The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

by Donald H. Wolfe

  Billy Woodfield, who was then a photographer for This Week magazine, recalled that Greene wouldn’t let him get near Marilyn. He commented, “During the rodeo location it got so bad that we were all hiding out and taking pictures with telephoto lenses from under the stadium stands. I got some pictures of Marilyn throwing up under the bleachers. I had the pictures printed, set them down in front of Milton Greene, and said, ‘This is what we have to go with unless you let us take some pictures!’ Finally he broke loose, and I got my shots.”

  Arthur Jacobs’s Beverly Hills office was handling the publicity for Marilyn Monroe Productions, and while Rupert Allan was Marilyn’s personal publicist, Pat Newcomb was sent along with other members of the Jacobs staff to Phoenix. Only twenty-five years old at the time, the spin doctor was merely an intern in the practice she would soon master. Margaret Patricia Newcomb was born and raised in the shadow of the Capitol, and her grandfather had been a prominent Washington judge. Her father, Carmen Adams Newcomb, was a lobbyist for the coal industry, which included the Great Lakes Coal and Coke Corporation, owned by Ethel Kennedy’s father, George Skakel, Jr.

  After living in Chevy Chase, Maryland, Pat Newcomb moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1946, when her father became West Coast representative of the extensive Skakel family real estate holdings in Southern California. Pat attended Immaculate Heart High School in Hollywood, and in 1948 she enrolled at Mills College, an exclusive girls’ school in Oakland, where she took a liberal-arts course, majoring in psychology.

  One of Pat Newcomb’s lecturers at Mills College was Pierre Salinger, who would later become President John Kennedy’s press secretary. In the early fifties Salinger was an investigative journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle. When Newcomb graduated from Mills in 1952, she became a researcher for her mentor, Salinger, who was writing a series of articles on corruption within the Teamsters Union. Three months were spent researching the articles, first at Dave Beck’s union headquarters in Seattle, and then in Detroit, where Jimmy Hoffa ran the affairs of the Central States Conference of Teamsters. Salinger uncovered incidents of corruption and brutality and found that Beck was lining his pockets with union funds, while Hoffa was recruiting ex-convicts and racketeers to enforce his policies.

  When Salinger learned that Arkansas Democratic Senator John L. McClellan was preparing to convene a Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor and Management Field, it was through Pat Newcomb and her father, Carmen, that an appointment was made for Salinger to meet the chief counsel for the committee—Ethel Skakel’s husband, Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother of Senator John F. Kennedy, who also served on the committee.

  “I shall never forget my first meeting with Bob,” Pierre Salinger stated. “It was a two-hour lunch in the Senate dining room. Although I was there as a reporter to interview him, I spent most of the time answering his questions on Beck and Hoffa…. Bob and I hit it off from the very beginning.”

  In 1956 Pierre Salinger was asked by Bobby to become an investigator for the McClellan Committee, and in November they set up shop in Los Angeles while investigating Teamster activities on the West Coast. In The Enemy Within, Bobby Kennedy wrote, “We arrived in Los Angeles on November 14, 1956, and got in touch with Captain James Hamilton of the Intelligence Division of the Police Department. We interviewed union officials, employers and employees and several confidential informants.”

  According to former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, “At the invitation of Chief William Parker, Bobby Kennedy set up his offices in the LAPD Intelligence Division. Their desks were next to Captain James Hamilton’s. Bobby Kennedy and Hamilton became close friends, and Bobby often relied upon Hamilton for information and guidance during the Select Committee investigations.” Two of Hamilton’s most trusted officers, the detectives Archie Case and James Ahearn, were assigned to assist Bobby in the investigations.

  Pat Newcomb decided that show business was her field, and it was through an intimate friend that she joined Arthur Jacobs Public Relations. However, her first assignment, on Bus Stop, proved to be short-lived. On the location in Phoenix she had a conflict with Marilyn Monroe, and Arthur Jacobs told her to return to Los Angeles. When questioned by Anthony Summers about the conflict with Marilyn, Newcomb stated, “We had this terrible falling out almost immediately. I didn’t know why for years, but it turned out to be over some guy that Marilyn thought I liked, someone I didn’t have any interest in at all. I didn’t know how to cope with it, and Arthur Jacobs told me I’d better get out of there at once.”

