by Donald Spoto
Weinstein and Cukor thought this was inspired, and things happened quickly. Two free-lance photographers (William Woodfield and Lawrence Schiller) were hastily summoned to join the Fox studio photographer (James Mitchell). For just under an hour, many stills were made of Marilyn from various angles—but with nothing like total nudity, front or rear.
By the end of the day she was exhausted, but there was a burst of applause from the crew and even an embrace from Cukor. “Do you think this was in bad taste?” Marilyn asked Agnes Flanagan as she headed for her dressing room. “I told her,” said Agnes, a dignified Irish grandmother, “that there was nothing suggestive about it at all.”
On Thursday, May 24, Marilyn was back on the set for solo closeups and over-the-shoulder two-shots with Cyd Charisse—despite an earache from her watery scenes. Martin was in his fourth sick day and there were last-minute rearrangements, but no one seemed much concerned; the picture was only nine days behind schedule, and these could easily be justified (especially with this surprise new publicity campaign). The production required only a conclusion to the messy, tangled script. On Friday, May 25, ignoring a low-grade fever and a slight discharge from her right ear, Marilyn worked without complaint, joining Martin and Charisse for eight complicated shots. In these, she spoke with a brilliantly phony Swedish accent, Marilyn’s character trying to pass herself off as a foreign maid in her own home. The outtakes remain among the indisputable examples of her greatly underestimated talent: she wanted, Marilyn said, to do a sendup of every Garbo mimic in history, and that is just what she gave Cukor. Now he and Weinstein began to worry even more—that despite the rumblings from executive offices here and in New York, something might not have to give at all: they could be getting a film worth saving.
Marilyn spent the weekend mostly alone, but she and Pat shopped for food on Saturday; the atmosphere, they agreed, was far pleasanter without Eunice lurking on weekends. Marilyn had placed a cotton wad in her ear and was taking antibiotics she had left over from her bout of sinusitis, but by Sunday there was a frank infection and her temperature had risen to one hundred two. A massive injection of penicillin cured her in record time, but she could not report for work on Monday.
On Tuesday, May 29, she and Dean Martin worked six hours on dialogue, doing forty-six takes of five shots and completing one and a quarter pages of script. As the outtakes reveal, Marilyn worked the scene carefully, executing a brief but gradually building anger, her voice always controlled, her eyes slowly blazing with resentment at an accusation of infidelity. Each time Cukor cut in, asking for a retake or giving direction, Marilyn listened patiently, sometimes asking a question, always nodding her agreement and eager to give what was best for the scene.
On Wednesday, Memorial Day, there was no call for anyone to report for work. On Thursday, May 31, Marilyn acted for the first time with her friend Wally Cox, for whom she had lobbied in the role of the shoe clerk roped in to pretend that he had been marooned on a desert island with her for five years. Not only was this an astonishing day’s work—thirty-eight takes of four setups, resulting in two and a half pages of filmed script—it was also one of the most hilarious scenes Marilyn Monroe ever acted for film. Wearing a cashmere suit with a mink collar and matching mink hat, she whispered, cajoled, begged the Milquetoast character to lunch with her—all the while trying a pair of shoes two sizes too small (“Well, go barefoot for five years!”). Once again, she made an indifferent scene memorable by investing it with just the right, light comic touch—her voice lilting but confident, her gestures properly elegant. Had Something’s Got to Give ever been released, the public would at least have seen Marilyn Monroe at arguably the loveliest point in her life.
The following day, June 1, 1962, Marilyn turned thirty-six. Evelyn Moriarty had planned a birthday celebration, but Cukor refused to allow any merriment until he had a full day’s work from his cast. In an overlong, actionless scene with Wally Cox and Dean Martin, Marilyn gave one of the subtlest performances of her career; it was also, alas, her final performance in a motion picture. With few words but with mock innocence, she tried to convince Martin that the meek Cox was her island partner. Marilyn had only to smile, to turn slightly to the left, to glance ever so lazily to the right—and there was film acting of a high caliber indeed, the result of fifteen years of hard effort at her craft. Here were gazes and intonations signifying wistfulness and victory, witty ruse and earnest yearning to be reunited with her husband: somehow, despite all the stress and pain of the last two months, she gave a performance of which any actress could be forever proud.
