Marilyn Monroe
Page 39
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
PART 1: A BROKEN GIRL
One: Mama
Two: Struggle for Survival
Three: Be a Good Girl
Four: The World Became Friendly
Five: “A Stray Little Kitten”
Six: Rising
Seven: Important Meetings
Eight: The Talk of Hollywood
PART 2: THE PREFERRED BLONDE
Nine: Melting the Screen
Ten: Dissatisfactions
Eleven: “Elegant Vulgarity”
Twelve: Marilyn Inc.
Thirteen: New York Actress
Fourteen: “A Different Suit”
Fifteen: Innocent Monster
Sixteen: Marriage
Seventeen: Marilyn Gets Hot
Eighteen: Truth
Nineteen: Making Love
Twenty: An Unfit Misfit
Twenty-one: A Woman Alone
Twenty-two: Nightmare
Twenty-three: Manic-Depressive
Twenty-four: Age Three Five
Twenty-five: Doctor-Patient Relations
PART 3: CLOSE TO CAMELOT
Twenty-six: Compartmentalization
Twenty-seven: “Negated Sex Symbol”
Twenty-eight: Starting Something
Twenty-nine: Mass Seduction
Thirty: Is Marilyn Finished?
Thirty-one: Elizabeth and Marilyn
Thirty-two: Last Sittings
Thirty-three: Sleepwalking
Thirty-four: Anger and Despair
Thirty-five: Miscommunications
Thirty-six: “We’ve Lost Her”
Epilogue: Lingering Radiance
Photos
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Also by Charles Casillo
About the Author
Copyright
MARILYN MONROE. Copyright © 2018 by Charles Casillo. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Jonathan Bush
Cover photograph of Marilyn Monroe © Estate of Bert Stern / Getty Images
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Casillo, Charles, author.
Title: Marilyn Monroe: the private life of a public icon / Charles Casillo.
Description: First edition. | New York: St. Martin’s Press, August 2018. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018004352 | ISBN 9781250096869 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250096883 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Monroe, Marilyn, 1926–1962. | Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC PN2287.M69 C39 2018 | DDC 791.4302/8/092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004352
eISBN 9781250096883
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.
First Edition: August 2018
* The author Anthony Summers stated in his book Goddess and subsequent television interviews that a scrap of paper with a White House phone number was later found within her bedclothes.
* Pat Kennedy Lawford, the actor’s wife, and sister of John and Robert Kennedy.
* Most likely she was confused about the spelling. In 1929 she heard of a man named Martin Mortenson dying in a motorcycle accident in Ohio, which led her to believe that her ex-husband was dead. At one point a young Norma Jeane was told that her “father” had died in an automobile accident.
* It has been suggested that Gladys would not allow it, which may be the case. She wanted to believe that she might reach a place in her life where she would be stable enough to take custody. Nonetheless the Bolenders never adopted any of their foster children other than Lester: If they adopted a child, they would no longer be paid for his or her upkeep.
* As an adult Marilyn developed a passionate interest in the human body. She intently studied anatomy—reading books about how the body was put together and worked, and hanging anatomical illustrations on the walls of various apartments, particularly those by the sixteenth-century physician Andreas Vesalius.
* Norma Jeane could never bring herself to call her foster father “Uncle” and continued to call him “Daddy.”
* As an adult, still wanting to be rescued by a father, she would attempt to re-create him in the men in her life. At a Manhattan party Marilyn confessed that she longed “to put on a black wig, pick up her father in a bar, and make love to him. Afterward she would ask, ‘How do you feel now to have a daughter that you’ve made love to?’”
* Years later Marilyn would track down this piano. She bought it, had it painted white, and kept it in her New York apartment.
* Many of the homes she was placed in were chosen by Grace and were known to her or were even Grace’s family members.
** Norma Jeane called most of her foster guardians “aunt” and “uncle.”
* During the breakdown of relations with her business partner, Milton Greene, after the agonies of The Prince and the Showgirl, she summoned a lawyer to her hotel suite in New York. The attorney was stunned when Marilyn, gulping straight vermouth, began relating her rape at the hands of a grown man when she was a child. Somehow she seemed to be connecting the physical violation to what she—via Arthur Miller—saw as a violation of her finances.
* It has been reported that Marilyn alleged this to get sympathy from Lucille Ryman Carroll and her husband, John Carroll, although Lucille believed it to be true.
** For the rest of her life Marilyn would battle with low self-esteem. All through adulthood she was unable to sustain relationships. She was neurotically mistrustful of people and had an extreme fear of abandonment. She felt that people were always using her and yet she allowed them to—constantly reenacting the role of a victim. Marilyn was also described as “frigid” by at least one of her doctors, and she had difficulty achieving orgasm.
