By nine-thirty, Ebbins couldn’t take it anymore. He opened the door to Marilyn’s bedroom and pleaded with her to hurry. He saw her sitting at her vanity table, naked, staring at herself in the mirror. “Marilyn, for God’s sake,” he said. “Come on! The president’s waiting—everybody’s waiting!”
Marilyn looked at him dreamily. “Oh,” she said. “I’m glad you finally showed up. I need someone to help me put on my dress.”
Marilyn arrived at the party some time after ten, according to Ebbins, “and did she look sensational—like a princess. Marilyn sashayed over to the president and said, ‘Hi Prez!’ He turned around, smiled at Marilyn, and said, ‘Hi! Come on, I want you to meet some people.’” As they walked away, Marilyn looked back at Ebbins and winked. He later learned that dinner was never served. Everybody feasted on hors d’oeuvres and got blind drunk. Nobody cared about dinner after a while, and Marilyn, of course, was the hit of the party.
Before Marilyn’s return to Hollywood, she met with Lee Strasberg. Despite warnings that he was sick with a bad cold, they had several sessions together discussing Something’s Got to Give, scene by scene. Over dinner on April 18, she convinced Paula Strasberg to return to Hollywood at a salary of three thousand dollars a week and, for the fifth time, become her private coach during production. On the way to the airport on April 19, Marilyn told Paula, “I think I’m coming down with Lee’s cold.”
When Marilyn returned to Los Angeles, she was met by a surprise. The Nunnally Johnson script she had memorized and gone over scene by scene with Lee Strasberg had been totally rewritten by Walter Bernstein, the blacklisted writer Henry Weinstein had brought back from London.
On Sunday, April 22, one day before her first day of shooting, Marilyn became wracked with chills and fever. Virtually unable to leave her bed, she picked up the phone and called Weinstein. “I wanted to tell you as early as possible,” she whispered, “I’m not going to be able to be on the set tomorrow.” Weinstein listened with growing alarm. Marilyn’s illnesses and problems had caused costly delays on Some Like It Hot, Let’s Make Love, and The Misfits, but this would be the first time she had shut down a production on the first day. On Monday morning at Fox on Stage 14, there would be the cast and 104 crew members waiting and ready to roll, and no leading lady.
For several days, George Cukor shot around Marilyn, doing scenes involving Dean Martin, Cyd Charisse, and Tom Tryon. Suffering from high fevers, dizziness, and lethargy, Marilyn complained of “unbearable pain behind my eyes.” An acute viral cold had developed into a serious sinus infection. Dr. Engelberg diagnosed it as “sinusitis,” and tests at Cedars-Sinai showed that she had contracted “chronic sinusitis,” which usually required a month of massive antibiotic treatment to cure.
A parade of studio insurance doctors visited Marilyn’s house. “Nobody believed she was really sick,” said production secretary Lee Hanna. New York executives were always skeptical of opinions by the private medical community and they sent their own studio doctor, Lee Siegel. Siegel, a tall, handsome man with a suave bedside manner, had been treating the actress off and on since 1951. He recorded her temperature at 101 degrees, described her respiratory tract as “badly occluded,” and noted that she had a serious secondary infection of the throat. “It will take weeks to cure this infection,” he wrote in a memorandum.
At Fox, the mood was grim. “Everyone knew that unless Marilyn felt in perfect condition, she couldn’t come in,” said Weinstein. “We were now at the mercy of all these doctors.” The frustrated director, George Cukor, thought “she was malingering.” But Eunice Murray recalled that “Marilyn woke up each morning at three with a headache and a high fever.” Each day she tried to go to the studio, but wasn’t able to make it. Studio logs show that Marilyn called for her limousine four times during the first seven days of her illness. On one of those days, chauffeur Rudy Kautzky was told by Mrs. Murray that Marilyn had passed out in the bathtub. “She knew she was sick, but was still guilty about not going in,” said masseur Ralph Roberts, who had returned to Hollywood at Marilyn’s request, despite Greenson’s misgivings.