At six o’clock, Evelyn was permitted to wheel out a cake she had purchased that morning at the Farmers Market. Sparklers glittered atop it and the traditional song echoed as Allan Snyder and Wally Cox poured champagne for everyone. Eunice angled her way onto the lot, drifting through distractedly as if she were a slightly boozy fairy godmother, and left saying nothing. But birthday or not, people departed quickly—it was Friday evening, someone said. Something was dreadfully wrong; an unusually tense atmosphere prevailed. In a half-hour, the party was over, and there were only herself, Wally and Evelyn left, sipping Dom Perignon from paper cups. Marilyn and Wally climbed into the limousine; she had with her the wardrobe’s cashmere suit and mink hat. There were no plans for the evening—Joe had put through a call from Europe, where he was on business with Monette—and so Marilyn had accepted an invitation to appear at a fund-raising baseball game for charity. She looked magnificent, posed happily for newsmen and retired alone at ten o’clock.
However memorable her appearance and significant her work that week, she must have been miserably lonely by Friday night, not to say frightened of losing her job. But most of all, as she told friends in telephone calls that evening, she was enraged at Greenson, on whom she had been conditioned to rely completely. To her, it seemed the ultimate act of betrayal: an axe was about to fall, and she had no defenses against it. Indeed, how else could she have felt after being so long a member of his family? Weinstein and Rudin had been right: a film at this time of her life, when she was so deeply (if ill-advisedly) committed to therapy, had been unwise, as even her tendency to a series of real physical maladies indicated. That she acquitted herself so brilliantly was a testament to her essential inner strength, her willingness to work, her desire not to let others down.
“What happened that weekend [after her birthday], I don’t know, but to me it was more important than the weekend she died.” Thus spoke Henry Weinstein almost thirty years later.
At the time, he could not have known the bizarre events that were just beginning. Early Saturday morning, June 2, weeping uncontrollably, Marilyn telephoned Greenson’s son and daughter, Dan and Joan, who had been instructed by their father to respond if she called; once again, it is hard to comprehend the appropriateness of involving his children in what Greenson himself called a dangerous case. They entered Marilyn’s bedroom, where they found her indescribably lonely and depressed, then giddy and disoriented—the classic signs of Dexamyl overdose. Following their father’s instructions, they called Milton Wexler, who sped to the house, found “a dangerous arsenal . . . a formidable array of sedatives on her bedside table and swept them all into his black bag” (thus Eunice). That night (actually June 3, at one in the morning), Dr. Milton Uhley was summoned, in the absence of Engelberg, to provide sedation.
On Monday, June 4, Marilyn, sober but livid with rage, felt no obligation to work in a situation from which she felt entirely disconnected. Eunice, unaccustomed to seeing her in such undiluted anger, put through a call to Greenson in Switzerland, but he had not arrived yet from Israel. At the same time, Paula—who had flown back to Los Angeles and was in residence at the Chateau Marmont, prepared to help—telephoned Fox that Marilyn would not report until she had discussions with her advisers. Prudently, Paula did not add her agreement with Marilyn that she ought not to work on a picture from which she was about to be dismissed. Marilyn, meanwhile, was on the telephone to Lee and to the R
ostens, and to Ralph Roberts, Pat Newcomb, Allan Snyder and Agnes Flanagan. She had, it may be presumed, been taught in therapy to assert herself: now she was assuring that her friends knew how bereft she felt. That day, two pages of the script for Something’s Got to Give were filmed; there would be no more work, although the picture was not formally shut down for a week. Just before six that afternoon, Phil Feldman, vice-president of business operations at the studio, telephoned Milton Rudin, who could provide no answer as to whether Marilyn would be on the set Tuesday or Wednesday.
