The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  On June 26, Marilyn received an honor that probably meant more to her than any she’d received since becoming famous: her hand- and footprints in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The occasion was really a promotional event for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Marilyn was joined by her costar Jane Russell for the ceremony; they wore matching white polka-dot dresses. She and Jane had become fast friends. “The biggest disappointment to her, though, was that Grace was too sick on this day to be able to accompany Marilyn,” said Wesley Miller from the law firm of Wright, Wright, Green & Wright. “Certainly, they both would have enjoyed the moment so much. Marilyn told me it seemed like just yesterday when Grace took her, as little Norma Jeane, to Grauman’s. She said she would place her small hands and feet into imprints left by the major stars of her youth as Grace stood behind her and watched. The two would go from one cement square to the next… and the next… each dedicated to a movie star who they had seen in motion pictures. Now, of course, Norma Jeane—as Marilyn Monroe—was in that same constellation of stars. In fact, she was a bigger star than many of the ones she and Grace once admired. For me, at the time, it was astonishing to consider how much she’d achieved, especially considering her unstable background. ‘This is as much for Aunt Grace as it is for me,’ she told me. ‘If it wasn’t for Aunt Grace, I don’t know where I would be, but I know it wouldn’t be where I am today.’ ”

  Throughout July, Marilyn was ill with bronchial infections. Grace insisted on taking care of her. She would take the telephone out of Marilyn’s bedroom and bring it into the living room and bury it with pillows so Marilyn wouldn’t hear it ring and disturb her sleep. Then she would dutifully take all messages for her.

  It was at around this time that Grace became alarmed because of Marilyn’s reliance on sleeping pills. She saw that Marilyn couldn’t sleep at night without them and that she couldn’t even take an afternoon nap unless she was medicated. Then there were the “uppers” Marilyn was taking to stay awake during the day after what she called “a sleeping pill hangover.” It was all too much, Grace decided. When she finally confronted Marilyn about it, Marilyn told her that she knew what she was doing, “and I’m very careful, Aunt Grace. I’ve been taking these things for at least ten years.” That was news to Grace. She also noticed that Marilyn was drinking—bourbon and soda—much more than she ever had in the past. Moreover, Marilyn believed that as a consequence of the stresses in her life, she was eating more and thus gaining weight. It’s true that she was a tad rounder at this time, but not much. However, every pound mattered when wearing those skin-baring gowns for which she was becoming so famous. At a loss as to what to do, she began using colonic irrigation—basically, enemas. If she had to get into a dress that she didn’t think would fit, she would endure as many enemas as it would take to squeeze into it Eventually, she would succeed, too; she could actually lose inches in just a day. Though it was an extremely dangerous way to control one’s weight, Marilyn would swear by it for the rest of her life. This was almost more than Grace could process. In fact, she didn’t believe it was true. As it happened, Wesley Miller mentioned it to her when he dropped by to deliver some documents for Marilyn to sign. He said that Marilyn had confided in his wife that she was using enemas for the purpose of weight loss. “I simply have never heard of such a thing,” Grace told Miller. “Well, it’s true,” he said. “Ask Marilyn. I’m worried about it. It’s not good. Someone needs to talk to her about it.” Grace agreed. “I can’t believe that Joe would allow such a thing,” she said. Grace then called Berniece to ask her if she were aware of her half sister’s bad habits. “I never knew a thing about sleeping pills,” Berniece said. “And bourbon? It just can’t be! Not Norma Jeane. It makes me wonder what else we don’t know.” *

  A Graceful Exit

  While Grace Goddard lived with Marilyn Monroe, she witnessed the beginning of her battle with mood-altering substances. However, by August, Grace too was self-medicating in order to help her deal with the great pain she was in as a result of the spreading cancer. Despite her best efforts, Marilyn was not able to convince her to undergo chemotherapy. Doctors brought in by Marilyn urged Grace to undergo a hysterectomy, and she does seem to have considered it briefly, but in the end she would never allow that surgery to happen. As much as Marilyn might have tried to convince her, Grace was adamant.

  It was a losing battle on all counts. There was nothing that could be done to encourage Grace to listen to the advice of the many doctors Marilyn had arranged for her to consult. By this time, Marilyn was getting ready to leave to begin filming River of No Return. Without treatment and Marilyn’s constant intervention, there seemed little doubt that Grace would die. Still, she believed that her Christian Science principles would heal her. At a loss as to how to proceed—other than just to pray for the best outcome—the two women would often go through numerous bottles of wine in a single evening. It was as if the alcohol allowed them to forget, even if just temporarily, that one of them was dying. On certain occasions, a distraught Marilyn would end such binges with a handful of pills to make her sleep. The longer Grace stayed with Marilyn, the more Marilyn’s medicine cabinet filled with different kinds of pain pills—prescriptions from different doctors, some intended to help Grace’s cancer or its collateral conditions, and some to make life “more bearable” for her. At this same time, both women were being treated for their anxiety, each having prescriptions of barbiturates, including phenobarbital. Marilyn eagerly took hers. Grace didn’t. She just puts them aside, promising to take them later.