* In 1960 Bette was married to Ken Westcott, who was working as a prop master for Desilu Productions. One day Marilyn was scheduled to come to the studio to pick up Eli Wallach, who had been a guest on a show. “He asked me if I’d like to meet Marilyn,” Westcott recalled. “I told her my wife was Bette Duggar, her junior high school friend. She immediately lit up. She became very excited and asked me for Bette’s phone number. She said she would call—but she never did.” What the Westcotts didn’t know was that at that time Marilyn was getting ready to make The Misfits and heading into the last two chaotic years of her life.
* She would specify that on the occasion of her death, no one was to “touch” her face other than Whitey Snyder. With her wicked sense of humor she once gifted him with a money clip engraved, “Whitey dear—While I’m still warm—Marilyn.” (The talented Snyder did indeed make up Marilyn’s corpse, being the makeup artist who truly was there for her in the beginning and at the end.)
* It is Natasha Lytess who was responsible for Marilyn’s distinctive articulation and sometimes artificial, exaggerated lip movements, which, early in her career, helped make her such a singular movie personality.
* The two of them were among the few people invi
ted to Marilyn’s funeral.
* Actually Marilyn had already posed topless and seminude quite a few times for photographers like Laszlo Willinger and Earl Moran—perhaps she felt too close to movie stardom to risk a career-killing scandal by doing so now.
* After they tried, unsuccessfully and very briefly, to live together in 1948, Marilyn’s mother took off. In Boise she married a man named John Stewart Eely. Marilyn felt ambivalent about her mother’s marriage. She was happy that she was well enough to have met a man and set up a household with him. She wanted her mother to be happy—but it seemed odd that she was never well enough to give herself to Norma Jeane. She was still just the lady with the red hair.
* After the interview for Life, Meryman noted that Marilyn became more candid after she started drinking champagne.
* In March 1954 a Broadway show entitled The Girl in Pink Tights opened on Broadway. It has often been reported that this was the Broadway show that Marilyn’s aborted film was based on. However, by the time the eponymous play premiered, Fox’s musical had already been shelved. The two scripts had nothing to do with each other. It is unknown whether the highly publicized, unmade Monroe vehicle influenced the title of the Broadway play in an attempt to make audiences connect the two separate vehicles: By now everything and anything associated with Marilyn Monroe was newsworthy and sure to pique the public’s interest.
* Susan Strasberg noted that Marilyn was always attaching herself to families.
* Truman Capote talks about attending Collier’s funeral with Marilyn in April 1955 in his book Music for Chameleons.
* Eventually Marilyn would view Miller’s behavior toward her as patronizing and condescending—she felt that he often judged her as being inadequate. Years after Marilyn’s death, the interviewer Larry King asked Susan Strasberg if Marilyn was able to hold her own with Arthur Miller. Without missing a beat Strasberg shot back: “Was he able to hold his own with her?”
* When Elia Kazan was called before the committee he decided to name the names of his friends who attended communist meetings with him, presumably to save his own career, although it tortured him for the rest of his life. Miller considered this extremely dishonorable, and it severely damaged their friendship.
* In an effort to obtain Pat Newcomb’s version of any of the events pertaining to her in this book, I wrote two detailed queries to her requesting an interview. Unfortunately she never responded.
* “I never understood why she was not nominated for Bus Stop,” Don Murray said. “That year it was won by Ingrid Bergman—a wonderful actress, there’s no question about that—but Marilyn’s performance in Bus Stop was so much richer, it had so much more variety, and it was so much more interesting than Ingrid Bergman’s character in Anastasia.”
* Susan Strasberg. Marilyn and Me: Sisters, Rivals, Friends (Time Warner Paperbacks; First Edition April 1992).
** Frank Langella. Dropped Names (Harper; February 26, 2012).
* Although Marilyn was always suspicious of everyone double-crossing her when it came to personal loyalty, she was never concerned with financial matters. It’s doubtful she would have suspected Milton of cheating the company (many people skimmed from Marilyn’s finances without her batting an eye), and even if she did, she most likely would have simply ignored it.
* Marilyn was slightly plumper now, and would become more so. The weight, to her pleasure, traveled to her bosom. Why hide it? For maximum impact, when she arrived she wore a full-length gold lamé cape wrapped around her—completely covered from the neck down—which gave her a great air of elegance. Once inside she shed the cape for the big “reveal.”
* Marilyn’s instincts proved to be correct. Some Like It Hot became the biggest hit of her career, although no one would have predicted it. Jack Lemmon recalled, “Most of the industry at the time thought Wilder was crazy for trying to make this film, that it would be a disaster. He was trying to make a two-hour movie out of a five-minute burlesque sketch.”
* Marilyn was also distressed to discover Wilder’s intention of making the film in black-and-white. “I only make color pictures!” she exclaimed. Wilder explained that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in their drag makeup photographed like green-tinted freaks in color. Marilyn reluctantly said, “Oh, I understand.” Wilder appeased Marilyn by telling her, “I’ll make you look more beautiful than you ever did before.” A promise he would keep.
