Marilyn Monroe

by Charles Casillo

  Today, many decades after Marilyn’s last months, people are no longer afraid to go on the record with the information that they know about her relationships because they no longer fear retribution.

  For example, a Hollywood hostess, now elderly, whose husband was a well-known actor (and a good friend of Marilyn’s) had a dinner party Marilyn and Bobby Kennedy attended—together. “After dinner Bobby and Marilyn went out for a walk,” she recalled. “But when they didn’t return my husband said he was going to go out and look for them. I said, ‘Never mind. I’ll go. I’ll go look for them.’ While I was walking down the driveway I saw Bobby and Marilyn in a parked car.”

  The hostess turned on her heels and went back to the party. Marilyn and Bobby returned a little while later. “I never told the story because my husband was close with Marilyn,” she told this author. “During his lifetime, Marilyn’s affair with Bobby was whispered about but never confirmed. It seems today it’s well known and accepted.”

  The esteemed photographer Murray Garrett, who had known Marilyn before she was a star, was working for Time Inc. in 1962. He and other photographers would hang out at New York’s Cock and Bull Bar—across from Time’s offices—where they would discuss the major photo ops of the day. Garrett recalled a night in the spring of 1962 when all the photographers were saying: “The big story is to catch Monroe either with JFK or Bobby at the house Lawford has in Santa Monica right near the beach.”

  One of them asked: “If you told me that I could get a picture of them making it in the backyard what would I do with it?” Garrett explains: “The only place you could sell a photo like that was to one of those insane gossip magazines. No legitimate publication would touch it. LIFE, Parade, Look—they’d say ‘Come on. Are you kidding me with that stuff? We can’t print a picture like that! And you can’t take it. You can’t do that.’”

  In that time there was an unwritten rule that serious journalists didn’t report on politicians’ extramarital affairs. Garrett continued, “Today you could do it. But then there was a self-imposed area of silence that you had to understand. Like a wall of silence that you wouldn’t cross. There were some things that were taboo that you wouldn’t cover.”

  Susan Strasberg, whose family was close to Marilyn for years, said that Marilyn told her mother, Paula, that there was an affair first with John F. Kennedy and then with Bobby.

  Marilyn’s life was compartmentalized. Because so much of her was publicized, she carefully boxed away segments of her life that she shared with very few—and even to those she gave only bits and pieces. So much of her belonged to the public. She wanted to keep a piece of herself to herself—it was a way to survive. That’s what makes her such a fascinating puzzle.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  STARTING SOMETHING

  Meanwhile 20th Century-Fox was committed to getting Marilyn in front of the cameras. By now, in addition to Dean Martin, the glamorous Cyd Charisse had been added to the cast of Something’s Got to Give, playing Martin’s other wife. Since there was no script anywhere near completion, the production couldn’t realistically begin until sometime that spring. In the coming months, as the start date continued to be delayed, five writers worked on the story, but none of their versions pleased Marilyn. She still felt something was missing—the spark, the wit that would make it a “Marilyn Monroe” movie. In desperation the studio hired Nunnally Johnson, who had written How to Marry a Millionaire, one of Marilyn’s great hits.

  While preparations for the movie plodded on, a huge boost to Marilyn’s ego arrived in the form of an invitation to sing “Happy Birthday” at an elaborate celebration for President John F. Kennedy to be held in New York’s Madison Square Garden that May. She called her current favorite designer, Jean Louis, and told him she wanted a dress that “only Marilyn Monroe could wear.” In response the designer came up with a concept that would be both elegant and racy. A transparent, flesh-colored gown, covered with crystals that would give the illusion of nudity. Marilyn was delighted and started fittings with Jean Louis.

  When Nunnally Johnson sent his reworked script to Marilyn, she was pleased. All the previous adaptations she had been shown did not have the feel of the star vehicle she was looking for. She liked that Johnson had added bits like a hula dance—she could make that kind of thing her own. She felt it was an excellent draft and that it just needed a few more jokes added.

