The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Marilyn's megalomania was combined with – perhaps stimulated by – her feelings of fear, inadequacy and worthlessness. Without Miller to reassure and restrain (if not control) her, she was now even more difficult to deal with. Bernstein said the studio had a big investment in Marilyn, one of the very few stars who could "open a picture" and draw an audience to see her movie. But no one knew how to handle her. Levathes was weak, Weinstein weaker. Everyone was scared, and Marilyn filled the power vacuum. Fox conceded too much and gave in for too long. Like a child with a loaded gun, Marilyn was out of control and got away with outrageous demands. Zanuck, much tougher than his successors, would never have indulged her.16 Yet once more, production halted because she was sick.

  In the midst of this crisis, Marilyn suddenly recovered her health and flew to New York to appear at President Kennedy's forty-fifth birthday party. She was thrilled to know that her idol, Jean Harlow, had attended President Roosevelt's birthday ball in 1934. But Levathes, furious at her absence, failed to see that this extraordinary event – which combined politics and power with celebrity and fame – was a superb opportunity to publicize her latest picture. On May 19, in Madison Square Garden – along with Maria Callas, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Henry Fonda and Jack Benny – Marilyn performed before 15,000 faithful Democrats, who contributed a million dollars to the party. As she was being sewn into her shimmering, skin-tight dress, the actor Peter Lawford, punning on her habitual fault and foreshadowing her fate, introduced her as "the late Marilyn Monroe." She turned "Happy Birthday, Mista Pwes-i-dent" into a breathy, even orgasmic tribute, rated PG for parental guidance, not suitable for children's parties.

  Kennedy, with ironic wit, said he was pleased that "Miss Monroe had sung happy birthday to him in such a wholesome way." Few people in the wildly enthusiastic audience knew that Marilyn had been Kennedy's mistress and was publicly expressing her love. Adlai Stevenson, echoing Arthur Schlesinger and perhaps in the know, wrote a friend about his " 'perilous encounters' that evening with Marilyn, 'dressed in what she calls "skin and beads." I didn't see the beads! . . . Robert Kennedy was dodging around her like a moth around the flame.'"

  Marilyn was eager for even more publicity to strengthen her hand in the struggle with Fox. On May 28 she posed for nude photos in the swimming pool on the set, which was modeled on Cukor's luxurious house. The photos showed that her body was still sensuous and beautiful. But all her serious ambitions, all her lessons at the Actors Studio, had led to a rotten movie and another display of her body.

  Speaking of disputes during production, Billy Wilder once told me, "If there's a serious conflict halfway through a film, the actor stays, must stay, and the director must go." Cukor, increasingly bitter and angry about Marilyn's behavior, urged the studio to replace her. Instead, he was replaced by Jean Negulesco, who'd directed How to Marry a Millionaire. When asked by the critic Kenneth Tynan what food Marilyn resembled, Cukor unkindly compared her to "a three-day-old Van de Kamp Bakery angel cake."17 Interviewed later on, he repeated the "under water" image that had struck previous colleagues, blamed yet pitied Marilyn and admitted that the whole project had been a disaster:

  Monroe had driven people crazy with her behavior during filming and had finally gone "round the bend." We have shot for seven weeks and we have five days' work. And the sad thing is that the five days' work are no good. She's no good and she can't remember her lines. It's as though she were under water. She's intelligent enough to know it's no good. And there's a certain ruthlessness, too.

  The studio has given in to her on everything. She's tough about everything. She's so very sweet with me. I am enormously sorry for her. Even her lawyer is baffled. She's accusing him of being against her. I think it's the end of her career.

  Cukor (contradicting his statement about her sweetness) also resented Marilyn's "plotting and bullying everybody with her outrageous demands" and concluded, "Fox was weak and stupid and deserved everything it got."18

  The crises on Something's Got to Give coincided with Fox's even more disastrous production in Rome of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Cleopatra. Fox had lost $61 million in the past three years; and Cleopatra, budgeted at $5 million, eventually cost $25 million. The studio, inextricably committed to Cleopatra, could not afford the excesses of both Elizabeth and Marilyn. On June 7, ten days after she posed for the nude photos, Marilyn was fired for her absence, lateness and impossibly poor performance. Fox also sued her to recover $750,000 in excessive costs. Like the hostile crew at the wrap-party of The Prince and the Showgirl in England, the Fox crew felt that Marilyn had neither appreciated their work nor treated them with respect. They placed an ad in Variety that sarcastically thanked her for the loss of their jobs at a difficult time.

