THANK GOD FOR JOE, THANK God,” Marilyn had proclaimed after he’d secured her release from the psychiatric ward at Payne Whitney. Joe DiMaggio had become Monroe’s voice of reason, her lifeline to the world of the living and sane. “Joe gives me hope for the future,” she told Lotte Goslar. “We’re closer now than we’ve ever been.”
Despite their apparent closeness, Joe and Marilyn were not—and never had been—totally candid with one another. DiMaggio did not, for example, reveal that Marilyn’s psychoanalyst, Dr. Greenson, had long been in communication with him, almost to the point where Joe had become a kind of junior colleague. In an incredible breach of medical ethics, Greenson not only divulged details of his diagnosis of Marilyn’s condition—he also shared with DiMaggio his views regarding many of Marilyn’s “friends,” including Frank Sinatra and Ralph Roberts, both of whom Greenson deemed detrimental to the cause. He also discussed the contents of some of the free-association tapes Marilyn had been preparing—her admission that she’d become multiorgasmic as well as her confessional fantasy of wanting to be debauched by her father, a father she didn’t know and had never met.
For her part, Marilyn kept secret from Joe news of a meeting she’d had in November 1961 with Twentieth Century–Fox to discuss her next film, the prophetically titled Something’s Got to Give, to be directed by George Cukor (who’d previously directed her in Let’s Make Love), and to feature Monroe, Dean Martin, Cyd Charisse, Wally Cox, and Phil Silvers. Scheduled for preproduction in late April 1962, the script called for Marilyn to perform a lengthy nude scene. Looking ahead, she couldn’t imagine that Joe would be particularly receptive to the idea of her appearing in the buff for all to see.
Nudity per se meant little to Monroe. She had few inhibitions so far as her body was concerned. Kurt Lamprecht visited her while on a junket to Los Angeles. “I had a writer friend named Will Fowler, and he’d met Marilyn several times, so I invited him along when I went to see her. The apartment itself seemed sparsely decorated. We were in the living room. She had photos of her three stepchildren—Joe Jr. and the two Arthur Miller offspring—and she still communicated with all three, sending them gifts and loving notes. ‘Like me, they’re from broken homes,’ she remarked. There was a photograph of Marilyn on the wall that had been taken by famed cinematographer Jack Cardiff, and Marilyn said it had been Arthur Miller’s favorite portrait of her, but he’d simply left it behind in her New York apartment. Pretty sad, I thought. She didn’t have many positive things to say about Miller, though she seemed fond of his kids. Miller and Monroe were apparently sexually incompatible, and she constantly referred to him as ‘a mama’s boy.’ In any case, she had on a terry cloth bathrobe, and after a few minutes, she slipped out of it and started walking around in the nude. No explanation, nothing, and we certainly weren’t going to complain. The odd thing is there was nothing sexual about it. She might as well have been at a nudist colony. She wasn’t trying to entice or seduce anyone. She was simply enjoying the moment, walking around without any clothes on.”
Entertaining casual male guests in the nude wasn’t an activity Monroe would have likely talked about with DiMaggio. What she did discuss with him was her precarious financial situation, particularly as she’d borrowed money from him several times. He perused her account books, compiled for her by her latest personal secretary, and discovered that, in 1961, Marilyn had spent $22,000 on clothes, $33,000 on doctors, and something over $60,000 on lawyers, accountants, hairstylists, maids, secretaries, and publicists. Joe noticed that Hedda Rosten, who’d stopped working for Marilyn long before, was still on her payroll. Marjorie Stengel, Monroe’s New York secretary in 1961, had inadvertently been paid nearly twice her salary. And an assistant to Aaron Frosch, MM’s New York attorney, had apparently skimmed funds from Marilyn’s account. Because the IRS had audited Monroe on several occasions, DiMaggio recommended that she keep all bills, contracts, bank statements, and other pertinent documents in a filing cabinet. He likewise suggested that if Marilyn wanted greater independence from Eunice Murray, she would do well to hire her own car and driver to get her around town. Marilyn contacted a local limousine service, and they sent over Rudy Kautzky. Rudy became her regular driver, taking her on her daily rounds, from Jurgensen’s for groceries to Elizabeth Arden for makeup. Her most repeated stopover was Vicente Pharmacy, which supplied her with her voluminous storehouse of prescription drugs.
