MARILYN MONROE’S FIVE-YEAR MARRIAGE TO Arthur Miller may have lasted longer than her union with Joe DiMaggio, but it was no more successful, and in a sense, was actually far less satisfying because it ended on dire terms. There was no residual friendship, nothing further to discuss, whereas the relationship between Joe and Marilyn never really ended. “Marilyn and I are back in business,” the Yankee Clipper told Toots Shor.
“In fact, they’d never been out of business,” said Paul Baer. “They’d been away from each other for a few years, but they were sleeping together again long before she and Miller were divorced. There was a real, long-lasting, almost unspoken intimacy between Joe and Marilyn, which is something she had with no other man.
“Still, there was the realization on Monroe’s part that none of her three marriages had endured. Nor had she been able to have children. And then, too, she had this terrible addiction to drugs and alcohol, which to a greater or lesser extent had never been addressed by any of her psychiatrists, all of whom knew each other. They’d take her off one drug and put her on another, and this lamentable practice went on for years. It was a conspiracy of shrinks. Whenever Joe asked her about the drugs, she’d tell him she knew more about pills than any doctor, so he needn’t worry.”
After officially reuniting in early January 1961, Joe DiMaggio gave Marilyn a gold necklace from which hung his diamond-encrusted 1951 World Series ring. She wore it at home whenever she and Joe were together. Ironically, DiMaggio’s other World Series rings were stolen from his hotel room in 1960. Marilyn’s ring was the sole survivor, until years later, when future Yankees owner George Steinbrenner gave him a replica set of the rings that had been stolen.
On February 1, Marilyn—accompanied by Montgomery Clift—attended a New York preview of The Misfits. Arthur Miller was there with his children. He couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge Marilyn. After the film ended, she passed him on the way out of the theater. “Hello, Arthur,” she whispered. He gazed in her direction and gave a vague nod. The only other interaction between them took place some weeks later when Marilyn attended his mother’s funeral. She went, she told Paula Strasberg, to console Isidore Miller, Arthur’s father, with whom she remained on close terms and continued to call “Dad.”
Whether because of her divorce from Miller, the termination of her affair with Yves Montand, the death of Clark Gable, or simply her reimmersion in the culture of barbiturates, the week that followed, much of it spent at the Strasbergs, nearly did Marilyn in. When she wasn’t with Lee and Paula, according to Lena Pepitone, she would lie in bed (in her darkened bedroom) in a drug-induced stupor, not eating, not sleeping, and not talking. Her daily therapy sessions with Dr. Marianne Kris provided her only excuse to climb out of bed.
Joe DiMaggio, still with the Monette Company, had agreed to serve as a batting instructor at the New York Yankees’ spring training camp in St. Petersburg, Florida. Had he been present, he surely would have prevented Marilyn from agreeing to Dr. Kris’s recommendation that she voluntarily check into the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, a few blocks from her apartment.
Marilyn Monroe signed into Payne Whitney in early February, under the alias “Miss Faye Miller,” and was placed in a kind of interrogation room. For the next three hours, a procession of doctors, their arms folded in front of them, entered the room to observe Marilyn and fire off what she considered a volley of meaningless questions. She was then placed in a locked ward for the mentally ill. Once in, as Marilyn quickly learned, there was no way out.
Although Marilyn had entered Payne Whitney of her own volition, it had been Dr. Kris who filled out the admissions papers, characterizing the patient as “potentially self-destructive, even suicidal.” Kris later claimed she had no idea the ward was locked and that Monroe couldn’t leave whenever she pleased. In any event, everything the actress brought with her, including her pocketbook and clothes, was confiscated. A nurse handed her a towel and washcloth, a baggy brown jumpsuit, and a pair of slippers. Her closet-sized room, also locked, had cement-block walls, a narrow bed with a rubber sheet, a lightweight metal chair, and a wash basin atop a small, round wooden table; a miniscule bathroom in a corner of the room contained a sink and a toilet. A pane of one-way mirror glass, cut into the room’s steel door, enabled hospital personnel to peer in on Marilyn without their being seen. The bathroom door had a built-in mirror of its own. The wails, moans, and cries of Marilyn’s fellow “inmates” could be clearly heard throughout the ward. The iron bars across the windows lent credence to what had always been Marilyn’s worst fear: that of ending up locked away and left to rot in a lunatic asylum. The question had crossed her mind a thousand times: Had she inherited the same schizophrenic blood virus that festered in her mother’s delusional brain?
In a seven-page letter that Marilyn addressed to Dr. Ralph Greenson on March 2, 1961, she described the harrowing experience in all too graphic detail, including her failed efforts to get out. For hours she had begged them to release her. She had stripped naked and stood in the middle of the room screaming. They threatened to put her in a straitjacket. She went into the bathroom and turned on the water faucet and let it run until she’d created a flood. They entered her room and locked the bathroom door, at which point Marilyn reportedly picked up a chair and slammed it against the bathroom mirror. As she explained in her letter to Greenson, “If they were going to treat me like a nut, I’ll act like a nut.” She then threatened to do herself harm, which, she is reported to have said, “is the furthest thing from my mind . . . since you know . . . I’m an actress and would never intentionally mark or mar myself. I’m just that vain.”
