The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  DiMaggio was a frequent visitor when Marilyn returned to her apartment on East 57th Street. Her half-sister described his angry reaction to an incident that would also have exasperated Miller. She noted that DiMaggio was still looking after Marilyn's interests – though he could not contain her extravagance – and that she must have resented his discovery of her habitual carelessness:"Joe spies a discarded bill and idly fishes it out [of the trash bin]. He scans over the list of household supplies and wines that have been delivered in the afternoon. He grumbles loudly, 'This bill is not right! It's added up nearly double! Doesn't someone check these things when they are delivered?'" DiMaggio gave a great deal to Marilyn and took nothing from her. In her last, unfinished letter to DiMaggio, found after her death, Marilyn wrote, "If I can succeed in making you happy, I will have succeeded in the biggest and most difficult thing there is – that is, to make one person completely happy. Your happiness means my happiness, and . . . "

  She continued to be plagued by medical problems. On June 28, 1961, still only thirty-five years old, Marilyn entered the hospital for the fifth time in the last ten months. She'd had a nervous breakdown during The Misfits in August 1960; been confined in Payne Whitney and in Columbia Presbyterian in February – March 1961; had a second (unavailing) operation for chronic endometriosis in May; and had her gallbladder removed in June. When she left the Polyclinic Hospital on West 50th Street in New York on July 11, she was assaulted by devoted and deranged fans (short for "fanatics"). "It was scary," she wrote. "I felt for a few minutes as if they were just going to take pieces out of me. Actually it made me feel a little sick. I mean I appreciated the concern and their affection and all that, but – I don't know – it was a little like a nightmare. I wasn't sure I was going to get into the car safely and get away!"8

  III

  Attempting to achieve a sense of stability and security, Marilyn bought her first house in February 1962 for $77,500, paying half in cash and taking out a mortgage for the rest. 12305 Fifth Helena Drive was on a short cul-de-sac off Carmelina Avenue, between Sunset Boulevard and San Vicente, in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles. Unlike the glamorous houses of most Hollywood stars, it was a modest, personal refuge. Marilyn bought some essential furniture on shopping trips to Tijuana and Mexico City: tiles for the kitchen, tin masks and mirrors for the walls, and textiles depicting Aztec figures. But the house was sparsely furnished and her phonograph remained on the floor. The small, 2,900-square-foot, one-story, L-shaped, Spanish-colonial home had adobe walls and a red-tile roof, and was protected by a high wall. It had two bedrooms, a small guest house, an oval swimming pool and a large garden. The interior had white stucco walls, white carpeting, cathedral-beamed ceilings, and tiled fireplaces in both the living room and master bedroom.

  She called it "a cute little Mexican-style house with eight rooms," and regretfully added, "I live alone and I hate it!" She loved animals and had always been fond of pets, who soothed her loneliness. She had had Tippy, the stray puppy of her childhood, who was shot by a neighbor; Josefa, a Chihuahua, named after its donor Joseph Schenck; and Hugo, Miller's basset hound, who helped pass her idle hours in Roxbury. Frank Sinatra now gave her a poodle called Maf (short for "Mafia"), whose name recalled his mob connections. Proud of the house and the improvements she made, she keenly showed visitors around and called it "a fortress where I can feel safe from the world".

  After her divorce from Miller, Marilyn attempted to fill the emotional emptiness in her life with a number of love affairs – all of them unhappy. She'd met the attractive and electrifying Frank Sinatra, a familiar mixture of vulgarity and glamor, through his friend Joe DiMaggio. When DiMaggio broke with Sinatra after the farcical Wrong Door Raid, Marilyn became sexually involved with her favorite singer. Sinatra loved luxury, was a lavish spender and tried to live up to his romantic reputation. But his seductive promises about marriage had recently deceived the sophisticated Lauren Bacall. She "said that she 'loved' her good times with Frank but that he could become 'ice cold'; she admitted that it was 'quite terrifying to be a victim of that.' . . . At a New Year's Eve party, Bacall said, Sinatra got drunk and became abusive, bringing her to tears."9 Resenting the pressure to marry, Sinatra publicly dumped Bacall when he got fed up with her. Notorious for his abrasive personality, Sinatra could be equally cruel with Marilyn. When she was talking to friends and dramatizing her orphaned childhood, Sinatra interrupted her by exclaiming, "Oh, not that again!" His boorish comments recalled Fred Karger's cruel put-downs. When she bored him, Sinatra (no great brain himself) would shout: "Shut up, Norma Jeane. You're so stupid you don't know what you're talking about."

