The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  But she was uncertain what she should do and felt very much alone. In June 1945 Norma Jeane would turn nineteen, and it was a difficult time for her. With Grace in Chicago and Jim gone she felt trapped in a limbo of loneliness. “I had been sort of a ‘child bride’ and now I was sort of a ‘child widow,’” she observed. At Radioplane she had transferred from the parachute room to the “dope room” because of animosity from girls she worked with who resented the attention and wolf whistles she received. She wasn’t getting along well with Jim’s mom, Ethel, who disapproved of Norma Jeane’s idea of becoming a model. Ana Lower was frequently ill, her mother was in an institution, and her father wouldn’t speak to her.

  “Sundays were the loneliest,” she later reflected,

  but I discovered a place to go on Sundays. It was the Union Station. All the trains from all over the country came in at the Union Station. It was a beautiful building, and it was always crowded with people carrying suitcases and babies…. I would watch people greeting each other when the train crowds entered the waiting room. Or saying good-bye to each other.

  They seemed to be mostly poor people. Although, now and then some well-dressed travelers would appear. But chiefly it was the poor people who kept coming in and going away on trains.

  You learned a lot watching them. You learned that pretty wives adored homely men and good-looking men adored homely wives. And that people in shabby clothes, carrying raggedy bundles and with three or four sticky kids clinging to them, had faces that could light up like Christmas trees when they saw each other. And you watched really homely men and women, fat ones and old ones, kiss each other as tenderly as if they were lovers in a movie…. Union Station—I used to go there on Sunday and stay most of the day.

  As she watched the smiling faces of reunited families and friends leaving the station beneath the sign that said “This Way Out,” she wondered what the way out was for her. Where was the exit from the loneliness and isolation, where familial communication could be observed only vicariously? It was in this caldron of loneliness that the ingredients were mixed into the potion that brewed up a goddess. The remote childhood hope that Grace had instilled in her of becoming a movie star like Jean Harlow became burning ambition.

  “You don’t have to know anything to dream hard,” she stated. “I used to think as I looked out on the Hollywood night, ‘There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I’m not going to worry about them. I’m dreaming the hardest!’ I knew nothing about acting. I had never read a book about it, or tried to do it, or discussed it with anyone. I was ashamed to tell the few people I knew of what I was dreaming. But there was this secret in me—becoming an actress, a movie star! It was like being in jail and looking at a door that said, ‘This Way Out.’”

  Without telling Ethel, she made an appointment with Miss Emmeline Snively, the proprietor of the Blue Book Modeling Agency, for 11 A.M., August 2, 1945.

  The night before, she was too excited to sleep. She got up before dark and took a long bath and massaged cologne into her skin. It took over an hour to make up her face. Had she made her lips too large? Was the mascara line right? Should she wear the suit or the dress? She put on the dress. She brushed her white suede shoes, her only good pair. Whatever she wore would have to match the shoes. The suit went best with the shoes. So off went the dress and on went the suit—too tight—back to the white dress.

  She had called in sick at Radioplane, and Ethel had guessed she was up to something. They didn’t speak as Norma Jeane put on her dark glasses and walked out the door—a vision in white as she got into Doughertys’ old Ford coupe and drove off to Miss Snively’s office at the Ambassador Hotel.

  It was only a few minutes after eleven when Norma Jeane arrived at the glass door of the Blue Book Modeling Agency. Taking a deep breath, she became “the other person” as she walked languorously into the reception room where large photos of beautiful, successful models hung on the walls. It wasn’t long before she was ushered into the inner sanctum, Miss Snively’s office. She tried with all her might to calm her nerves and hoped she wouldn’t stutter. Miss Snively, a small, effervescent lady in her fifties, had been in the business for decades. She could distinguish a model from a wanna-be at a glance.

  “My dear, please walk to the door and back.” Miss Snively noted that the walk was unsteady and wiggly, the hair was too thick and too curly, the upper lip was too short, and there was a slight bump on the nose—but the smile was good, the legs were shapely, the bosom was superb. What caught Miss Snively’s attention, however, was the air of wholesome sweetness about her. In the white dress, Miss Snively recalled, “She looked like a cherub in a church choir.”

