Marilyn Monroe

by James Spada

  Wilder replied: “Of course I am deeply sorry that she lost her baby. But I must reject the implication that overwork or inconsiderate treatment by me or anyone else associated with the production was in any way responsible for it. The fact is that the company pampered her, coddled her and acceded to all of her whims. The only one who showed any lack of consideration was Marilyn, in her treatment of her co-stars and her co-workers. Right from the first day, before there was any hint of pregnancy, her chronic tardiness and unpreparedness cost us eighteen shooting days, hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless heartaches.”

  Monroe receives the French equivalent of the Oscar for her performance in The Prince and the Showgirl, March 1959.

  At the New York premiere of Some Like It Hot in April, Marilyn looks like cotton candy that would glow in the dark. The film was a huge success, Monroe’s biggest moneymaker, and was critically acclaimed as well. Her performance, for the fourth time in a row, was superb, and she was acknowledged by most critics as one of America’s finest comediennes. The film has been hailed as the greatest comedy of all time, and Marilyn’s contributions to it are vital.

  MM in Chicago for that city’s Some Like It Hot world premiere. Her incandescence has been explained as a result of her alabaster skin and platinum hair, but her masseur Ralph Roberts said it was more than that. “The skin layer right under the surface is moist and deep, like no other woman’s. In the dark, her skin could light up a room.”

  Her husband helps Marilyn out of a New York hospital on June 26 after she underwent corrective surgery designed to allow her to bear children.

  More acclaim for her performance in The Prince and the Showgirl. Italy awards Marilyn its David di Donatello Prize, its version of the Oscar, as “Best Foreign Actress of 1958.”

  The Millers try to retain some privacy as they attend a performance of Macbeth in Boston, August 15, 1959.

  Monroe listens demurely at a Hollywood dinner in honor of visiting Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, September 1959. She arrived on time, prompting Billy Wilder to quip, “Now I know who should direct all her pictures—Khrushchev!” Said Marilyn to her maid, Lena Pepitone, “I could tell Khrushchev liked me. He smiled more when he was introduced to me than for anybody else at the whole banquet. He squeezed my hand so long and hard I thought he would break it. I guess it was better than having to kiss him, though.”

  PART SEVEN

  The Last Reel

  1960-1962

  Marilyn meets the Montands. A January 1960 Hollywood party introduced Marilyn’s latest leading man, French actor-singer Yves Montand, and his actress wife, Simone Signoret, to the press. Marilyn and Yves were to costar in Let’s Make Love, Monroe’s first film for Twentieth Century-Fox in four years.

  Marilyn wins the Golden Globe Award as “Best Actress in a Comedy” for Some Like It Hot, March 8, 1960. She was again not nominated for an Oscar.

  Marilyn is attended to while filming Let’s Make Love, January 1960.

  “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” Marilyn’s big production number entrance in Let’s Make Love, would prove to be one of the few bright spots in the film and the point at which she looked her loveliest. Monroe had been rather zaftig for several years. Once a reporter, irate at being kept waiting, asked her cattily, “Gained a little weight, haven’t you, dearie?” She replied, “My husband likes me plump.”

  Marilyn seems serene on the set. But a fellow actor found a notebook of hers in which she had written: “What am I afraid of? Why am I so afraid? Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I am afraid and I should not be and I must not be. Fuck!”

  Marilyn looks on as one of the film’s guest stars, Gene Kelly, teaches Montand a few dance steps. Let’s Make Love turned out to be one of Marilyn’s least effective films; the plot was labored and witless, Montand’s performance in a silly role was weak and Monroe’s characterization of showgirl Amanda Dell swung widely between naive and neurotic. For the most part her costumes were unflattering, and she sometimes looked drawn and tired. It was the first film in which the traumas of Marilyn’s personal life showed on her person on screen. The film was not a hit at the box office.

  Monroe listens intently to George Cukor’s direction. Yves Montand told a reporter during filming, “Marilyn is a girl with a great many fears. She needs understanding, someone to calm her fears.”

  With both their spouses out of town, Marilyn and Yves attend a preview of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment in Hollywood. By now industry insiders knew they were having an affair. Monroe’s marriage to Arthur Miller had been slowly coming apart for a variety of reasons, including his weakness and condescension towards her, and her loss of respect for him as a result. She let herself get caught up in an infatuation for Montand and told a reporter, “Next to my husband and along with Marlon Brando, Yves Montand is the most attractive man I’ve ever met.” Her first reaction upon seeing him, according to her maid, Lena Pepitone, was, “Doesn’t he look like Joe?! I love his voice. He’s so sexy! Wow!”

  For Montand’s part, his affair with Marilyn was a meaningless fling; he certainly had no intention of letting it break up his marriage. He told Hedda Hopper, “I think Marilyn is an enchanting child. ...She’s a simple girl without any guile. Perhaps I was too tender and thought that maybe she was as sophisticated as some of the other ladies I have known. I’ve never known anyone quite like Marilyn Monroe. She is known throughout the world, but she is still a child.”

