Marilyn Monroe

by Charles Casillo

  Finally Lawford begins to introduce her again, this time even referencing his wife, Pat Kennedy: “Mr. President, because in the history of show business, Pat says, in no one female who meant so much, who has done more…” At this point Marilyn appears, seeming to metaphysically materialize out of the darkness as she climbs several steps and teeters across the stage, her ermine wrap giving brief flashes of the delights underneath.

  When she stands at the podium side by side with Lawford she pulls the stole tightly around her until he says, “I’ll take that.” Then Marilyn does the big reveal. When she removes the white fur and hands it to Lawford, the audience of fifteen thousand people gasps collectively. The sheer silk material of the gown seems to have melted away under the lights, and Marilyn’s magnificent body appears to be nude, covered only by hundreds of sparkling crystals.

  Lawford exits, leaving her alone onstage. “When she came down with that flesh colored dress without any underwear on you could smell lust,” reported Hugh Sidey, who covered John F. Kennedy for Time. At the podium Marilyn takes her time. Standing there she is the culmination of everything Marilyn Monroe was mythologized for—dreamy, sexual, fuzzy, glittering, naked—unworldly in her beauty.

  Marilyn flicks the microphone. She shields her eyes from the lights to gaze out at the audience. She smiles. She looks around. She lets out a deep sigh, which elicits more screams and whistles from the crowd. She hesitates, allowing the sex slowly to fill up in her. Then she begins: “Happy Birthday to you.…”

  A giant birthday cake is wheeled out; the glamorous president takes to the stage to thank all the performers, ending with: “Miss Monroe left a picture to come all the way East. And I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet wholesome way.”

  * * *

  Marilyn’s sultry serenade to the president electrified audiences at the time and continues to fascinate today. “It was mass seduction,” Richard Adler declared, even though he had been scandalized by her rehearsal the night before. Dorothy Kilgallen, one of the journalists who suspected an affair at the time and dared to hint at it, wrote: “It seemed like Marilyn was making love to the President in the direct view of 40 million Americans.”

  After the performances an exclusive party was held at the Manhattan residence of the entertainment lawyer Arthur B. Krim and his wife, the medical researcher Mathilde Krim. Marilyn chatted and laughed, but Susan Strasberg noticed that she seemed totally lost. When she hugged Susan, she felt Marilyn’s nails nervously dig into her arms as if she were trying desperately to hold on to something. When it came to Marilyn, there was always something going on underneath.

  “I watched President Kennedy watching her,” Susan said. “Those two glittering, charismatic Geminis were fascinating together, and apart.… I wondered if she was going to rendezvous with the president as she had before.” Marilyn may also have felt Kennedy watching her.

  The pollster Lou Harris, who was friends with John F. Kennedy, remembers that the air at the Krims’ party was filled with sexual innuendo and flirtations. Harris was especially aware of the erotic atmosphere because he watched Henry Fonda talking intimately to his wife on the couch for a long time. Susan Strasberg was appalled when Vice President Lyndon Johnson put his hand up her dress, inviting her: “Come sit on my lap, little girl.”

  Amid all this, it was impossible not to notice Marilyn. That night she was the moon. Everything and everyone was viewed through her incandescence. “The image of this exquisite, beguiling, and desperate girl will always stay with me,” Kennedy historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his journal. “I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful; I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous, and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible unreality about her—as if talking to someone under water. Bobby and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me, but one never felt her to be wholly engaged.” Then Schlesinger watched, fascinated, as Marilyn “receded into her own glittering mist.”

  At one point, it seems, Marilyn led Bobby to believe that he had won the “mock” competition. “Jack had already been with Marilyn more than once before,” Lou Harris said. “I know because he told me. So it was curious to see Bobby flirting with her—and she was flirting back.” When asked if he thought it might be a ploy by Marilyn to make the president jealous, Harris replied: “I was aware that there was sometimes a competitive thing going on between the two brothers—particularly when it came to women. Marilyn may have been playing up their rivalry.”