When an earlier broken-glass suicide attempt failed to elicit the desired reaction, Marilyn went on a hunger strike; she began to eat only after they advised her that if she didn’t eat, they would have to give her intraveneous nourishment. When she refused to bathe, she was carried face-up into a shower room and was hosed down, after which she was made to sit in a bathtub. She cursed the nurses when they tried to force her to go to occupational therapy. When she again insisted they release her from the hospital, they informed her that only Dr. Kris could sign her out.
Unable to reach Kris by phone (she was permitted one call per day), she decided to write to Lee and Paula Strasberg: “Dr. Kris has had me put into the New York hospital . . . under the care of two idiot doctors. They both should not be my doctors . . . I’m locked up with all these poor nutty people. I’m sure to end up a nut if I stay in this nightmare, please help me, Lee, this is the last place I should be . . . I love you both. Marilyn. P.S. . . . I’m on the dangerous floor! It’s like a cell.”
As with Dr. Kris, Marilyn couldn’t reach the Strasbergs by telephone. And probably for good reason: as she eventually learned, it had been Lee who’d first suggested to Dr. Kris that Marilyn, “for her own good,” be sent to Payne Whitney for observation. When she finally learned of the Strasbergs’ involvement in the “plot” to put her away, Marilyn accused them (in her words) of “treason and treachery.”
On her third day at Payne Whitney, Marilyn asked the nurse to place a long-distance call to Joe DiMaggio in Florida. Nearly hysterical, Marilyn implored Joe to help her get out. He promised to be there the following day.
At six in the evening on Friday, February 10, Joe DiMaggio stood in front of the nurses’ station on the sixth floor of the hospital and asked to see his wife. A nurse’s aide recalled the occasion: “I immediately recognized Mr. DiMaggio,” she said. “He was a tall, handsome, imposing figure in a double-breasted dark blue suit, French-cuffed shirt, hand-painted tie, spit-polished shoes, and a designer overcoat on his arm. He was powerful-looking, with streaks of gray in his dark hair. I wondered how he’d gained access to the floor, since it was a locked ward. I soon found out. I went and located the head nurse, and she asked him how he’d gotten in. ‘I was let in by the chief of security for the hospital,’ he responded. ‘We’re buddies. He used to work security at Yankee Stadium.’ Then he repeated his request regarding Marilyn Monroe. She’d registered under a different name, but we all knew her true identity. The head nurse balked. She stated that the only person who had jurisdiction over Miss Monroe was Dr. Kris, her psychiatrist. In a very low, controlled but threatening voice, DiMaggio said to her, ‘I’ll give you five minutes to get her out here, or I’ll tear this fucking place apart brick by brick.’ So the nurse went and brought back Marilyn Monroe. ‘Now get me everything she had on when she checked in,’ ordered DiMaggio. The nurse said she would, but if he wanted her released, they needed Dr. Kris’s signature. He gave her Dr. Kris’s phone number. She answered. It seems DiMaggio had already spoken to her, because she said she’d be right over to sign the papers. DiMaggio told the nurse he’d send Dr. Kris upstairs when she arrived but, in the interim, he and Marilyn would wait in the lobby. Marilyn changed into her street clothes, and they left.”
Realizing that Dr. Kris’s signature would be required, DiMaggio had made prior arrangements with Ralph Roberts to pick up the psychiatrist by car and drive her to the hospital. Roberts remembered how upset Kris seemed on the way over: “She was crying. ‘I did a terrible thing,’ she said. ‘My God, I didn’t mean to, but I did. I should never have listened to Lee Strasberg.’ She must have repeated this mantra a dozen times. When we arrived at Payne Whitney, she went to sign the papers. Joe told Marilyn he’d head back to his suite at the Hotel Lexington and then join her later that night in her apartment. When Kris returned, she began apologizing to Marilyn, but the damage had been done. Marilyn screamed at her in the car, threatened to sue her for malpractice, and told her she was done. She was like a hurricane. After that night, Marilyn never saw or spoke to Dr. Kris again.”
Joe DiMaggio understood that, whatever Marilyn’s condition before her hospitalization, she remained extremely upset, all the more so given her treatment at Payne Whitney. She agreed to enter a hospital in a more comfortable and less menacing setting, provided she could leave without having to go through a middleman and provided Joe be listed as her caretaker. In addition, DiMaggio promised to fly in from Florida to visit her whenever he had a day off. At five o’clock on February 11, having made arrangements through the team physician of the New York Yankees, Joe accompanied Marilyn to the Neurological Institute of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where she remained without incident for three weeks, until March 5. DiMaggio visited her on a half dozen separate occasions, flying in twice a week.
“Joe DiMaggio remained convinced that Marilyn’s career was slowly killing her,” said Ralph Roberts. “I tended to agree.”
