Finally, when Stern and Marilyn were left completely alone in the room, Marilyn seemed to fall asleep. He leaned down to kiss her. The moment she felt his lips touch her, she turned her face away. “No,” she said without opening her eyes.
Exhausted and hungover, Marilyn did not show up for more photos the following day. On Thursday, July 12, she returned to complete the Vogue sittings.
The resulting high-fashion photos, rarely seen for decades, show a glimpse of the ravishing Marilyn Monroe who was on her way. The actress who might have been.* Complex. Mature. Elegant. Breathtaking.
THIRTY-THREE
SLEEPWALKING
By mid-July President Kennedy told Bobby to end the relationship with Marilyn for the same reasons he had—there was too much talk going around; the risk was too great. Bobby was not only jeopardizing his own career, he was putting the entire Kennedy White House and legacy in danger. Bobby started distancing himself that July. Not cutting her off completely, as his brother had done, but definitely pulling back and letting Marilyn know they couldn’t go on the way they had been.
Marilyn was hurt and confused and furious. It was one blow too many that summer. Perhaps if there was a family. A man who loved her completely and accepted her with all her complexities. Or a baby. Or parents. But Marilyn had none of these things as the summer days moved on. It was awful to feel that she didn’t fit in anywhere, that she didn’t belong.
She lashed out and brooded and raged because she felt unwanted and used: She had always felt this way—these were the ongoing themes of her life. But she was helpless in responding to her feelings or resolving them because ultimately she felt she was unlovable—and that being used is what she deserved.
Desperate, grasping, and searching—she still had hopes that she could win Bobby back. Perhaps if they met again she could be beautiful enough, witty enough, sparkling enough, to make him risk everything for her. She continued to call him.
Marilyn also called Greenson at all hours. She would be overcome with anxiety and despair, and he would have to drop whatever he was doing and talk to her—sometimes go to her. She would call in the middle of the night and announce, “I haven’t slept.” Or she would tell him about something that had happened to her. At this point he was her only real lifeline.
* * *
The depression that enveloped her in 1962 was like nothing she had ever experienced before. It was soul crushing. It paralyzed her.
As a result her life became messy. On occasion, when socializing, she ignored things—like personal hygiene and grooming—that in the past had been important to her. Friends looked away sadly when she sometimes showed up at the Lawfords’ house in a drugged fog, her hair wrapped in a scarf, unkempt fingernails, with menstrual spots on her white Capri pants. “She would get wobbly,” a guest who encountered her there said. “She did drink champagne and take pills at the same time. I’d seen her very out of it. All of us had. I mean, really stumbling around.”
Some felt Marilyn was slowly going mad that summer, and the people around her recognized it, but if she disgusted them they were seduced by her too. It was intoxicating to be near someone who was so beautiful and famous and by turns needy and demanding or brilliant and hopeful. Marilyn sometimes seemed to be existing in a place between life and death.
To combat loneliness she would spend the night at the Lawfords’ house in Santa Monica. There she might appear completely out of it. Attempting to quash her pain with drugs, she would wander into the couple’s bedroom in the middle of the night, without knocking on the door, and stand at the foot of their bed, staring down at them. Lawford would pretend to be sleeping and watch her through slitted eyes. His marriage was actually crumbling by this point, but Marilyn had no clue. “Why can’t I be as happy as you two?” she would ask. Some mornings they would find menstrual blood on the sheets in her bedroom.
William Asher was in the process of writing a movie about a train heist for Marilyn that would have had her starring with Sinatra and other members of the Rat Pack. Encountering her at the Lawford beach house, he observed, “She was trying to sleepwalk through life. She’d reach that point, where she was going through the paces and not really being there. Going through it and not really making contact. It was a bad period.”
Yet she was still able to glue herself together on occasion and show up as the stunningly beautiful, assured woman everyone wanted—although it was becoming more and more of a burden for her. On Wednesday, Marilyn attended a Fourth of July barbecue at the Lawfords’, where Robert Kennedy was one of the guests.