  According to Harris, at one point in the pretend competition, Marilyn briefly pressed Bobby up against the wall. “I thought that was brazen of her,” Harris stated. “And Jack certainly witnessed it since he rarely took his eyes off of her. But the next moment she could act very demure … alone in the world, belonging to no one. That made her all the more attractive to everyone.”

  Because of Marilyn’s sexy performance that night, and the rumors that were circulating about an affair between them, it has widely been assumed that the two had a sexual encounter after the party. Susan Strasberg, who had kept a curious eye on both of them, witnessed them leaving separately, although she did notice that Marilyn’s “exit was uncharacteristically reserved. She slipped out—no grand farewells.” Kennedy was staying at his favorite Manhattan hotel, the Carlyle.

  * * *

  Two reliable sources have gone on record with contradictory accounts of seeing Marilyn after the Krims’ party. James Haspiel, who had been following Marilyn around New York since 1955, and whose accounts of her have proved to be trustworthy, said that she arrived at her apartment alone in a car at exactly 3:50 a.m. Earlier he had been at Madison Square Garden and had watched his idol’s dynamic performance. As was usual for him, he waited in front of her apartment building for Marilyn to arrive home.

  She pulled up in front of the building in a black limo. He noticed that her hair was not in the carefully lacquered style she had worn at the gala. It looked “as though she had combed it out” like “white spun gold.” And she was not wearing her shoes. He also noticed that Marilyn was fatigued and visibly upset. When she saw Haspiel she said something to him, a comment that he chose not to reveal but that angered him and prompted him to reply, “Oh, go to hell, Marilyn.” That was the last time Haspiel ever saw her.

  Ralph Roberts gives a different time frame. Encased in the security of her apartment, Marilyn was far too hyped up to sleep and she phoned Roberts, waking him, asking him to come over and give her a massage. “She called me as soon as she got home,” Roberts said. He arrived at her place within minutes “because I lived three blocks away from her.”

  Roberts estimated the time to have been about two o’clock, but he could be confused; his approximation was made after being roused from a deep sleep and hurrying to Marilyn’s place. It is unlikely she could have been home by two considering the length of the event at Madison Square Garden and the time she spent socializing at the Krims’ party.

  Haspiel claimed to have seen Roberts enter the building—which would put the time at about four. Haspiel was not as close to Marilyn as Roberts was, but he was friendly with the star and, in his way, as devoted. Although he was not directly involved in her life, he often knew her schedule and discreetly followed her around town for years, sometimes documenting their encounters with photos, sometimes not. At times he interacted with her, and at others he simply observed her. Haspiel often knew her secret activities and meetings better than the press.

  * * *

  The time of her arrival at her apartment is important, and it depends on which witness you believe. If Marilyn arrived home near four, that would have given her enough time to rendezvous with Kennedy at the Carlyle—something that was widely assumed at the time. If Marilyn did meet the president at the hotel, it was a brief encounter. But this would not be unusual for Kennedy, who notoriously didn’t engage in sexual foreplay.

  Jackie Kennedy confessed th
at her promiscuous husband was “a flop as a lover.” She told a friend that he “just goes too fast and falls asleep.” Milt Ebbins commented: “Jack was a hit and run with women. We know that from the women. Bing! Up and out. And I asked him about that once, and he said, ‘You gotta take it fast when you don’t have much time.’”

  Angie Dickinson who, like Marilyn, often socialized with the Rat Pack and was also having affairs with Frank Sinatra and John Kennedy, described making love with Kennedy as “the best twenty seconds of my life.”

  Pamela Colin—then a socialite and an editor at Vogue—guested at the White House and knew of many society woman who were having affairs with the president. The future Lady Harlech revealed: “Then there was the famous Angie Dickinson who used to go up and down in the lift at the Carlyle Hotel, you know, at the back, the service lift.”