On April 30, against Dr. Siegel’s advice, Marilyn went to the studio and filmed for about ninety minutes before collapsing in her dressing room and being driven home. Though she made repeated efforts to work, she was confined to her bed again from May 5 to 11. While Marilyn tried to regain her health, and Cukor rooted around for sequences to film without her, fear was creeping into the Fox executive building. Fox was concurrently filming the ravenous cash-eating monster Cleopatra in Europe. Problems with both productions threatened to bankrupt the studio.
While Greenson had guaranteed Fox that Marilyn would be on the set each day and the film would be finished on schedule, he hadn’t anticipated physical illness. Paranoid studio executives called Greenson at frequent intervals, reminding him of his assurances and seeking clues to her possible motivations in destroying the studio. Was she really sick? Was she sabotaging them because she was being underpaid? Had she had a mental collapse? Had she succumbed to drugs?
Inexplicably, Greenson departed from Los Angeles on May 10 for four weeks. His disappearance at this very critical time in Marilyn’s life remains a mystery. He told Fox that his wife was ill and needed to be treated at a hospital in Switzerland. But that proved not to be true. He told Marilyn and several associates that he was going to Europe on a speaking engagement. In his absence he designated the analyst who shared his Beverly Hills office, Dr. Milton Wexler, to care for his patient. Dr. Wexler, who still practices from his Santa Monica home, refuses to discuss why Greenson left town, where he went, or anything relating to his own visits to Marilyn during Greenson’s absence. But according to an associate who was close to the psychoanalyst at the time, Greenson went to Switzerland and on to Germany, where he attended a conference at the Frankfurt School.
In his textbook Explorations in Psychoanalysis, Dr. Greenson discussed Marilyn and the problem of his departure. Without naming the patient, in the chapter “On Transitional Objects and Transference” Greenson wrote about an emotionally immature patient who used a chess piece as a talisman to get over his absence at a time when she was making a public appearance of great importance. Greenson wrote, “The young woman had recently been given a gift of a carved ivory chess set…. As she looked at the set through the sparkling light of a glass of champagne, it suddenly struck her that I looked like the white knight of her chess set. The realization evoked in her a feeling of comfort…. The white knight was a protector, it belonged to her, she could carry it wherever she went, it would look after her, and I could go on my merry way to Europe without having to worry about her.”
The public appearance, of course, was the president’s birthday gala.
On May 14, Marilyn was finally feeling better and returned to the studio, but a rumor was spreading through the Fox corporate headquarters that Marilyn was planning to attend President Kennedy’s birthday gala scheduled for Saturday, May 19, at Madison Square Garden.
Henry Weinstein had given Marilyn tentative approval to attend, but this had been before the number of production delays caused by Marilyn’s illness. Marilyn had spent six thousand dollars on an incredible gown designed by Jean-Louis, and the arrangements for her appearance at the gala had been made through Peter Lawford, who was enthralled with the thought of having Marilyn sing “Happy Birthday” to the president.
Gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen had already reported to radio listeners that Marilyn was to be the centerpiece of the president’s forty-fifth birthday celebration and that a “spectacular dress” had been created for the star.
Designer Jean-Louis recalled Marilyn asking him to create a dazzling gown for the occasion. He said, “It was made of flesh-colored silk gauze embroidered with rhinestones to reflect the spotlights. Each rhinestone was hand-sewn into place.” During one of the fittings Jean-Louis said there was a call from Hyannisport, which Marilyn took in the next room. When she returned she was singing, “Happy Birthday,
Mr. Presi…”—stopped, and said with a wink, “Oops, I’m not supposed to say that.” Norman Jefferies remembered Marilyn letting him hold the gown when it first arrived at her home, and the entire silk gown could be held in the palm of his hand.
But word came from the New York office that Marilyn wasn’t to attend the gala. Milton Gould, the lawyer who was head of the Fox executive committee, instructed Frank Ferguson, the studio’s chief counsel, to warn Marilyn against leaving the set on Thursday for the flight to New York. Though the event was on Saturday, rehearsals were set for late Friday. While it seemed improbable that a major studio would pass up such a major publicity event for one of its top stars, a two-page letter threatening the star with dismissal if she left the set of Something’s Got to Give was sent to Mickey Rudin. The letter stated, “In the event that Miss Monroe absents herself, this action will constitute a willful failure to render services. In the event that Miss Monroe returns and principal photography of the motion picture continues—such re-commencement will not be deemed to constitute a waiver of [Fox’s] right to fire Miss Monroe as stated in her contract.”
