During production of this movie, Marilyn and Yves Montand at first formed a close bond of friendship. As it happened, he was insecure about his role in Let’s Make Love and about his grasp of the English language. (Actually all of his dialogue ended up having to be meticulously rerecorded.) In this kind of insecurity, he shared Marilyn’s own apprehensions. She was never sure she was very good as an actress, and to have a costar who had his own self-doubts was a provocative development in her life. She liked him very much and wanted him to feel the same way about her. However, Marilyn being Marilyn, she couldn’t help but be late to the set, which was a bit of a problem for Montand. One day when she didn’t show up for work, he left a terse note under the door of her bungalow:
Don’t leave me to work for hours on end on a scene you’ve already decided not to do the next day. I’m not the enemy. I’m your pal. And capricious little girls have never amused me.
She was horrified when she received his little missive. In fact, she felt so terrible, she overreacted and couldn’t leave her bungalow until Mr. and Mrs. Montand went to comfort her and tell her that it was all right, they would all survive. The shoot went on. Then… it happened in mid-April 1960. Montand was concerned about Marilyn because she was too exhausted to attend a rehearsal. Arthur Miller was in Nevada with John Huston scouting possible locations for The Misfits. Montand’s wife, Simone, was in Europe working on a film. Paula Strasberg suggested that Yves go to Marilyn’s bungalow to say hello and make her feel better about her absence. He did. So, there he was, asking her how she felt and hearing her tell him she would be fine when—one thing led to another. According to what he later wrote in his memoir, he couldn’t help himself and leaned over and kissed her, and then… they made love.
The affair lasted for just two months, from April until June, when the film wrapped. When it ended, the Montands tried to put the pieces of their marriage back together. It was difficult, though, because anytime someone tumbled into bed with Marilyn Monroe it ended up front-page news. The Montands had their hands full not only with their broken marriage but with an avalanche of publicity about it. Yves Montand and Simone Signoret proceeded to make statements that surprised the American public. They suggested it was perfectly fine for Yves to have had an affair with “someone like Marilyn Monroe” because that is how the machinery of marriage works. It was just that Marilyn mucked up the works by taking it all too seriously.
From Yves: “[Marilyn] is a simple girl without any guile. Perhaps I was too tender and thought she was as sophisticated as some of the other ladies I have known. Had Marilyn been sophisticated, none of this ever would have happened… she is known throughout the world, but she is still a child. Perhaps she had a school girl crush. If she did, I’m sorry. But nothing will break up my marriage.”
From Signoret: “Let us say Marilyn felt Yves’ charm. Who doesn’t? But everything that might be natural among us is twisted and deformed right from the start by publicity and talk. The real problem is that when a woman feels the physical attraction of a man who is not her husband, she must also feel she is in love to justify it. It is no longer casual even in passing. A man, on the other hand, doesn’t feel he has to confuse an affair with eternal love and make it a crisis in his marriage.”
When reporter Alan Levy read Mrs. Montand’s comment to Marilyn, she said softly, “I think this is all some part of her problem, not mine.”
“It was all very hurtful,” said Rupert Allan. “It was despicable of Yves Montand to say what he did. And I’m not sure Yves came out looking much better. Of course, Marilyn was wracked with guilt and embarrassment. I remember her saying, ‘I shouldn’t have done it because he’s married.’ I think she felt shame about it. Of course, she was married, too, but that seemed a secondary concern. You can imagine her reaction to all of this if she wouldn’t come out of her bungalow because he had chastised her for being late. This kind of public thrashing took a lot to get over. It was as if the Montands were saying, ‘Well, of course he had sex with her. She’s Marilyn Monroe after all. Then, silly girl, she thought it meant something. How stupid of her. Now, let’s just all move on, shall we?’ It was very reductive.”
Rupert Allan’s observation that Marilyn felt guilt about the affair rings true in that, generally, she was conflicted about her feelings relating to marriage. On one hand, she had great respect for the notion of wedded bliss and constantly told her half sister, Berniece, how fortunate she was to be married to the same man for so many years. She even mentioned the Montands to Berniece as a couple she very much admired for their commitment to each other. On the other hand, she seemed to not have a problem with having affairs with married men. Simply put, she seemed to believe that if a man would have sex with her then he must not be happily married—and therefore he was fair game.