  The truth was that Marilyn had heard rumors that the spin doctor was a lesbian and having an affair with another woman connected with Arthur Jacobs. According to Rupert Allan, who had been in Phoenix when Newcomb’s proclivities were called to Marilyn’s attention, she telephoned Arthur Jacobs and requested that Newcomb be taken off Bus Stop. The moral climate was quite different in the fifties, and Allan observed that Marilyn didn’t want a situation that could indirectly involve her in scandal. Several years after Bus Stop, Newcomb would become Marilyn’s publicist and one of the last people to see Marilyn on the day she died—a day on which they were to have another “terrible falling out.”

  When the Bus Stop company returned to Los Angeles, Marilyn moved from the Beverly Glen house to the Chateau Marmont on the Strip, where she stayed in the former Jean Harlow suite. Manager Corrinne Patten recalled that Arthur Miller was a frequent weekend visitor: “His weekend visits to the Marmont were very hush-hush. He was supposed to be in residence in Reno, obtaining his divorce. Instead, he was sneaking away to be with Miss Monroe.”

  In March of 1956, Arthur Miller had traveled to Reno to establish a six-week residency for his divorce. He stayed in a small motel cottage at Pyramid Lake, fifty miles northeast of Reno. While waiting for his divorce he frequently visited the Stix house, which was in nearby Quail Canyon. The Stix house had been rented to an attractive divorcee who had befriended two cowboys. They were itinerants who made their living by searching the surrounding mountains for wild mustangs and selling them for dog food. Both were confirmed bachelors and heavy drinkers and fancied themselves lady-killers. Miller became intrigued with these two Wild West throwbacks to a vanishing frontier, and they would evolve into the central characters of The Misfits.

  “Once a week I would fly into Los Angeles, a technical illegality, since my period of residency in Nevada had to be unbroken,” Miller remembered. “Marilyn’s coach, Lee Strasberg’s wife, Paula, had the next room in the Chateau Marmont and was acting as Lee’s proxy, with daily phone calls to him in New York on Marilyn’s problems.”

  Amy Greene recalled that Joshua Logan began dreading Mondays at the studio, knowing that Marilyn would have difficulty getting back in touch with Cherie after a weekend with Arthur. “She was a wreck after those weekends,” Amy Greene reflected. “She couldn’t bring Arthur to see us, he couldn’t leave the hotel, and then suddenly on Sunday night or Monday morning, he skipped back to Nevada. This left her confused, guilty, lonely—and all that brought on a cycle of pills and sickness.”

  Marilyn didn’t get along well with her leading man, Don Murray, who was appearing in his first film. But Marilyn’s problem with Don Murray was on a professional level, not a personal one. An accomplished stage actor, Murray was a bright, well-educated, cultured young man, whom Logan had spotted on Broadway in the ANTA revival of The Skin of Our Teeth. In Bus Stop Murray had trouble in reaching for Bo’s crude behavior toward Cherie. His gentle approach worked against the animalistic sexual tension between Cherie and Bo—so essential to the thin story.

  Logan often sided with Murray in his less aggressive concept of the character, and Marilyn found herself alone in her struggle to uncivilize Murray while Cherie was trying to civilize Bo. Don Murray, who never topped his performance in Bus Stop, apparently was totally oblivious of what Marilyn managed to accomplish.

  “Like a child, she said and did things impulsively from a self-centered viewpoint,” according to
Murray. “When she thought I’d ruined a scene of hers, she continued the action as rehearsed, taking her costume and hitting me across the face with it. Some of the sequins scratched the corner of my eye and she ran off. But she wasn’t deliberately mean.”

  The scene Murray was referring to was the first encounter in the Blue Dragon Café, when Cherie tries to escape Bo’s advances and runs off the cabaret floor. Bo clutches at her costume and rips off the sequined train. Cherie grabs it back, angrily saying, “Give me back my tail,” and hits Bo across the face with it.