In early July she met with Richard Meryman several times for a long profile in LIFE. Also, sometime between July 5 and July 7, there was a party in Marilyn’s honor—another orchestrated event to counter all the bad publicity insinuating that she was a fading sex symbol on a downward spiral—this one for the people in her Hollywood circle. Most likely the party was on Friday, July 6.
During the recorded interview, Meryman asked her how long it took to get into her persona and “appear” for such an event. Marilyn replied: “Well, that ordinarily wouldn’t take very long. It’s just that [the press] sort of slandered me, saying that I’m depressed and I’m in some kind of a slump, and hidden away—all those kind of things. So then I take a little extra time with my hair, a little extra flip of the hair. A little extra eyeshadow around the eye. A little more glitter. It’s just my way of saying ‘HA!’” Then Marilyn and Meryman broke up laughing (along with Pat Newcomb, who was sitting in on the interview).
Marilyn was determined to show her friends that she was still optimistic for the future and at the top of her game, even though she was filled with mistrust. “It’s a private party but a lot of people will be there who are sort of concerned about my welfare—they claim,” she added. With her increasing paranoia it was difficult for her to believe that anyone, even her friends, truly cared.
* * *
Death was certainly on her mind that July. Marilyn very much wanted to change her will. Mickey Rudin, who was convinced that Marilyn was dangerously unstable, kept putting her off. He said he could not sign a document that stated Marilyn Monroe was of sound mind. If Rudin had had his way, he would have declared Marilyn incompetent. “She could have a crisis over what she was having for lunch,” he groused. He felt she should be institutionalized: “After she was fired that was the only hope.”
Marilyn had a great fear of going insane—especially after her Payne Whitney experience. Being put in an institution again would have been torture for her, but her lawyer said he felt she should have been. Rudin’s problem being her attorney—as he saw it—was that if he went to court asking for her to be declared incompetent, he’d be “thrown out on my ass and make a fool of myself.” In addition Greenson felt, and Rudin agreed, that institutionalizing Marilyn would have been worse than death for her.
* * *
The amount of medication Marilyn was taking cannot be overlooked. Greenson’s family said that he was trying to wean Marilyn from her dependency on the barbiturate Nembutal by prescribing chloral hydrate, a sedative he felt was milder and not quite as addictive. “He was trying to get her to exist,” Rudin said. “He didn’t have control. He wasn’t her guardian. He couldn’t tell her not to associate with Pat Newcomb so they could exchange pills.”
Newcomb admitted that she and Marilyn shared pills at times. Today people point to Marilyn’s prescription-drug intake as if it were something extraordinary and unusual. Although there is no doubt that she took an enormous number of pills, in Hollywood circles and in the upper echelons of society, casual pill taking was surprisingly common in the 1960s. “Everybody was taking pills,” Newcomb said. “Everybody tried everything.” Newcomb named a famous actor whose poker parties she’d attended, where they used “all kinds of sleeping pills for chips.” Rudin said of the show-biz set of the era, “I might bring a good bottle of wine to somebody’s dinner—they’d bring pills.”
But even by those standards, Marilyn was different.
She had much more access to pills because of the number of doctors she saw, the variety of pills they prescribed, and the amounts she consumed because of the tolerance she had built up. Newcomb recalled that Marilyn had some strong stuff on her nightstand. “One time I just wanted to relax, and there wasn’t valium and she gave me a pill and I was knocked out,” Newcomb said. “I was so detached. I was scared. So I don’t know what the doctors were loading her up with.”
Engelberg was also giving Marilyn injections, shots that he later claimed were vitamins and liver extract. It is likely that he was also alternately injecting her with stimulants and sedatives, depending on her needs. Nothing made her feel any better.
* * *
Friends picked up on her distress signals. Most of them, however, didn’t understand the depths of her sickness and despair. Surely she couldn’t have imagined that a relationship with John F. Kennedy could ever have become serious. And if she was feeling neglected by Bobby Kennedy, they thought the solution was to keep her close, show her a good time, help her snap out of it. A weekend at the Cal-Neva resort lodge—owned by Frank Sinatra—might give her some relief, some relaxation, music, games, a few drinks.