* Curtis (born Bernie Schwartz in the Bronx) absolutely hated working with Marilyn, and by the end of filming he loathed her. His insult was widely reported at the time—and Curtis never once objected. He continued to comment negatively about her after her death, all through the 1960s. But as Marilyn’s mythological status grew, Curtis would spend decades denying he ever made the comment. In later years, as his place in movie history was forever linked with Marilyn, Curtis both softened his memories of her and also wildly exaggerated them. Late in his life Curtis went so far as to claim that they had an affair during shooting and that the baby Marilyn was carrying was his. Finally, in 2008 he admitted that he had indeed made the “Hitler” remark but explained that he was simply being sarcastic in response to a silly question.
* Marilyn’s intuitions were right. A few years later, shortly after she died, Miller would use her again for one of his last successful plays—writing unflatteringly about their marriage for all to see in his autobiographical play After the Fall.
* An interesting factor comes from a memo that was later found with Marilyn’s copy of the screenplay. Edward Parone, a writer with ties to Miller, was reviewing potential scripts for Marilyn Monroe Productions. He started off his critique of Breakfast at Tiffany’s with “I think not.” He went on to criticize the script: “I can see Marilyn playing a part like Holly and even giving this present one all the elan it badly needs, but I don’t feel she should play it. It lacks insight and warmth and reality and importance.” When Marilyn went on to do The Misfits instead, Parone was named “Assistant to the Producer.”
* In The Misfits, Roslyn says, “Me? I never finished high school” (just like Marilyn). When Clark Gable conveys his approval, she is bewildered and asks, “You don’t like educated women?”
* Much later Montand would say that Signoret made him suffer for years to come because of his affair with Marilyn.
* Miller’s true feelings would be conveyed in his revenge play After the Fall. By the time it was produced, Marilyn was dead. Elia Kazan directed the play, and it can be argued that it also displayed his disparaging feelings for Marilyn. Traces of Miller’s truer feelings for Marilyn can be found in all the characters he allegedly based on her after her death. Most of them are unhinged or whores or both (After the Fall, Some Kind of Love Story, Everybody Wins, Finishing the Picture).
** Jules Feiffer with the character of “Bobbie” in Carnal Knowledge, played by Ann-Margret. Woody Allen’s “Nola” in Match Point, played by Scarlett Johansson. Also David Cronenberg with “Claire” in Dead Ringers, played by Geneviève Bujold. All these writers brilliantly managed to accomplish what Miller could not: creating psychologically complex Monroe-like characters—beautiful, neurotic, seductive, and emotionally fragile women.
* Sinatra’s music was a tremendously important part of her life. She often listened to it in the privacy of her bedroom, and played his records in her dressing room before shooting to get herself in the right mood for a scene.
* Later, when pressed, Kay Gable refused to put any blame on Marilyn for Clark’s death. Kay remained fond of her, and sent her a warm invitation to her baby’s christening, which Marilyn accepted.
* Not being family members, the Strasbergs were unable to do anything about Marilyn’s situation.
* DiMaggio told Marilyn that he was a changed man—and that it was partially due to her. He said he had taken her advice to go in
to psychotherapy after the divorce and that it saved his life. He saw the errors of his ways—that he had been remote, distant. He told her that if he had been Marilyn, he would have divorced him too. But if he was hoping for a total reconciliation, a remarriage, Marilyn had other ideas.
* Just the idea of being suspected of homosexuality frightened Marilyn. As the world’s sex symbol, the desire of all men, she couldn’t stand the idea of her sexuality being in question. Revered as the ideal woman, she was terrified of anything of a masculine nature being detected in herself, although homosexuality in others generally didn’t bother her. Certainly she had many gay friends that she loved and respected, including Montgomery Clift, Rupert Allan, Truman Capote, and Jack Cole.
* Sandburg expressed great sadness over her death in Look. “I wish I could have been with her that day.… I believe I could have persuaded her not to take her life.”
* A memo was sent out to the hotel staff stating: “Marilyn Monroe will be Mr. Sinatra’s guest. It is Mr. Sinatra’s intention that Miss Monroe be accorded the utmost privacy during her brief stay here at the Sands. She will be registered in Mr. Sinatra’s suite. Under no circumstance is she or Mr. Sinatra to be disturbed by telephone calls or visitors before two pm.”
* When Earl Wilson reported in his column that Marilyn held her highball glass on the railing—while Sinatra sang to her—Marilyn was quick to call and correct him. “It was not a highball glass,” she protested affably. “I was drinking champagne on the rocks—and it was a champagne glass.”
* By now Marilyn sometimes had trouble even saying her age.
* After she died Sinatra would lease her old apartment unit, probably out of a combination of sentimentality and convenience. Sinatra had the apartment soundproofed at a cost of seven thousand dollars.
* Because of constant delays and setbacks, NBC finally canceled any plans for a production of Rain starring Marilyn.
* The two sex symbols had costarred in The Wayward Bus in 1957.