Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  At the end of April, Marilyn was back in Los Angeles and feeling so well (except for a nagging pain in her stomach and right side) that she told columnists and friends she would soon be back at work on a new film, although what that might be she had no idea. At first she accepted an offer to live briefly at the home of Frank Sinatra, who was away on a European tour; then Marilyn contacted Jane Ziegler, the daughter of Viola Mertz, her former landlady at 882 North Doheny Drive at the corner of Cynthia Street. As it happened, an apartment had just become available in this same complex where she had rented in 1952. Marilyn moved in some hastily bought furniture—bookcases, a large bed she put in the living room and a vanity table and wardrobe in the small bedroom.

  Visitors like Ralph Roberts and Susan Strasberg saw that the place could have been a hotel room: it lacked personal touches, there were no photographs or awards, merely a few books, a suitcase of clothes and a makeup box. The apartment seemed to be merely a base from which she would dash out to a waiting limousine for errands, for visits to Dr. Greenson or Dr. Engelberg, or for meetings with an agent, a publicist, screenwriter or producer. As sensitive as ever to ambient noise, Marilyn depended on Nembutal to sleep.

  In May, she was happy to receive from Clark Gable’s widow an invitation to attend the christening of the baby John Clark; this was a reunion that killed the occasional rumor that Kay Gable believed Marilyn’s tardiness was the cause of her husband’s death. Then, within days of that happy event, she was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where Dr. Leon Krohn again operated to relieve her agonizing, chronic endometriosis.

  Back home by June 1, she dined with a few friends on her thirty-fifth birthday and met with a London reporter. “I’m very happy to have reached this age,” she said. “I feel I’m growing up. It was wonderful being a girl, but it’s more wonderful being a woman.” On June 7, she attended a party in Las Vegas, given by Frank Sinatra for Dean Martin’s forty-fourth birthday; also present were (among others) Elizabeth Taylor and her husband Eddie Fisher.

  The reason for her presence was simple. It is unclear exactly when Marilyn began a brief, intermittent romance with Frank Sinatra (perhaps as early as two or three rendezvous in 1955 in New York), but the liaison was resumed that June and lasted until late that year. Frank, apparently the more smitten, met Marilyn at his home in Los Angeles, and occasionally in Las Vegas or Lake Tahoe.

  “There’s no doubt that Frank was in love with Marilyn,” said the producer Milton Ebbins, who knew them both well that year. Ebbins, a friend of Sinatra and vice-president of Peter Lawford’s production company, recalled an incident that revealed Sinatra’s infatuation for Monroe. After accepting an invitation to a luncheon for President Kennedy at the oceanfront home of Lawford (who was then married to the president’s sister Patricia), Sinatra failed to arrive.

  “He has a terrible cold,” said his secretary Gloria Lovell, telephoning the singer’s last-minute excuse. (By coincidence, Lovell lived in the same apartment complex as Marilyn.)

  “Oh, Gloria, come on, this is hard to believe,” replied Ebbins, who took the call. “Tell him he’s got to come. He can’t do this to the president!” But the secretary was adamant: Sinatra would not appear. Later, Ebbins learned from Lovell and from Sinatra himself the real reason for the astonishing absence: “He couldn’t find Marilyn!” Ebbins recalled. “She had been staying at his house for a weekend, and she had gone out for something—shopping or a facial or whatever—and he couldn’t find her! It wasn’t worry for her safety, he was just that jealous of her whereabouts! To hell with the president’s lunch!”

  Marilyn resented this proprietary attitude. She liked and admired Frank and felt safe in his company. She would not, however, be possessed by him, for by 1961 Joe really had no competition; Marilyn also knew that despite their involvement Frank followed his own romantic inclinations elsewhere. “I think he might have married Marilyn if he had the chance,” according to Ebbins. “After all, for Frank to break an engagement with the president of the United States—and I can assure you how badly he wanted to go there—that was a major thing for him! He could have come to the lunch, departed and found her later. I tell you, he was hung up on this girl!” Rupert Allan, Ralph Roberts and Joseph Naar (a close friend and agent-manager for Lawford) also knew of Sinatra’s deep feelings for Marilyn.