  The day finally came at the end of July when Marilyn had to leave the state to begin working on the movie. Grace needed to return to her family. They both knew that Grace was going home to die. On September 23, while Marilyn was away making the movie, Grace Goddard passed away. She was just fifty-nine.

  A Shocking Discovery About Grace

  Grace Goddard’s husband, Doc, told Marilyn and Berniece that her death had been very sudden—as he put it, “the cancer just took over.” He hadn’t been aware of how long Grace had been battling the disease. “Grace’s death seemed terribly sad and needless to Marilyn and me,” said Berniece years later, “and we never really got over it.”

  Of course, the funeral, on October 1, was very difficult for Marilyn. “I feel an anchor is gone,” she told Berniece in a tearful telephone call after the funeral. She said that it seemed that “life is just one loss after another.”

  Berniece said she hoped Joe DiMaggio could be of some comfort. Marilyn told her that without a doubt, he was more important to her now than ever before.

  After the funeral Marilyn had a warm telephone call from Ida Bolender. It had been many years since the two last spoke. Marilyn’s life had taken so many twists and turns, she’d actually lost touch with the Bolenders. However, Ida and Wayne were alive and well, and still living in Hawthorne. In speaking to Marilyn, Ida explained that she and her husband had moved next door to the house in which Marilyn was raised. They had turned the old residence into a boarding house for employees of a nearby factory. With that income, she said, they were doing quite well. “I hope you know that if you need anything at all, money or anything, I would love for you to call me,” Marilyn told her, according to what Ida later recalled to her foster daughter Nancy Jeffrey. “You did so much for me. I would love to help you.” Ida said she appreciated the offer but they were doing just fine. “I wanted you to know how sorry I am about your Aunt Grace,” Ida told her. Ida then acknowledged the long-smoldering grievances between her and Grace and said, “Truly, I don’t know, to this day, why she disliked me so much. I don’t know what I ever did to her. Do you know?” Marilyn said that it was probably best for them to not even try to figure it out all of these years later. “I know that you both loved me, and that’s what’s important,” she concluded. Ida also told Marilyn that she was unhappy about the way Marilyn’s life at the Bolenders’ had been recently depicted in the press. “They are saying that we were mean to you and that we were poor,
” Ida said. “I don’t understand that, Norma Jeane.” Ida said that she had read somewhere that Marilyn recalled Grace bringing her a birthday card with fifty cents in it. Apparently, Marilyn told the reporter that Ida took the money from her because she had dirtied her clothing. “But that never happened, Norma Jeane,” Ida said. “You know that never happened, don’t you?” Ida said she would never have done such a thing and that it broke her heart to read about it. Marilyn then tried to explain show business public relations to her foster mother, telling her that she shouldn’t believe anything she read, “especially,” she said, “when it comes to Marilyn Monroe,” referring to herself in the third person. In truth, though, Marilyn constantly fed the flames of controversy about her times with the Bolenders by painting a more dismal picture than was true, and she also never did anything to rectify any falsehoods. The phone call ended with both women expressing their love for each other and promising to stay in touch.

  After speaking to Ida, Marilyn apparently called Gladys to tell her that her old friend Grace had died. Gladys said that it was probably for the best. According to a later recollection, she said that Grace had been being followed for years and that if she hadn’t died when she did, “someone was going to kill her.” Marilyn listened patiently, trying not to become upset. By now, she thought, she should be used to hearing these kinds of upsetting proclamations from her mother. She’d hoped that Gladys would be upset by her friend’s passing. Maybe such sadness would have suggested a bit of a healing on Gladys’s part, but that was not the case. Marilyn told her mother that she intended to visit her very soon. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Gladys said. Then she hung up.

  Many years later, long after even Marilyn’s death, it would be revealed that Grace Goddard had actually committed suicide. The death certificate reads, “Death by barbiturate poisoning—ingestion of phenobarbital.” Apparently, Grace, a woman who always had the solution to everyone’s problems, had finally come up against one for which she could not find a solution—cancer. At the very end of her life, the biggest dilemma she faced was how to end the suffering her family would experience by watching her slowly waste away. So she ended her life quickly to save others from continued sadness, in the same selfless fashion as she had lived.

  After the funeral, Marilyn Monroe was taken by limousine back to her apartment. She was once again alone in the place where she had attempted to nurse Grace back to health and had failed. Her Aunt Grace was gone forever. The one woman Marilyn could always depend upon had receded into the family history. Now it seemed that all that remained of Grace Goddard in Marilyn’s home was what might make the loss just a little easier to handle: bottles and bottles of pills.