It was Dr. Greenson who suggested that she would be more comfortable in her own house in the Los Angeles area as opposed to her small North Doheny Drive apartment. Ralph Roberts saw Greenson’s suggestion as “an obvious attempt to nail Marilyn down so she couldn’t leave Hollywood and return to New York, which is what she wanted to do and should’ve probably done. Owning a house entails far more responsibility than renting an apartment. Although she had mixed feelings about it, once she bought the place, she became a virtual prisoner. Joe DiMaggio liked the house but didn’t like the underlying idea behind the house; Greenson tried to convince him that it would somehow solve all her psychological issues. Greenson apparently felt that owning her own home would be a suitable substitute for the baby and husband she didn’t have. A house could provide her with a sense of security. ‘It will save her from herself,’ said the shrink. As time would tell, he couldn’t have been more wrong.”
In an interview Alan Levy conducted with Monroe that was published in Redbook magazine in August 1962—the month she died—she was quoted as saying, “I could never imagine buying a new home alone. But I’ve always been alone, so why couldn’t I imagine it?” In the same interview, she spoke about her second go-round with Joe DiMaggio: “I’ve always been able to count on Joe as a friend after that first bitterness of our parting ended. Believe me, there is no spark to be kindled. I just like being with him, and we have a better understanding than we’ve ever had.”
In addition to DiMaggio’s brief exposure to the rites of psychotherapy, he’d more recently attended a series of classes in anger management. Now able to contain his temper, a task made easier by his all but having given up alcohol (he still had an occasional glass of champagne), he was far more capable of harnessing his emotions. He no longer insisted that his present relationship with Marilyn need end at the altar. He happily accepted the role she thrust upon him, that of friend, mentor, and lover. When Marilyn told him—over a game of gin rummy—that Dr. Greenson wanted her to acquire a house in Los Angeles and “settle down,” he finally admitted that Greenson had discussed the matter with him. DiMaggio’s advice to her was to purchase a simple abode, nothing fancy or elaborate, and certainly not one of those garish movie star monstrosities to be found in Bel Air and sections of Beverly Hills.
It happened to be Eunice Murray who came across the “ideal” house for Marilyn. Located on one acre of sloping lawn at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood, only a mile and a half (how convenient!) from Dr. Greenson’s Santa Monica home, the L-shaped 2,300-square-foot Spanish colonial hacienda featured dark beamed ceilings, arched doorways, adobe stucco walls, a wood-paneled dining room, and a sunken living room with fireplace. Built in 1929, the house contained three bedrooms and two baths. Marilyn’s bedroom, the largest of the three, had its own bathroom in addition to a fireplace; the room faced the front of the house. A kidney-shaped swimming pool, surrounded by tropical foliage, sat behind the residence. A red brick driveway led to a two-car garage and an attached guest cottage. Fifth Helena Drive was a cul-de-sac, and the hacienda stood at the end of the street, guaranteeing Marilyn at least partial privacy. It was also conveniently located near San Vicente Boulevard, Brentwood’s main thoroughfare.
“I never owned a house before,” said Marilyn. “It’s a cozy place, not at all ostentatious. It was just for me and for a few friends.” Putting a positive spin on the purchase, Marilyn added, “It’s a fortress where I can feel safe from the world.”
Before closing on the deal, Marilyn called Joe DiMaggio in San Francisco and asked him to come look at the house. He flew down, and Eunice Murray drove the couple to the property. ‘You’d better duck down so nobody recognizes you,’ Murray warned DiMaggio. ‘They may get the wrong idea.’ ‘He can’t hide his nose,’ remarked Marilyn. DiMaggio laughed. Marilyn led him through the house, room by room. At the end of the tour, Joe admitted the place looked sturdy and had charm. He suggested she build a small apartment over the garage for either a household employee or extra guests. To maintain privacy, he advised her not to put her name on the mailbox at the edge of the driveway. Finally, he lent her another $15,000 to help her purchase the residence. She made a down payment of $42,500 and took a fifteen-year mortgage on the remainder, which cost her $320 per month. The total price of the house was $77,500.