  But for all that the rumor mills and columnists have over the years made of this relationship, it was, after 1961, essentially a friendship: Marilyn’s man was Joe, and it was well known that Frank was involved with, among others, the actress Juliet Prowse.

  Throughout that spring, the chronic pain in Marilyn’s right side had become sharper, along with more frequent bouts of indigestion. During the third week of June, she asked Ralph Roberts to accompany her to New York, where on June 28, in agony with digestive-tract illness, she entered the Manhattan Polyclinic on West Fiftieth Street—her fifth admission to a hospital in ten months. Doctors diagnosed impacted gallstones and an acutely inflamed gallbladder, the cause of her chronic pain and “indigestion,” which often (as typical of the condition) troubled her at night and unfortunately led her to take more barbiturates.

  On June 29, a successful, two-hour cholecystectomy was performed; back in her room after the operation, Marilyn awakened to see Joe, who had been with her during admission and right up to the time she was wheeled away for surgery. He was with her daily for a week, until family business took him to San Francisco; then, from August to November, he was away on foreign business with Monette. Marilyn remained in constant contact with him.

  On July 11, after receiving a new hairdo from the famous New York stylist Mr. Kenneth, Marilyn left the hospital. Outside, two hundred fans and a hundred reporters and photographers awaited, crushing around with questions, requests for autographs—and trying to touch her, to tug at her sweater, to be as close as possible to the most photographed woman in the world. “It was scary,” she said later.

  I felt for a few minutes as if they were just going to take pieces out of me. Actually it made me feel a little sick. I mean I appreciated the concern and their affection and all that, but—I don’t know—it was a little like a nightmare. I wasn’t sure I was going to get into that car safely and get away!

  Pat Newcomb arrived from Los Angeles to help, bringing along the bouncy little gift of a puppy. Marilyn was delighted, saying, “I think I’ll call him Maf Honey, in honor of Frank”—a joke referring to Sinatra’s alleged friendships with shady characters.

  That month, Marilyn and Ralph drove to the Miller home in Roxbury, where she retrieved a few final possessions. He recalled that day—Marilyn holding an old winter topcoat close to her face and saying, rather like Mama Bear expecting to find Goldilocks, “He’s been with a woman who wears another kind of perfume and who has been wearing my coat,” which Marilyn forthwith tossed into a trashcan. (The woman was, as they both knew, Inge Morath, soon to become the third Mrs. Arthur Miller.)

  Later, Marilyn told Norman Rosten,

  I told [Arthur] when I’d be there, but when I arrived he wasn’t. It was sad. I thought maybe he’d ask me in for coffee or something. We spent some happy years in that house. But he was away, and then I thought, “Maybe he’s right, what’s over is over, why torment yourself with hellos?” Still, it would have been polite, sort of, don’t you think, if he’d been there to greet me? Even a little smile would do.

  There was, however, a warmer moment with someone else from Marilyn’s past, although one not quite so familiar. Her half-sister, Berniece Baker Miracle, was in New York for a visit, and on a second retrieval mission to Roxbury she accompanied Ralph and Marilyn. This was perhaps the third time in their lives the women had met, and there was little for them to discuss or to share. But Marilyn was genial and complimentary to Berniece, as Ralph remembered: “Just look at her lovely hair, that beautiful red color—it’s just like our mother’s.”

  * * *

  In early August, Marilyn decided to return to Los Angeles. Unable to find a New
York psychiatrist she liked and unwilling to consider a return to Marianne Kris, she settled on Greenson for permanent therapy. While Marilyn traveled by airplane to California, she asked Ralph Roberts to drive cross-country with his car, so that over the next few months he could be her companion, chauffeur (driving was still awkward after her surgery) and masseur. This position he was glad to undertake for so close a friend. She leased a room for him at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, less than ten minutes away from Doheny Drive, and they were together (like the most devoted siblings, as Pat and Susan put it) every day from August to November. Ralph helped Marilyn resettle in her apartment; they shopped; he delivered her for facials at Madame Renna’s, on Sunset Boulevard; he drove her to Greenson’s home for sessions every afternoon at four; and most evenings they barbecued supper on the terrace at Doheny. She called him “The Brother.”2

  Among Marilyn’s first requests was that Ralph help to install heavy curtains, similar to those she had in the Beverly Glen house in 1956—blackout fabric extending almost the entire width of the wall to assure a complete blockage of light.