  Fox had always treated Marilyn maladroitly. Schenck and others had forced her into couch casting; Zanuck, slow to recognize her talent, gave her many mediocre parts; the executives dropped her when her first contract expired; denied her a star's dressing room; kept her to an extremely unfair contract when she earned more than anyone else for the studio; suspended her in 1954 for refusing to appear in the inferior picture, The Girl in Pink Tights; and failed to exploit the publicity value of her birthday tribute to President Kennedy. They also did more harm than good by indulging her. They tolerated her drama coaches on the set, put up with her lateness, failed to give her the proper treatment for drug addiction and waited far too long to fire her from Something's Got to Give. Walter Mirisch, the experienced producer of Some Like It Hot, thought Marilyn was clearly not well enough to perform, and that the studio should have shut the picture down in less than thirty days.

  Marilyn, used to getting her way with everything, was devastated. She and everyone else thought her career was ruined. She spent hours and hours staring at herself in the mirror, looking for telltale wrinkles and signs of old age. Like the bosomy Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham, she slept with her bra on to prevent her breasts from sagging. Being fired made her even more unsure of her identity. When the photographer George Barris introduced Marilyn to his maid, who said, "I can't believe it. Are you really Marilyn Monroe?" she replied, "I guess I am. Everyone says I am."19

  Marilyn was replaced by Lee Remick. But Dean Martin, who had a contractual right to approve his co-star, said "no Marilyn, no picture." Then, on July 25, the executives at Fox, who still didn't know what they were doing, suddenly changed their minds. They dropped the lawsuit and asked, even begged Marilyn to come back. On August 1, only four days before her death, she signed a new contract for $250,000 – two-and-a-half times her original fee. Marilyn, insecure as ever, was still in a precarious emotional state, but the new contract seemed like a second chance, a promising turn of events.

  Seventeen

  Suicide

  (1962)

  I

  In 1962 Marilyn's physical and mental health was deteriorating, her personal and professional life was failing, and she was increasingly lonely, ill and frightened. The circumstances of her death were muddled and mysterious, and people inevitably speculated on its causes. Who or what destroyed her – the men who abused her, the doctors who bungled her care, or her own craving for release? She may have died of an accidental overdose, she may have been a deliberate suicide or (as some think) the victim of a politically motivated homicide: we'll never know for sure.

  Richard Meryman, who interviewed her for Life magazine the month before her death, recently wrote, "I do not believe that she deliberately killed herself. There was no indication of such a degree of despair. It is my strong opinion that her death was an involuntary overdose of narcotics." Several circumstances suggest that her death was accidental. She did not seem depressed and did not alarm most friends who saw her during the last days of her life. She loved her new house and was absorbed in decorating it. She was still, as her last photos show, luminously attractive. She had contracted with Fox to resume work on Something's Got to Give. There was a vague possibility of remarrying DiMaggio, though they had still not resolv
ed the essential conflict between her domestic life and her career. She also had a high tolerance for drugs and thought she could handle them. After muddling her brain with barbiturates, she may have forgotten how many pills she'd already taken.

  But the evidence suggests that Marilyn did in fact commit suicide. Her emotional difficulties – sexual frigidity, insomnia, drug addiction and depression – were getting worse. She feared yet another mental breakdown and permanent insanity. More immediately disturbing factors were Kay Gable's accusation that Marilyn was responsible for Clark's death;Marilyn's third divorce, from Miller, and the disconcerting news that his new wife, Inge Morath, was pregnant; the failure of her third operation for endometriosis and inability to have children of her own (Murray told the FBI that Marilyn felt like a "negated sex symbol"); the failure of her psychoanalysis; her cruel rejections, within a few months, by Sinatra and both Kennedys; her persistent anxiety that she was growing older and losing her looks; her fear that she'd never be able to change from comedy to drama, and that, despite the new Fox contract, her career was (or soon would be) over.