Enthusiastic about the purchase, Marilyn busied herself decorating the new acquisition. She bought a Norman Norell–designed red fabric couch for the living room, which arrived only days before her death and remained encased in the guest cottage. From a local collector, she bought a bronze copy of a Rodin statue (The Kiss), the original of which she’d seen on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She acquired an oil painting of a bull by Poucette, an acclaimed contemporary French female artist. She transformed the smallest bedroom into a fitting room and began modernizing and refurbishing the kitchen and bathrooms as well as the two remaining bedrooms, the living room, and the guest cottage, selecting mostly dark, rustic wooden furniture and fabric in imitation of Dr. Greenson’s Spanish-style house. Like Greenson, she placed a low wooden coffee table in front of her living room fireplace. She installed new lighting fixtures throughout. She created a sleeping nook for Maf in the guest cottage because he tended to bark at night, keeping the actress awake. She ordered a red carpet to be woven for the guest cottage and commissioned an artisan to hand-paint the rafters with flowers and leaves. She made plans to install a potted herb garden and bought a number of flowering plants and citrus trees from Frank’s, a nearby nursery. To further her interest in gardening, she subscribed to Horticulture magazine and hired a landscaper and a gardener to help develop the grounds. She hired two handymen—Eunice Murray’s son-in-law, Norman Jefferies, and his brother, Keith—to make new kitchen cabinets, refinish the floors, and do other odds and ends around the house.
Describing her aspirations and current state of mind for the benefit of photographer George Barris, a recent friend, Marilyn said, “I’m going to live in my new house all alone with my snowball, my little white poodle . . . Oh, sure, I’d rather be married and have children and a man to love—but you can’t always have everything in life the way you want it. You have to accept what comes your way.”
Of the house itself, she noted, “It’s small, but I find it rather comfortable . . . It’s quiet and peaceful—just what I need right now . . . There are fourteen red stone squares leading to my front door, where there is a ceramic tile coat of arms with the motto Cursum Perficio, meaning ‘end of my journey.’ I hope it’s true.”
• • •
On February 1, 1962, two weeks before she departed Los Angeles on a furniture shopping expedition to New York and Mexico, Marilyn attended a dinner party at the home of Peter and Pat Lawford. Their guest of honor that evening was Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general of the United States and President Kennedy’s younger brother. Marilyn had attended a party for JFK at the Lawfords only ten weeks earlier. Obviously, the president had mentioned Monroe to his brother because when Lawford asked Bobby if there was anyone in Hollywood he wanted to meet, he immediately named Marilyn Monroe. As JFK’s former campaign manager, Bobby had encountered her briefly at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1960. No doubt aware of the extent of his brother’s relationship with Monroe, Bobby eagerly anticipated the dinner, as did Marilyn.
Peter Lawford sat them next to each other and watched with amusement as Bobby’s eyes more than once traveled the distance between Marilyn’s visage and her more than ample (yet very firm) bustline. “He wasn’t exactly subtle about it, but then the Kennedy men never were very subtle when it came to women and sex. She bombarded him with questions related to civil rights, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and J. Edgar Hoover. She asked him if he and his brother planned on firing Hoover, and he said they wanted to but wouldn’t. Marilyn told me later that Dan Greenson, her psychiatrist’s son, had helped her frame the queries. However, I don’t think her purpose was simply to impress Bobby. Politics truly interested her. Bobby must have been pleasantly surprised because he called the following day and said, ‘Jack’s got good taste. I didn’t realize Marilyn Monroe was as bright as she is. And she also has a terrific sense of humor.’ ”
Joan Braden, whose husband, Tom Braden, had been a top operative with the CIA, attended the party and noted that Bobby was “enthralled with Marilyn to the point where he ignored everyone else, including Kim Novak, who sat to the attorney general’s right while Marilyn sat to his left. We were all but invisible to him. Kim suffered in silence. Ethel, Bobby’s wife, was there as well, but the Lawfords had seated her at another table near Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. Ethel seemed oblivious to Bobby’s very intense interest in Marilyn.”
Marilyn was taken with Bobby. “The General,” as she later came to call him, struck her as vibrant and authentic, unusual traits in a profession abundant with egocentric phonies. Then again, Bobby was thirty-six—young for a full-fledged politico, and only a year older than Marilyn. She was still “the president’s girl,” but she liked Bobby. He was fun, and he wasn’t a bad dancer either, as she discovered after dinner. Before the evening ended, Bobby gave her his private line at the Department of Justice and told her to call whenever she wanted. “You might come to regret that offer,” Marilyn warned him.
