Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  Nineteen fifty-five, in many ways a year of valuable discovery and precious learning, was also the time when Marilyn swallowed too many pills and too much champagne. Amy recalled this as a time when Marilyn was constantly on and off a diet, on and off pills. “One day she gave me a bottle of sleeping pills and asked me to keep these for her: if she asked for them, I was to give her an argument. I told her she’d come to the right person. But soon she cajoled and begged me, and Milton insisted I give her the pills.”

  As usual at that time, such drugs were not difficult to obtain, and physicians kept Marilyn and Milton supplied. “Miltowns [a popular tranquilizer] were handed out like candy,” as Amy recalled. It seemed everyone had unlimited supplies of pills—and soon Milton was as much a wreck because of them as Marilyn. Pharmaceutical companies gave doctors free pills, and some doctors gave too many free samples to patients, keeping them frequent visitors to their offices. “It was an awful cycle,” Amy added. “Milton’s brother was a doctor, and we had tons of pills—anything we wanted, uppers, downers, it was all available.”

  In this regard, Marilyn’s time with Hohenberg seems to have been unfruitful. The more anxious Marilyn became, the more separate she felt from Milton and resentful of him and his therapist, as Irving Stein and Frank Delaney noted in separate memoranda throughout the year. How could Milton function when she could not? How could he, too, take pills and visit Hohenberg and yet dispatch his tasks? How deeply and how long would she feel disengaged from others, from life? Inner work invariably endures a dark and painful period, a classic night of senses and spirit, but Marilyn could not find any sustaining light or hope during that year that had promised to be so golden.

  One weekend that summer at the Strasberg beach house, Marilyn stood naked in the moonlight while Susan, sharing her room, watched fascinated, admiring the resiliency, buoyancy and glow of Marilyn’s skin. “I wish I were like you,” said Susan.

  “Oh, no, Susie,” Marilyn replied. “I wish I were like you! You’re about to play a great part on Broadway—Anne Frank—and people have respect for you. No, no—I have none of those things.”

  That same summer, Marilyn surprised the town of Bement, Illinois, by accepting an invitation to celebrate their centenary, to open an art show and to speak about her favorite president, Lincoln, of whom a new bust was to be unveiled. To accompany her and to document the journey, she invited photographer Eve Arnold, who recalled that Marilyn “had a great sense of showmanship and self-promotion,” and this apparently negligible summertime event in rural America was not to be slighted. “I’m going to bring art to the masses!” she said with a laugh.

  The trip took her away from New York for just one day. The citizens of Bement were beside themselves with adoration, taking amateur snapshots and obtaining autographs of the great movie star, and Marilyn loved it all. According to Arnold, Marilyn always knew instinctively where the camera was placed, played to it, made love to it, got proof of her existence from the still photo, not the movie’s flickering image. In the presence of the camera as a worshipful audience, a transformation occurred automatically: Marilyn’s breasts were thrust forward, her abdomen was drawn in, her rear end swiveled, a smile and a glow illuminated her face. Her skin, as Susan had remarked, had something like a translucent glow, and a fine mist of down on her face captured a kind of halo, a nimbus of light round her: photographs seemed to canonize her, to offer a creature almost ethereal as well as sensual.

  She was experienced enough to know just how much she needed great photographers like Greene and Arnold, those who memorialized her in images, supporting the myth and illusion that propelled people into theaters. “She was pleased if you liked her most recent motion picture,” recalled John Springer of the Jacobs office, “but if you talked about her recent magazine cover or photo layout, she really came alive with pleasure.” And so she did in Bement, smiling, waving, meeting grandmothers, holding infants in arms—always aware of the beloved camera but also of the people who would cherish her, perhaps forever after.

  Returning to New York and to weekends with the Strasbergs and the Greenes, Marilyn saw more of Arthur Miller, just as A View from the Bridge was preparing for its premiere. This she attended at the Coronet Theater on September 29, when she met the playwright’s parents for the first time. Not long after, Marilyn sat in the kitchen of Isadore and Augusta Miller’s Brooklyn home, wearing no makeup and only a plain gray skirt and a high-collared black blouse. “This is the girl I’m going to marry,” Arthur told his parents. No one thought he was very serious, for there had not yet been any open talk of divorcing Mary Grace.

