Marilyn Monroe
Page 28
Kennedy sprang into damage-control mode. He approached a former journalist, William Haddad, who was now inspector general of the Peace Corps, and asked him to go to the media and squelch any budding rumors regarding him and Marilyn.
Some stories linking the president to the sex goddess were already in the works in gossip columns as blind items. “See the editors,” Kennedy demanded. “Tell them you are speaking from me and that it’s just not true.” Haddad believed him. Years later, however, Haddad felt betrayed by Kennedy. Eventually he came to believe that the stories regarding an affair between Kennedy and Monroe were true.”He lied to me,” Haddad said. “He used my credibility with people I knew.”
Along with having the press taken care of, Kennedy knew that Marilyn herself had to be dealt with. Senator Smathers, a close friend of Kennedy’s, confirmed that Kennedy asked him to get Marilyn to stop talking to her friends. Smathers said, “So I called someone I knew. A friend of Marilyn’s I knew I could trust, and I said, ‘Look, I need you to put a bridle on Marilyn’s mouth and stop her from talking so much about what’s going on with Jack. It’s starting to get around too much.’”
* * *
With Greenson still out of the country that weekend, a distraught and drugged Marilyn called his adult children, Joan and Daniel, and asked them to come visit her at her home. When they arrived, they were drawn into a disturbing scene. It was the middle of the afternoon, but the heavy blackout drapes were tightly drawn. They encountered Marilyn sitting up in bed, naked under a sheet, wearing a sleeping mask over her eyes “like the Lone Ranger.” But unlike what might be expected from a seminude Monroe in her bed, Daniel Greenson described it as “the least erotic sight you could ever imagine. The woman was desperate.”
As they sat with her, every depressive thought that inhabited her mind poured out in a litany of anguish. “She talked about being a waif, that she was ugly, that people were only nice to her for what they could get from her, nobody loved her,” Daniel recalled. She also expressed remorse about not having children. “She said life wasn’t worth living anymore.”
Soon their father’s colleague, Milton Wexler, arrived and confiscated the multitude of pills at Marilyn’s bedside. But it was apparent that this was no passing depression: Marilyn was in serious need of help.
Pat Newcomb was so concerned about Marilyn’s dreadful state that she slept at the foot of her bed. Marilyn, in no condition to work, phoned in sick once again. When she failed to show up on Tuesday—the production was once again at a standstill—studio executives were realistically considering the possibility that they had to take drastic action. Fox had already started contacting other major stars to replace Marilyn. Both Kim Novak and Shirley MacLaine turned down the role.
Greenson was contacted in Rome by Mickey Rudin, who informed his brother-in-law that, on top of Marilyn’s awful condition, he believed the studio had had it. “I think they’re about to bounce her,” he said.
“I’ll come back,” Greenson said. “I’ll interrupt my trip.” Greenson told Rudin to let the studio know that he would get Marilyn back to work. Leaving his wife in Europe, Greenson headed back to Los Angeles.
Because there was no way that the public could see the material that Marilyn had already shot, stories started circulating that her performance was no good. She was distracted and disconnected. George Cukor himself fanned the flames of these rumors.
Cukor called Hedda Hopper with an exclusive interview, hinting that Marilyn was over the hill, although he insisted his comments not be credited to him. In a column headlined “Marilyn to Be Replaced, Is She Finished?” Hopper referred to Cukor as “one of the most knowledgeable men in the industry.” Then she quoted him: “I believe it is the end of her career. She wants to do the picture but she has no control of herself. Her performance is not good. It’s as though she’s acting underwater.”*
* * *
Greenson arrived on the evening of June 6 and went directly from the airport to Marilyn’s house. He was concerned but he was also angry—although some of this anger should have been directed toward himself. Throughout the year, while proclaiming he was working to get Marilyn more independent, what he had succeeded in doing was the opposite. He made her more reliant on him, more dangerously vulnerable, instilling in her a neediness and dependence on him that was impossible to fill. Marilyn had become a huge responsibility. She had taken over his life while losing control of her own. Marilyn Monroe had become a barely functioning mess, partially of his making.