• • •
When Marilyn arrived in New York, she invited Norman and Hedda Rosten to spend an evening with her and Frank Sinatra. Rosten described Marilyn, in a simple green print dress, as looking “like a young girl—sixteen or eighteen—going to a school dance.” She was “giddy, high spirited, and nervous.” Sinatra still excited Marilyn. She saw him several evenings and shopped for furniture (for the Brentwood house) during the day. Another evening she attended a party for President Kennedy at socialite Fifi Fell’s Park Avenue penthouse apartment, then (according to FBI and Secret Service files) stayed with JFK at the Carlyle. Following her stopover in New York, she spent a weekend in Miami Beach with Joe DiMaggio, rewarding him for his generous and frequent financial loans by giving him a formal portrait of herself by artist Jon Whitcomb, which Joe later hung in the bedroom of his San Francisco house. DiMaggio gave Marilyn several self-help books, among them a guide to finding happiness in a difficult world. During their weekend together, Marilyn introduced DiMaggio to Isidore Miller, who was again wintering in Florida. Joe and Marilyn ate dinner in a small Italian restaurant on Collins Avenue. DiMaggio evidently made no mention of his competition; by this point, he no doubt knew of Marilyn’s romances with both Sinatra and JFK but probably convinced himself that being Monroe’s part-time lover represented a happier circumstance than not having access to her at all.
On February 21 Marilyn flew from Miami International Airport to Mexico City on the second leg of her furniture treasure hunt. Eunice Murray had visited Mexico a week earlier and had returned with names of dealers, galleries, collectors, and shops for Monroe to visit in the course of her trip. With Marilyn in Mexico were hairdressers Sydney Guilaroff and George Masters, Pat Newcomb, and Eunice Churchill, the medical secretary to both Ralph Greenson and Hyman Engelberg. Marilyn’s therapist and personal physician currently shared office space at a medical facility at 436 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. Eunice Churchill’s function on the Mexican junket was to pose as an interior decorator, enabling Marilyn to gain reductions on the purchase of furniture and furnishings, including ceramic tile for the bathrooms of her Brentwood property.
“Our first stop in Mexico City was a Catholic orphanage,” recalled Sydney Guilaroff. “Marilyn had brought along all sorts of gifts for the kids: clothes, toys, candy bars, the works. They loved her for it. These children were among the poorest of the poor. And Marilyn, of course, understood their hopelessness, what it meant to be locked away in an orphanage. She filled out papers to be able to adopt one or more of the orphans.
In Mexico City, the group stayed at the Continental Hotel, where they were greeted each morning by hundreds of fans chanting “Maraleen! Maraleen!” A pair of security guards had been hired to protect the actress. Pat Newcomb arranged a press conference for her in the hotel’s grand ballroom. Two days into the trip, Marilyn and her entourage visited the Byrna Gallery, where Monroe bought three paintings by prominent Mexican artists. At a fine-arts shop, she ordered glass and metal sconces for the light fixtures, a silver-framed mirror for the dining room, and two large rectangular mirrors for her bedroom. She acquired a hand-carved chess set and ordered several art deco chairs. “She also bought clothing and jewelry,” said Sydney Guilaroff, “but instead of placing the jewelry in her hotel room safe, she wrapped it in tissue paper and kept the packet in a pair of her shoes. There had been several recent robberies in the hotel, and I guess Marilyn figured her jewelry would be more secure in a shoe than in a safe.”
Marilyn traveled around Mexico with Fred Vanderbilt Field, a disinherited member of the prominent American family and a longtime associate of the Greensons, whose pro-Marxist and Communist leanings made Field a major FBI target. He and his wife, Nieves, took Marilyn on a tour of Mexico, driving her to Cuernavaca, Taxco, and Borda. The actress’s brief association with Field led to a flurry of FBI reports, one of which (sent by an official of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division) clearly demonstrated that Eunice Murray had become a bureau informant. “According to Eunice Murray,” read an FBI memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover, dated March 2, 1962, “the subject (Marilyn Monroe) still reflects the political views of Arthur Miller. Her views are very positively and concisely leftist. However, if she is being actively used by the Communist Party, it is not general knowledge among those working with the movement in Los Angeles.”
And then there was José Bolaños, the thirty-five-year old actor/screenwriter/film producer from Mexico City, who spotted Monroe in a restaurant and sent a dozen roses to her table. Dark, intense, masculine, and moody, Bolaños had once been a matador, a bullfighter. Passionate and romantic, he was, Monroe told Lena Pepitone, “the greatest lover in the world.” The only problem was his jealousy. “He’s worse than Joe,” she said, referring to the DiMaggio of old.
