The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

He brought a large photograph to my chair. It was a picture of a yacht.

  “How do you like it?” he asked.

  “It’s very beautiful,” I said.

  “You’re invited,” he said. He put his hand on my neck.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ve never been to a party on a yacht.”

  “Who said anything about a party?” Mr. Cohn scowled at me. “I’m inviting you—nobody else! Do you want to come or not?”

  “I’ll be glad to join you and your wife on your yacht, Mr. Cohn,” I said.

  “Leave my wife out of this!” he said. “There’ll be nobody on the yacht except you and me—and some expensive sailors. We’ll leave in an hour. And we’ll take a cruise overnight!”

  He stopped and scowled at me as I stood there motionless.

  “What’s the idea of standing there and staring at me like I insulted you?” he demanded to know.

  He put his arms around me. I didn’t move.

  “I’m very grateful to you for the invitation, Mr. Cohn,” I said, “but I’m busy this week, and so I shall have to refuse it.”

  His arm dropped from me. I started for the door, and I thought to myself I mustn’t act as if I thought he was some kind of monster. I turned in the doorway. Mr. Cohn was standing glaring at me. I had never seen a man so angry. I made my voice as casual and friendly as I could….

  “I hope you invite me some time again on an occasion when I can accept your invitation,” I said.

  “This is your last chance!” he said fiercely.

  I walked through the door and out of the office where movie stars are made. “Maybe he’s watching me,” I thought. “I mustn’t let him see me upset.”

  He cursed and yelled after me, “What makes you think you’re so special!?”

  I drove to my room in my car. Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl people expect to find dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. But things weren’t entirely black. They really never are. When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you’re laughing again.

  On Monday she received word that Columbia would not be picking up her option.

  29

  The Ways of the Cross

  Love is eternal—until it ends.

  —Dorothy Parker

  Being dropped by a major for the second time was a long fall. From the depths of the Hollywood deep it was difficult to see the bright colors—the gold and shining white, the greens and violets—that danced on the surface, where King Cohn’s yacht sailed in the blue with expensive sailors.

  “I lay in bed again day after day, not eating, not combing my hair,” Marilyn remembered. “I kept remembering how I had sat in Mr. Arnow’s casting office controlling the excitement about the great luck that had finally come to me, and I felt like an idiot. There was going to be no luck in my life. The dark star I was born under was going to get darker and darker.

  “I cried and mumbled to myself. I’d go out and get a job as a waitress or clerk. Millions of girls were happy to work at jobs like that. Or I could work in a factory again. I wasn’t afraid of any kind of work. I’d scrubbed floors and washed dishes ever since I could remember.”

  Marilyn didn’t know what to do with her life. She was still in love with Freddy Karger, and she could have been content being Mrs. Karger; but Freddy, who had just gone through a divorce, wasn’t ready to marry again. In her quandary she turned to Nana Karger for advice. Seeing her deep distress, Nana, who was a Roman Catholic, suggested she go to a church and ask God what she should do, “Any church. It’s good. You’ll get some comfort out of it…. Just pray to God and give your thoughts to Him.” It was to St. Victor’s Church in West Hollywood that Nana often went for comfort and inspiration, and Marilyn went there and sat quietly for nearly three hours before the altar with the large cross.

  “I sat alone thinking a lot about the past and understanding the frosty-hearted child, Norma Jeane…. When I looked back on all the years I could remember, I shuddered. I knew now how cold and empty they had been. I had always thought of myself as someone unloved. Now I knew there had been something worse than that in my life. It had been my own unloving heart. I had loved myself a little, and Aunt Grace and Ana. How little it seemed now!”

  She concluded that if she could make just one person happy by loving him her life could find some meaning and fulfillment, and she realized how deeply in love she was with Freddy Karger. “It was while I lay on the ocean bottom, figuring never to see daylight again, that it hit me, hoisted me into the air, and stood me on my feet looking at the world as if I’d just been born…. A new me appeared in my skin—not an actress, not somebody looking for a world of bright colors…. When Freddy said ‘I love you’ to me, it was better than a thousand critics calling me a great star—all the fame and bright colors and genius I had dreamed of were suddenly in me!”

