–62, hovering discreetly, protectively on the sidelines. When not working, the two women socialized together, and it was through Newcomb that Marilyn reacquainted herself with Peter Lawford and his wife, Pat Kennedy Lawford, the sister of John and Bobby Kennedy. Newcomb would often stay at Marilyn’s apartment when she was in New York and—at times—at her home in Los Angeles. At the scene of Marilyn’s death, a devastated Newcomb asked gathering reporters: “How would you feel if your best friend died?”
Newcomb was the primary person in charge of Marilyn’s publicity, but the relationship went way beyond that. People who were around at the time go so far as to say that Newcomb became obsessed with Marilyn.
Because of Newcomb’s feverish dedication to Marilyn, her intentions began to confuse the star. Marilyn both craved this devotion and feared it (coming from a woman). Some say Newcomb wanted more from Marilyn than she was prepared to give. But—at this stage in her life—without a husband or steady lover, Marilyn needed someone who extended complete dedication, unconditional love. This is what Newcomb offered.
In return—as she did wit
h anyone who was devoted to her—Marilyn made extreme demands. If Marilyn tried to call Newcomb at home and got a busy signal, she would become hysterical. When she finally got through she would scream and yell. Eventually Marilyn had a separate phone line installed in Newcomb’s apartment so she could reach her at all times. Marilyn was the only one who had the number. “And she’d call and call,” Newcomb remembered. “I tried to do everything I could, but sometimes it was just too much.”
As always, Marilyn would do her best to repay Newcomb’s loyalty. After she complained that her car wasn’t working well, Marilyn gave Newcomb a new Thunderbird. She gifted her with a mink coat. And after wearing them a few times, Marilyn gave Pat a valuable pair of emerald earrings Frank Sinatra had given her.
But after Marilyn’s death, Newcomb seemed to want to distance herself from their intensely personal and multilayered relationship. In 1992 Newcomb told Donald Spoto: “All of these publications calling me ‘her best friend, her closest friend.’ It wasn’t like that. I mean, she told me a lot of things.… But she never told anybody everything. But I think of a friendship as a two-way street. And since she is not anyone I would have ever called on as a friend, I don’t consider it a friendship in that way. It was a professional relationship. I cared about her as a person.”
In spite of what Newcomb had to say after the fact, all the evidence shows that she and Marilyn were close. Very close. Rupert Allan became annoyed when, after talking to Marilyn at the office, Newcomb suggested that if he wanted to know what was going on with Marilyn, he should go through her. Allan snapped back that he had been a friend of Marilyn’s for a long time.
Michael Selsman, who also worked with Newcomb at the Arthur P. Jacobs agency, claims that there was a lot of talk about a possible lesbian relationship between Marilyn and Newcomb—and it wasn’t coming from the show-business community. The rumors spread among people in Marilyn’s circle “who knew her and worked with her.”
Whether their relationship eventually became sexualized or not, it definitely became one of mutual dependency that was unhealthy for both women.
Newcomb was possessive of Marilyn, building a barrier around her client—someone described Marilyn as “a caged animal”—no one could get to Marilyn without going through Newcomb. “Pat Newcomb was the closest confidante to Marilyn,” Milt Ebbins, Peter Lawford’s agent and friend, who was part of Marilyn’s social set, commented. “Was there something sexual between them? I have no proof of that, but they were very, very close. Constantly together. Marilyn loved her, she was very fond of her. I don’t know what their association was. I hesitate even to read something into it.”
Newcomb asserted to the author Lois Banner that there was no lesbian relationship between her and Marilyn. Yet Susan Strasberg made the distinction that “the adrenaline rush that came from Marilyn’s involvement with Pat Newcomb became somewhat sexualized.” Strasberg would say that Marilyn had nicknamed Newcomb “Sybil,” implying friendly “sibling rivalry.” But as their relationship intensified, Marilyn’s feelings grew more complicated, with paranoid undertones.
In those pre-sexual-liberation days, what had come to terrify Marilyn was the confusing of genders. For her there was a clear line of masculine and feminine behavior. She was paranoid about anyone finding anything masculine in herself.
Marilyn began discussing Newcomb in her sessions with Greenson, with homosexuality a major concern. “She could not bear the slightest hint of anything homosexual,” Greenson wrote. “She had an outright phobia of homosexuality* and yet unwittingly fell into situations which had homosexual coloring, which she then recognized and projected onto the other, who then became her enemy.”
Was Marilyn afraid of developing sexual feelings for Newcomb, or did she simply resent Newcomb for pressuring her into something she wanted no part of—shades of Natasha Lytess? “Marilyn’s mother was schizophrenic,” Susan Strasberg observed. “As a result Marilyn’s feelings toward women were complex and ambivalent.”
In his correspondence Greenson gave an example of Marilyn’s relationship with a girlfriend named “Pat,” who had put a blond streak in her hair, close to Marilyn’s color. Marilyn interpreted Newcomb’s emulation as an attempt to “take possession of her,” feeling that identification meant “homosexual possessiveness.” Greenson wrote that Marilyn “burned with fury against this girl,” accusing her of trying to “rob her most valuable possession.”