  “Do you really want to be a model, dear?”

  “Yes, I’d like to try.”

  “Try—that’s the spirit, dear. If you’ve got the willpower you’ll make it. There are a lot of pretty girls like you in this town, but you’ve got one thing, dear, that beats ’em all, and that’s charm. Charm—that’s what you’ve got!”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “But you’ve got to have the know-how, dear. We offer a three month course of training for one hundred dollars.”

  “I guess that lets me out,” Norma Jeane said dejectedly, “I d-don’t have one hundred dollars.”

  “You don’t have to pay me now, dear. You can pay it out of what you earn as a model. Do you want to get down to work?”

  “Oh, yes!” was the immediate reply.

  The next day Norma Jeane quit her job at Radioplane. When Ethel Dougherty learned of her plans and complained that Jim wouldn’t approve of a modeling career, Norma Jeane took her things and moved back to Ana Lower’s home.

  Looking back at the days when Norma Jeane was just beginning her career, Miss Snively commented, “She was the hardest worker I ever handled. She never missed a class. She had confidence in herself, and did something I’ve never seen any other model do. She would study every print a photographer took of her. I mean she’d take them home and study them for hours. Then she’d go back and ask the photographer, ‘What did I do wrong in this one?’ or ‘Why didn’t this come out better?’ They would tell her. And she never repeated a mistake. Photographers liked her because she was cooperative. She knew how to take directions.”

  Norma Jeane’s first modeling job was as a hostess at the Los Angeles Home Show in the Pan-Pacific Auditorium. The ten dollars a day she earned was almost enough to pay back Miss Snively for her training. By the end of the summer, she was becoming a photographer’s dream, earning enough money to pay rent to Aunt Ana and the repair bills on Dougherty’s Ford, which she had smashed into a streetcar when she was enthralled by a daydream.

  At first she may have thought that the car horns that reached a crescendo in the Los Angeles basin on the afternoon of August 14, 1945, were honking at her. But the persistent honking of horns throughout the city was the first cacaphonic news flash to most Angelenos that World War II had come to its sudden conclusion. The noisy celebrations of peace reached jubilant crescendos on Hollywood Boulevard, Times Square, and the Main Streets of America, but the euphoria was soon chilled by the fall of the Iron Curtain and the onset of the cold war. With the defeat of the Axis powers, the unity of purpose that had united East and West came to an end as the Soviets aggressively sought world domination.

  Following Lenin’s dictum “Capture the cinema, and you capture the hearts and the minds of the people,” the Comintern focused on Hollywood, where a concerted effort was made to infiltrate the film industry. The full extent of the Comintern’s covert activities has only recently been documented, with the opening of the Central Party Archives in Moscow. Many of the Hollywood fronts were orchestrated by the Comintern headquarters under directives from the Kremlin.

  Money was always a problem, and the “silver-spoon Communist” Frederick Vanderbilt Field was frequently relied upon by the Comintern to put together funding for CP fronts. It was Field who financed the Rus
sian Institute; the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council; and the People’s Education Centers, where John Howard Lawson and Dr. Hyman Engelberg were instructors along with Hollywood labor leader Herb Sorrell.

  Another shadowy figure along with Dr. Hyman Engelberg in the Arts, Sciences, and Professions Council was Eunice Murray’s husband, John M. Murray. Eunice Murray’s son-in-law, Norman Jefferies, stated that John Murray was a devoted member of the Communist Party who had several identities and led a double life. Both lives would have ended in the shadow of obscurity were it not for brief mention of Eunice Murray’s husband by Monroe biographers. In the addenda of Frank Capell’s book, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, Capell refers to John Murray as “a left-wing labor organizer” who often came home “messed up from his strike and organizing activities.” In Marilyn Monroe: The Biography Donald Spoto refers to John Murray as a Yale divinity student who became a Hollywood studio carpenter, “which Eunice took for an imitation of the Lord Jesus Himself.”