  Marilyn told Natasha Lytess, “The only security I hope for is to be married, and Freddy is the man I want to be married to.” Karger had said that he loved her. He was charmed by the love she had for him and by her beauty, and he delighted in answering her questions about life and music and art. He took her to concerts at the Hollywood Bowl and outings at the beach, and they went dancing at the Palladium. But Karger’s love was not the open-hearted surrender of Marilyn’s. His heart bore the safety bars of cynicism. His sardonic smile expressed a world-wary skepticism, and he doubted the depth and sincerity of Marilyn’s emotions. The protective barrier he put up was something she was unable to fathom, and sometimes he teased Marilyn about her ignorance of culture and history, laughed at her malapropisms, and said, “Your mind isn’t developed. Compared to your body, it’s embryonic.”

  Lytess had moved with her daughter Barbara to an apartment on Harper not far from Karger’s. Often Marilyn would stay there and look out the window, anxiously waiting for Karger to stop in on the way to work, or on the way home. When Karger had left and Lytess returned, she frequently found Marilyn with tears in her eyes. Aware that Marilyn and Karger were carrying on an affair in her apartment, Lytess advised her not to see him anymore. “She was in love with someone who was treating her miserably, as a convenience,” Lytess said years later. “He was only interested in her physically—not as a human being, not as an actress…. All the time, she was so nice to his family and to his daughter. Marilyn would have loved to marry him, even though he was impossible. She thought love would change him. I hoped she would be distracted from this relationship.”

  While Lytess made it clear that she didn’t like Freddy Karger, at the same time Karger distrusted Natasha Lytess, who he felt had too great an influence over Marilyn and was trying to dominate her life.

  One night when Karger and Marilyn were in bed together, they started talking about the future.

  “I’ve thought of us getting married,” Karger said. “But I’m afraid it’s impossible.”

  Marilyn didn’t say anything.

  “It would be all right for me,” he observed, “but I keep thinking of my daughter. If we were married and anything should happen to me—such as my dropping dead—it would be very bad for her.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It wouldn’t be right for her to be brought up by a woman like you,” Karger said. “It would be unfair to her.”

  After Karger left, Marilyn recalled that she cried all night, “He didn’t love me,” she said. “A man can’t love a woman for whom he feels half contempt. He can’t love her if his mind is ashamed of her.”

  In the holiday season of 1948, Marilyn bought Karger an expensive watch as a Christmas present. It was meant as a token of her eternal love, but proved to be very much involved with time. Engraved with the date 12/25/48, the watch cost five hundred dollars—far more than Marilyn could afford. She purchased it on time, with installment payments of twenty-five dollars a month. After wrapping the gift she hurried over to Karger’s apartment and gave
it to him.

  Marilyn recalled that he was quite overcome by the beauty and generosity of the gift. Nobody had ever given him such an expensive watch before. But he wondered why she had only engraved the date and hadn’t included something like “From Marilyn to Freddy, with love,” or a sentiment like that. She responded, “Because you’ll leave me someday, and you’ll have some other girl to love. And you wouldn’t be able to use my present if my name was on it. This way you can always use it, as if it were something you’d bought yourself.”

  She hoped he would contradict her and say that her fears were silly and unfounded, but he didn’t. “I cried again all night,” she remembered. “To love without hope is a sad thing for the heart, and I knew what I had to do. I had to leave him. The moment I thought it, I realized I’d known it for a long time. That’s why I’d been sad—and desperate. That’s why I had tried to make myself more and more beautiful for him, why I had clung to him as if I were half mad. Because I had known it was ending.”

  It took her two years to pay off the five hundred dollars for the watch. By the time Marilyn had paid the last twenty-five-dollar installment, Karger had married Jane Wyman in the Catholic church with the large cross above the altar.