• • •
In many respects Joe DiMaggio appeared to be a changed man, perhaps due to his limited exposure to psychotherapy but more likely the result of his realization that if he didn’t alter his personality, he and Marilyn could never work out their differences. He seemed more tender, gentle, and patient with her, less prone to fits of jealousy and anger, more understanding. They were closer now—and nicer to each other—than they’d ever been. He apparently told her that if he’d been married to his former self, he too would have sought a divorce. When he visited from St. Petersburg, they sat in her room at Columbia-Presbyterian and had long, heartfelt conversations—mostly the actress talking and the ballplayer listening. Marilyn introduced him to the doctors and nurses at Columbia-Presbyterian as “my hero—the man who rescued me from that utter hellhole.”
By middle age, about to turn forty-seven, DiMaggio had changed in other respects as well. Because of his ulcers, which came and went, he cut back on his cigarette habit and indulgence in alcohol, limiting himself to a half pack a day and a couple of glasses of beer at dinner. He’d taken to drinking tea instead of coffee and had given up rich desserts. He was more generous when it came to money. When Marilyn told him she’d overdrawn her checking account at Irving Trust by $7,000, he generously covered it for her. Although never a simple man, he still had simple tastes. As one of his pals put it, “Give Joe a cup of tea and turn on the TV set, and he’s a happy man.” For this reason, if for no other, the relationship with Marilyn didn’t—and probably couldn’t—work full-time. It was his growing awareness that this was the case, and his gradual acceptance of that fact, that imbued their current bond with an intimacy it had previously lacked.
The day that Marilyn walked out of Columbia-Presbyterian, Joe invited her to join him at the Yankee spring training camp in Florida. Even among the veteran Yankee players, it became known that Joe had undergone a certain metamorphosis. “I always regarded DiMaggio as a haughty, imperious type of guy,” said Mickey Mantle. “He struck me as somebody who just didn’t like people, who wanted to be left alone, and who was above it all. That’s not to say he wasn’t one of the greatest ballplayers of all time, but he certainly wasn’t one of the warmest. But in 1961, for whatever reason, he seemed different. He’d stick around and eat dinner with the young guys on the team. He’d give them tips. He’d give the old guys tips as well. He’d tell stories. He’d invite players for breakfast. He began to socialize. Then he disappeared for a while. We heard Marilyn Monroe came to visit him, and he wanted to spend time with her.”
Joe and Marilyn occupied separate but adjoining rooftop suites at the oceanfront Tides Hotel and Bath Club, in the quiet and peaceful, predominantly residential town of North Redington Beach, Florida. They rested, swam, fished, walked along the beach at sunset, collected seashells, biked, dined alone, and attended several Yankees spring training games together. It was like a second honeymoon but without the wedding ceremony.
Mercifully, the press didn’t know where to find them and the Yankee front office wasn’t talking. Sports Illustrated ran a photo of Marilyn ogling Joe (wearing his old number 5) as he hit fly balls to prospective outfielders, but that was the extent of the press coverage. One morning as they sat on the beach at North Redington—Marilyn in a loose-fitting white dress, sunglasses and a large floppy hat—they were spotted by a group of tourists, one of whom approached and asked Monroe for her autograph. “Leave the lady alone,” snapped Joe, a seeming reversion to his former possessive self, for which he later apologized to Marilyn, explaining that he was merely “trying to preserve her privacy.”
They spent several days in Gainesville, where Marilyn visited with her half sister Berniece Miracle and Berniece’s daughter, Mona Rae. Marilyn borrowed Joe’s car one afternoon and drove to Miami Beach to see Isidore Miller. On April 11, back in New York, she sat next to Joe DiMaggio in the press box on opening day at Yankee Stadium. The pregame ceremony included Jane Morgan singing “The Second Time Around,” which Bob Hope introduced by dedicating it to “Joe and Marilyn.” At the end of the game, Yankees coowner Dan Topping hugged Marilyn and handed her a baseball signed by the entire team. A few months later, she sent the ball to Joe DiMaggio Jr., who subsequently sold it to a sports memorabilia shop for $400.
“After busting out of Yale,” said Joey, “I did the dumbest thing I’ve probably ever done. I moved to San Francisco and married a girl I barely knew. We eloped. It lasted a month. I then moved to my mother’s house in LA, and within a couple of weeks, I racked up a six-hundred-dollar phone bill. So I gave her the money from the sale of the baseball and split. I moved in with a guy named Tom Law, who earned a living of sorts as an extra in the movies. He got me a job working at his uncle’s rug factory in Santa Monica, which ended when a crane veered off course and gouged a large hole in my leg. After it healed, I joined the marines. I figured the armed forces were probably more interesting and less dangerous than working in a rug factory.”