  Marilyn was, according to Ralph, trying to take things slowly at first; her health and stamina returned, and she seemed happy and optimistic. But Ralph, Pat, Susan Strasberg, Allan Snyder and, on his occasional visits to Los Angeles, Rupert Allan noticed that the more deeply Marilyn entered into her psychotherapy, the more miserable she became. “At first she adored Greenson,” Roberts recalled,

  but it did not seem to any of us that he was good for her. He began to exert more and more control over her life, dictating who she should have for friends, whom she might visit and so forth. But she felt it was necessary to obey.

  Marilyn’s relationship with her therapist became, during the last year of her life, painfully tangled and complex. By October, Greenson was regularly canceling appointments with other patients at his Roxbury Drive office and rushing home to meet privately with Marilyn. In November, she often stayed after her session for a glass of champagne with his family—forever obliterating her anonymity as a patient and accepting an intimacy that Greenson offered with monumentally inappropriate nonchalance. Soon she was staying for dinner, sometimes three or four times weekly. Ralph Roberts, who arrived promptly after her hour to return her to Doheny Drive, was more and more frequently dismissed by Greenson, and one or another of the family drove Marilyn home later in the evening. The doctor was, as his wife had mentioned in another context, making a patient “a member of his family,” and thus fulfilling “his foster-home fantasy of a haven where all hurts are mended.”

  But what may have sprung from honorable motives also revealed Greenson’s own weakness and had profoundly deleterious effects on his patient, himself and his family: he was swiftly becoming the classic case of the therapist who himself would have benefited from expert counseling. Instead of providing the techniques for Marilyn to find within herself new resources for independence and autonomous judgment, he made her more dependent, ensuring his own dominance. And because he gave her the signal to do so, Marilyn began relying on his family, telephoning the Greenson residence at any hour to discuss her dreams, her fears, her hesitation about this script or that appointment and the vagaries of one relationship or another. Treated and addressed like a family member, she acted more and more like one, presuming access at any time and asking Joan Greenson to transport her here and there when Ralph was otherwise engaged. “He overstepped the usual patient-doctor boundaries,” as his colleague and friend, the psychiatrist Dr. Robert Litman, said. “I do not suggest there was anything improper in the relationship, but there was certainly a danger in getting so involved in adopting her and putting her into his family. This put him in an impossible situation.”

  Joan and her brother Daniel (both of them college students at the time) knew their father was a strict Freudian, but Greenson told them and his wife that he believed traditional therapy would not be effective in Marilyn’s case, that she needed the example of a stable family in order to find one for herself. He found her, he told them, so charming and so vulnerable that only he could save her. Of this overt savior complex any professional colleague would sternly disapprove.

  As for Marilyn, this heightened relationship—which she was in no position to contradict—was at first flattering and satisfying. But Greenson could not replace her need to work, to do something as an actress, and without the compensations of creative activity, she fell into a depression. That season, she sent to Norman Rosten a lyric expressing her mood of dark doubt for the course of her inner life:

  Help Help

  Help I feel life coming closer

  When all I want is to die.

  A part of her, as she told her best friends, rejected the stifling manipulation of her psychotherapeutic situation—but she felt more and more dependent.

  Marilyn’s complete absorption into the orbit of Greenson’s life continued uninterrupted, and on a Saturday afternoon in late November, the doctor took a remarkably selfish step. Asking Marilyn to come to his home for two sessions in one day, he sent her back to Ralph Roberts, who was waiting in the car at curbside. She was, as Roberts could never forget, deeply upset and weeping. “Dr. Greenson,” she said, “thinks you should go back to New York. He has chosen someone else to be a companion for me. He said that two Ralphs in my life are one too many. I told him I call you Rafe. ‘He’s Rafe!’ I said, over and over. But he says no—that I need someone else.”