He returned to Marilyn’s house the following morning. That day he brought a disheveled Marilyn, with black-and-blue marks under her eyes, to the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Michael Gurdin. The doctor noted that Marilyn was obviously heavily medicated and that she had hastily attempted to cover the bruises with makeup. Greenson told Gurdin that Marilyn had taken too much medication and had slipped in the shower. After taking an X-ray he determined her nose was not broken.
* * *
On Friday, June 8, Greenson met with executives at Fox to persuade them he could have her on the set the following Monday. He did not mention her injuries; instead he attempted to insert himself more deeply into the production of Something’s Got to Give.
Although Marilyn’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, sat in on the meeting, it is disturbing that a star’s psychiatrist was negotiating with her studio. Also in attendance was Fox’s vice president of business operations, Phil Feldman, who took extensive notes. He recorded Greenson boasting that he would “be able to get his patient to go along with any reasonable request and although he did not want us to deem his relationship as a Svengali one, he in fact could persuade her to anything reasonable that he wanted.” Making a huge leap of faith, Greenson assured the studio representatives that he could have Marilyn on the set, ready and eager to work that Monday.
Rudin didn’t share Greenson’s optimism. “I did my best. I was trying to keep that project alive,” Rudin said. “Not because I personally believed it would get done. If you’re defending a client in a murder case you try everything. To me this was it: There was going to be a Marilyn Monroe or there wasn’t going to be a Marilyn Monroe. She had to finish that shitty picture.”
No matter how much influence Greenson had over Marilyn, however, he did not have any impact on her studio’s assessment of her. Later that day 20th Century-Fox announced that Marilyn Monroe had been fired.
* * *
Lee Remick, a pretty twenty-six-year-old actress who was under contract with Fox, was announced as Marilyn’s replacement in Something’s Got to Give. Since she was the same size as Marilyn, she could fit into her costumes. She was rushed to the studio that day to pose happily with Cukor, while going over the screenplay. It seemed as if it had all been orchestrated to humiliate Marilyn, to show the star that she was actually dispensable.
By the end of the day the studio had filed a $750,000 lawsuit against Monroe. Marilyn, already in a terrible emotional state, was devastated by the news that she was fired. She was incensed that the studio didn’t believe that she was ill, and distressed that they dismissed her so publicly and cruelly.
THIRTY-ONE
ELIZABETH AND MARILYN
“You know, don’t you, that they fired me because of Elizabeth Taylor?” Marilyn asked Ralph Roberts. “It’s not her fault; it’s the company’s fault. But they fired me because of Elizabeth Taylor.” The studio already had too much time and money invested in Cleopatra and Taylor could not be replaced. A Fox spokesman had said to the press: “No company can afford Monroe and Taylor.”
The media was constantly trying to instigate a feud between Monroe and Taylor, though their screen images and physical appearances couldn’t have been more different. In reality they barely knew each other, and the two had no animosity toward each other.
Taylor, in Rome finishing her last weeks on the trouble-plagued set of Cleopatra, saw the angry headlines declaring that Marilyn had been fired by the studio to which they were both under contract. She immediately fe
lt a kinship with the troubled star.
In 1962 Marilyn’s beauty, emotional problems, loneliness, illnesses, and advancing age were good copy for magazine articles, while Taylor’s overblown, passion-fueled exploits seemed specifically created for lurid cover stories.
Taylor’s public image was that of a lusty, big-bosomed man-eater—a dark femme fatale who went after her passions with gusto, got them, and then dug in for more. Audiences simultaneously condemned and admired her—and they hungrily gobbled up any scraps of information about her latest doings.
But those close to Taylor knew that, in her private life, she was a fiercely loyal friend with an extraordinarily big heart. She always responded to wounded souls. It was common for Taylor to come to the aid of someone she felt sympathy for, and she never sought out press coverage or bragged about it to other people in a self-aggrandizing way.
The director Mike Nichols, who worked with Taylor and knew her well, commented: “There are three things I never saw Elizabeth Taylor do: Tell a lie; be unkind to anyone; and be on time.” The third trait is probably something Taylor and Monroe could have bonded over. Like the rest of the world, Taylor read of Marilyn’s firing from Fox on the front pages of newspapers.