On Tuesday evening, June 5, Fox warned Rudin that they were prepared to file suit against Marilyn for breach of contract, to which Rudin replied that he understood their position, and all he could say was that at Marilyn’s request he had telephoned Greenson in Switzerland, requesting that he return to facilitate a resolution to the situation. Weinstein, frantic, had also called Greenson, who was indeed en route even as they spoke: he arrived in Los Angeles the evening of Wednesday, June 6. “Fox needed a reason to shut down that picture,” according to Evelyn Moriarty, who, along with the rest of the cast and crew, was piecing together the week’s events. Paula, weary, called her and asked, “Evelyn, do we have any friends?” Well may she have asked.
Greenson went directly from the airport to Fifth Helena on the evening of June 6, then went home, and early next morning was back at Fifth Helena. And at this point events took a grotesque turn.
The contradictions in Greenson’s conduct must be faced in all their complexity. On the one hand, he considered Marilyn’s condition so perilous that he left specific instructions for her care with his children, three colleagues and his brother-in-law, her attorney. Having made the decision to depart, he then leaped at once to return, abandoning his wife and doing exactly what a therapist in such a situation is trained to avoid: playing the savior and making himself central in her life. Marilyn’s anger notwithstanding, he could have left her career problems in the hands of Rudin and Fox, where they were rightfully being adjudicated; that, however, would have been to admit peers—for him, competition.
What transpired at their reunion cannot be determined, but his attitude toward Marilyn was clear from a letter he wrote two weeks later to a friend named Lucille Ostrow, which reveals the extent of his rage at himself, at Marilyn and at a situation he had permitted to go beyond control. He had not only missed his vacation, he complained to Ostrow: he also missed a few days in New York planned as an interval—a business meeting with Leo Rosten, a party in Greenson’s honor to be given by Dore Schary and an appointment with his publisher. All these he canceled, he said, to rescue his patient. Greenson added that he felt like an idiot, for on his return Marilyn recovered quickly and was delighted to be rid of the burden of a terrible picture. Furious for the inconvenience, Greenson ended the letter by saying that he had canceled his other patients and was now seeing only this schizophrenic one regularly again: she had, in other words, completely taken over his time and his life—but (one might ask) at whose insistence? He was, Greenson told Ostrow, depressed and lonely; very likely without yet admitting it to himself, he bitterly resented what he had allowed Marilyn to do to him and his family. The letter, dated and postmarked June 22, 1962, is a bitter diatribe of therapist against patient.
“Everybody [on Something’s Got to Give] was aware that Greenson had put Marilyn in a cocoon-like situation,” said Walter Bernstein.
I always felt that she had become an investment to people like him—an investment not only financially, in caring for her, but even in the fabrication of her illness. It had become a need for him and others that she be considered sick, dependent and needy. There was something sinister about Ralph Greenson. It was well known that he exerted enormous influence over her.
Susan Strasberg agreed: his close involvement with Marilyn was an open secret no one really discussed.
But the influence and involvement then led beyond resentment to outrage and anger—indeed, to a rage that far exceeded hers. “If I behaved in a way which hurt her,” he wrote to Kris on August 20, “she acted as though it was the end of the world and could not rest until peace had been re-established, but peace could be reconciliation and death.” This odd comment was followed by his admission that he became “impatient with her constant complaints” and that he was “being led by countertransference feelings.”
But it was Greenson himself who had a lifelong tendency to irrational fits of anger. An actor and writer who sought his help was told that he ought to go elsewhere because the man “needed a psychiatrist who could love him. You don’t understand—psychiatrists must love their patients.” The young man replied that he understood perfectly if “love” meant concern, but that otherwise this advice did not seem right. “But then Greenson became a violent, screaming hysteric. He completely lost control, and in fact it frightened me. ‘How dare you challenge me!’ he shouted. I am the expert, not you! You are wrong, you are mad—you are a schizophrenic!’ ” The man found Greenson, after three meetings, a “profoundly unstable man. And then I learned that most of his patients were bored, tennis-playing Beverly Hills matrons or movie stars, and he hated them—in fact, he made no secret of it.” Other ex-clients felt uncomfortable at the constant intrusion of sex and questions about intimate sexual matters, whenever possible, into therapeutic discussions.