  Cherie’s spunky anger and the blow across the face are totally unexpected, and this shows in Bo’s reaction. The scene proved to be essential in establishing the undercurrent of their relationship, but Murray hadn’t wanted to play the scene that way. He felt that Bo should be playful, rather than “vulgar and aggressive.” He wanted to toy with the tail of her costume and have it come off accidentally rather than yank it off—and Logan was going along with him. Murray was so upset that Marilyn had struck him so hard with the tail that he went to Logan and said that he refused to work with her any longer unless she apologized. Logan took up the matter with Marilyn, who agreed to offer her apologies, but when the moment came and the two were face to face at the end of the day, Marilyn burst into tears and said, “Damn it, damn it—I won’t apologize to you, no, no!”

  Cherie had her way, and that’s what ended up on the screen—but Marilyn paid the price.

  After the incident on the set with Murray, Arthur Miller was awakened in the middle of the night by his motel manager, who told him he was wanted on the phone. It was near midnight when Miller put on his robe and ventured forth to the phone booth outside the motel office. It was Marilyn. “Her voice, always light and breathy, was barely audible,” Miller recalled:

  “I can’t do it, I can’t work this way. Oh, Papa, I can’t do it!” she said in the shorthand of breathless hysteria. “…says I did the scene with vulgarity…can’t stand women—none of them can. They’re afraid of women, the whole gang of them…. Vulgar! Vulgar! Supposed to rip off my tail—this thing I have sticking out of my costume in the back…. But angrily, so it makes a mockery of me so I can react, instead of just lifting it away. I didn’t even know he’d done it. So I said, ‘Rip it off! Be rough with me so I can make it real when I react.’ But they’re afraid to act nasty because the audience might not approve—you see what I mean? I’m no trained actor, I can’t pretend I’m doing something if I’m not. All I know is real! I can’t do it if it’s not real. And he calls me vulgar because I said that! Hates me! Hates me! Oh, Papa, I can’t do it anymore! I can’t make it!”

  Miller had never heard her so unguardedly desperate before, and he tried to calm and reassure her.

  “Oh, Papa, I can’t fight them alone. I don’t want this!” she sobbed. “I hate it! I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me, and be a good wife. I can’t fight for myself anymore.”

  She had never revealed this dependency before, and Miller recalled feeling the rush of trust she was expressing in him and their future together: “I suddenly saw that I was all she had, and then I realized that I was out of breath, a dizziness was screwing into my head, my knees unlocked, and I felt myself sliding to the floor of the phone booth, the receiver slipping out of my hand. I came to in what was probably a few seconds, her voice still whispering out of the receiver over my head. After a moment I got up and talked her down to earth, and it was over: she would try not to let it get to her tomorrow, just do the job and get on with it. Lights were still revolving behind my eyes. We would marry and start a new and real life once this picture was done.”

  39

  Mazel Jov!

  When you’re in love, the whole world is Jewish.

  —Paula Strasberg

  Marilyn once remarked that she had appeared on calendars “but never on Time,” In May 1956, however, she made the cover of Time magazine. A lengthy cover story by Ezra Goodman hinted at her romance with Arthur Miller.

  With Bus Stop completed, she returned to her Sutton Place South apartment in New York, where she was besieged by reporters seeking confirmation of the romance rumors. Marilyn declined to comment. Miller’s divorce was granted on June 11, and the next day he returned to the East Coast, where he found the press camping on Marilyn’s doorstep—along with a representative of the House Un-American Activities Committee, who handed him a subpoena. He was to appear before the committee in Washington on June 21.

  Miller wasn’t surprised at being called before HUAC. So many of his friends and associates had already been subpoenaed—Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, Hannah Weinstein. But the timing was bad. Arthur and Marilyn were planning on going to London for the production of The Prince and the Showgirl, and he needed a passport.