  And in the new moon of 1949 all the fame and bright colors and genius Marilyn Monroe had dreamed of moved to the plenilune alignment that eclipsed the dark star…. She went on an interview for a Marx Brothers movie:

  “This is the young lady for the office bit,” said the producer, Lester Cowan.

  Groucho stared thoughtfully at her.

  “Can you walk?” he demanded to know.

  She nodded.

  “I am not referring to the type of walking my Tante Zippa has mastered,” said Groucho. “This role calls for a young lady who can walk by me in such a manner as to arouse my elderly libido and cause smoke to issue from my ears.”

  Harpo honked the horn on the end of his cane and gave her a cross-eyed leer.

  Marilyn demonstrated her walk.

  Harpo’s horn honked three times, and he stuck his fingers in his mouth and blew a piercing whistle.

  “Does your chiropractor know about this?” Groucho inquired.

  “Walk again,” said Mr. Cowan.

  She walked up and down in front of the three men. They stood grinning.

  “Does your chiropractor’s wife know about this?” Groucho asked.

  “What do you think?” Mr. Cowan asked Groucho.

  “She’s Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one,” said Groucho. “You’ve got the part, Miss Peep. We’re going to shoot you tomorrow at dawn for stealing this picture. Come early, unless you’d like to spend the night with me rehearsing. And don’t forget your lines—I certainly can’t.”

  “And don’t do any walking in any unpoliced areas!” said Harpo. (Honk-honk!)

  They shot the scene the next day in a stage on the Goldwyn lot. Groucho directed her in a “walk on” that walked off with the picture—Love Happy.

  30

  Golden Dreams

  I’ve been on calendars, but never on Time.

  —Marilyn Monroe

  Photographer Tom Kelley’s call came at a propitious moment. He asked Marilyn if she would pose nude for a calendar photo.

  “What does it pay?” she asked.

  “Fifty dollars,” Kelley responded.

  Though Marilyn Monroe bore no misgivings about nudity, she had never posed des nuda. But the mean slapstick of poverty had recently delivered a stinging blow. After her brief scene in Love Happy, which had yet to be released, Marilyn made the rounds of the casting offices in her secondhand car, but found no work and no prospects. Soon she wasn’t able to keep up with her car payments or rent.

  In their travels along the perilous path of the Hollywood fringe, Marilyn and young Bob Slatzer pooled their poverty and moved in together, sharing an apartment beneath the shadows of the Hollywood sign on Primrose Path. Bob occasionally resorted to picking cotton in the fields of Indio in order to buy the groceries. After the cotton season, the pickings were still poor in Hollywood, and Marilyn received a repossession notice on her automobile. One night when the two of them returned to their apartment, they found that the landlady had changed the lock on their door for nonpayment of rent.

  After waiting for the landlady to leave the building, Slatzer crawled through the window while Marilyn drove her car up the driveway. They quickly loaded their few worldly belongings into the car. Opening the apartment door from the inside, Bob and Marilyn then entered the hallway and exited the building like respectable tenants—only to see Marilyn’s car pull out of the driveway and roar off down the street with their things. The car had been repossessed. It would cost fifty dollars to get it back.

  “What did you say it pays?” Marilyn asked photographer Tom Kelley.

  “Fifty dollars is the best I can do,” Kelley replied.

  On May 25, 1949, Marilyn arrived at Kelley’s Hollywood studio. Located at 736 North Seward, it was virtually across the street from Consolidated Film Laboratories, where Gladys, Grace Goddard, and Stan Gifford once worked. While Marilyn certainly needed the fifty dollars, posing nude for the camera also held a certain appeal—an extension of her childhood dream of appearing for all to see in the attire bestowed upon her at nature’s finest boutique. The photos Tom Kelley took that day proved to be incredibly unique. Posed on red folds of velvet, such as one might see lining a Tiffany jewelry box, Marilyn Monroe appears less erotic than iridescent, the pièce de résistance in the master jeweler’s sample case. The Baumgarth Calendar Company paid Tom Kelley five hundred dollars for the world publishing rights. Baumgarth made a small fortune on the Golden Dreams calendar. Marilyn got her fifty dollars, and the return of the priceless possession a Hollywood starlet with golden dreams can’t possibly live without—her car.