  However, there is no academic record of John Murray’s having attended Yale Divinity School, and according to Norman Jefferies, Murray’s faith was drawn from the well of Marx and Engels, and he revered Joseph Stalin. Murray was far from being a simple carpenter who worked at the studios; his tools were the hammer and sickle, and he worked diligently with Herb Sorrell in following Lenin’s dictum to capture the cinema. John Howard Lawson’s declared objective was to introduce Marxist thought into the content of Hollywood films, while John Murray’s task was to communize the Hollywood trade unions.

  In 1940 John Murray and Herb Sorrell had made a concerted effort to gain control of the motion-picture unions by forming the CP-oriented United Studio Technicians Guild to supplant the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). Together they organized the bitter jurisdictional strike against the Walt Disney Studio in 1941. When World War II ended they formed a leftist coalition of anti-IATSE studio employees called the Conference of Studio Unions, and the surrender of Japan marked the beginning of renewed labor wars in Hollywood orchestrated by Murray and Sorrell.*

  Selecting Warner Bros, as the field of jurisdictional battle, Murray and Sorrell placed 750 pickets around the Warner Bros, lot in Burbank. When the IATSE employees tried to enter the studio gates the pickets overturned their cars as Jack Warner angrily looked on from a soundstage roof. The Burbank police and studio guards beat back the pickets with clubs and fire hoses, and by the end of the next day over eighty people had been injured in a pitched battle between the rival unions before additional police called from nearby towns could restore a semblance of order. The matter was turned over to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which in October 1945 ruled in favor of the Conference of Studio Unions. The victory inflamed Murray and Sorrell’s ambition to take over all the Hollywood locals, and the labor wars quickly spread to the other Hollywood studios.

  Norman Jefferies recalled that it was during the time of the strikes that he was dating John and Eunice Murray’s daughter, Patricia, a student at Santa Monica High School. The Murrays had built a large and comfortable home in Santa Monica at 802 Franklin Street, and according to Jefferies it was the scene of numerous meetings involving the communist labor movement in Hollywood. Fifteen years later it would be to this same house on Franklin Street that Marilyn Monroe would be driven by Mrs. Murray for her appointment with her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson.

  Jefferies described John Murray as a bright, well-educated man versed in history and the arts who spoke six languages. “Jack [John] Murray was a strange man—so was his brother Churchill,” Jefferies observed. “Jack wasn’t home much, or even in Los Angeles, unless it was on party business. That was his life. The Murrays didn’t have much of a marriage because he was gone most of the time. He was either in Mexico or on the East Coast.

  “During the strikes the Murrays frequently had cell meetings, or what they called ‘club’ meetings there at the house,” Jefferies recalled. “Herb Sorrell was there a lot, but Jack Murray was the strategist along with his brother Churchill and people he brought up from Mexico. Sorrell was the organizer and the street fighter, but Jack and Churchill were the brains. Eunice was part of all this, but I never got the idea that she was an organizer.”

  The prolonged postwar Hollywood labor strikes of 1945 and 1946 caused economic hardship for the studios as well as the unions. After over a year of walkouts and litigation, the Conference of Studio Union’s strike funds were totally depleted, and many of those who had supported John Murray and Herb Sorrell lost everything when the NLRB reversed its position and ultimately ruled in favor of the IATSE. As Norman Jefferies recalled, the Murrays could no longer meet their mortgage payments and lost the home that had been built on Franklin Street by unemployed studio carpenters. It was ultimately purchased by a man Jefferies had occasionally seen at the meetings held in the Murray home, a man they looked to for party directives—Ralph R. Greenson.

  23

  Los Angeles Limited

  Hell must be like Los Angeles….

  —Bertolt Brecht

  Sigmund Freud was twelve years old when his father told him the story of how an arrogant gentile had knocked his new fur cap into the muddy gutter and shouted, “Jew! Get off the pavement!”…“And what did you do?” asked young Sigmund. “I stepped into the gutter and picked up my cap,” said Jacob Freud.