Marilyn didn’t want to go. She wasn’t feeling well mentally or physically. Peter and Pat Lawford, who were going to be there that weekend, tried to persuade her to come along. Whatever was going on with her—and no one was 100 percent sure—Sinatra was worried too. He wanted her there. One of his long-term assistants had told him that Marilyn was in a state of depression because she had recently had an abortion. (This was another hush-hush rumor going around industry circles at the time regarding Marilyn that could never be proved or disproved.)
Others claim that Marilyn simply had one of many gynecological procedures—more corrective surgery trying to relieve her agonizing periods. Still, there were enough rumors and controversy swirling around Marilyn to make Sinatra seriously concerned.
Eventually Pat Lawford persuaded her to go to Cal-Neva—but the Lawfords had their own agenda. The couple were doing their best to cheer Marilyn—and to get it through her head that it was time to move on. There was no future with Bobby Kennedy—he would never leave Ethel.
Sinatra had his private plane pick them up and deliver them to the resort for the weekend of July 28–29. The Cal-Neva lodge got its name because it was located exactly on the state line that divided California from Nevada. One of its novelties was that gambling was allowed on the Nevada side of the resort. The other side had a beautiful main room for live entertainment, where Sinatra’s friends would often perform. It also included about twenty furnished cottages. When staying there, Marilyn was always given Chalet 52, a place of honor for special guests.
On this weekend Frank Sinatra would be performing in the main room at the lodge while the singers Buddy Greco and Roberta Linn would be playing in the lounge.
On arrival, Marilyn presented her mask on cue—the expert celebrity, the practiced smile. “When she arrived you’d never believe that she had a care in the world,” Greco said. “I was sitting with Frank [Sinatra], Peter Lawford, and a bunch of other people, outside of Frank’s bungalow, when a limousine pulls up and this gorgeous woman in dark glasses steps out. Before I realized who it was, I thought, ‘My God, what a beautiful woman.’” But after a while Greco saw that underneath the assured pretense, the woman was crumbling. “She was shaky, fragile, almost what I would call breakable,” he added.
The few surviving photographs—the last-known photos taken of her alive—show her wearing a scarf over her hair, tied under her chin. Her face is clean of makeup, and she is wearing dark sunglasses. She is thin and wan—wearing Capri pants and a clingy Pucci top. She looks thinner than ever before, and in spite of her automatic smile, the photos exude an atmosphere of delicacy and illness. She in fact looks like a woman going through the motions of being Marilyn Monroe.
Still, at this early stage of the weekend she seemed game. She cozied up to Greco, turning her back to the camera, showing a tiny derriere through the slacks, face turned to look at the lens. Sinatra, sitting a few feet away, probably not knowing he was in the frame, looked up quizzically, protectively, an expression that seems to ask, “What is she doing now?”
When the Lawfords and Sinatra joined Marilyn in her chalet, her mental anguish was palpable. Joe Langford, a Sinatra security employee, recalled that the head chef at Cal-Neva was ordered to prepare the ailing Monroe special meals. At one point a steak dinner with baked potato and cheesecake was served. “I know that the meal was sent to her chalet. Mr. Lawford opened the door in Marilyn’s room. The waiter never saw her. Then the tray was sent back to the kitchen about two hours later. The only thing that had been eaten was the cheesecake, and someone said that Mr. Sinatra had eaten that.” Food was no longer something Marilyn was concerned with.
The weekend would only go downhill from there. Pat Lawford was livid to discover that Sam Giancana was also staying at Cal-Neva that weekend. Giancana was one of the kingpins of the underworld, one of the best-known mobsters in the world. To have him there, hobnobbing with the president’s sister and brother-in-law and Marilyn Monroe, was very dangerous indeed. One wonders what was going through Sinatra’s head when he made arrangements for the ingredients of this deadly social cocktail.
As the day went on, Marilyn continued to self-medicate to distance herself from her pain. Numbed by pills, champagne, and eventually vodka, she reached the point where she didn’t care—or was unable to do anything—about her appearance. Guests remember a blond mess in a Pucci dress. She did attend Sinatra’s show that evening. Betsy Duncan Hammes, a guest at the lodge for the weekend, observed Marilyn watching Sinatra perform looking “completely out of it.”