Bolaños and Monroe spent a night in Acapulco. The next day, he took her into the dense forests on the outskirts of the city to the Pancho Villa House, a shrine to the famous Mexican Robin Hood who lived at the turn of the century. A hero to some, a villain to others, Pancho Villa remained a mythic figure whose army of lovers—females of all ages—had purportedly numbered in the thousands. Visitors to the shrine paid $25 each to watch women lie on a bed and make love to the spirit of Pancho Villa. They would go through all the motions of lovemaking. They would writhe, thrash, moan, groan, tremble, and gyrate, while the paying spectators watched in stunned silence. They would call out Pancho’s name as they reached climax. It didn’t occur to Marilyn until she’d returned to the States that Pancho Villa’s “lovers” were nothing more than a bunch of performers being paid to put on an exhibition. And that the so-called Acapulco shrine to Pancho was only one of many scattered around Mexico and run by a band of enterprising operators.
When Marilyn’s eleven-day Mexican sojourn ended, she returned to Los Angeles via New York. She told Lena Pepitone that José Bolaños had proposed to her. On March 5 Bolanos joined Marilyn in Hollywood and accompanied her to the annual Golden Globe Awards. Once again the Hollywood Foreign Press Association found a reason to give Marilyn a statuette, this time naming her the World’s Favorite Female Star. It wasn’t an Oscar, but it would have to do. The Hollywood Reporter noted that her acceptance speech was slurred, suggesting she’d downed too many pills or too much booze—or both. Joe DiMaggio, in New York, read about José Bolaños and hopped the next plane for Los Angeles. By the time he arrived, Bolaños was on his way back to Mexico. Marilyn had checked him into the Beverly Hills Hotel, and then, in his words, “she never came back.” Without funds to pay for his lodging, Bolaños had no choice but to check out.
• • •
With Joe DiMaggio’s newfound acceptance of psychotherapy, he’d taken steps to forge a peaceful relationship with Dr. Ralph Greenson. But when Joe arrived in Los Angeles in early March, an event transpired that affected both his attitude and his budding friendship with the therapist. Opposed to Marilyn’s fleeting romance with José Bolaños, Greenson suggested that she stay at his house until the screenwriter left town. Having brought over a toothbrush and little else, she was still there when DiMaggio showed up to drive her home. Greenson told DiMaggio that he’d sedated Monroe and that she was asleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He said it would be best if she remained in his home until further notice. Evidently awake, Marilyn heard DiMaggio’s voice and began yelling his name. The ballplayer bolted past Greenson, ran up the stairs, found Marilyn, and brought her back downstairs. She complained that Greenson had forced her to stay against her will, that she’d planned on spending a single night but that he hadn’t permitted her to leave. Joe ushered her out of the house and into his car, and they drove off. Marilyn told Joe that not only had Greenson imprisoned her, he’d also encouraged her to break off many of her personal ties, DiMaggio included.
By the time DiMaggio left Los Angeles, having helped Marilyn move some of her new furniture into her Brentwood house, he’d come to thoroughly distrust her psychiatrist. “Even Marilyn began to wonder about Greenson,” recalled Joe DiMaggio Jr. “She told me as early as mid-March that she planned to make one more picture and then move back to New York. She’d finally come to share my father’s opinion regarding Hollywood—he called it ‘a cesspool,’ and she termed it ‘the first circle of hell.’ ”
Ongoing surveillance of Monroe by both the Secret Service and the FBI revealed that on March 24, 1962, Monroe and John F. Kennedy spent the night together at Bing Crosby’s Palm Desert residence. A photograph of them, located in the FBI files, shows JFK attired in a turtleneck sweater and slacks, while Marilyn has on only a white terry cloth bathrobe. Peter Lawford originally asked Frank Sinatra to host Marilyn and the president at his Palm Springs home. In anticipation of their arrival, Sinatra had spent some $500,000 transforming his estate into the West Coast White House, constructing a series of bungalows for the Secret Service and a heliport to accommodate the executive chopper that would be used to transport Kennedy from the Palm Springs airport to the property.