* * *
One unknown fact is that immediately after Marilyn’s firing, Elizabeth called Marilyn from Rome and offered to help her in any way possible. Taylor didn’t often talk publicly about the good deeds she did in her private time, but on some nights, when she was in a chatty mood, she might tell some of her stories.
Kimothy Crues, who became close with Taylor years later when she was making her Broadway debut, remembers, “I worked with Elizabeth Taylor on The Little Foxes on Broadway in 1981. We stayed friends pretty much up until her death. Through the years we spent a lot of time both in New York and then in Los Angeles after Elizabeth bought her house in Bel Air. We had various discussions about any number of subjects.
“There was a night that publicist Chen Sam, Elizabeth, and I were sitting around, a couple of sheets to the wind—Elizabeth hadn’t gotten sober yet—and I asked her about her studio years. It was a subject she would talk about sometimes and other times she preferred not to. But on this night she started talking about the Cleopatra experience.”
Taylor told Crues that it was really the studio’s own mishandling that was causing them to have serious financial troubles. “They started shooting the movie while I was ill,” she said. “They shut down the production in London. They started over in Rome and had to rebuild the sets at a great cost.” She was not happy with some of her behavior but also horrified by how she was treated by the studio and by the press. Crues felt comfortable enough to ask Taylor about Marilyn Monroe.
“Well,” Taylor replied, “I didn’t know her well. In many ways we were sort of pitted against each other by the press. But in 1962 I was being blamed for bankrupting 20th Century-Fox, and then Marilyn started a movie and Fox and the press started going after her. She was ill and missing shooting days. Then I heard Fox had fired her. I could only imagine how humiliating that was for her.”
Elizabeth had had enough. She revealed to Crues, “I actually called her. I got her on the phone, and I said, ‘I know we’re not friends, Marilyn, but what’s happening to you now has been happening to me for a long time over this Cleopatra situation. The financial problems that are going on with the studio are not the fault of either one of us—but they need to put the blame on someone for their desperate problems and they seem to be using the two of us. So I wanted to tell you, if you’re in a bad position and you need any help financially I will send some money to you.”
More surprisingly Taylor told Marilyn that she was willing to publicly demonstrate her solidarity with her. Taylor was in the last weeks of a chaotic two-year ordeal with Cleopatra, but the studio still needed some key shots for her to complete the movie. “If this gets any uglier than it already is,” Taylor went on, “I can stage a walkout. I will walk off this picture and go to the press and say, ‘They are trying to put the blame on Marilyn for their troubles just as they tried to put the blame on me.’”
Marilyn was flabbergasted and very moved by Taylor’s kindness toward her, but she didn’t want to make matters worse for either one of them. “Well, thank you so much, Elizabeth,” Marilyn said. “I’m okay financially. I don’t need money, although I really appreciate the offer. And I don’t want you to walk out of the movie. Neither one of us should damage our career any more than the studio already has.”
Aware of all the bad press being heaped on Marilyn, Taylor (who knew her own share of scandals) offered her some advice: “No matter what they write about me, Marilyn, I never deny it. I never confirm it. I just keep smiling and I just walk. I just keep walking forward. You do the same.”
Taylor ended the conversation by saying, “If there is anything you need—anything at all—call me and you will have it within twenty-four hours.”*
THIRTY-TWO
LAST SITTINGS
Being fired brought up all Marilyn’s lifelong fears of being unwanted and rejected. She was devastated. She spent her days without structure. She might go to the Lawford’s beach house, often spending the night there. Everyone could feel her despair.
She had never been fired before, and now she felt that her good name in the industry had been tarnished and she might never be hired for another movie. If she looked too deeply into the future, she saw those doors slamming in her face. In an attempt to numb her fears she was drinking heavily, living mainly on a diet of champagne, potent tranquilizers, and sleeping pills.