  Marilyn, needless to say, was mortified—and the situation did not help her shaky marriage at all.

  July 1960: Marilyn and Clark Gable at a party to celebrate the start of filming on The Misfits, a film written by Arthur Miller expressly for Marilyn and directed by John Huston. Gable was another of Monroe’s girlhood idols and a man she often fantasized was her real father.

  Marilyn with Thelma Ritter in the opening scene of The Misfits. She played Roslyn Tabor, a vague, neurotic, highly sexual woman with a deep melancholy, a love for animals, and a longing for her mother. The character, especially since it was written by Miller, hit a little too close to home; it was an extremely difficult role for Marilyn to play.

  Filming The Misfits, Marilyn was under the greatest strain of her life. Shattered by the impending failure of a marriage that she thought would bring her lifelong love, security, and respectability, her miscarriages, and Yves Montand’s rejection of her, she was barely able to function in the 100-degree heat of the Nevada desert. By now she had begun to drink heavily and to rely on various pills. “She took so many pills to help her sleep at night,” John Huston later said, “that she had to take other pills to get her going in the morning. And that ravaged the girl.”

  The problems on location were worsened by the director’s nightly forays to gambling casinos, where he would stay up all night, using production money to cover his losses.

  Marilyn and Miller barely spoke; she often never showed up on the set, and when she did she was unable to perform. She drove Clark Gable to distraction, a fact that further upset her. Gable said as filming ended, “What the hell is that girl’s problem? Goddamn it, I like her, but she’s so damn unprofessional. I damn near went nuts up there in Reno waiting for her to show. Christ, she didn’t show up until after lunch some days, and then she would blow take after take... I know she’s heavy into booze and pills. Huston told me that. I think there’s something wrong with the marriage. Too bad. I like Arthur, but that marriage ain’t long for this world. Christ, I’m glad this picture’s finished. She damn near gave me a heart attack.”

  The situation with Marilyn got so bad that John Huston was finally forced to close down production and send her to a Los Angeles hospital to get her off the alcohol and pills and allow her to rest. Two weeks later, September 5, 1960, Miller brought her back and she resumed filming.

  The first day back on the set, Marilyn gives the film one of its most charming moments. Her childlike glow regained, she leans across the breakfast table and asks Gable, “You like me, hunh?�
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  But the strains once again got to Marilyn; the entire Misfits filming was one of the most grueling in Hollywood history. It was chronicled in a book, The Making of “The Misfits,” and became the most expensive black-and-white picture made to that date.

  The last day of filming, November 5, 1960, Gable hugs Monroe, both of them overjoyed that this excruciating ordeal is over. The next day Gable suffered a massive heart attack. Ten days later he died.

  Soon after she completed The Misfits, Marilyn’s life came apart. On November 11 she announced that her marriage to Arthur Miller was over, and ran the gauntlet of the press as she left her apartment. “Miller Walks Out on Marilyn,” the New York Daily News headline screamed. With Gable’s death four days later, Marilyn was at a low point in her life. After reading a gossip column item suggesting that Kay Gable blamed Marilyn for her husband’s death, Marilyn came close to jumping out of her New York apartment window. She would put up a brave public front after that, but things only got worse.

  January 31, 1961: costar Montgomery Clift escorts Marilyn to a New York preview of The Misfits. Marilyn’s performance was praised by many critics; it was a complete departure from anything she had done before, and it presented a touching look at a sensitive, unhappy woman. The film was not a hit at the box office, but many film scholars regard it as one of the finest American films ever made.

  Marilyn is released from the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center on March 5, 1961. It was at first announced that she had been hospitalized for “a rest,” but press reports speculated it was worse than that (“Hint Marilyn May Be ‘Greatly Disturbed’”). It was only years later that the full truth emerged: the recent events of her life and her growing dependence on drugs and alcohol had led her psychiatrist to admit her to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York. There Marilyn found iron doors slamming behind her and bars on her windows. “What kind of place is this?” she screamed. “What are you doing to me?” With her grandparents, uncle, and mother all having been committed, Marilyn was terrified that she, too, would go insane. At Payne Whitney her fears were justified: there was a doorless toilet in her room and a glass pane on her door through which passing nurses could check on her. She degenerated into hysterics within two days.

  She was able to make one call to Joe DiMaggio in Florida. He came to New York immediately and used his considerable influence to have Marilyn released. He took her to Columbia Presbyterian, where she had a private room without bars. After three weeks of withdrawal from pills, Marilyn was released. Reporters crushed around her as usual, asking her to comment on Elizabeth Taylor’s near-fatal illness. When she got home, she told Lena Pepitone, “They were going to put me in a straitjacket! Thank God for Joe. Thank God!”

  More heartache: Marilyn attends the funeral of Arthur Miller’s mother on March 8. With her is her secretary, May Reis.

  The harrowing year and a half Marilyn had been through shows clearly on her face as she attends a benefit for the Actors Studio at New York’s Roseland Dance City on March 13, 1961.