The anger was evident with peers and friends, too: Ralph Greenson was simply not a man to be challenged. In 1957, he received a letter from his old friend John Frosch, editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, reporting that an essay Greenson had submitted was not suitable for publication in its present form. This infuriated Greenson, and he answered in angry disbelief, wondering why Frosch was treating him so badly and why he bore such an obvious vendetta. On February 4, 1957, Frosch replied, shocked at his friend’s tone, saying that Greenson was behaving in a completely irrational manner, that he saw this as strictly a professional decision. Greenson should consider revising his article and resubmitting it, Frosch concluded, but that never happened.
There are several primary documents connecting Marilyn’s final dismissal from Something’s Got to Give with Greenson’s return from Switzerland and the events of June 7 and 8: Greenson’s letters to Ostrow and Kris; the memoranda of the Fox meetings on June 5, 6, and 7; Eunice Murray’s incomplete 1973 memoir; and the account of an eminent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon named Michael Gurdin.
Dr. Gurdin became part of the story on the morning of June 7, when Greenson brought Marilyn to his office. “She was disheveled,” Gurdin recalled,
and there were black and blue marks on both lower lids, poorly covered by makeup. The story Greenson gave me was that she was in her shower, slipped and fell. Now it was obvious to me that Miss Monroe was under the influence of drugs—her voice was thick and slurred. But her major concern was that she had a picture commitment, and that she was fearful that her nose was broken. She actually talked very little, and the questions I put to her regarding her injury were answered by Dr. Greenson. She did not answer. I did not take any X-rays because she did not want them. I examined her carefully, and I could find no evidence of a fracture.
According to Dr. Gurdin, Marilyn’s injuries could indeed have been the result of a fall, as he was told,
but it is possible that she could have been struck on the face. Either a fall or an assault would give those same signs, for if an injury is sustained to the nose to have any bleeding under the skin, you won’t see it on your nose, you’ll see it under the eyes—because the tissues under the eyes are very soft and loose, and blood escapes into them. Also, there’s a direct connection between the tissue under the nose and eyes.
Once Gurdin had pronounced Marilyn fracture-free, a flurry of telephone calls was made. First, Greenson telephoned Rudin (who was at Lake Tahoe), who asked his partner Martin Gang to call Feldman and report that Greenson, having returned, was now in charge of Marilyn’s relationship with the studio. Since she had accused Rudin of being “with them” (i.e., of sid
ing with Fox rather than with her) and since Greenson was “the medical member of the team in charge,” Greenson would determine Marilyn’s ability to return to the picture—which, he said, might occur within the week. Greenson asked to be quoted as follows: “I am convinced that she can finish the picture in the normal course,” a statement vague enough to come from any politician. Greenson then telephoned Eunice and instructed her to say nothing to the press, nor to anyone who called from the Arthur Jacobs office, from New York or from the studio. He then advised her that the injury to Marilyn’s face was no cause for concern and she should forget about it. Nothing was communicated to Weinstein.
In all these calls and announcements, there is clearly a serious problem. Greenson never mentioned Marilyn’s accident and their visit to Gurdin, an occurrence that could ironically have helped her. Fox rightly expected a reason to be offered for her absence that week, but they received none. Instead of buying time for another week by simply showing Fox that a woman with bruises was hardly fit for the camera, not a word was spoken by Greenson (the only one besides Gurdin who knew about the accident, if such it was). Just as crucial, his letters to Kris and Ostrow (and Murray’s memoir) are noteworthy for their presentation of Marilyn as a gravely ill patient, a schizophrenic and a desperate abuser of dangerous drugs: Would not his account of her nearly tragic, drug-induced accident have supported these allegations? She could have sustained career-threatening if not life-threatening injury, after all.