  While making the rounds of the agencies and casting directors, Marilyn was waiting in an office of the William Morris Agency when she was spotted by Johnny Hyde, a onetime child juggler and acrobat in the Loew’s vaudeville circuit who had become one of Hollywood’s top agents. A diminutive man, he had had a special chair made that gave him stature as he sat behind his large executive desk, staring at the luscious blonde with the lost look.

  “You’re going to be a great star,” Hyde said. “I know. Many years ago I discovered a girl like you and brought her to Metro—Lana Turner. You’re better. You’ll go farther. You’ve got more!”

  “Then why can’t I get a job?” Marilyn asked. “Just to make enough to eat on.”

  “It’s hard for a star to get an eating job,” said Johnny. “A star is only good as a star. You don’t fit into anything less.”

  Marilyn recalled that she laughed for the first time in months, but that Johnny Hyde didn’t laugh with her—he just kept staring and staring.

  Johnny began squiring Marilyn around town, showing her off. They attended Hollywood parties, had dinner at Chasen’s and Romanoff’s, danced at Ciro’s, the Mocombo, and the Troc. Sometimes there would be dinner parties at Johnny Hyde’s big house on North Palm Drive near Charlie Feldman’s. Marilyn called Johnny’s dining room “my own private Romanoff’s” because it had booths and café tables just like Mike Romanoff’s famous restaurant. Johnny bought her clothes, put her up in a small efficiency apartment at the Beverly Carlton Hotel on Olympic Boulevard, and took her to the Beverly Hills plastic surgeon to the stars, Michael Gurdin, who rounded her chin and took the bump off her nose—the bump Grace had always said was her only imperfection.

  While Johnny went to Europe on business, Marilyn went on a multiple-city tour for the opening of Love Happy. When she arrived in New York, Andre de Dienes located her at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, and they had a reunion on the strand of Long Island, where he photographed her cavorting on the beach. “She was radiant,” de Dienes recalled. “She had the presence and ease of an established star.” But de Dienes no longer clicked with Marilyn, and the ashes of their fiery romance were never reignited.<
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  Marilyn suddenly abandoned the Love Happy tour when Johnny called to say she had landed a role in Ticket to Tomahawk at Fox. Hoping it would be her ticket to a new contract, Marilyn played a chorus girl in a western musical. But Ticket to Tomahawk went nowhere, and it again revealed that Marilyn’s talents were far above the mediocrity of the material.

  Though Darryl F. Zanuck continued to ignore the blonde, whom he referred to as “strawhead,” MGM talent director Lucille Ryman alerted Marilyn to a role Metro was casting.

  “There’s a part in John Huston’s picture The Asphalt Jungle that’s perfeet for you,” Lucille said. “It’s not a big part, but you’ll be bound to make a big hit in it. Tell your agent to get in touch with Mr. Huston.”

  Johnny Hyde brought me to Mr. Huston’s office, and Mr. Huston gave me a copy of the script. Unlike Mr. Zanuck, he did not believe that actresses shouldn’t be allowed to know what they were going to act in. I took it home and my friend Natasha Lytess agreed to coach me…. I studied the part for several days and then returned to Mr. Huston’s office to read for him.

  I felt sick. I had told myself a million times that I was an actress. I had practiced acting for years. Here, finally, was my first chance at a real acting part with a great director to direct me. And all I could do is stand there with quivering knees and a quivering stomach…. I felt desperate. Mr. Huston caught my eye and grinned.

  “We’re waiting, Miss Monroe,” he said.

  “Would you mind if I read the part lying on the floor?” I blurted out.

  “Why, not at all,” Mr. Huston replied gallantly.

  “I stretched myself out on the floor…. I had rehearsed the part lying on a couch, as the directors indicated. There wasn’t any couch in the office. Lying on the floor was almost the same thing, however. I went through the part and when I finished I said, “Oh, let me do it again.”