  When Cukor saw the new script, however, he hit the roof. He felt it was too different from the original movie—which of course was the point. Marilyn wanted an updated, modern comedy written exclusively for her. Cukor, on the other hand, felt that the original script, although dated, had “charm.” To demonstrate his own power, Cukor hired a new writer, Walter Bernstein, to totally revamp the Johnson version in two weeks’ time.

  Director and star had completely different visions of what kind of movie it should be. A compromise was reached: Bernstein would work on rewrites of the Johnson screenplay on different-colored paper so Marilyn could evaluate the changes he was making.

  * * *

  The public hadn’t seen Marilyn on screen for more than a year, and in this film, scheduled to be released in October 1962, she would be introducing a new version of herself. She was slimmer than she had been in years, her hair was white-blond, teased out, and flipped. The Jean Louis costumes, while formfitting and sexy, were also stylish and elegant. The look would introduce an up-to-date, more sophisticated Marilyn.

  On Tuesday, April 10, 1962, the day of the filmed costume and makeup tests, Marilyn Monroe’s beauty reached its zenith—as if all her other looks had been experiments to reach this ravishing pinnacle.

  If there was any question in Hollywood’s eyes of Marilyn’s continuing charisma, her absolute ability to light up the screen, this footage—had it been seen by the public at the time—would have put any doubts to rest. Parading a variety of looks, she walks back and forth across the set modeling her costumes, elegantly flaunting her perfectly proportioned body. Regaining her figure has clearly given her renewed confidence. Marilyn has never appeared more in command of herself, or more exquisite on film. All the adoration and betrayals and love and hate and failures and triumphs of her life have fed into this moment, filling Marilyn with a complicated beauty that is thrilling to watch.

  The following day, however, Marilyn failed to show up for a meeting to discuss the tests. The producer, Henry Weinstein, eager to share his excitement about her appearance, rushed to her house and was horrified to discover Marilyn in bed in a drug-induced coma. Greenson and Engelberg were called to what was by now a familiar and worrisome scenario. Marilyn was rescued once more.

  Weinstein was so troubled by Marilyn’s overdose that he went to the studio executives and, like Mickey Rudin, asked them to postpone the production. He argued that Marilyn’s mental state was too unpredictable. Determined to get a Marilyn movie into theaters, they called Weinstein “melodramatic.” The Fox heads declared that production would continue as scheduled.

  * * *

  On April 18 Marilyn received Bernstein’s revised version of the script on blue paper. Marilyn was not amused by his pedestrian dialogue and was dismayed at the gooey lines he wrote in an attempt to make her character more likable to the children, who don’t recognize her as their mother. In a razor-sharp criticism, Marilyn contemptuously scrawled across one page: “Too flat. It’s painting black on black so to speak. We don’t have to worry about heart. I have one, believe it or not.”

  With the script still unsatisfactory to Marilyn, Cukor postponed the start of shooting until April 23. This would give Bernstein another week to rewrite. A few days later Marilyn received new pages on pink paper. Soon after that, yellow pages with more rewrites arrived. The script was now a mess of different colors, ideas, and styles.

  That Monday 104 crew members reported to soundstage 14, ready and excited to start filming, even though the script was still incomplete. Marilyn called in sick. By now no one could have been expecting an easy production involvi
ng Marilyn Monroe. All the studio could do was schedule a start day and hope for the best. Marilyn continued to call in sick for the rest of the week. The familiar pattern of rearranging schedules and shooting around her had begun. The studio doctor confirmed that Marilyn was sick with a fever and chest congestion, and suggested production should be postponed for one month. But by now it was a case of a movie star who had cried wolf too many times. No one believed she was ill.

  What was really going on with Marilyn that spring? Was it a power play? Hypochondria? A simple fear of facing the camera? Was she truly sick? The answer, according to her internist, Dr. Engelberg, was that her illness was most likely a combination of all of these things.

  “She was easily disturbed by the pressures of work, although she worked hard,” Engelberg explained. “When she was depressed her resistance dropped to infection. There’s a phrase that is used by doctors, Psyche and Soma, which means psychological and emotional things and the bodily things. They affect each other.”