  Marilyn’s Rebellion

  The end of 1953 saw Marilyn Monroe close to total collapse. She had been working hard, the relationship with Joe DiMaggio was draining (though she would never think to leave him), she was still upset about Grace’s death, worried about Gladys, and now she was also having tremendous problems with 20th Century-Fox. The studio announced that her next movie was to be The Girl in Pink Tights. From the title alone, Marilyn felt that she was in for another dumb-blonde role, and she didn’t want to do it. If she had looked beyond the title, she would have discovered that it was a movie based on a recently closed Broadway musical of the same name starring French singer/dancer Zizi Jeanmaire. “Directors think all I have to do is wiggle a little, not act,” she complained to one reporter. To another, she was even more specific about her unhappiness. “I’m really eager to do something else,” she said. “Squeezing yourself to ooze out the last ounce of sex allure is terribly hard. I’d like to do roles like Julie in Bury the Dead, Gretchen in Faust and Teresa in Cradle Song. I don’t want to be a comedienne forever.”

  Ever since the advent of sound movies, studio contractees were forced to take part in whatever movie was thrown at them by their studio, and they had to be happy about it. When it came to The Girl in Pink Tights, Marilyn displayed nerve and shrewdness unheard of at the time—she demanded to see the script. Darryl Zanuck, who had never made a secret of the fact that he didn’t like and, even more unfortunately, didn’t respect Marilyn, said that there was absolutely no way he would consider giving her script approval. She didn’t actually want “approval,” though—she just wanted to see the script. Of course, if she didn’t like it, she would then not want to do the movie. Zanuck said that the production was going to cost Fox more than two million dollars and that the role was “written and designed” for Marilyn. He couldn’t understand her problem. The Girl in Pink Tights obviously had not been “written and designed” for Marilyn, because the property had tried and failed on Broadway.

  It got worse. When Marilyn found out that Frank Sinatra was making $5,000 a week to her $1,500, she became even more dissatisfied with Fox. “I’ve been in this business a long time, and I know what’s good for you,” one executive told her. Her response was, “I’ve been in this business a very short time, but I know what’s better for me than you do.”

  Later, she would say of River of No Return and (the soon-to-be-filmed) There’s No Business Like Show Business, “I was put into these movies without being consulted at all, much against my wishes. I had no choice in the matter. Is that fair? I work hard, I take pride in my work, and I’m a human being like the rest of them. If I keep on with parts like the ones Fox has been giving me, the public will soon tire of me.”

  At this same time, Marilyn began confiding in a very good friend, the excellent photographer Milton Greene (who would go on to take many of the most amazing photographs of her). She told him that she was very unhappy about the ridiculous amount of money Fox was paying her at this time—$1,500 a week. She said that the roles she was playing “are all the same, all dumb-blonde types with sex appeal,” and “it’s too much tedium. I’m sick of it.” Greene suggested that perhaps the two of them should start their own production company. She could then choose her own roles, select her own films, and work in tandem with the studio system instead of strictly for the system. Today, of course, major actors and actresses develop their own projects or, at the very least, cherry-pick their roles carefully to suit not only their tastes but also whatever image they have cultivated to present to their public. Most major stars have their own production companies through which such projects are developed and even financed. While the biggest male stars of that time did in fact have their own production companies—Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, and Burt Lancaster, to name a few—and thus exerted creative and financial control over their careers, that was not the case with female stars. But Marilyn Monroe was about to change that. This was the only way to go, and Marilyn and Milton had decided their goal would be to create their own company. They began discussing the matter with her attorneys. It was definitely one way to avoid the “dumb blonde” kind of movie.

  Marilyn was supposed to report to work on December 15. She didn’t. When the studio sent executives to her home on Doheny to try to convince her to change her mind, they were met by an enraged Joe DiMaggio, who ordered them off the premises.

  Joe and Marilyn were having their own problems at this time. He was still unhappy about the demands of her career. In his view, she wasn’t even the same woman he had met a year earlier. She was constantly distraught, run-down, anxious. She could not sleep without pills. Then she would be lethargic for much of the next day. He felt she needed a break—a long break. However, there was no chance of that happening anytime in the near future. She had a tight schedule of TV appearances, photo shoots, rehearsals, and, of course, movies.

  “Joe was sick and tired of Marilyn’s career,” said Stacy Edwards, who was a sportswriter at the time in Philadelphia and knew Joe well. “I know he went with her to Canada when she made River of No Return. He called me from there to do an interview. ‘I hate it up here,’ he told me. ‘They treat her like she’s a princess and if you want to know my opinion,’ he said, ‘I think she’s getting to be too spoiled. She expects everyone to treat her
like these people on these movie sets, and this ain’t real life.’ He said he wanted to get her out of the movies. ‘We’ll buy a nice home in San Francisco and just live a simpler life,’ he told me. I said, ‘Joe, are we talking about the same Marilyn Monroe—I mean, the movie star? Because she ain’t quittin’ the movies. She looks like she loves it too much for that.’ He said, ‘Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.’

  “I knew Joe and I knew what he was about deep down, and it wasn’t just Marilyn’s career. The attention she got, he was used to getting. When he walked into a room with her, he disappeared. He wasn’t used to that at all. He was used to being the center of attention. But with Marilyn, no man could ever be the center of attention. She drew focus wherever she went. Joe couldn’t accept that.”