  The evening before Miller was to leave for Washington for the HUAC hearing, Spyros Skouras, the Greek immigrant who had become president of 20th Century-Fox, paid a surprise visit to Arthur and Marilyn in an attempt to encourage Miller to cooperate with the committee as Kazan, Odets, and Lee J. Cobb had done. If the rumors that Fox’s top star was going to marry a “pro-lefto” were true, Skouras’s concern was that patriotic organizations would boycott Marilyn Monroe movies. Miller described the meeting:

  When I opened our apartment door to let Skouras in, I saw that he was tired, a weary old man in a dinner jacket…. Marilyn immediately came into the foyer, and they embraced, almost tearfully on his part…. “Won’erful, won’erful,” he kept repeating with eyes closed, his nose in her hair…. Her nearness could make old men actually tremble, and in this was more security for her than in a vault full of money or a theater echoing with applause. Holding her hand to his lips, Skouras took her to the couch and sat beside her.

  “Hones’-to-Gah dahling, I worry about you personally. I can’t help what some of those people out there doin’ to you these years. I’m not Twentieth, I’m only the president. I speakin’ to you from my heart, Mahlin, dahlin’.”

  Out of the blue, he took Marilyn’s hand, and with an envelopment of privacy between them asked, “You in love, Switthar’?”

  She nodded that she was.

  “Gah-bless you—won’erful!” he said, patting her hand with fatherly benediction…turning to me he said, “Gah-bless you Artr—won’erful. I know you fine man, you goin’ take good care this girl. She’s like my own daughter, hones’-to-Gah!”

  Now that he had to believe we were not merely shacking up, the Company was inevitably and menacingly involved. With two pictures still owing them before she was totally free, her marrying at all was bad enough for her image of sexy availability, but to marry me in my situation was disaster. He sighed, “Artr, I hopin’ very much you not goin’ to make some terrible mistake with the Committee.”

  He came wide awake now, watching for my reaction. ‘I know these congressmen very well, Artr, we are good friends. They are not bad men, they can be reasonable. I believe personally, Artr, that in your case they would take you privately in executive session, you understand? No necessity to be in the public at all. I can arrange this if you tell me?”

  In the subtext of the times, Skouras meant that in exchange for “clearing” himself by naming names and cooperating with the committee, Miller would be questioned in camera instead of in open hearings, which would be widely reported by the press. Miller was tempted, but the committee members didn’t want to hear him in camera. They wanted to question him in open hearings.

  When Miller was called he was represented by attorney Joseph Rauh, who had also represented Lillian Hellman. Miller’s appearance before the committee was on June 21, 1956, in the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building. Miller’s clash with the committee came when he refused time and again to name others he had met at communist gatherings. “I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him,” he stated to his interrogators. “These are writers, poets, as far as I could see, and the life of a writer, de
spite what it sometimes seems, is pretty tough. I wouldn’t make it any tougher on anybody. I ask you not to ask me that question.”

  Miller’s words had an effect on all who listened. Even the committee was taken aback by the sense of honor revealed; however, according to one source, the words were Marilyn’s. In 1961, Marilyn related to Danny Greenson, the son of psychiatrist Ralph Greenson, that Arthur Miller had been afraid. He had seen the careers of many writers destroyed by the committee. Miller had been very tempted to name names. It was Marilyn who told him he mustn’t make any writer’s or poet’s life tougher than it already was. Marilyn revealed to Danny that she had told Miller, “You can’t let those bastards push you around. You’ve got to stand up to them.” When she related this in 1961 it was of great interest to Danny, because at the time he was a student at the University of California at Berkeley, and as a political leftist and a member of SLATE* he had been demonstrating against the Un-American Activities Committee. Danny Greenson later commented, “She really was unsophisticated politically, but her instincts were always with the underdog and—to me—on the side of right. There was more to Marilyn than met the eye.”

  Marilyn was suspicious of any doctrinaire political theories, and her sentiments, which were drawn from her own experience, were with the downtrodden and people in emotional and material need. Though she disagreed with Stalinism or any form of tyranny, she respected the individual’s right to embrace what he or she believed in.

  At the hearings, Marilyn stood by the man she loved, and in doing so played one of her better roles. She wisely played the role of the loving ingenue waif and engendered sympathy for Miller. When asked by reporters about Miller’s testimony, she smiled sweetly and replied, “I don’t know much about politics. I’ll have to have a good talk with him, and I think he’s very tired.” However, Marilyn’s New York maid Lena Pepitone later revealed that when Marilyn was mad at Arthur, she would refer to him as “that damned communist!”