  For centuries after the destruction of Solomon’s temple and the Diaspora, the Jews suffered and endured persecution that became ingrained into their culture as a way of life. But when Hitler came to full power with the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, hate and intolerance revealed their demonic face.

  Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, a Freudian psychoanalyst working with mental patients in a Berlin asylum, noticed a strange change taking place among the inmates. “As the threat of the Nazis coming to power became greater,” he said, “You could see its effect even on the mental patients. They began to play at being Nazis themselves. Of course, a few really were Nazis. But the others—they would pretend that they were Nazis too. Some of them, when I went to talk to them, even tried to threaten me.”

  When insanity became a system of government, the fortunate few fled from the European madhouse that had been taken over by the inmates. Hitler’s rise to power brought to America some of its finest scientists, musicians, teachers, and artists.

  The Jewish immigrants hoped for assimilation, and while there was, indeed, widespread anti-Semitism in America during the thirties, it wasn’t genocidal, and the hope was that if a Jew worked hard and behaved like a good American, his family could at least live in peace. Many of them took innocuous new names, cut off their earlocks and trimmed their noses, listened to Lum and Abner, took off their yarmulkas and put on fedoras and cowboy hats. In West Los Angeles some even tried to join the Bel Air Country Club.

  Most of the Freudian psychoanalysts seeking refuge in America were Jewish, and many of them were Marxists. For those who had abandoned their faith in Judaism, Freud and Marx offered a leap of dissent to dogmatic empiricism and a means of interpreting human aggression.

  To many Americans in the thirties psychiatry was regarded as esoteric and foreign. Because of its sexual context, practitioners of Freudian analysis were suspect in a culture with Puritan roots. Some immigrant analysts remained in New York, and others went to Boston, Chicago, and Topeka, but the ultimate destination for many of the Freudian exiles was Hollywood, the sun-filled oasis of golden opportunity—with its pools and palms and a plethora of meshugas, who seemed to find safety in numbers in Movieland.

  Freud’s student Ernst Simmel was one of the first refugee analysts to arrive in Hollywood. Simmel and the highly respected Freudian Otto Fenichel had been among the founders of the prestigious Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. But they were members of the Communist Party, and when Hitler came to power they compounded their sins against the Reich by being Jews who espoused Freudian-Marxism. When Simmel heard that the Nazis were coming to get him, he jumped out of the rear wind
ow of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and didn’t stop running until he reached Hollywood and Vine.

  Otto Fenichel’s route was more circuitous. It was his desperate dream that Freudian-Marxism would prevail over Nietzschean facism, and Fenichel first fled to Oslo and then Prague, where he led underground movements against the Nazis and secretly published his Rundbriefe—mimeographed circulars that he sent to a select group of intellectuals who endorsed Freudian-Marxist solutions to mankind’s problems.

  As Hitler’s armies overwhelmed Europe, and Fenichel was forced to flee, Ernst Simmel arranged for Fenicher’s immigration to Los Angeles in 1938. Though many of Simmel and Fenichel’s fellow Freudians held Marxist views and were members of the Communist Party, the situation in America didn’t provide a climate for a political concept of psychoanalysis.

  The rather pragmatic medicalization of analysis in the United States tended to undermine the zealous cultural and political heritage of the Freudian exiles. Some of the early Los Angeles analysts, such as May Romm and Francis Deri, began making big bucks on Bedford Drive with monied clients from the film industry who were willing to pay plenty to hear themselves talk.

  The majority of the immigrant psychoanalysts didn’t want to be overtly political. They wanted to get established and make money. The burning intellectualism that had lit the fires of the European Freudian movement became the fifty-minute-cash-and-carry-on hour in the United States. Though Fenichel and Simmel tried to keep the Marxist flame burning, they found that it wasn’t politic for them to publicly espouse pro-Soviet sympathies.