When Marilyn heard about the letter from the Fox legal department, she called Bobby Kennedy, who knew Judge Rosenman and the top people on the Fox board of directors. However, Kennedy was concerned that factions within the Democratic Party would disapprove of her appearance, and he tried to discourage her from attending. Some leaders had previously expressed their concerns over JFK’s association with Monroe. Soon there were private expressions of outrage. Richard Adler, a coordinator of the event, recalled that key leaders called him the day before the gala and begged him to cut Monroe from the ceremony. Six congressmen and three senators, all Democrats, sent him telegrams to protest her appearance. At the time, Washington was awash with gossip about the president’s affair with the Hollywood actress. Former CBS news producer Ted Landreth, who later produced the BBC documentary Say Goodbye to the President (1986), said that “highly placed political leaders knew of the affair. The Washington press corps knew about it, as well.” But either the president failed to perceive the dangers, or the reckless duality of his nature blinded him to the consequences.
Weinstein felt that Marilyn was determined to go in any event; “I mean, here’s a girl who really did come from the streets, who had a mother who wasn’t there, and a father who had disappeared, a girl who had known all the poverty in the world. And now, she was going to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the president of the United States in Madison Square Garden. There was no way for her to resist that.”
When the production company of Something’s Got to Give broke for lunch on Thursday, May 17, a deafening whine announced the arrival of an enormous helicopter that set down on the heliport near soundstage 14. Borrowed by Peter Lawford from Howard Hughes, the space-age chariot had arrived to take the Lady of Shalott to Camelot. Leaping from the helicoptor, Lawford hurried to Marilyn’s dressing room and escorted her to the waiting royal blue chopper. Following several steps behind them were Pat Newcomb and Paula Strasberg. As they boarded the helicoptor, Lawford glanced behind him, hoping he wouldn’t see an enraged Cukor running after them. Before the frustrated director and the executives at the Zanuck building knew what happened, the helicopter rose quickly into the air and headed for the Los Angeles Airport.
Marilyn’s appearance at the Madison Square Garden Presidential Gala on May 19, 1962, would be her first performance before a large audience since she had entertained the troops in Korea during her honeymoon with Joe DiMaggio. The gala was to be attended by fifteen thousand people and televised to the nation. In a sense, the event was the apex of a dream—the fulfillment of Norma Jeane’s dream of attainment, of being accepted and wanted. One of the most popular and beloved film stars of Hollywood singing “Happy Birthday” to the most important man in the world, the president of the United States.
Mickey Song, Marilyn’s hairdresser at the event, stated, “While I was working on Marilyn, she was extremely nervous and uptight. The dressing room door was open and Bobby Kennedy was pacing back and forth outside, glaring at us. Finally, he came into the dressing room and said to me, ‘Would you step out for a minute?’ When I did, he closed the door behind him, and he stayed in there for about fifteen minutes.”
While waiting in the hall outside the dressing room, Mickey Song could hear Kennedy and Marilyn having an argument. The attorney general’s voice was growing louder and louder, and he was using expletives. When Kennedy came out he said to Song, “You can go in now,” and then unexpectedly grabbed Song by the arm and demanded, “By the way, do you like her?”
Song recalled nodding enthusiastically that he did.
“Well, I think she’s a rude fucking bitch!” Kennedy exclaimed as he stormed down the hall.
When Song entered the dressing room he noticed that Marilyn was disheveled. She tried to smile and asked, “Could you help me get myself back together?”
Marilyn grew terrified as showtime approached, and had some champagne to steady her nerves. She had difficulty in remembering a stanza of the birthday song that had been written especially for the president. Richard Adler, the producer of the show, had suggested to Jack Kennedy that Marilyn be cut from the production because he felt she might flub her song lines. “Oh, I think she’ll be very good,” Kennedy responded.
During the show, the president sat in the presidential box, his feet up on the rail, smoking a cigar. Bobby and Ethel Kennedy sat nearby. Jackie Kennedy had begged off. When she heard that Marilyn was going to be there she elected to go horseback riding in Virginia.