  Without argument, Roberts came to the apartment the next afternoon to collect the massage table he used each night for Marilyn. Gloria Lovell told him she had heard Marilyn weeping throughout the night, that she longed for her friend to remain. In thrall to Greenson, she had no courage or recourse to withstand this extraordinary imposition and rupture of a good and beneficial friendship. Marilyn Monroe’s life was not becoming wider and more open to growth, but narrower, more dependent and childish. “She began to get rid of a lot of people around her who only took advantage of her,” wrote Greenson of this time in Marilyn’s life.

  The following day, before departing for New York, Roberts came to say farewell to his friend, but he could not rouse her from sleep after ringing for five minutes. Untangling a garden hose, he made as if to water the shrubbery, flowers and plants and then deliberately splashed her apartment. Marilyn pulled back the curtain, opened a window and said, “I know what you’re thinking, but everything’s all right.” Yes, she said, she was groggy from too many sleeping pills. But there was a reason. The residents of a nearby house had a wild party the night before, and knowing of their famous neighbor they stood under her window and shouted her name, calling her to join them.

  Marilyn never knew the name of the woman who had led this group, nor did they ever meet; she was a former bit-part actress who sometimes used the name Jeanne Carmen. Like Robert Slatzer, Carmen emerged from obscurity many years later to transmute her geographic proximity to Marilyn Monroe into something of a career. Claiming that she was Marilyn’s roommate at Doheny Drive, she began, in the 1980s, to invent an imaginative series of scurrilous tales for which there is simply no basis in fact: a wild romance between Marilyn and Robert Kennedy, for example, including indiscreet assignations, joyrides to Malibu beaches and nude swims.

  Like that of Slatzer, however, Carmen’s name is nowhere to be found in Marilyn’s address books, nor did anyone who knew Marilyn ever hear of or see (much less meet or know) her. Betsy Duncan Hammes, a singer, close friend of Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope and the daughter of a Los Angeles County under-sheriff, was a frequent visitor to her friend Gloria Lovell, who lived across the breeze way from Marilyn and dined several times weekly with her. “I never heard of anyone named Jeanne Carmen,” said Betsy. “I know she never lived in that complex, because Gloria and I certainly would have known her, just as we would have known if Marilyn had a roommate.”

  But Marilyn’s difficulties were just beginning. Also in November, she was summoned for discussions at her old studio, where she had contractual obligations to fulf
ill: two films, to be specific, at $100,000 salary per picture. Marilyn was not the only bankable Hollywood star to be embittered by the much-trumpeted news that Elizabeth Taylor was to receive ten times that amount for a Fox epic called Cleopatra which (as everyone also knew) was in a financial and artistic pickle—first at the London production facilities and then in Rome, where its budget had risen to the then comical sum of thirty million dollars, plunging Fox to the brink of bankruptcy. By this time, Cleopatra was almost a metaphor for the studio itself, where astounding chaos prevailed.

  The company’s problems had, indeed, been escalating for years and may be briefly outlined. Buddy Adler had been production chief since 1956, after Darryl F. Zanuck retreated to Europe to work as an independent producer releasing through the studio. An effective and admired executive, Adler died in 1960, at fifty-one. At this crucial time, Fox was reeling from the advance of television, the decline of the old studio system (and the end of the old seven-year contract), the beginning of wildly inflated salaries (Taylor was a case in point) and an array of nasty power struggles within the executive boards of Fox in Los Angeles and New York.

  Also at this time, blame for the unprecedented costs of Cleopatra was laid at the feet of studio president Spyros Skouras, who was “demoted upward,” as it were, from president to chairman of the board. The vacuum of power was filled, on orders from Fox’s New York-based committee of financiers, by a man named Robert Goldstein, who was not especially familiar with the fine points of film production. “You must have a death wish,” said executive vice-president David Brown candidly to Skouras, who had asked his opinion about this choice. Brown’s reply was subsequently reported (by Skouras or some meddler) to Goldstein. “Not long after,” as Brown added, “I was at once booted out of the executive vice-presidency for creative operations and my position as a director of the parent company, and suddenly I was a producer!”3