  Elizabeth Taylor’s delays on the astronomically overbudget Cleopatra, now in its last days of filming in Rome, had created severe financial problems for the studio. Marilyn, just starting her movie, would bear the brunt of it. Fox had everything invested in the Taylor extravaganza and needed immediate cash. It was well known—and widely reported—that the studio was less patient with what they considered Marilyn’s shenanigans because of Cleopatra.

  20th Century-Fox treated its two biggest stars quite differently. To Fox, Marilyn Monroe was a disturbed marshmallow they could push around and appease by submitting to a few of her demands and making her feel important. Elizabeth Taylor was nobody’s fool: a no-nonsense, tough-talking businesswoman who knew what she wanted and demanded it—or else. If she was sick, they better damn well wait it out. Unlike Monroe, Taylor cared a lot more about getting her money than being wonderful. Although she often managed to do both.

  Because of Fox’s treatment of her, Marilyn viewed the studio as the enemy, which made it even more difficult for her to show up. They were using her. They were disrespecting her. They were treating her like a “machine.” It made her more belligerent regarding the studio heads, and it intensified her illness.

  * * *

  On Monday, April 30, a week after production had begun, Monroe showed up at the studio to shoot her first scene for Something’s Got to Give. She arrived on the set looking slim and lovely but still complaining of a fever. She shot scenes around the house where her character returns after five years of being stranded on a tropical island. There was no dialogue, but in close-up Marilyn powerfully conveyed a range of tender emotions when she first sees her children.

  The next day hopes sank again when Marilyn showed up at 7:00 a.m. only to collapse under a hair dryer at 7:30. She was sent home. She didn’t work for the rest of the second week. Marilyn was so ill that she missed an opportunity to meet the visiting shah and empress of Iran.

  By Thursday, May 10, Marilyn was still calling in sick. In the midst of panic and disorder, Greenson left for a four-week trip to Europe with his wife. It was a planned trip, and part of Marilyn’s illness stemmed from her dread of Greenson going away. “I told her that I would return if it was necessary,” Greenson said. The doctor would be leaving her in the care of his colleague Dr. Milton Wexler. At this point Marilyn had worked one day in the three weeks of filming. He seems to have made Marilyn dependent on him; now he was leaving her at a time when she needed support the most.

  * * *

  At last on Monday, May 14, Marilyn returned to work. She picked up shooting the scene where her character first returns home. Her actions involved her lingering by the pool, interacting with the children. In spite of the mawkish dialogue, Marilyn found in the scene—a mother at last being reunited with her children—an emotional and psychological gold mine to draw on. They finally seemed to be making progress when Marilyn showed up for work the next two days.

  What is fascinating about Something’s Got to Give is that almost every moment filmed for the movie survives. Because this movie was never completed, the footage was boxed and locked in a warehouse where it remained unseen for three decades. When discovered it was a revelation. In the unedited footage we get an excellent view of the shooting days on the set of Something’s Got to Give and an unprecedented look at the working Marilyn Monroe.

  For years her studio, her directors, and her costars had attempted to portray Marilyn as a difficult, exhausting actress who screwed up lines, demanded retakes, and acted like a troublesome, uncooperative diva. Yet this unedited footage tells a different story. Even between takes, as the camera rolled, we see a Marilyn who is focused, agreeable, pleasant, and working hard. It clearly illustrates how some in the industry were against her: There is no monster in Marilyn here.

  Even though Marilyn was working hard and well, there was tension. Her many absences had put everyone on edge, and Cukor in particular was now on the brink of despising her—although the actress and director put up a pleasantly polite working facade, when watching the rushes you can sense the strain between them. Cukor got back at her by ordering many takes of the same scene even after it seems to have been flawlessly performed in the first few takes.

  Cukor wasted almost an entire day of shooting a scene between Marilyn’s character and the family dog, because the trained dog refused to bark on cue. Marilyn, kneeling by the pool in heels, remains in good humor while the director insists the scene be shot again and again—slowing down a production that was already moving at a sloth’s pace.