Marilyn was well aware that John F. Kennedy was shutting her out. When she felt his affection slipping, she felt her emotional stability going with it. She needed someone or something to anchor her. Robert Kennedy wasn’t the most powerful man in the world—but as attorney general he certainly had power. And he had the illustrious Kennedy name. Marilyn found that he had a sensitivity that John didn’t. He was more receptive to her, and more touched by her combination of beauty and vulnerability. Bobby was a man she could love and, she hoped, who could love her—rescue her.
Marilyn’s phone records show eight calls to Bobby Kennedy at his office between late June and early July. Kennedy’s private secretary said that whenever Marilyn called he would take it if he was in the office; if not he would return it immediately.
She was invited to a party being thrown by Bobby and Ethel Kennedy for Peter and Pat Lawford. Instead of calling, Marilyn sent a weird telegram on June 13, which has often been misquoted.
UNFORTUNATELY I AM INVOLVED IN A FREEDOM RIDE PROTESTING THE LOSS OF THE MINORITY RIGHTS BELONGING TO THE FEW REMAINING EARTHBOUND STARS. AFTER ALL, ALL WE DEMANDED WAS OUR RIGHT TO TWINKLE.
On June 27 Marilyn saw Bobby, who was in Los Angeles for a meeting regarding a movie adaptation of his book, The Enemy Within, at Fox. After the meeting was over, Kennedy drove to Marilyn’s house. The official reason for this visit was that her kitchen was being remodeled and he wanted to see it. Later Marilyn went over to the Lawfords’ house for a dinner party with Bobby.
* * *
Simultaneously Marilyn did her best to keep her career going. She attended meetings at Fox; they were already seriously discussing rehiring her and bringing the movie back into production. Dean Martin had rejected Lee Remick as a costar, stating that he had signed to do a movie with Monroe and only Monroe. After the studio lost Monroe—well, after they fired her—they started to realize what a valuable commodity they had actually let go. There was really no one who could replace her. They wanted Marilyn back. Meanwhile, Marilyn also set out to do something that had given her reassurance for most of her life (most of her adult life, that is): facing the still camera. To demonstrate to the media, Fox, and the world who still had the power, Marilyn agreed to do various photo shoots. Marilyn was especially excited about a scheduled sitting with Vogue. The photographer would be a hot young photographer from New York named Bert Stern.
* * *
Marilyn’s
dismissal from Fox allowed the press to sensationalize the current hook in their “Monroe” stories: The world’s most popular sex symbol was fading fast, her once-sensational career was all but washed up.
As she had done many times, Marilyn set out to prove the establishment wrong. In spite of the unflattering headlines, she remained very much in demand and was in negotiations for upcoming projects. She was in talks with Frank Sinatra about costarring with him in two movies: an acerbic comedy, How to Murder Your Wife, and a musical version of Born Yesterday.
In addition to planning these projects, Marilyn was staying in close contact with Marlon Brando. Ralph Roberts said that she had “rediscovered” her friendship with Brando that summer and was closer to him than ever before.* She had not given up on her dream of one day acting as Lady Macbeth opposite Brando. The emotionally confusing nature of the summer, the onslaught of nasty press, intermixed with the lovely images of her movie-set skinny-dip on magazine covers and offers of provocative new projects, pulled Marilyn in different directions, forcing her to take action and to make her voice heard.
In mid-June Marilyn entered a hypomanic phase of activity, socializing and publicizing herself. To combat the ongoing negative publicity of her dismissal from Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn had Newcomb set up in-depth interviews with Redbook and LIFE. Marilyn also agreed to a photo layout for Cosmopolitan.
Marilyn was desperately trying to convince the public—and herself—that she was more than a sex symbol. The interviews she gave to magazines that summer clearly illustrate her divided mind. “I’m not only proud of my firm bosom,” she told Alan Levy for Redbook. “I’m going to be proud of my firm character.”
* * *
It was Bert Stern’s idea to shoot Marilyn for Vogue. At thirty-two Stern had risen up the ranks in photography, starting his career in advertising. Ironically he had just returned from Rome, where he had shot Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra. Stern had become so successful that he had the opportunity to make his own assignments for Vogue.