In 1994 Berniece Miracle (with daughter Mona Rae Miracle) coauthored My Sister Marilyn, recalling (among other episodes) a stay with her half sister in New York in late April. The visit had been arranged when Marilyn spent time with Berniece in Gainesville, Florida. When Berniece came to New York, Marilyn paid to have her hair styled by Kenneth and bought her a new wardrobe. Joe DiMaggio squired Gladys Baker’s two daughters around town, taking them to lunch at Serendipity (he drove them there but didn’t go in) and provided them with theater tickets. Berniece, who was modest and down-to-earth, had fond memories of DiMaggio. In her Marilyn memoir, she described him as “unpretentious” and “full of common sense and concern for Marilyn.” Joe was equally impressed with Berniece. Before her departure, he gave her an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of himself in a Yankees uniform, which he inscribed: “To Marilyn’s lovely sister Berniece—whose pleasant company was appreciated, Joe DiMaggio.”
Lena Pepitone recalled that Joe and Marilyn spent a good deal of time together during April and the beginning of May. They would stay either at her apartment or in his suite at the Hotel Lexington, a few blocks away. “Arthur Miller had removed some furniture from the apartment,” said Pepitone, “and you could see stains all over the white carpeting where his dog had peed or pooped. Joe hired a carpet cleaner and went furniture shopping with Marilyn to replace what Miller had taken out. I thought they might be preparing to live together again. Then one night they had an argument. Joe found a discarded grocery bill in the trash. He added it up and discovered that the store had charged Marilyn nearly twice what she should have paid. ‘Why don’t you look the bills over before you pay them?’ he scolded her. Marilyn grabbed the bill out of his hand. ‘It’s none of your business,’ she growled. ‘It’s my money, not yours.’ That’s how it started. It ended with Joe giving Marilyn a bit of a shove as he rushed past her out the door in a burst of anger.”
They soon had words again, this time over the surprise arrival at Marilyn’s apartment of a white French poodle puppy, a gift from Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio’s onetime pal. Marilyn referred to Sinatra alternately as “Frankie” or “Francis.” So why, DiMaggio demanded to know, had Frankie or Francis delivered a puppy to Marilyn’s door? He realized that Sinatra and Monroe knew each other, but he didn’t know the extent of their friendship. Most of Hollywood’s leading actresses, particularly the more attractive ones, had at some point crossed paths with Sinatra. But how many of them were the recipients of small, cuddly puppies? Why the dog? Why now? It made no sense. Joe pressed her for an answer, until she finally offered him one. It sounded all too familiar.
“It’s none of your business, Joe,” she said. “You and I are no longer married. I don’t have to answer to you.”
And he said: “You never did answer to me, even when we were married. You did what you wanted to do, and that was probably part of the problem.”
Marilyn Monroe once named Frank Sinatra one of the two most fascinating men she’d ever known, the other being Marlon Brando. The legendary entertainer first met the legendary actress before she married Joe DiMaggio. He’d been cast opposite her in the ill-fated Girl in Pink Tights. Reportedly, Marilyn had sought refuge in Sinatra’s Coldwater Canyon home for a day or two immediately following her divorce from DiMaggio. Although still involved with Hal Schaefer, Monroe had evidently indulged in a brief romp with Sinatra. And then there had been the scandalous Wrong Door Raid in which DiMaggio, aided by Sinatra, attempted to catch Marilyn “in the act” with Schaefer. Neither DiMaggio nor Schaefer had the slightest inkling that the target of the raid was also involved with one of its chief perpetrators. “I had no idea that Marilyn and Frank Sinatra were lovers,” said Hal Schaefer.
In the mid-1950s, at the height of Marilyn’s New York period, she and Sinatra had continued to see each other occasionally. Once, when Sinatra performed at the Copa in New York, Marilyn arrived unexpectedly with Milton and Amy Greene, only to be told that without reservations they couldn’t get in. Sinatra spotted Marilyn and instructed a waiter to set up an extra table at the foot of the stage. To the amazement of the Greenes, he proceeded to sing the entire set directly to Marilyn. Their affair resumed after Monroe’s divorce from Arthur Miller. Lena Pepitone admitted that on at least one occasion Sinatra had spent the night with Marilyn in her New York apartment. “I served them dinner at night and breakfast in the morning,” she said, “and this was one day after Joe DiMaggio had slept over.”
Sinatra’s gift to Marilyn of a cute little puppy told Joe DiMaggio everything he needed to know, or almost everthing: he wasn’t the only Italian American in Marilyn’s life, though he may well have been the only one that truly loved her. But there wasn’t much he could do or say. After all, as Marilyn had conveniently pointed out, they were no longer husband and wife. The elation Joe experienced after publicly resuming their relationship quickly turned into confusion. In reality, Sinatra was only part of the story. The other part—Marilyn’s involvement with John F. Kennedy, the newly elected president of the United States—represented a chapter that seemed almost fictional.
In what must surely be considered an intricate juggling act, Marilyn somehow managed to compartmentalize and yet combine her trio of lovers. DiMaggio, Sinatra, and Kennedy had Marilyn in common. She stayed with JFK at the Carlyle during one of his periodic trips to New York, finding him “strong yet fragile.” As for Sinatra’s gift, Marilyn named the poodle “Maf” (or “Maaf-Honey”) because of the crooner’s purported Mafia connections. To spite Arthur Miller, Marilyn let Maf sleep on an expensive white beaver coat that the playwright had given her as a birthday present.