  The process of aging – as the Gloria Swanson character revealed so memorably in Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) – is especially hard for a once gorgeous and idolized woman. For an actress who derives all sense of self-worth from her looks, it is tragic. When Clara Bow, for example, failed to make a comeback, she gained weight and grew reclusive, became depressed and suffered a series of breakdowns. Joseph Mankiewicz noted, as early as Marilyn's appearance in All About Eve, how she obsessively examined her face in the mirror. When she looked at herself in 1962 and saw a spot, a sag, a deepening of wrinkles, she knew her days as a beauty were ending. After her latest film fiasco, many male stars (and some outstanding directors) were unwilling to work with her. As Robert Frost wrote in "Provide, Provide": "No memory of having starred / Atones for later disregard / Or keeps the end from being hard."1

  Lack of true friends and soul-piercing loneliness also contributed to Marilyn's suicide. Even when living with a husband and working with colleagues, she tended to exist in a self-enclosed world of her own. Abandoned in childhood by her parents, she was finally abandoned by her friends. She felt she could buy rather than earn friendship, and therefore had no one to rely on. She was a beautiful woman who couldn't keep a man and didn't have a date on her last Saturday night. Peter Lawford called her at 7 p.m. to invite her to a dinner party, but she refused, in a voice that was thickened and nearly inaudible from drugs. Her last, foreboding words to him were, "Say goodbye to Pat [his wife]. Say goodbye to Jack. And say goodbye to yourself because you're a nice guy." There was no need to say goodbye to Bobby: she'd just seen him. Naturally alarmed about Marilyn, Lawford called his manager, who advised him not to get involved. So Lawford ignored the danger and did nothing to help her. His last wife (also named Pat), wrote, "He was haunted by her death, maintaining a sense of personal responsibility for her loss for the rest of his life. . . . If anyone 'killed' Marilyn Monroe, it was Peter and his manager, who failed to act in a constructive manner."

  Many people not only claimed that they'd phoned Marilyn on her last day, but also insisted that they were the last one to speak to her. Peter Lawford, Ralph Greenson, Sidney Skolsky, Joe DiMaggio, Jr., Ralph Roberts, the New York businessman Henry Rosenfeld, her hairdresser Sidney Guilaroff, Jeanne Carmen (who called, she said, to arrange a golf date!), her Mexican lover José Bolaños and Norman Rosten all seemed to be worried about her, but none of them assuaged or responded to her solitude, depression and despair. Rosten retrospectively realized that she was deceiving herself and living in a dream world:"[Marilyn said] she was in great shape (not true); she was planning to begin a film in the fall (fantasy); her house was almost furnished (never to be); . . . she was getting film offers from all over the world (doubtful)." Rosten wondered if there could be "a life for her outside the dream? Marriage and motherhood – that crucial reality – had faded away. Was there any other for her? It seemed improbable that a new life could be found in the land of the scorpions."2

  After severing ties with most of her family, ex-husbands, friends and employees, Marilyn had almost no one left. Lawford had pimped for the Kennedys, who'd jilted her. Pat Newcomb was apparently following their orders, and Eunice Murray spied on her. Greenson exploited his celebrity patient. DiMaggio was in San Francisco. Her New York friends were too distant or too self-absorbed to help. That great portrayer of solitude, Joseph Conrad, described her condition when he wrote, "We live, as we dream – alone."

  Like Sylvia Plath, Marilyn had narrowly survived several suicide attempts, from her late teens until the year before she died (see Appendix). Her marriage to Miller did not prevent her from attempting suicide, but did prevent her from succeeding. After he cut loose from her, she was on her own and heading for the rapids. Overwhelmed by her psychological crises, Marilyn was now willing to destroy her beauty and talent. Ever since she'd posed for photographers as a pretty teenager, she had learned to become "Marilyn Monroe" and had lived, in a strange dissociation, as two women. One was the ordinary girl who wanted a stable domestic life, with friends, marriage and children; the other was the movie idol and sex goddess, with the hourglass figure, glistening lips and crown of blond hair. She no longer wished to maintain her unreal self, and may have thought, at the end: whoever finds my body can do whatever they like with it. I don't want it any more.