  The harrowing year and a half Marilyn had been through shows clearly on her face as she attends a benefit for the Actors Studio at New York’s Roseland Dance City on March 13, 1961.

  “Thank God for Joe.” Attempting to get her life back together, Marilyn vacations in Florida, where Joe DiMaggio has joined the New York Yankees for their spring training, March 1961. The trip was highly therapeutic for her. At one point, when “caught” leaving a motel by a photographer, Marilyn and Joe look extremely uncomfortable.

  Marilyn watches a Yankee batting practice.

  Back in New York in April, Marilyn and Joe watch a game at Yankee Stadium. By now speculation about a remarriage was rampant in the press, but they would only say, “No comment.”

  Looking serene and lovely, Marilyn attends the May 1961 christening of John Clark Gable, born months after his father’s death. Marilyn was overjoyed at the invitation: it suggested that Kay Gable did not, after all, blame her for Clark’s death.

  Hospitalized again on June 29 for removal of her gallbladder, Marilyn looks radiant as she is wheeled out of New York’s Polyclinic Hospital to a waiting ambulance on July 11...

  ...but before long the huge crowd that had gathered to catch a glimpse of her became unruly. She was roughed up and very nearly injured in the melee.

  Recuperating in California, Marilyn made very few public appearances during the rest of 1961.

  February 1962: Marilyn attends a performance of Macbeth in New York with Lee and Paula Strasberg.

  Joe and Marilyn kiss good-bye after another Monroe visit to Florida, February 21, 1962. Marilyn said, “I loved being here,” and when asked if she and Joe were on the road to a reconciliation, she replied, “I don’t know what you mean. We’re very good friends. There’s nothing to reconcile.” The press reports on Marilyn and Joe were accompanied by news of Arthur Miller’s remarriage, to Inge Morath, a photographer he had met on the set of The Misfits.

  At a February 26 press conference in Mexico, where she went to buy furnishings for her new Mexican-style home in Brentwood, near Los Angeles. Joe helped her with the house’s purchase, and it was said he planned to buy the house next door in order to be near her, and hoped for a remarriage.

  Considering adopting a child, Marilyn visits an orphanage in Mexico. She never went through with the adoption plan, but she donated $1,000 to a local children’s welfare institute that gave breakfasts to needy youngsters. “I know what it means to go without breakfast,” she said.

  Marilyn arrives at the Golden Globe Awards in Hollywood, March 1962.

  Rock Hudson and Steve Allen look on as Marilyn accepts a Golden Globe as the World Film Favorite—Female.

  With Dean Martin, her costar in Something’s Got to Give, a comedy about a wife who returns from seven years on a desert island to discover her husband has remarried. It was a remake of the 1940 Cary Grant-Irene Dunne film My Favorite Wife.

  The famous nude swimming sequence. Marilyn was so proud of the new slim figure her gallbladder surgery created that she shed the flesh-colored bathing suit she was wearing for the scene and agreed to pose au natureI for two photographers. The photos of a nude Marilyn sitting poolside were published throughout the world.

  Amid rumors that Twentieth Century-Fox officials were considering replacing her in Something’s Got to Give because of her repeated absences from the set, Marilyn flew to New York to sing at President Kennedy’s forty-fifth birthday celebration in Madison Square Garden. Here she rehearses her performance.

  May 19, 1962: Monroe’s sexy, breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday” led President Kennedy to quip, “I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”

  For many Monroe fans, this night represented the epitome of Marilyn’s larger-than-life glamour. “I was honored when they asked me to appear at the President’s birthday rally,” Marilyn told Life. “There was like a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing ‘Happy Birthday’—like if I had been wearing a slip I would have thought it was showing or something. I thought, Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out!”

  Back in Hollywood, Marilyn films a scene with costar Wally Cox. When she urges him to have lunch with her, he tells her he always brings his lunch with him and eats in. “I’d be ever so grateful if you’d take it out,” she purrs.

  Monroe is directed by George Cukor. According to Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the screenplay of How to Marry a Millionaire and who had worked with Marilyn on a version of Something’s Got to Give with which she was quite happy, Marilyn’s chronic illness and frequent failures to report to work were a result of her fears and misgivings about George Cukor. He was not happy with the script and made changes, with many of which Marilyn disagreed. She felt frustrated and helpless and was afraid that a repeat of the Let’s Make Love fiasco would ensue. Marilyn had had two box office flops in a row, and she had not had a film in release in over eighteen months. This was to
be her comeback picture, and if it failed, her career, she felt, might well be over.

  As so often in the past, her fears and insecurities manifested themselves in illness and tardiness. She appeared for just one day of filming out of fifteen, resulting in a $2 million loss to the studio. Fox, stung by its financial losses due to Elizabeth Taylor’s exploits during the filming of Cleopatra, came down hard on Marilyn. She was fired from the picture. A studio source said, “Something has to be done with these unprofessional people. We have to sit down on them or else forget about the industry. They’re ruining it.”