If Joe DiMaggio resented Marilyn’s reluctance to be with him on an exclusive basis, he tried not to show it. He saw her whenever she seemed willing to see him and otherwise busied himself socially with one or another of a long list of standbys, his favorite being Phyllis McGuire, if only because she was already spoken for and therefore couldn’t object to his ongoing pursuit of Monroe. In fact, McGuire’s beau, Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, coincidentally a friend of Sinatra’s, called Joe and invited him for a round of golf. “Giancana soon became a regular golf partner,” said Paul Baer. “They made for an odd twosome, particularly because Joe would occasionally spend time with Phyllis, Giancana’s girlfriend, and the arrangement didn’t seem to bother Sam.”
Evidently not the possessive type, Giancana had a second girlfriend, Judith Campbell, a former Las Vegas showgirl whom Frank Sinatra had introduced to Jack Kennedy in 1960. Like Marilyn Monroe, Campbell attended the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that summer and continued her relationship with JFK after he entered the White House. Not only did Giancana know about Campbell’s affair with the president, but he encouraged it. Campbell became a glorified courier, carrying messages back and forth between Giancana and Kennedy, Kennedy and Giancana. To add to the intrigue and make matters even more complicated, Judith Campbell was likewise sexually involved with Frank Sinatra and now, thanks to Giancana, with Joe DiMaggio. It all made for an unholy alliance, with Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe at the center of what would become an interlocking circle of tragedy and misfortune. “It’s difficult to believe,” said Peter Lawford, “that JFK and Marilyn Monroe would soon both be dead.”
• • •
Having dismissed Marianne Kris as her psychoanalyst and having learned that Lee Strasberg had been instrumental in placing her on a locked ward at Payne Whitney, Marilyn Monroe decided to leave New York, return to Los Angeles, and resume her therapy sessions with Dr. Ralph Greenson. Tired of living out of a suitcase at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Marilyn sought a more permanent address and found it in a ground-floor flat at 882 North Doheny Drive, the same Beverly Hills apartment complex in which she’d resided before marrying Joe DiMaggio. Gloria Lovell, Frank Sinatra’s personal secretary, lived on the same floor in the same building. While waiting for workmen to renovate the apartment, Marilyn moved in with Frank Sinatra. Comedian Joey Bishop, a sometime member of Sinatra’s Rat Pack, saw her at Sinatra’s house in early June 1961.
“I’d gone over there for our weekly poker game,” said Bishop. “Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and two or three other guys were there, and in the middle of the game, this tiny white puffball of a puppy waddled into the room. ‘New dog?’ Dino asked, and Sinatra said, ‘It’s Marilyn Monroe’s dog. She named it Maf, as in Mafia. Isn’t that a dumb name?’ And then Marilyn came into the room, evidently looking for the dog. And the thing is, she was completely nude except for a pair of emerald earrings that Sinatra had given her. We froze, and she stopped dead in her tracks. I could tell that Sinatra wasn’t too pleased about her not wearing any clothes. I’d heard she’d just recently undergone some minor gynecological surgery at Cedars of Lebanon, but she’d seemingly recuperated because she looked pretty damn good. After saying hello to everyone, she gathered up the mutt and went back into Sinatra’s bedroom. Marilyn was thirty-five at the time and perhaps a bit afraid of losing her great sex appeal, and I couldn’t help but think that being with Sinatra confirmed for her that she still had it—in spades. I’d seen her with Sinatra at his home in Palm Springs and at the Palm Springs Racquet Club. I once went out with them on a yacht; before we left, Marilyn went wandering around the pier trying to find someone who could provide her with sleeping pills because she’d forgotten to bring hers along. Another place Sinatra brought Marilyn was the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe, which was coowned by both Sinatra and Sam Giancana. Then there were all sorts of crazy rumors involving Marilyn, Sinatra, and John F. Kennedy, the wildest being that on November 6, 1960, they had a threesome in Palm Springs. JFK, on the campaign trail at the time, stayed at Sinatra’s home that day. Sinatra even mounted a plaque in the house to the effect that Kennedy ‘had slept’ there. But that was the extent of it. There was never a threesome. There were two twosomes, both involving Marilyn. But I can also tell you that the most important man in Marilyn’s life was Joe DiMaggio. His love for her knew no limits. And though their marriage ended in divorce, she loved him as well. When she needed him, he’d race to her side, like one of those Saint Bernard dogs in the Swiss Alps.”
Joey Bishop acknowledged hearing rumors of a possible marriage between Sinatra and Monroe but rejected the notion. “They were lovers and friends,” he said, “but essentially they were friends. Marilyn enjoyed Sinatra’s company and liked talking to him. He was a great listener and an excellent dispenser of advice. He could also be a bit of a jerk. He’d lose his temper and start yelling at her, particularly when she got drunk. I remember being in Las Vegas at a party Sinatra threw for Dean Martin. Marilyn was drinking out of a flask, and Sinatra started shrieking at her. It was almost comical. ‘Shut your fucking filthy mouth, Norma Jeane,’ he bellowed. ‘Just shut your fucking filthy mouth.’ ”
Ralph Roberts had caught up with Marilyn in Los Angeles and went with her to the Dean Martin party. “It took place on June 7,” he said, “and Marilyn drank a lot, too. But there was good reason for it. That entire spring she had digestion problems and a chronic pain on her right side. I convinced her to have a complete physical.”