“A month before the visit,” said Peter Lawford, “J. Edgar Hoover informed Bobby Kennedy that the FBI had been made aware of Frank Sinatra’s ongoing dealings with leading Mob figures, such as Sam Giancana. I received a phone call from Bobby informing me that they’d decided to have the president stay at Bing Crosby’s house rather than Sinatra’s. Bobby asked me to pass on this information to Sinatra, which I did. From that day forward Sinatra was persona non grata at the Kennedy White House. He blamed me for what happened, and it ended our friendship. He was furious. He got hold of a jackhammer and tore up the heliport outside his property. His last words to me were, ‘Why would he stay at Crosby’s place? Crosby’s a fucking Republican.’ ”
• • •
Despite his growing animosity toward Marilyn’s psychiatrist, the month of April turned out relatively well for Joe DiMaggio. He spent several days with Marilyn at her Brentwood house, met with his son one weekend in San Francisco, was paid handsomely to appear at a baseball memorabilia show in Boston, and was invited to lunch at the United Nations with UN Undersecretary General Ralph Bunche. Although the working press had to provide UN security guards with proper identification, when DiMaggio reached the dining room entrance, the guards instantly recognized him. “Come on in, Joe,” said one of them, “Dr. Bunche is waiting for you.”
The same month proved to be much more problematic for Monroe. In April she attended costume and makeup tests for Something’s Got to Give. A remake of My Favorite Wife, a 1940 comedy starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, the never-to-be-completed Something’s Got to Give was about a shipwrecked woman, thought to be deceased, who returns home after several years only to learn that her husband has remarried.
The ill-fated project was doomed from the start. One of the major problems was that Twentieth Century–Fox began shooting long before having a completed and approved script in hand. The other major problem was Marilyn Monroe herself. “Her chief gripe,” reported Whitey Snyder, “was that Fox had given Elizabeth Taylor a million dollars to star in Cleopatra, whereas she was being paid one-tenth that amount. She said she should never have disbanded Marilyn Monroe Productions or gotten rid of Milton Greene, and she blamed it all on Arthur Miller. From the beginning, Marilyn had it out for Fox’s bosses, all of whom she contended were corrupt. As usual, she was constantly late on the set, arrived high and hung over and unable to recall her lines. To complicate matters, Dr. Ralph Greenson had convinced Fox to hire him in a sort of supervisory capacity to keep Marilyn going. He felt she needed the picture for her own self-esteem. In my opinion, he should never have been directly involved with the project. There seemed to be something strange and phony about Greenson’s relationship with Marilyn.”
Shortly after production on the film began, Marilyn received an unexpected and highly disturbing note from C. Stanley Gifford, the man she believed to be her birth father. Claiming that he wished to “make amends” for his refusal in the past to acknowledge or meet Monroe, Gifford’s brief letter wished her luck on her latest film venture and ended with the words: “From the man you tried to see some ten years ago. God forgive me.”
Upon receipt of the card, Marilyn contacted Lotte Goslar and read it to her. “She was in tears,” Goslar recalled, “and she kept saying, ‘It’s too late, much too late.’ ”
A week later, according to Goslar, Marilyn received a telephone call at Fox from a woman in Palm Springs who claimed to be Stanley Gifford’s private nurse. Gifford had suffered a heart attack and wasn’t expected to survive. That’s the reason he’d sent her the note. He wanted to talk to her before he died. Monroe responded by telling the nurse exactly what she’d been told ten years earlier when she’d approached Gifford: “Please assure the gentleman I have never met him, but if he has anything specific to say to me, he can contact my lawyer. Would you like his number?”
That was the last Marilyn heard from Gifford, and vice versa. As it turned out, Gifford survived his heart attack and outlived his daughter. Their interaction during the filming of Something’s Got to Give brought to an abrupt halt Marilyn’s lifelong search for her real father. It likewise, no doubt, contributed to Marilyn’s mounting slag heap of personal problems, earmarked most profoundly by her addictions and difficulties in front of the cameras. Director George Cukor lashed out at Pat Newcomb one day for bringing a bottle of champagne onto the set. “Stop acting like a fucking social director,” he yelled, “and start acting like a publicist!” Following a series of arguments with Monroe, who constantly complained that the script kept changing, Cukor sent Darryl Zanuck a memo expressing his disdain for Monroe and her lack of consideration for the cast and crew: “Marilyn is the least professional performer I have ever worked with.” To which Zanuck replied: “If I could, I would launch a torpedo from here—aimed directly at her dressing room.” Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson sent Henry Weinstein, producer of the picture, a letter complaining that Marilyn Monroe “represents everything that’s wrong with Hollywood. She’s spoiled silly and drugged out of her mind. I saw some footage yesterday, and she seemed to be moving in slow motion, as if in a trance. It’s difficult to watch.”