The premise of Let’s Make Love has Marilyn portraying musical comedy actress Amanda Dell, appearing in an off-Broadway revue that satirizes celebrities, including the fictional Jean-Marc Clement (Montand), a French-born billionaire industrialist who is now headquartered in New York City. Clement attends a performance just as Amanda is going through Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” a full-on production number with a half dozen chorus boys, staged by Jack Cole. He is instantly smitten by Amanda’s beauty and sets in motion a plan to win her heart without revealing his identity as the super-rich businessman being parodied in the revue. The balance of the film follows the development of Jean-Marc’s pursuit of Amanda, complete with the two rehearsing the musical numbers, and also including acting out love scenes together. As expected, the sexy continental wins the heart of the musical comedy star without ever revealing his true identity.
It’s clear from Marilyn’s work in this movie that she was trying to expand her horizons, yet it was difficult for her. She wrote these words in a notebook in her dressing room:
What am I afraid of? Why am I so afraid? Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act, but I am afraid. I am afraid and I should not be and I must not be.
She actually had no reason to be afraid of this movie, this script. She was much better than the film deserved, actually, and that may have been the problem. The weak script forced her to fall back on her tried-and-true image of sexy blonde bombshell in order to make the movie work. In other words, Arthur Miller did her no favor with this one. Still, it was well received. In fact, Daily Variety gave it a surprisingly rave review, which read, in part, “After the film is underway about 12 minutes, the screen goes suddenly dark… and a lone spotlight picks up Marilyn Monroe wearing black tights and a sloppy wool sweater. She announces with appropriate musical orchestration, that her name is Lolita and that she isn’t allowed to play (pause) with boys (pause) because her heart belongs to daddy (words and music by Cole Porter). This not only launches the first of a series of elegantly designed [by Jack Cole] production numbers and marks one of the great star entrances ever made on the screen, but is typical of the entire film—which has taken something not too original (the Cinderella theme) and dressed it up like new.”
Let’s Make Love would be released September 8, 1960, and gross $3 million at the box office. It would also be nominated for an Oscar for the best scoring of a musical.
In the summer of 1960, Marilyn stayed on in Los Angeles while Arthur was busy with preproduction of The Misfits. Yves and Simone were back in Europe. Feeling more confused than ever, Marilyn did what perhaps she should not have—she continued with her therapy. Her New York psychiatrist, Marianne Kris, had recommended that when Marilyn was in Los Angeles she begin seeing a colleague named Dr. Ralph Greenson, which Marilyn agreed to.
Marilyn and Pat
In the spring of 1960, while Marilyn was in Los Angeles, she met a woman who would not only go on to become a good and trusted friend but would actually alter the course of her life, even if inadvertently—Pat Kennedy Lawford. In some ways, Pat may be the consistently missing link in all accounts of Marilyn’s relationship with the Kennedy family. While she is referred to in many bio
graphies as having been Monroe’s “best friend” during the 1960s, this might be overstating their relationship a bit—and little concrete information has ever been reported. In some ways, it was an unlikely alliance between the two women.
As we have seen, Marilyn had been the unwanted love child of a woman who had gone insane. She’d spent her childhood being passed from foster home to foster home, never knowing what it felt like to belong, to be loved. Despite her fame, she never had much money; she always lived beyond her means. Privately, she longed to know the comfort and protection of a real family. In stark contrast, Patricia Kennedy Lawford—“Pat”—was the sixth of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s nine children, a member of the closely bound and influential Kennedy family. Her privileged background allowed her to live an affluent lifestyle, educated in the finest convent schools and graduating from Rosemont College, a private women’s liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. She traveled the world over and wanted for nothing, always under the protective and watchful eye of her wealthy family.