Marilyn went to see Dr. Hyman Engelberg and told him she had to return to New York to finish packing up her apartment, so Engelberg set up an appointment for her with an associate of his at the French and Polytechnic Medical School Hospital (closed since 1977). Ralph Roberts accompanied her to New York. On June 28 a physician at New York Polyclinic Hospital examined the actress and determined she had an impacted and inflamed gallbladder. A two-hour operation to remove the gallbladder was performed the following day. Joe DiMaggio stayed in the hospital with her the first night and visited her daily for a week, until he flew to San Francisco on family business, thereafter calling Marilyn several times a day until her release from the hospital on July 11. As she left the hospital, she found herself surrounded by hundreds of screaming fans and a hundred reporters and press photographers. “It was frightening,” said Ralph Roberts, who picked her up by car and drove her back to her apartment, where she recuperated until the second week of August, adding painkillers and the diet pill Dexedrine to her once again burgeoning amalgam of barbiturates.
Roberts recalled that Joe DiMaggio, currently on a lengthy business trip for the Monette Company, managed to see Marilyn in New York on several occasions in late July and early August. Another time Roberts drove Marilyn to the Waldorf to visit with Frank Sinatra, in town on a singing engagement. “She downed a flask of vodka in the car on the way to his hotel,” recalled Roberts. “I wasn’t crazy about her affair with Sinatra. I liked Joe DiMaggio. I believe if she’d married him again, she would’ve been happier and less lonely. She told me Dr. Greenson didn’t like Sinatra for her either, though strangely enough he didn’t object to John F. Kennedy.
“While still in New York, Marilyn tried to find a New York therapist. She had no intention of resuming with Dr. Kris, but she couldn’t find anyone to take her place. Had she found an adequate replacement, she very likely would’ve remained in New York, a city she loved. But then, also, she’d begun to pull away from the Strasbergs. She credited them for having helped her both professionally and personally, but she couldn’t get past the Payne Whitney disaster for which Lee Strasberg was partially to blame.”
Before returning to California, Marilyn asked Ralph Roberts to drive her to Roxbury so she could retrieve some personal belongings. She’d made Roberts call Arthur Miller to let him know they were coming. When they arrived, the farmhouse was empty. Marilyn gathered some of her clothes, a few pairs of shoes, some books and records, and her tennis racquet. On the way back to Manhattan, Monroe wondered aloud why her former husband hadn’t bothered to show up. “We could’ve said our good-byes,” she mused. Then she added, “Maybe he’s right—what’s over is over.”
Marilyn wanted Ralph Roberts to return with her to Los Angeles. She offered to put him up at the Chateau Marmont, while she shifted back and forth at first between her new apartment on North Doheny and Frank Sinatra’s Coldwater Canyon home. After several weeks, she moved back into her apartment. That fall, she leased a Thunderbird for Roberts, and he drove her around, at the same time continuing in his role as her masseur.
“At the end of October,” said Roberts, “Joe DiMaggio Jr. paid Marilyn a visit. He wrote to Marilyn all the time, and she wrote to him. He was the closest she ever came to having a child of her own. He was on better terms with her than he was with his father. He’d talk through his problems with Marilyn. She used to give him spending money. In any case, he’d enlisted in the marines and attended boot camp in San Diego. He had a young girlfriend, Pam Reese, to whom he’d become engaged. He brought her along. Marilyn didn’t like her, but she nevertheless asked me to let them borrow the car for the weekend. Within a period of two days, Joe Jr. managed to rack up half a dozen traffic violations. That’s when Marilyn bought him his own car and told him that henceforth he’d be held responsible for his own summonses. I once talked to Joe DiMaggio about his son. ‘Joey’s an okay kid,’ he said, ‘but he makes messes and expects others to bail him out. He imbibes beer the way most people drink water. Hopefully the Marines will help him mature.’ There seemed to be an undertone of anger in his voice. I had the feeling he resented the fact that his son had a relationship with Marilyn separate from his own.”
• • •
Once more on drugs and drink, seeing Dr. Greenson six (and sometimes seven) days a week, Marilyn Monroe appeared to be back on the same roller coaster she’d ridden so many times before. “Dr. Greenson had long given up hope of weaning Marilyn off pharmaceuticals,” remarked Ralph Roberts. “He gave her whatever she wanted in the way of medication, because he realized she’d go elsewhere if he didn’t. The irony is that Dr. Hyman Engelberg was doing the same. As a result, Marilyn was getting double doses of a number of pharmaceuticals. Greenson didn’t seem to know what Engelberg was giving her, and vice versa.”