  Marilyn also visited Norman and Hedda Rosten. At their beach house she was once mobbed to the point of near-drowning when swimmers besieged her, but she laughed off the event, ever grateful for the attention. Champagne and caviar, prized because they were not the stuff of waifdom and orphanages, became her favorite foods that year. And poetry, however dense, nourished her immediately, even before someone began to offer an exegesis or she consulted a critical text. Rosten remembered her reading aloud with great feeling a selection from Yeats, making the words her own, as she did a photo opportunity or a movie role:

  For everything that’s lovely is

  But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

  O never give the heart outright. . . .

  When she finished, her host added, there was in the room almost a reverential hush no one dared interrupt. There seemed to be a tacit understanding not only of Yeats’s wisdom but of the words’ aptness for her who had just read them.

  That autumn, there were scenes from plays by Anton Chekhov at the Actors Studio, and Lee loaned Marilyn several recordings of Tchaikovsky, Scriabin and Prokofiev—all of it adding to Marilyn’s established love for Russian culture. In these interests Arthur indulged and encouraged her, and so when she learned that season that her much-loved Michael Chekhov had died in California, Marilyn asked Arthur to read aloud with her some passages from The Brothers Karamazov, as a kind of private memorial. Chekhov had been the first to encourage her to undertake the role of Grushenka, and that evening Arthur promised to write a screenplay of the novel for her.

  Expanding this cultural predilection, she went to hear the Russian pianist Emil Gilels at Carnegie Hall on October 11. When introduced, he said to Marilyn, “You must visit Russia one day. Everyone there would like to see you.”

  “I would love to,” Marilyn replied, “and some day I will. Right now I’m reading Dostoevsky.”

  In fact she had already made a fateful decision that very season. During her visit to Bement, Carleton Smith of the National Arts Foundation had asked if she would like to travel to Moscow to lead a contingent of American artists discussing an exchange of Western and Russian culture. No time was necessary for Marilyn to accept, and at once she took the necessary step of applying for a Russian visa. But the typical bureaucratic delays intervened—and a good thing, for she could not at this time abandon MMP and the growing prospects for an imminent deal and a return to work.

  At the same time, Marilyn was known as the companion of Arthur Miller, whose every statement was attended by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Beginning in 1955, a formidable file on Marilyn Monroe also began to accumulate in Washington—records of which she was never aware. They comprise a ludicrous waste of paper.

  As documents later declassified revealed, the FBI, the CIA and the office of the attorney general were in 1955 vigilant to the point of obsession regarding the travels of those thought to be dangerous to the national interest by virtue of past Communist sympathy—which was sometimes all but “proven” by anyone’s affinity for Russian culture. Marilyn’s FBI file meticulously tracked her departure from Hollywood, her relocation with the Greenes in Connecticut, her friendship with Arthur Miller, her studies at the Actors Studio and her request to travel to Russia. J. Edgar Hoover demanded that every attempt by Marilyn to leave the country be carefully monitored—travels with or without Miller, and on whatever apparently personal b
usiness. The nation just might be thick with Russian spies masquerading as movie stars.3

  At the same time, Marilyn’s relationship with Arthur had effectively ended all rumors of a reconciliation with Joe. “I expect our divorce to become final within about a month,” he told reporters glumly when he arrived in Paris that summer. The final decree dissolving the marriage became effective October 31, 1955. “I never should have married him,” Marilyn told Amy Greene. “I couldn’t be the Italian housewife he wanted me to be. I married him because I felt sorry for him, he seemed so lonely and shy.” She “felt sorry” for Arthur, too, and these feelings—however much based on her wish to be needed, not merely desired—are important elements toward understanding why she contracted marriages that seemed unsuited to her talent and temperament.