  It’s possible that Marilyn had been whisked up the service elevator to where an exclusive group of friends had gathered. Then Marilyn and Kennedy could have slipped away for a quick tryst before she was driven the short twenty blocks back to her apartment—where Haspiel observed her emerging from the car barefoot and upset. It would also make sense that Marilyn’s hairdo would have been combed out at the hotel—her hair is intact in all the photos at the Krims’ party, and it is unlikely she would have mussed it there.

  * * *

  When Marilyn showed up for work on the Fox lot on Monday morning, the studio executives were not feeling any excitement over her much-talked-about performance. They were in fact furious that she had missed more work because of the event. She did nothing to appease their allegations of her being difficult. Pleading exhaustion, she wouldn’t do close-ups. The following day, because Dean Martin had a cold she refused to work with him. All Cukor could do was shoot retakes. The movie had been in production for weeks, and Marilyn was still working on her first scenes.

  On Wednesday, however, she showed up for the third day in a row with a “Marilyn Monroe” tactic that never failed to sway everyone back into her corner. She was scheduled to film a swimming scene in which her character, Ellen, tries to entice her husband, Nick, into telling his new wife that she has returned. The scene required Marilyn to swim naked by moonlight and squeal in delight until her husband comes out to confront her. In keeping with the morals of the era, the swim would be only a tease: The costume department had created a flesh-colored net bikini for Marilyn to wear in the water.

  After Marilyn conferred with Cukor, she decided to make it a genuine nude scene. She later explained, “Honestly, if I had done those scenes in a flesh netting it really would have looked phony, and I am convinced that false nudity is much more obscene than the real thing could ever be.”

  Although she had the set cleared of unnecessary bystanders, Marilyn did allow two photographers, Lawrence Schiller and Billy Woodfield, to document the scene. Even while Marilyn was performing naked, swimming, splashing, and kicking in the water, the scene was lit in such a way that one really couldn’t see much nudity. But every frame of film is filled with Marilyn’s peachy playfulness. “I think I am an actress,” she later told a reporter, “and as such in order to act nude I had to feel nude.”

  After coming out of the water, she sits poolside, her exquisite back facing the camera, as she dries her hair. Then she stands and languidly wraps her naked body in a plush blue robe. In one take the robe slips open, very briefly exposing a breast and firm derriere. These naked flashes allowed the film’s publicity to announce that it was the “first true nude scene done in an American film by a major movie actress.”

  Photos of Marilyn frolicking naked would surely make global headlines and be worth a fortune. When Woodfield and Schiller asked what Marilyn wanted in return for allowing them to sell the photos, she casually informed them that she wanted the pictures to knock Elizabeth Taylor off worldwide magazine covers.

  Not only did the still photographs result in a sensation, Fox and the entire Something’s Got to Give company were thrilled. The mundane little comedy now had a bona fide “Marilyn Monroe” scene, and because of the skinny-dip scene, it had a highly inviting hook to attract audiences. The rushes were viewed as being right up there with some of the greatest moments of Marilyn ever captured on film.

  The psychological contradictions were not lost on Marilyn: posing nude, flaunting playful sexuality, while wanting to be taken seriously as an actress. In the coming decades this would not be impossible for an actress, but in 1962 a woman past thirty-five was expected to act in certain ways, and appearing naked in a motion picture was not one of them.

  THIRTY

  IS MARILYN FINISHED?

  Marilyn continued to show up for work for the next two days. However, she phoned in sick on the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth because of an ear infection. Once again morale sank. By now everyone was almost out of their minds from waiting for Monroe.

  The crew and studio executives weren’t the only ones reaching the breaking point with Marilyn. Her lawyer, Mickey Rudin, was getting fed up with her causing one disturbance after another. “Every day, coming on the set was a challenge. Every day she’d find reasons not to do it. I mean, she’d have to screw up the courage to come out of that dressing room! That could have been a cinch for normal people, with sane people. You don’t judge the actions of a disturbed person by standards of normality. She was not sane. Nobody seems to accept that fact.”

  That Wednesday, Marilyn did show up to—at last—shoot her very first scene with leading man Dean Martin. Marilyn starts off strong in the opening takes of the scene but seems to be fading by the end of the day. Flubbing lines and low on energy, she was sent home early.