That fall of 1961, according to Roberts, Marilyn appeared to be severely depressed. One reason for her downward turn may have been her relationship, however fleeting and sporadic, with the president of the United States. On November 19 she attended a dinner party at Peter Lawford’s beach house; JFK attended, as did Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, and Angie Dickinson (another of Kennedy’s girlfriends). Aware of the president’s liaison with Monroe, the two Secret Service agents on duty that evening noted in their daily report that Kennedy and Marilyn had spent the night together in Peter and Pat Lawford’s bedroom. Marilyn’s periodic encounters with JFK surely filled her imagination with visions of a possible future with the president. “I think I’m good for his back,” she joked with Peter Lawford, referring to Kennedy’s chronic back problems. “I’m a soldier,” she added, “and he’s my commander in chief.” Despite the frivolity and heightened drama of the moment, even Monroe must have realized the futility of the affair, adding the element of uncertainty to her already delicate state of mind.
“By this point in time, I knew all about Marilyn and the president,” said Ralph Roberts. “In a way, I guess I knew all along. She didn’t discuss the matter in detail with me, but she left little doubt. For example, the morning after the Lawford party I picked her up with the car. ‘How did it go with President Kennedy?’ I asked her. ‘If I told you,’ she responded, ‘I’d have to kill you.’ ”
Normally Roberts would arrive at Marilyn’s North Doheny apartment at nine in the morning and drive her to Dr. Greenson’s house for her therapy session. Some days she’d have a double session. Other times she’d stay the entire day, taking her meals with the psychiatrist’s family and relaxing in the guest bedroom. Greenson adopted her in a manner not unlike the Greenes or the Strasbergs, incorporating her into his private life, creating an illusion of dependence on Marilyn’s part not particularly useful to the therapeutic process and completely at odds with the classic methodology described in his own textbook, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis. Greenson’s methodology with respect to Monroe struck her friends and acquaintances as highly unorthodox and unprofessional, if not potentially dangerous to her mental well-being. And there was no denying, as Ralph Roberts was quick to notice, that the more Marilyn saw of her psychiatrist, the worse her condition became.
One morning in early October, Roberts went by Marilyn’s apartment to pick her up. He rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. “I began getting vibrations that something was wrong,” he ventured. “I had a set of keys to Marilyn’s apartment, and I tried to open the door, but it was double-locked from within. Gloria Lovell, Frank Sinatra’s secretary, lived in the next apartment. I had the keys to her place as well. I rang her bell. There was no answer, so I went in and called Marilyn on the phone. She finally answered. She sounded totally incoherent, as if she’d had a stroke or something, so I went outside, jumped a fence, and started banging at Marilyn’s window with a garden hose. After a while she came to the window and said, ‘I’m a little tired this morning, Ralph. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ ”
Roberts arrived the next day at nine in the morning, and the scene repeated itself. The front door was double-locked from inside, and there was no response. Roberts called Dr. Greenson, and the psychiatrist ordered him to break into Marilyn’s apartment, so Roberts jimmied open the bathroom window and went in. “Marilyn heard the commotion and came to the bathroom door,” said Roberts. “She was very, very drowsy—completely out of it. She mumbled something about a wild party in the building the night before, and the revelers found out she lived there and kept ringing her doorbell until she finally called the police. Anyway, she got dressed, and I drove her to Greenson’s house. She seemed upset when she went in but much more so when she came out after her session. In fact, I’d never seen her so upset before. She said Greenson wanted her to come back in and have a double session. I told her I’d wait. When she came out again, she seemed extremely withdrawn. On the way home, the only thing she said was that everyone was swindling her. She didn’t sound totally rational. I called her early the next morning and asked if I should come over. ‘Ralph,’ she said, ‘Dr. Greenson thinks you should go back to New York, and he’s sent over a woman to take care of me and drive me around. He doesn’t want me to speak to a lot of people, including the Strasbergs.’ ”
Ralph Roberts flew back to New York later that day. He called Gloria Lovell a few mornings later to tell her he’d returned to New York. He also told her about the woman Dr. Greenson had sent over to look after Marilyn.
“I bumped into the woman in the corridor,” said Gloria. “She introduced herself to me. Her name’s Eunice Murray. She claims she’s Marilyn’s new housekeeper.”
“Housekeeper, my ass!” scoffed Roberts. “She’s Marilyn’s watchdog. Greenson wants to control her by severing her ties to the outside world.”
Born in Chicago in 1902, Mrs. Eunice Murray first met Ralph Greenson in 1948 when she sold him her Santa Monica house. Through her connection to Greenson, Mrs. Murray had worked as a psychiatric nurse both in mental hospitals and on a private baisis. Paid $200 per week, Eunice, who had a married daughter named Marilyn, fulfilled multiple roles in Monroe’s life, one of which, as Roberts asserted, was that of watchdog. She regularly reported back to Greenson, keeping him fully apprised of his prize patient’s comings and goings, including the names of any and all visitors.
There is no question that Greenson attempted to separate Monroe from those he considered a negative influence or counterproductive to her mental health. There is likewise little evidence to indicate that Greenson possessed great insight into Marilyn’s particular set of problems.