The situation grew progressively worse. Three weeks into production, Marilyn came down with a viral infection and refused to go to work. Peter Levathes, acting head of the studio, dropped in on Monroe at her Brentwood house. He thought she looked and sounded fine. He made an appointment with Mickey Rudin, her attorney, and pointed out that Marilyn had certain contractual obligations, which she wasn’t meeting. He told Rudin, “All I ever hear, every single day, is, she’s not feeling well, she has a cold, she has a virus, she’s under the weather. The point is, she’s never on the set, and on those rare occasions when she’s around and in front of the cameras, she either massacres her lines or forgets them altogether.” Rudin communicated with Ralph Greenson, noting that Levathes had threatened to terminate Marilyn and shut down the production. The psychiatrist “guaranteed” that Marilyn would show up punctually every day and would apologize to the director and producer for her absences. Although Greenson had come to disapprove of Joe DiMaggio’s presence in his ex-wife’s life, he turned to the ballplayer in an effort to convince Marilyn to resume work on the project. Reluctant to become involved with Twentieth Century–Fox, DiMaggio nevertheless spent two days with her in Brentwood, attempting to raise her spirits.
It was at this stage, following DiMaggio’s departure, that Marilyn surprised both Greenson and Cukor by vanishing from Los Angeles and flying to New York for three days on what she termed “a top-secret” mission. The mission entailed singing the “Happy Birthday Song” to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962, in celebration of his forty-fifth birthday.
It had been Peter Lawford’s idea to have Marilyn Monroe sing for the finale of the president’s birthday gala, a Democratic Party fund-raiser held before eighteen thousand paying supporters and a television audience numbering in the millions. In Monroe’s absence, shooting on Something’s Got to Give once again ground to a halt. As Marilyn and Peter Lawford flew to New York, Bobby Kennedy telephoned Milton Gould, the chairman of Fox’s executive committee, and requested that the studio release Marilyn for several days so she could participate in the festivities. Unaware that Monroe had already departed, Gould said it would be impossible—the film was way behind schedule. Recalling the conversation, Gould noted that RFK called him “a no-good Jew bastard” and hung up on him.
Marilyn had asked fashion designer Jean Louis to create her dress for the occasion. At a cost of $7,000, the couturier had fashioned a skintight, flesh-colored mesh gown studded with rhinestones. Wearing nothing underneath, Marilyn described the garment as “all skin and beads.” “The skin was visible,” commented Peter Lawford, “but the beads were not.” Marilyn personally paid the bill for the gown but was later reimbursed by Bobby Kennedy, who evidently wrote it off as a “Justice Department expense.”
Another payment assumed by RFK went to Mickey Song, a Beverly Hills hair stylist who attended to JFK and RFK whenever one or both visited the West Coast. Song had been flown to New York to cut President Kennedy’s hair prior to the Madison Square Garden birthday party. “I saw Marilyn Monroe sitting alone in her Garden dressing room and noticed that while her hair had been preset, it had to be brushed out,” said Song. “I asked Bobby Kennedy, whose hair I also cut earlier that day, if Marilyn needed me to attend to her hair. He led me to her and introduced us, though I’d met her previously on several occasions at Hollywood parties. She seemed nervous as I worked on her hair. A few minutes later Bobby returned and said he needed to talk with Marilyn, so I left the room. The next thing I knew, he came barging out of her dressing room and slammed the door behind him. ‘I think she needs you again,’ he said. And under his breath, he muttered, ‘What a bitch!’ I went back in. Her hair was totally disheveled. She didn’t say anything as I combed it back into place, but it seemed apparent to me that he’d tried to put the make on her and she fought him off. For my bouffant job on Marilyn, Bobby eventually sent me a check for fifty dollars.”
Mickey Song further remembered that Marilyn was drinking heavily, alternating between champagne and vodka, as she waited for her cue. Among the celebrities in the packed house that night were Jack Benny, Henry Fonda, and Ella Fitzgerald. Peter Lawford introduced her. Her gown glittering, she moved slowly in the direction of the spotlight, stopped, looked straight at the president and began to sing her seductive, unmistakably sexual rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Ethel Kennedy had joined Bobby in the audience, but Jackie passed the evening at her retreat near Middleburg, Virginia, evidently uninterested in hearing her husband serenaded by the woman who secretly planned to evict her from the White House.