  In the autumn, Marilyn’s lease at the Waldorf Towers expired, and MMP took another half-year lease for her at 2 Sutton Place. From here she went to classes and therapy as usual but also intensified her theatergoing: during 1955 and early 1956 season she saw, among other plays, Paul Muni in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind; Susan Strasberg in The Diary of Anne Frank; and Edward G. Robinson and Gena Rowlands in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night (about which there were brief but fruitless discussions for her to play in a film version). Escorted by Marlon Brando—with whom she was often seen at theaters, restaurants and returning late to Sutton Place—she also attended several film premieres, among them a December gala for The Rose Tattoo.

  At a benefit supper after that screening, Marilyn was introduced to an actress she had recently seen onstage—but one she was in no hurry to meet. In October, she had attended the opening night of George Axelrod’s first comedy after The Seven Year Itch, a farce called Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (which was being presented even as the author was writing the screenplay for Bus Stop). The leading lady of Rock Hunter was Jayne Mansfield, a buxom, platinum blonde manufactured to capitalize on Marilyn.

  More to the point, the play was an hilarious satire on the idea of an American screen goddess named Rita Marlowe who forms her own production company. “You all start out by saying you want to write about the real me,” says Rita to a journalist, “the shy lonely girl I really am. But then you always end up by writing the same old things. How I don’t wear underpants. My divorce . . .” The play, from first scene to last, was a pièce-à-clef about Marilyn Monroe.

  As the curtain rises, Rita Marlowe has just divorced a legendary sports figure named Bronk Brannigan, a character prone to violent assertions of his rights over Rita. She is attended by her masseur, just as Marilyn regularly engaged her good friend, the actor and physical therapist Ralph Roberts, for such treatments. Similarly, there are references throughout the play to the major professional players in Marilyn’s life: Sidney Skolsky, the William Morris Agency, Charles Feldman, MCA, Billy Wilder and Darryl Zanuck—and the journalist without experience who joins forces with Rita is a clear reference to Milton Greene, novice producer. There is also a playwright named Michael Freeman—a double of Arthur Miller—who has written a work called No Hiding Place Down Here (which has a plot satirizing A View from the Bridge).

  Marlowe (an obvious annexation of the names Marilyn and Monroe) is a silly, empty-headed cipher who dresses scantily both at home and work and has pretensions to act absurdly inappropriate roles (Joan of Arc, for example). Rita is also considering a neorealistic film script based on a play about a psychiatrist and a hooker—at which point Axelrod was getting dangerously close to the documentary genre.

  All sexual energy, Rita cannot remember the name of a magazine from one moment to the next, but her stupidity does not prevent a happy ending: a playwright in Hollywood and the journalist transplanted there both return to New York, rejecting the artifice and regaining their souls in the bargain. The play, which ran successfully for 444 performances, did not strike Marilyn as amusing as it did theater audiences. With no further comment, she said flatly to Axelrod several months later, “I saw your play.” He did not ask her to elaborate.

  * * *

  As the year drew to an end, there was a major snowfall in New York and wild flurries of activity in the offices of Milton Greene and of his attorneys. For one thing, Frank Delaney left the services of Milton and MMP when he sensed Marilyn’s inexplicable loss of confidence in him. Irving Stein added Delaney’s duties to his own.

  On another issue, Marilyn’s occasional hairdresser Peter Leonardi falsely claimed that she and Milton had promised to set him up in business at his own salon; he brought the matter to deposition and then foolishly tried to bribe a settlement out of court by taking as hostage several of Marilyn’s fur coats. Irving Stein’s corporate notes from October 6 through November 9, when the matter was resolved, record significantly that the entire matter—more reminiscent of a Feydeau farce than a serious corporation—was to have been adjudicated not by attorneys or police, but by Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Hohenberg. Stein referred to her in his notes as “Marilyn’s psycho.”