At this stage in the psychoanalytic process, Marilyn remained steadfastly loyal to Greenson, oblivious to his questionable approach to her condition and happy to be included in his family’s activities. She began attending the chamber music recitals he organized at his home on Sunday afternoons. She befriended his wife as well as his two grown children. She treated Joan Greenson, his twenty-year-old daughter, like a younger sister, teaching her how to dress, dance the Twist, and walk in a sensuous manner. She engaged in political discussions with Dan Greenson, four years older than his sister Joan, a medical student at Cal Berkeley.
Dr. Greenson gradually lured Marilyn into his lair by making himself available to her whenever she needed to talk. She had his permission to call at all hours, day or night. Because he had so many sessions with her, he granted her a preferential fee of $50 an hour. He gave her a tape recorder and encouraged her to make free-association tapes, recording her daily thoughts, a process she seemed to enjoy. Yet for all his seeming generosity and openness, behind her back in a never-ending cascade of indiscreet notes and letters, the psychiatrist continued to describe his patient in terms that most assuredly would have wounded her.
Ralph Roberts, Pat Newcomb, Susan Strasberg, Lee Strasberg, and Whitey Snyder would all point out that Marilyn was “lonely and had so few friends” principally because Greenson had cut her off from the world. They further agreed that her psychotherapy didn’t help her much, and the more time and money she invested in it, the more depressed she became. As for the “day” and “night” nurse, they were one and the same, and her name was Eunice Murray.
• • •
“Marilyn and I kept in touch by telephone,” said Ralph Roberts. “Late in 1961, she called and said she’d be coming to New York for a few days. She missed Joe DiMaggio and wanted to see him. She said he was going to lend her some money. She’d borrowed from him in the past. She surprised me by stating she was having a miserable time of it in therapy but figured her best option for the moment was to remain with Greenson. She said she missed her New York friends and asked me to return with her to California when she flew back. ‘What about Dr. Greenson? He won’t approve,’ I said. ‘To hell with him,’ she responded.”
The plane Marilyn boarded for New York encountered engine trouble and had to return to Los Angeles. Waiting for the airline to arrange a second flight, she sent DiMaggio a telegram: “Dear Dad Darling, . . . Leaving again on another plane at 5 p.m. . . . I thought about two things, you and changing my will. Love you, I think, more than ever.” Marilyn signed the telegram “Mrs. Norman,” one of her many pseudonyms.
DiMaggio gave Marilyn a check for $15,000 and arranged to visit her in Los Angeles over Christmas and New Year’s. She flew back to California with Ralph Roberts. “She felt happy she and Joe were going to share the holidays together,” Roberts recalled. “She called him her ‘best friend ever.’ ‘I love him and always will,’ she went on. ‘The problem with our marriage was that Joe formulated an image in his stubborn Italian mind of a traditional wife—one who would be faithful, do what he told her to do, and devote all her time to him. There was no way I could stop being Marilyn Monroe and suddenly become someone else, even if I’d wanted to. It didn’t take either of us very long to realize the situation and end our marriage. But it didn’t end our love for each other.’ ”
Marilyn told Roberts that they’d both changed. Joe was calmer, less pushy, more concerned with protecting her. And she was less ambitious, more concerned with finding happiness outside the motion picture business. She was even contemplating going to college and getting a degree. “Joe and I are both high school dropouts,” she remarked. “That’s a rather sad commentary, I must say.”
Eunice Murray encountered Joe DiMaggio for the first time in Marilyn’s apartment several days before Christmas. He was drinking tea that Marilyn had brewed for him. He struck Murray as cordial but quiet. That evening, the couple ate dinner at La Scala. The next day they visited Olvera Street, the block of Mexican shops in downtown Los Angeles, where they bought Christmas tree ornaments to decorate a small evergreen in Monroe’s living room. They did some quick gift shopping and then met with Whitey Snyder and his wife for drinks. They spent one day and one night at a rental cottage not far from the Racquet Club in Palm Springs, and were back in Marilyn’s apartment for Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day they joined a half dozen couples at the Greensons’. The other male guests clustered around DiMaggio and asked him question after question about his playing days with the Bronx Bombers. Marilyn sat next to Joe and listened quietly. Joan Greenson later remarked that Joe and Marilyn reminded her “of an old married couple still very much in love.” On New Year’s Eve Joe and Marilyn entertained Joan Greenson and her boyfriend with champagne and caviar. They roasted chestnuts in Marilyn’s fireplace and danced. The next morning—January 1, 1962—Joe took off for San Francisco and the family restaurant. Marilyn sent him a telegram, which read, “I love you, Joe. Happy New Year!”
Having heard that Joe and Marilyn had spent the holidays together, columnist Earl Wilson called Monroe and put it to her squarely.
“Are you and Joe going to get married?”
“I like my freedom,” Marilyn answered. “I like to play the field.”
“Particularly the outfield,” quipped Wilson.
“Frankly, I’d rather be the catcher,” laughed Marilyn. She spoke fondly of Joe, reiterating what she’d said many times before:
“We tried marriage once. Right now we’re the best of friends, and that’s not a bad place to be after so many years.”