  Although she showed up on time once again on Thursday, a helicopter landed on the studio lot after lunch with the intention of picking up Marilyn and—along with Pat Newcomb, Peter Lawford, and his agent, Milt Ebbins—flying her to the airport to catch a plane to New York so she could perform at the president’s birthday celebration that Saturday night.

  When the studio heads objected, Marilyn countered that she had told them six weeks earlier that she was going—which was true—but that was before they knew the extent of the absences she would have racked up by then. Now they were horrified that she would even consider walking out during a workweek.

  As far as Marilyn was concerned, missing President Kennedy’s birthday fete was out of the question. It was one of the biggest honors of her life to be asked to sing “Happy Birthday” to the president of the United States. Here was a woman who constantly questioned herself, and now she would be associated with the world’s most powerful man. With a remarkable gown already designed, she intended not only to perform for the president but also to affirm to the world—and herself—that Marilyn Monroe was still in every way a phenomenon.

  TWENTY-NINE

  MASS SEDUCTION

  Marilyn was actually quite terrified of singing the simple “Happy Birthday” in front of a massive crowd. She started practicing weeks before. “I remember sitting on the bathtub, listening to her singing as she was putting on makeup,” Joan Greenson said. “She would sing to me. As it got closer to the time of her going, she got more and more nervous about it. I gave her my copy of The Little Engine That Could. It was very strange to me, a twenty-one-year-old art student saying to Marilyn Monroe, ‘Oh I know you can. Get out there and do a good job.’”

  Marilyn found comfort in the tale of the little train’s bravery and perseverance and took the book with her to New York as a talisman.

  In Manhattan, on the evening before the gala, Ralph Roberts dropped by Marilyn’s Fifty-seventh Street apartment to watch her rehearse. Pat Newcomb and Paula Strasberg were there, along with the Broadway lyricist Richard Adler. Adler was staging and producing the event, and came to get a sneak preview of her performance.

  As she did when rehearsing for her show for the troops in Korea, Marilyn worked tirelessly at perfecting her act. “I went to the apartment about eight or nine o’clock and there was a pianist there,” Ralph Roberts recalled. “They rehearsed ‘Happy Birthday’ over and over again. As the evening progressed, Marilyn’s rendition of the
song became more and more suggestive, and the show’s producer became increasingly perturbed. “Richard Adler was very upset with her interpretation,” Roberts recalled. Marilyn knew that Jackie Kennedy wouldn’t be in the audience next to her husband; the first lady had chosen to be at a horse show in Virginia with her children.

  Marilyn began the song yet again, and Adler approached Roberts, whispering urgently, “We cannot do this to the president of the United States!” Adler then slipped out of the apartment to call the president to warn him that Marilyn couldn’t do it. It was too sexy.

  Kennedy laughed. “It’ll be fine. Everybody’ll love it.”

  * * *

  The day of the event Marilyn transformed herself into the bigger-than-life icon people expected. In those hair-obsessed days, Marilyn had Mr. Kenneth style her hair into a mega-bouffant with an exaggerated wing on one side. Her semitransparent gown of flesh-colored silk—soufflé gauze covered with more than 2,500 crystals—had to be sewn onto her naked body so that it became a top layer of skin. Of course it was impossible to wear any underclothes beneath such a garment—although it did have an invisible zipper in the back so that she wouldn’t have to be cut out of it as she had been with other gowns.

  She left her apartment and arrived at Madison Square Garden with Pat Newcomb, very late. Her date for the evening was Isidore Miller, her ex-father-in-law, whom she still loved very dearly, and whom she continued to look to as a father figure. She brought him because she wanted to give him the gift of meeting the president.

  Capitalizing on the barrage of press Marilyn was receiving about always being absent or late on the set of her new movie, Peter Lawford made her introduction a running gag throughout the show. He kept introducing her, only to find himself gesturing, with a drumroll, to an empty spotlight.

  “I think we were all holding our breath because we knew she was extremely nervous,” Diahann Carroll recalled. “I mean really just petrified. But we weren’t worried about the dress. We knew the dress was almost lacquered onto the body.”