So much of Marilyn’s identity, her public persona, was being the sexual desire of men. Her whole projection of herself was based on that. She once stated, “I don’t mind it being a man’s world. As long as I can be a woman in it.” Newcomb’s perceived passionate feelings threatened her. But—with everything in her life becoming more confusing and unclear—she pressed ahead with the relationship.
“She could be very touching,” Newcomb recalled. “I always felt a kind of watching out for her. But deep down at the core she was really strong, much stronger than all of us. And you’d forget it for a while because she seemed so vulnerable.” But sometimes Marilyn’s suppressed angst surfaced, and she would say something “quite cruel,” Newcomb revealed. “She could be quite mean.”
Milt Ebbins would witness Marilyn’s “meanness” toward Pat on a flight from Los Angeles to New York. He was sitting behind Marilyn and Newcomb. Marilyn started yelling at Newcomb. “She was really screaming at her,” Ebbins recalled. Even in the airplane with the motors running, Ebbins could hear Marilyn’s angry voice hysterically lashing into Newcomb. “Marilyn’s vocabulary included words I’d never ever heard of, and she wielded them like a sailor with no embarrassment,” Susan Strasberg once said. “She had quite a temper when she lost control.” Ebbins leaned over the seat and saw that Newcomb was in tears. Just sitting there crying—taking it. Ebbins said, “Marilyn, cool it.’” Then Marilyn turned around and gave Ebbins a sly, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin.
As the months went on, Marilyn’s love-hate relationship with Newcomb—and sibling rivalry—would grow more extreme. It would crescendo on the last mysterious day of Marilyn’s life.
* * *
Marilyn entered a manic phase that was all about shedding the past four years. She wanted something new in her life: a movie, a lover, a hairdo. With a renewed vitality, she lost weight, gushing to the columnist Jonah Ruddy, “I’m on a high-protein diet and I weigh 123 pounds, which is right for me. I feel absolutely wonderful.”
With her shaky new confidence she consulted a hip young hair stylist, George Masters, who went to meet Marilyn at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
“Do me any way you want. I don’t care,” Marilyn told him, as he assessed the freshly washed hair hanging limply to her shoulders. Masters couldn’t believe that this huge star would give him free rein over her legendary blond locks. But in the moment, sipping champagne in a ripped terry robe, it really seemed as if she couldn’t care less.
He went to work on her, cutting her hair shorter and teasing it out. When he finished he gushed, “Miss Monroe, you look absolutely killing.” Marilyn loved it and called to tell her newspaper columnist friends about her new look; they labeled Monroe’s new hairstyle the “killer cut.”
As if to project a new hopeful attitude and youthful vigor, Marilyn started dressing in very bright colors—Pucci became a favorite designer. Gone were the polo coats and baggy checkered slacks of New York. In previous years she had preferred neutral colors—black, white, and nude tones. Soon her closets were filled with clingy Pucci dresses of fuchsia, powder blue, hot pink, lime green, and orange—which showed off her newly svelte figure. She bought colorful patterned blouses she contrasted with fitted white shantung pants and spike heels. She looked marvelous.
However Marilyn was also experiencing the physical effects of entering her midthirties. As she lost more weight, her breasts became smaller. A few years earlier Billy Wilder had commented: “She has breasts like granite, they defy gravity.” Now they were becoming less perky.
Still, she liked to be provocativ
e and give the illusion of being braless with high, firm breasts. Marilyn’s longtime makeup artist, Whitey Snyder, disclosed that—in those days before breast implants—Marilyn came up with an ingenious trick: Under her clothes she started wearing a flimsy bra. To give the impression that she was braless she had a pair of breast pads created. These were thin padded cups with a slight bump in the middle—which suggested a nipple—that fitted over her bra cups. When Marilyn put on one of her tight jersey dresses or a silky top over the bra and breast pads, it appeared she was braless with firm breasts and a hint of nipple peeking through.
* * *
In 1961 Hollywood friends were delighted to have her back on the scene. The bad times of the winter had left her feeling isolated and estranged from the world. Now she attempted to join in and found herself at times happier than she had been in years.
She became good friends with the much-older esteemed poet Carl Sandburg. They were both thrilled to find they had so much common ground. They talked of their admiration for Abraham Lincoln and Charlie Chaplin. Most of all they shared a love of poetry. Sandburg gave her a volume of his complete poems, and she sought his opinion on poems she had written. “She had faith in me,” Sandburg would say. She sensed he wasn’t impressed with her celebrity but wanted to know her as a person. Marilyn would often throw her arms around him or squeeze his hand while he was talking. Obviously he had become another father figure—she confided in him. “He’s so pleased to meet you,” Marilyn said. “He wants to know about you, and you want to know about him.” Sandburg was moved by her tragic story. “The first sixteen years of her life was [sic] enough to floor most of us,” he said. He added, “I had great respect for her as an artist and as a person.” She was a lovely girl. He thought she “was a good talker.” “There were realms of science, politics, and economics in which she wasn’t at home, but she spoke well on the national scene, the Hollywood scene, and on people who are good to know and people who ain’t. She sometimes threw her arms around me like people do who like each other very much. Too bad I was forty-eight years older—I couldn’t play her leading man.”*
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