  In January 1962, Sinatra discarded her and became engaged to the dancer Juliet Prowse. As usual, Marilyn hopelessly pursued the man who'd jilted her. The following month, Eunice Murray told the FBI that Marilyn was "very vulnerable now because of her rejection by ARTHUR MILLER and also by JOE DiMAGGIO and FRANK SINATRA. She telephoned SINATRA to come and comfort her and he would not do it." Marilyn would spend the last weekend of her life at Lake Tahoe in Sinatra's Cal-Neva Lodge, where the line dividing the two states cut through the public rooms and swimming pool. She was invited by the actor Peter Lawford to hear Sinatra sing and discussed future projects with Dean Martin. But she spent most of her time (quite separate from Sinatra) with DiMaggio.10

  With Ralph Roberts banished and Eunice Murray hostile, Marilyn turned for comfort to her West Coast publicist, Pat Newcomb. Four years younger than Marilyn, she came from a wealthy and prominent Washington, D.C. family – her father was a judge, her mother a psychiatric social worker – and had graduated from Mills College in Oakland, California. Blond and attractive, she had the classy look of the Kennedy sisters. Marilyn's maid described Newcomb as "an eager, efficient college girl who didn't threaten Marilyn at all. Pat was all business, seeing her role as mainly one of shielding Marilyn from the press, setting up interviews and photography sessions, making sure all her travel plans went smoothly." Newcomb accompanied Marilyn to Mexico for her divorce from Miller, and helped her find and furnish her new house. On the last day of Marilyn's life, Newcomb unintentionally infuriated her insomniac boss by sleeping overnight in the house for twelve long hours.

  IV

  Living in her isolated, makeshift way in Brentwood, Marilyn was courted and discarded by various unscrupulous men. In one of the most bizarre episodes of her life, she became involved with the president of the United States. Peter Lawford, John Kennedy's brother-in-law, introduced Marilyn to him and his brother Robert, the attorney general. Their womanizing father, Joseph Kennedy, had had a well-known liaison with the actress Gloria Swanson; Presidents Roosevelt and Eisenhower both had mistresses. The youthful, handsome, wealthy Kennedy, complete with elegant wife and pretty children, followed an even more promiscuous path. A historian of Hollywood politics noted that Kennedy's "dalliance with Marilyn Monroe chiseled into the culture the assumption that power's rewards included access to the iridescent life of the famous, with its code of license barred to ordinary men and women." In those days the press protected the randy president, who cavorted with naked beauties in the White House swimming pool, and the public knew nothing about the private life of the remarkably idealized man. But there was always the danger of scandal to add drama and excitement to his seductions. He did not have much time for protracted liaisons, but enjoyed flirting with his lovers on the phone. The Oval Office telephone tapes recorded "much explicit talk of a sexual nature with Monroe."11

  The journalist Seymour Hersh stated that the Marilyn–Kennedy affair began in the mid-1950s and lasted into the presidency, and that she once visited his family estate on Cape Cod. But their main venues were Lawford's beach house in Santa Monica and the Carlyle Hotel (Kennedy's favorite) in New York. Both Marilyn and Kennedy knew how it felt to be irresistibly attractive and adored by millions. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the Harvard historian and Special Assistant to the president, revealed that Marilyn could seduce intellectuals as well as the mass of
ordinary men. He found her ravishing, but (like Natasha Lytess, Nunnally Johnson and George Cukor) noted her remote, withdrawn and detached "under water" quality:

  The image of this exquisite, beguiling and desperate girl will always stay with me. I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful; I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible unreality about her – as if talking to someone under water. Bobby [Kennedy] and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me, but one never felt her to be wholly engaged. Indeed, she seemed most solicitous to her ex-father-in-law, Arthur Miller's father, a baffled and taciturn man whom she introduced to the group and on whom she constantly cast a maternal eye.