  The influence of Dr. Hohenberg on the day-to-day decisions of Marilyn’s business life seems to have grown like Topsy: “Milton telephoned to say the psychiatrist vetoed Marilyn’s seeing Peter [Leonardi] . . . and that Marilyn should not submit to the demands of everyone who insisted upon seeing her.” Why it should have been necessary for Greene or anyone else to obtain Dr. Hohenberg’s approval, or even to involve her in business and legal matters, is not easy to know, but that she made herself virtually indispensable to Milton and Marilyn was obvious. And that they were in no position to act independently—much less to regulate their mutual, increasing reliance on barbiturates—further suggests that perhaps they required treatment other than what Margaret Hohenberg was prepared to provide.

  But the principals of Marilyn Monroe Productions were to end 1955 and begin 1956 in good spirits, whatever the attendant psychological problems. After all the fussing and feuding between Fox and MMP—much of it merely keeping lawyers and agents busy with reams of paper—a contract was ready for Marilyn to sign.

  Its principal provisions provided at last the tardy bonus for Itch, plus $100,000 per upcoming film and $500 weekly during production for maid service and other expenses. She had to appear in only four films for Fox over the next seven years, and they would be projects whose subject, director and cinematographer she could approve; she could make one picture at another studio for each she made with Fox; and she could record, be heard on radio and appear on a half-dozen television programs annually; she would also have the benefits of a tax shelter, for her own corporation would pay out her salary.4 In regular monthly checks to MMP, Fox would pay Marilyn a gross annual salary of $100,000, and Milton would receive $75,000.

  The year ended as it began, with a champagne party—this one held privately and quietly, at the Greenes’ home as midnight tolled on December thirty-first. To make it altogether a happy new year, they had just decided on the company’s first two projects ahead, each based on a play. Marilyn was to appear in a film of William Inge’s Broadway hit Bus Stop for Fox, and with Laurence Olivier in a movie version of Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince, to be produced in London.

  “I’m beginning to understand myself now,” she said that season. “I can face myself more, you might say. I’ve spent most of my life running away from myself, but after all, I’m a mixture of simplicity and complexes.” There would be ample and dramatic opportunities offstage, during the coming year, for all this to be tested.

  1. For all the boldness and the ambiguity of her adoption of disguises, there was still the fundamental crisis of identity, to which Marilyn even referred jokingly. When Susan Strasberg once said she was in conflict about something and that she felt she had another voice clamoring inside her head, Marilyn remarked, “You have only one voice? I have a whole committee!”

  2. However much Hollywood marketed Marilyn and sex, it continued to reward elegance: the Oscars in 1953 and 1954 were handed to Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. Even later, her extraord
inary work in Bus Stop and The Prince and the Showgirl was ignored by colleagues: Marilyn, who had the temerity to have spent a year away from Hollywood, was not even nominated for an Academy Award.

  3. Curiously, however—perhaps because it had to be done with the express approval of the attorney general—there was no extensive security check conducted on Marilyn during 1955.

  4. At the time, the top corporation tax was fifty-three percent, while the top personal income tax was eighty-eight percent.

  Chapter Sixteen

  1956

  THERE IS PERSUASIVE EVIDENCE that Marilyn Monroe is a shrewd businesswoman,” proclaimed Time magazine on January 30, 1956, detailing the terms of her new contract with Fox, as if it had been the easy victory of a one-woman operation. Time also reported that she would soon be on her way to Hollywood to begin Bus Stop.

  It was indeed a busy season. On February 5, Laurence Olivier, his agent Cecil Tennant and playwright Terence Rattigan arrived in New York to meet with Marilyn about The Sleeping Prince, which Olivier had played in London with his wife Vivien Leigh in 1953. In 1954, Hugh French had suggested to Marilyn that the role of an American chorus girl who falls in love with a Middle European royal roué was perfect for her. As she began to choose her own projects, Marilyn had kept Rattigan’s play in mind and wanted no other than Olivier for her prince—precisely, she said, because it was so wildly improbable a pairing of actors and because it might help her achieve greater respectability as an actress. For his own benefit, Olivier asked to co-produce, direct and act as co-star, a demand to which MMP finally yielded after an avalanche of cablegrams between them and Olivier that winter.