  Finally, she took control of her life by ending it. Her suicide was a form of revenge against the living, a tacit accusation that the survivors had not done enough to save her, a way to punish the false friends and treacherous lovers who'd failed and abandoned her. She wanted to make them feel guilty about her death and to take her suffering seriously. As she sadly prophesized in her memoir, "I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand."3

  II

  Marilyn's doctors were partly responsible for her death. Well aware of the danger, Greenson said he wanted to make "a drastic cut in Marilyn's use of drugs . . . and keep strict control over the medication, since [he] felt she was potentially suicidal." Greenson also said that he brought in the internist Hyman Engelberg to help Marilyn reduce her dependence on drugs, and that the two doctors promised to keep in close contact about the dosage. In fact, as Greenson's wife revealed, the doctors gave her whatever she wanted: "The idea was that she was never to be said no to when she wanted a prescription, because the only thing that would happen was she would procure medication elsewhere and not inform her primary physicians about it. So whenever she asked for a drug she would usually get it." Both Greenson and Engelberg, without consulting each other, recklessly prescribed potentially fatal drugs for her, and were willing to risk her suicide rather than lose her as their patient.

  Greenson's forceful personality had made Marilyn slavishly dependent on him, and he knew that she was "depressed and agitated, i.e. rejected and tempted to act out" during her conflict with Fox about Something's Got to Give. But he abandoned her by leaving on May 10 for a five-week summer vacation in Europe, and placated her with a new prescription. In his weirdly egotistic manner, he described this treatment as a kind of pharmaceutical fellatio that would fill her mouth with his essence:

  I prescribed a drug which is a quick-acting anti-depressant in combination with a sedative – Dexamyl. I also hoped she would be benefited by having something from me to depend on. . . . I felt that she would be unable to bear the depressive anxieties of being alone. The administering of the pill was an attempt to give her something of me to swallow, to take in, so that she could overcome the sense of terrible emptiness that would depress and infuriate her.4

  The autopsy report stated that Monroe, "a thirty-six-year-old, well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female . . . had swallowed forty to fifty Nembutals and a large number of chloral hydrate pills. . . . The blood test showed 8.0 mg.% of chloral hydrate, and the liver showed 13.0 mg.% of pentobarbital (Nembutal), both well above fatal doses." The cause of d
eath was "Acute barbiturate poisoning. Ingestion of overdose." Barbiturates first numb the brain and then shut down the respiratory system, and prevent the victim from breathing. Engelberg insisted that he'd never prescribed chloral hydrate, a hypnotic and sedative, which Marilyn could have bought on her recent shopping trip to Mexico City. But he freely admitted, without any sense of remorse or guilt, that he'd prescribed fifty Nembutals on Friday August 3, knowing that if Marilyn took them all at once, they would certainly be fatal. She bought the pills that day, and the bottle was found empty beside her deathbed. John Huston, who'd helped save her in Reno, stated the real cause of Marilyn's death: "The star system had nothing to do with it whatsoever. The goddamn doctors killed her. They knew the girl was a pill addict."5

  The circumstances surrounding Marilyn's death have been fiercely disputed, but it's possible to establish the basic facts about what actually happened. In the afternoon of Saturday August 4, Robert Kennedy apparently visited and quarreled with her. Greenson (who'd returned from Europe on June 6) also saw her for several hours and found her despondent. Between 10 and 11 p.m. Arthur Jacobs, Marilyn's chief publicist and Newcomb's boss, was summoned from a concert at the Hollywood Bowl – though it's not clear how he was found among the thousands of people in the audience. Murray, who didn't usually stay overnight, was the only other person in the house.

  The accounts of both Murray and Greenson, who found the body, were incongruous and inconsistent. At first Murray said she suddenly awoke at midnight, saw a light shining under Marilyn's door and found the bedroom locked. But the new thick carpet prevented any light from being seen outside the room; and Marilyn, especially after her forced confinement in Payne Whitney, never locked her door. Murray said she then phoned Greenson, who told her to use the fireplace poker to part the draperies through the grille of the open bedroom window. In fact, the drapes were nailed across the window to ensure darkness and had no parting in the middle. Yet, according to Murray, she managed to see Marilyn's naked body (in a grotesque parody of the nude calendar) sprawled prostrate and angled across the bed. Greenson rushed over to the house from Santa Monica. With the same poker, he broke an unbarred window at the side of the house and climbed into the bedroom.