“I couldn’t understand how the smiling woman who arrived a few hours earlier had disintegrated so quickly,” Buddy Greco remarked. “The porcelain doll had smashed.”
Cami Sebring was also a guest that weekend because her husband at the time, the celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring (later a victim of the Manson killings along with Sharon Tate), cut Sinatra’s hair. Cami, who attended Sinatra’s show, remembered seeing some ushers carrying out a woman who was clearly inebriated. They had her under the arms, her feet were dragging. They seemed to have some concern, but were moving very, very fast—as if they had been told to remove her as quickly and inconspicuously as possible. Cami was sitting by the door and they passed right by her. “It was then,” she recalled, “when she was right in front of me, that I realized that this woman was Marilyn Monroe.”
They deposited her in Chalet 52. Marilyn passed out with the phone off the hook—perhaps she dropped off while dialing a friend, perhaps she kept it off the hook on purpose as a lifeline. The operator working the switchboard could hear her breathing. At some point Pat Lawford decided to check on her, and, entering Marilyn’s room, she realized that the star had once again overdosed.
Pandemonium ensued. Ted Stephens, who worked in the kitchen, remembered getting a phone call from Peter Lawford in the middle of the night. “‘We need coffee in Chalet 52!’ he screamed into the phone. He sounded frantic. No less than two minutes passed and it was Mr. Sinatra on the phone screaming, ‘Where’s that goddamn coffee?’ I learned later they were walking Marilyn Monroe around, trying to get her to wake up.”
Betsy Hammes said that, although they didn’t call an ambulance and Marilyn’s stomach wasn’t pumped, they did “roll her over a barrel,” meaning that they forced Marilyn to vomit in case she had taken too many pills.
Gloria Romanoff, another guest that weekend, heard the following morning that they had plied Marilyn with coffee and walked her around until she started to come to. Gloria recalled this being the second time Marilyn had overdosed at Cal-Neva. The next morning Cal-Neva guests and staff were abuzz with the news that there had been a close call in Chalet 52, where Marilyn Monroe had overdosed.
Some witnesses say that at one point, Sam Giancana got into Marilyn’s room. Photos were said to exist of Giancana degr
ading Marilyn (supposedly because of her involvement with Bobby Kennedy). At a Marilyn Remembered fan club meeting, Lily Woodfield told this author that she had seen photographs (in the possession of her husband, the photographer Billy Woodfield) of Sam Giancana in Marilyn’s room. Both were fully clothed, but Marilyn was on all fours and Giancana was sitting on her back, like children playing “horsie.” It would have been a remarkably degrading position for a world-renowned celebrity.
Sinatra was distraught at Marilyn’s behavior. He saw to it that she went back to Los Angeles with Peter Lawford in his private plane. “We all wondered what happened to her,” Buddy Greco said. “But it was obvious Frank was too upset to talk about it. When Frank was upset you didn’t push it.”
According to legend, Sinatra had asked that those photos be destroyed. But Delores Swann, a friend of Sinatra’s first wife, Nancy, said that Sinatra kept at least one photograph taken of him and Marilyn during that “lost” weekend. “I saw it in his home,” Swann said. Frank told her, “That was taken the weekend before she died. Every time I look at it I want to cry. She was a beautiful, beautiful woman.” Then he added, “But she was weak. She was so goddamn weak.”
* * *
Fox’s head of production, Peter Levathes, came to talk to Marilyn about going back into production with Something’s Got to Give.* She wanted to finish the movie, but with a new script and director. The executive was charmed by Marilyn’s ideas for some physical comedy. She thought of a scene where Ellen, who has been eating with her hands on the island for five years, tries to remember how to use utensils gracefully, and keeps kicking off her shoes because she’s used to being barefoot. Later, after they agreed the film would be completed with her suggestions, she showed him some of the fashion photos from the Vogue shoot. She laid the pictures out on the floor and asked him to pick out some that he liked.
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