Pat, who was thirty-six when she and Marilyn became friends, was outgoing and friendly. She wouldn’t have been considered beautiful, but she was arresting just the same. She had a resolute-looking face that was a bit longish, with deep blue eyes, a sharp nose, and, of course, that toothy Kennedy smile. She was athletic, again like her relatives, her tall, slender body moving with easy grace as she tossed the pigskin about with her brothers. Always eager to forge an identity separate and apart from her famous family, she was a TV producer for a while before having her children. She had loved being in show business and wished it could have continued, but a Kennedy woman’s first responsibility was always to family, not career. Still, Pat was a very independent person. In fact, she was known in the family as “the Hollywood Kennedy,” the least politically motivated of the Kennedy sisters, the one who—as Jeanne Martin, Dean’s widow, put it—“loved a good time, loved show business, was a lot of fun and well liked by the stars she had met through her husband: Judy Garland, Jackie Cooper, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Martha Raye, Jimmy Durante, and dozens of others. You could depend on Pat. She was an absolutely fabulous person. She could be a great friend. She was, to Marilyn.” (Note: Pat was godmother to Jeanne and Dean’s daughter, Gina Caroline.)
When Peter Lawford first introduced Marilyn to Pat, two words came to mind: Grace Goddard. “She reminds me of my Aunt Grace so much I can’t even believe it,” Marilyn said at the time. “She has the exact same personality. When she laughs, it’s Grace’s laugh.” Any similarity Pat had with Grace may have been one of the reasons Marilyn felt so close to her so quickly. Definitely, Pat had Grace’s energy. She was always busy, always moving—always on the go and excited about going there. She was also wisecracking and had a sarcastic sense of humor. For those to whom the memory of Pat Kennedy doesn’t strike an image, think Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. That was Pat Kennedy.
Pat had met her husband, the British actor Peter Lawford, in 1949 in London. They married in 1954. By this time, Pat was thirty and had a personal fortune of $10 million. Peter, at thirty-one, was worth about $100,000 and was accused by some Kennedy loyalists of being a gold digger. Kennedy patriarch Joe certainly did not approve of him. “If there’s anything I’d hate more for a son-in-law than an actor, it’s a British actor,” he said. That Peter was Protestant didn’t help matters. Christopher Lawford, Pat’s son, recalls his mother saying that Joe Kennedy sent her on a trip around the world in order that she might forget Peter. “It didn’t work,” she told her son. I got to Japan and turned right around.” Joe Kennedy called J. Edgar Hoover and asked him to check out Peter’s background. Imagine it. Your potential father-in-law has the pull to have you investigated by J. Edgar Hoover. “He found out that I wasn’t homosexual and that I wasn’t a Communist, so I guess I was okay in those respects,” Peter would later say. “Still, Joe Kennedy wasn’t a fan of mine. It took Pat a lot of courage to marry me when her old man disapproved so much. I think she was very brave to do it, actually.”
Though Pat loved Peter, the marriage was troubled almost from the start, partly because of Peter’s personal demons, his drinking habits, and, later, his obsession with trying to fit in with Frank Sinatra’s notorious Rat Pack, but also because he never felt that he fit in the Kennedy fold, either. Whereas the husbands of Pat’s sisters, Eunice and Jean, both became involved in the Kennedys’ financial empire, Peter never did; he simply wasn’t interested. It may sound absurd in retrospect, but the fact that he couldn’t play football made things worse for him with the family. After all, he was unable to participate in the family’s greatest free-time ritual. “Never played in my life,” he said in 1981, “and that was bad news to the Kennedys. I was an outcast from the start.”