While emcee Peter Lawford built up the running gag that led to her entrance, Marilyn sat in the wings. She had lost her white knight, and as she waited for her cue her terror increased. Milt Ebbins recalled that she was heavily fortified by champagne well before her cue at the finale. At last, Lawford said, “Mr. President, because, in the history of show business, perhaps there has been no one female who has meant so much, who has done more…Mr. President—the late Marilyn Monroe!” There was a thunderous ovation as the spotlights picked up Marilyn’s entrance. The thousands of rhinestones created around her a halo of luminosity, and she seemingly floated toward the microphone. Handing Lawford the white ermine jacket she had secretly borrowed from the Fox wardrobe department, she began softly singing to the president in her inimitable breathless manner—giving each syllable a meaning all its own:
Happy birthday—to—you
Happy birthday—to—you,
Happy Birthday Mr. Pres—i—dent
Happy Birthday to you.
Singing over the raucous laughter and applause, she then rendered a flawless rendition of the special verse written by Richard Adler to the tune of “Thanks for the Memories!”:
Thanks, Mr. President,
For all the things you’ve done,
The battles that you’ve won,
The way you deal with U.S. Steel,
And our problems by the ton,
We thank you—so much!
As the giant birthday cake was wheeled onto the stage, Marilyn led the throng in another chorus, then stepped away from the microphone as the president took the stage during an overwhelming ovation and said, “Thank you. I can now retire from politics after having had, ah, “Happy Birthday” sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”
After Marilyn’s performance, she was literally carried back to her dressing room, where she complained to her maid, Hazel Washington, of feeling dizzy. The stress of the event was exhausting, and she had a recurrence of the sinusitis. Hazel tried to persuade her to return to the apartment, but Marilyn insisted on attending a postgala party at the penthouse of theater magnate Arthur Krim. “I was very worried about her,” said Hazel Washington. “From that evening on, Marilyn just kept getting sicker and sicker, but she wouldn’t stop.”
She was escorted to Arthur Krim’s party by her former father-in-law, Isadore Miller, whom Marilyn introduced to the president and the attorney general. She had been the hit
of the gala, and she mesmerized the crowd as she moved through the party from group to group receiving congratulations for her stunning performance. Adlai Stevenson, who attended the Krim party, said later, “I don’t think I had ever seen anyone so beautiful as Marilyn Monroe that night. She was wearing skin and beads. I didn’t see the beads! My encounters with her, however, were only after breaking through the strong defenses established by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around her like a moth around a flame.”
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., noted, “There was at once something magical and desperate about her. Bobby, with his chivalry, his sympathy and absolute directness of response, got through the glittering mist surrounding Marilyn as few did.” But Bobby Kennedy’s “directness of response” and backstage maneuvers hadn’t gotten through the mist surrounding Marilyn’s determination to appear at the gala.
Later during the course of the party, the president and Bobby Kennedy escorted Marilyn to a quiet corner where the three held a private but animated conversation for a quarter of an hour. Although a number of photographs were taken of this occasion, only one photograph survives, the rest having been destroyed by the Secret Service. Dorothy Kilgallen later reported that Marilyn and Bobby Kennedy danced five times during the evening, while an angry Ethel Kennedy looked on. As they walked from the dance floor, they encountered uninvited White House journalist Merriman Smith. Smith was making notations in his notebook, and at two-thirty in the morning, Secret Service agents were banging on Smith’s door to interrogate him about his notes. “They wanted to make sure I didn’t write about Marilyn and Bobby.” Agents also appeared at eight-thirty the next morning in the photo lab of Time magazine and demanded the photo negatives showing the Kennedys and Monroe at the Krim party.
In the early hours of Sunday, the president and Marilyn left the party and took a private elevator that descended to the basement of the Krim apartment building. From there they walked through the labyrinth of tunnels that connected it to the Carlyle Hotel and the private elevator to the Kennedy penthouse overlooking Manhattan. It was the denouement of a very special day, and what Marilyn hoped would be the dawn of a new dream. But it proved to be the beginning of a rapid descent into a nightmare.
The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe Page 47