  Like an overeager pupil, Marilyn may have bored Kennedy with some liberal ideas that she'd picked up, second-hand, from Miller. The FBI, without (as usual) establishing the reliability of its informant, reported that Marilyn had met Kennedy at the Lawfords': "She was very pleased, as she had asked the President a lot of socially significant questions concerning the morality of atomic testing and the future of the youth of America. She already had been asked by LAWFORD to appear at the President's birthday party." Her maid reported, more persuasively than the FBI, that Marilyn was completely unaware of contemporary political events: "To Marilyn, Castro was a convertible sofa, not a dictator. Because she didn't read the paper or listen to the radio, she didn't know the Bay of Pigs invasion [of April 1961] ever occurred."12

  In any case, Kennedy had no time for sexual niceties, let alone political pillow talk. When dallying with her, Marilyn said, "he wouldn't indulge in foreplay, because he was on the run all the time." Her sometime neighbor, the minor actress and trick-shot golfer Jeanne Carmen, gave a crude but convincing account of Marilyn's galloping connection with the president:

  To John Kennedy, Marilyn was just another fuck. I don't think he ever really cared about her the way Bobby did, and I don't think she was ever really in love with him. And he wasn't even good in bed; I can tell you that one firsthand, because I had him too. I don't know too many women out here who didn't sleep with Jack. He was a two-minute man. I think sex to him was just about another conquest.

  Now, Bobby was a different story. He was sweet, cute and playful, and he really cared about Marilyn. . . . I think he was in love with her, in his own little way.

  When John sent his brother to break off his affair with Marilyn, Robert quickly succumbed to her charms and had his own affair with her. In this negative version of vicarious courtship, the envoy replaced the lover he was supposed to represent. Since Marilyn could no longer have John, she maintained her glamorous connection to Washington by taking Robert as his surrogate. The young attorney general, the nation's chief prosecutor and notable family man, was equally dazzled by the Hollywood star.

  Marilyn first met Robert at Peter Lawford's house of assignation on February 1, 1962. The next day she sent Miller's teenage son a girlishly enthusiastic letter describing how she had spoken up for the "youth of America":

  Oh, Bobby, guess what. I had dinner last night with the Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, and I asked him what his department was going to do about Civil Rights and some other issues. He is very intelligent, and besides all that, he's got a terrific sense of humor. I think you would like him. Anyway, I had to go to this dinner last night as he was the guest of honor, and when they asked him who he wanted to meet, he wanted to meet me. So I went to the dinner and I sat next to him, and he isn't a bad dancer, either. . . . He asked if I had been attending some kind of meetings (ha ha!). I laughed and said, "No, but these are the kind of questions that the youth of America want answers to and want things done about." Not that I'm so youthful, but I feel youthful. But he's an old 36 himself, which astounded me because I'm 35. It was a pleasant evening, all in all.

  Their sporadic affair lasted only a few months, though Robert saw her on the last day of her life. A friend later recalled that in January 1964 Robert "handed me a packet of letters – maybe a dozen or so – and told me to 'get rid of them.' . . . He admitted to me later that they were love missives both he and Jack had received from Marilyn Monroe."13 She undoubtedly wrote to the Kennedys, but it seems highly unlikely that Robert would give the volatile letters to a friend instead of simply destroying them himself.

  The FBI – along with the Kennedys, the corrupt union leader Jimmy Hoffa and the executives at Fox – had all wired Marilyn's house and tapped her phone. In January 1965, the FBI (run by Robert's fierce enemy, J. Edgar Hoover) turned up some evidence about the liaison: "An alleged relationship between the Attorney General and Marilyn Monroe had come to the Bureau's attention previously." After Fox cancelled her contract, Marilyn Monroe phoned Robert Kennedy at the Department of Justice "to tell him the bad news. ROBERT KENNEDY told her not to worry about the contract – he would take care of everything. When nothing was done, she again called him from her home to the Department of Justice, person-to-person, and on this occasion they had unpleasant words. She was reported to have threatened to make public their affair."