Immediately after they married, Peter began seeing other women—even during Pat’s pregnancies. However, Pat was accustomed to the idea of the philandering husband; her father and brothers had long ago exposed her to the notion of the unfaithful spouse, and of course, her mother, Rose, had endured a roaming husband in Joe. Pat did, too, but she was angry about it, not collected. She didn’t even try to fake it. Much like her sister-in-law, Jackie, she felt that the best she could do was to make sure her husband didn’t think she was a complete idiot, and then go about the business of making a good life for herself. She took it a step further. She insisted that she and Peter have separate bedrooms. She decided early on that she’d just as soon not sleep next to someone she knew was having sex with someone else. An oft-told “inside story” among Marilyn’s and Pat’s friends was that shortly after they met, Marilyn was at the house having lunch when Peter walked into the room. Pat took a sandwich from a platter in the middle of the table and handed it to Peter. “Ham and cheese,” she said. Then, in the next breath and very nonchalantly, “And that little brunette you were [expletive deleted] last night? I want her out of the picture. She called the house. And that’s where I draw the line. You got it?” She met Peter’s stunned expression with a stern one of her own. He just nodded and left the room, embarrassed. Then Pat went back to her conversation with Marilyn as if the scene had never happened. Later, Marilyn said, “She’s probably the strongest, most confident woman I have ever met. I wish I had her balls.”
In the spring of 1960, these two very different women—Marilyn and Pat—became close friends. It was an ironic meeting in the sense that Marilyn had dated Peter for a short time back in 1950. Peter was crazy about her, Marilyn not so much him. In some ways, the friendship between Marilyn and Pat made sense, though. Pat was drawn to the glamour and glitz that was all Marilyn’s, whereas Marilyn had always longed for the security and financial stability enjoyed by Pat. In other ways, the friendship seemed surprising. For instance, Pat was puritanical. While Pat was rather plain and ordinary in appearance, Marilyn was… well, Marilyn. While it was said that Pat made the sign of the cross whenever she had to have sex with Peter, Marilyn was… well, Marilyn.
“I don’t know when it happened exactly, but I know that Pat started to become very, I don’t know what the word is for it, really—infatuated, I guess, with the idea of knowing Marilyn Monroe,” says Pat Brennan, who met Pat in 1954 and remained friends with her through the 1960s and 1970s. “I think it’s safe to say that she was starstruck by her. Suddenly, everything was ‘I just spoke to Marilyn and she said that…’ It was as if she had a best friend overnight. I found it strange.
“I remember calling Pat once in the spring of 1960 and she said, ‘I’d like for you to speak to someone here.’ The next thing I knew, I was hearing this breathy voice on the other end of the phone. Marilyn. ‘Pat says you are her dear friend,’ she told me. ‘Well, I am, too. Maybe we’ll meet one day.’ I said, ‘Fine, let’s do.’ Finally Pat came back on the line. ‘So what do you think of that?’ Pat said. She was definitely impressed by Marilyn and wanted to impress others that she knew her.”
Very quickly, the two women became close. Pat’s son Christopher recalled of his mom and Marilyn, “[Maril
yn] had a quiet voice and she would smile at me and head out to walk on the sand with my mom. My mother told me Marilyn was like her ‘little sister.’ It surprised her that Marilyn was so open with her. My mom didn’t come from an environment where emotions and feelings were openly shared. Marilyn Monroe trusted my mother’s love for her.”
As they got to know each other, they began to share details of each other’s life while commiserating about their joys and sadnesses. For instance, Pat had three children—Christopher, Sydney, and Victoria. In a year, she would have a fourth, Robin. Marilyn, of course, desperately longed for children. Sometimes the stories Pat told Marilyn about her family would leave her with her mouth wide open, such as this one:
“After Peter and I had Christopher, Peter was very unhappy because the baby cried all the time and the house smelled like shit,” Pat told Marilyn in front of other friends.
“Oh, well, I guess that’s what happens when you have a baby,” Marilyn said. “So what did you do?”
“Well, we decided it would be best if Christopher had his own apartment across the street.”
“What? How old was he?”
“Well, he was about two months old, actually. So, anyway, we rented an apartment for him and the nanny and he slept over there. It was just a lot easier on everyone.”
Indeed, Pat Kennedy Lawford was of a rare breed. Her story about Christopher aside, she was the best mother she knew how to be to her children. Of course, the Lawfords had a live-in nanny, but when the brood was a little older Pat would give the nanny one week off a month so that she could be a full-time mom to them. She would turn the clocks ahead an hour so that the kids would go to sleep a little earlier—but after spending the day running after four small children she probably figured she deserved the break.
The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe Page 34