  The following day Marilyn seemed energized, her performance rising above the mundane writing. In a scene that takes place in a fancy shoe store, the dithery comic actor Wally Cox—best known for his TV series Mr. Peepers—plays a nerdy shoe salesman she wants to pass off to her husband as the man with whom she was stranded on the island. Marilyn had one more day of shooting left in her.

  Marilyn filmed the last scene of her life on June 1, 1962—her thirty-sixth birthday. If she was feeling down or panicked that day, it didn’t show in her performance. She arrived on time and filmed an entire day with Martin and Cox. The scenes captured are some of Marilyn’s best work in the film. As she was busy shooting, flowers and cards arrived all day at the studio.

  At the end of the workday, a cake adorned with sparklers was wheeled out. In spite of the cake and champagne, the celebration seemed forced: The smiles were fake. The underlying mood was grim. Still, there was no way of anyone knowing that this would be the last day of shooting.

  After the on-set celebration, Marilyn took Dean Martin’s son to a baseball game at Dodger Stadium. The Angels were playing the Yankees. Her appearance was a fund-raiser for muscular dystrophy. Marilyn was scheduled to walk onto the field, throw out the first pitch, and accept the check for the worthy cause.

  Albie Pearson, the Angels center fielder, was waiting to walk her to home plate for the pregame presentation. Pearson was excited and nervous to meet Marilyn Monroe, and he asked, “Well, where is she?” He was surprised to see one of the biggest stars of the era alone in the corner of the dugout. Marilyn was wearing the elegant beige fur-trimmed suit and mink beret she had worn earlier in her scene at the studio, but she was “pale, nervous and shaking.”

  Pearson did not encounter the Monroe he was expecting. “I was shocked,” he said. “I expected her to be flashing a big smile, and instead I got this sober look.”

  In spite of the expert makeup, the glamour, the exquisite form, he “looked at the most famous yet loneliest person I ever saw in my life,” Pearson recalled. “She was a beautiful shell.” Pearson remained silent as he and Marilyn walked out of the dugout, but he was astonished at her transformation once she was in front of the crowd. She instantly turned on—smiling and waving—giving them exactly what was expected. When Pearson walked her off the field, her persona no longer needed, her smile vanished instantly
.

  * * *

  The distress, the emptiness, the loneliness that Albie Pearson recognized in Marilyn were reflections of real suffering, a culmination of hopelessness that had been building up in her for some time and may have been exacerbated by the mere fact of another birthday, a year older, the ever-ticking clock.

  Also, word had reached Marilyn that President Kennedy, once smitten with her, now felt it necessary to distance himself. Her performance at his birthday gala had brought too much whispered speculation of a possible affair between them.

  Others had warned Kennedy that tongues were wagging—that behind her deceptively self-assured sensuality she was terribly vulnerable, impossibly needy, and in fact unstable. At first Kennedy wasn’t concerned. He felt tremendously protected by both the Secret Service and the press. But when he was confronted by the one person he knew he could not refuse—his wife—he understood he had to put a stop to anything further developing between him and Marilyn.

  Although his indiscretions hurt her terribly, Jackie Kennedy had long ago come to terms with her husband’s infidelities. She learned to accept his affairs as long as they did not touch her—or her family. But she viewed his dalliance with Marilyn differently from the others for a number of reasons. It wasn’t that Jackie felt threatened by Marilyn—she was too assured of her importance in Kennedy’s life—but she understood the fascination that surrounded the blond star.

  More than anything Jackie understood that her family would be publicly disgraced if it somehow came out that her husband was having an affair with Marilyn. Plus, Jackie felt a great deal of empathy for her. She knew that Marilyn was a deeply sensitive, troubled woman. “This one is different, Jack. Have some pity on her,” she warned. “I want you to leave Marilyn alone.”

  Kennedy realized that Jackie was right. Though he felt revelations about his sex life had been protected by a press that, for the most part, adored him, gossip regarding himself and Marilyn could spread to the mainstream press, causing serious harm.