  Marilyn never quite understood, even after three divorces, that many men wanted to sleep with her but very few wanted to marry her. Miller had left his wife for Marilyn; Montand and the Kennedys would not. (Jackie Kennedy's imitation of Marilyn's breathy, whispering voice may have been an attempt to make herself more attractive to her husband.) These sophisticated men had casual affairs with Marilyn and then abandoned her. She fell in love and expected them to marry her. When they rejected her and told her the affair was over, she pursued them and made her wound more bitter. Complaining to Lawford about a recurrent pattern in her life, she said angrily that the Kennedys "use you and then they dispose of you like so much rubbish." The superstar also told another man that she'd been treated like a whore: "I feel passed around! I feel used! I feel like a piece of meat!"14

  V

  Marilyn's last project, Something's Got to Give, was the greatest disaster of her career. The shooting began on April 23, 1962, and recapitulated in a more intense way all the problems of her previous movies. It was a remake – almost always worse than the original – of the Cary Grant-Irene Dunne comedy, My Favorite Wife (1940), in which a female explorer, presumed dead seven years after her shipwreck, suddenly turns up on the day her husband has finally remarried.

  Peter Levathes, the new head of production at Fox, came (like Skouras) from a Greek background. A lawyer, formerly head of the television department of a New York advertising agency, he'd replaced Zanuck and was supposed to reverse the studio's alarming financial decline. The director Jean Negulesco described him as "a tall, dark man, nervous and with the faraway look of a man with responsibilities beyond his understanding or ability." Hoping to prevent Marilyn's notorious lateness, Levathes instantly met all her demands. At her insistence, he dismissed the producer David Barry and replaced him with Harvey Weinstein, a New York stage and television producer who (under Greenson's guidance) was supposed to be able to control her. Levathes agreed to have the script extensively rewritten. He also hired Marilyn's first choice, Dean Martin, as her leading man, but this too caused conflict. Martin (who spent most of the time practicing his golf strokes) made $300,000 plus 7.5 percent of future profits. Marilyn, still under the stringent Fox contract, got only $100,000. When she became dissatisfied with the director Frank Taschlin, Levathes – at a cost of $250,000 – replaced him with George Cukor, who'd directed Let's Make Love.

  Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the fatuous scripts of Marilyn's We're Not Married and How to Marry a Millionaire, completed the screenplay and left for Europe. In true Hollywood style, six other writers then worked on the script, constantly changing but never improving it. To conceal their handiwork and deceive Marilyn, they had the secretaries retype the pages on white paper instead of the blue normally used for rewrites. In the end, there were only four pages left of Johnson's screenplay. Marilyn, naturally confused and upset by all the changes, wa
s angry about not being consulted or respected.

  Finally, Walter Bernstein, a bright Dartmouth graduate and once-blacklisted writer, was brought in to do a "final polish" – or revive the corpse. As he discussed the script with Marilyn, Bernstein found "her manner at once tentative, apologetic, and intransigent." When they disagreed about a scene, she exclaimed, "Don't be such a writer." She thought that Bernstein, like Miller, was too defensive about his script and too unreasonable in expecting the words to be spoken as he'd written them. She also, playing the operatic diva and repeating Paula Strasberg's grandiose notions, referred to herself in the third person: "Remember, you've got Marilyn Monroe. . . . You've got to use her." Glad to have the job, Bernstein added one scene in the bedroom. But he thought Johnson's original script was fine and that there was no real reason for all the changes. They merely made Marilyn even more insecure and unhappy.15

  When shooting finally began, Marilyn, pleading poor health, turned up for only thirteen of the first thirty work days. "If she did show up," Bernstein recalled, "it was like the Second Coming. Everybody bowed down and genuflected." In six weeks, Cukor, running a million dollars over budget, managed to turn out only seven-and-a-half minutes of usable film. From her infrequent appearances it was clear to him that she could no longer function as an actress. Something's Got to Give (in its few completed scenes) is an awful movie and Marilyn is quite awful in it. She's stiff and unnatural with her "cute" Hollywood children, who are playing in the pool when she returns home as a stranger and is reunited with them.