After completing the number, Marilyn launched into a specially written version of “Thanks for the Memory,” and then led the audience in a happy birthday chorus. A large cake was wheeled out, and the president soon appeared onstage to cut it. “I can now retire from politics,” he joked to the crowd, “having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”
With the show over, the party adjourned only long enough for a few of the more notable participants to relocate to a private affair hosted by Arthur Krim, head of United Artists. Still wearing her nearly diaphanous gown, Marilyn was as much a hit in Krim’s town house as she’d been at the Garden. Although the actress had rejected Bobby Kennedy’s advances earlier that evening, he hadn’t given up. UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson would recall in his autobiography that in order to converse with Marilyn that evening, he’d been “forced to break through the strong defense established by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around her like a moth around the flame.”
Marilyn’s escort for the evening was Arthur Miller’s father, whom she introduced to both the president and the attorney general. At midnight, she placed Isidore Miller in a taxicab and returned to the party. Later that night, she joined JFK for a private birthday celebration in one of the bedrooms of the family’s penthouse suite at the Carlyle. As usual, a Secret Service agent was posted outside the front door of the suite to guard against the possibility of somebody walking in on the couple. An FBI report not released until 2010 revealed a new wrinkle concerning Monroe’s dealings with the Kennedys. Apparently in an alcoholic haze, she’d spent an hour in bed with JFK, and then entered a second bedroom and passed the remainder of the night with Robert F. Kennedy, whose aggressive nature and perseverance had obviously paid off. The following day, RFK bragged to Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, that he’d finally “bagged Miss Monroe.” It was Salinger who disclosed this information to an FBI agent.
Back in Los Angeles, Marilyn went to dinner with Ralph Roberts. “She gave me a detailed account of the birthday bash, but couldn’t seem to recall what happened after she and the president reached the Carlyle,” said Roberts. “However, I must admit I didn’t realize until this particular point in time just how much John F. Kennedy had meant to her. She’d built the affair into a full-blown romantic fantasy. For months she’d been calling the president at the White House, writing him letters, even sending him snippets of her love poetry. But what truly amazed me was her admission that she’d once telephoned Jackie Kennedy. She actually told the First Lady she wanted to marry the president, and apparently Jackie humored her by saying she had no objection and, in fact, had grown weary of her fishbowl existence in the executive mansion. I could well imagine their conversation, both women expressing their thoughts in that whispery, Little Bo Peep voice they shared. Still, I had some serious misgivings about Marilyn. She seemed to have constructed a whole new reality for herself, a magic kingdom in which she—and she alone—reigned supreme.”
On May 25, back on the set, Marilyn did a nude swimming pool scene. “It’s the only time she seemed to come alive,” said George Cukor. On June 1 she celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday by taking Dean Martin’s teenaged son to a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game and then went to dinner with Frank Sinatra at Trader Vic’s. The next morning she came down with a head cold, and again production on the film had to be suspended—but not before the cast threw a small birthday party for Marilyn at the Fox Studio. On June 8, having seen and heard enough, Peter Levathes issued the following public statement: “Marilyn Monroe has been removed from the cast of Something’s Got to Give. This action was necessary because of Miss Monroe’s repeated willful breaches of contract. No justification was given by Miss Monroe for her failure to report for photography on many occasions. The studio has suffered losses through these absences.”
Levathes attempted to salvage Something’s Got to Give by replacing Monroe with actress Lee Remick, but Dean Martin—the male lead—refused to work with anyone other than Marilyn. Levathes offered Martin’s role to Robert Mitchum, but Mitchum—a friend to both Monroe and Dean Martin—wasn’t interested. With few options available, the studio now sued Monroe for $750,000 in a futile attempt to recover a fraction of its losses. The lawsuit never reached court.
“They ought to sue Elizabeth Taylor, not me,” Marilyn told Ralph Roberts. “Cleopatra has cost them far more than my stupid little film. But it’s easier to blame me for everything. I’m a pushover. Elizabeth Taylor’s the Queen of the Nile.”
In despair over her ouster from the film, Marilyn turned to Joe DiMaggio for consolation. In spite of his past rages, his hatred of Hollywood and the movie industry, Joe had never turned away from Marilyn. Nor had he ever given up hope of getting back with her on a full-time basis. In anticipation of spending more time with her, he had just resigned his position at Monette. He arrived at Marilyn’s Brentwood home and asked her to marry him. He wasn’t a billionaire, but he had more than enough money to support them both. He would supplement what he already had by endorsing products and appearing in television commercials. They could still have children—if need be, they could always adopt. In time they could revive Marilyn Monroe Productions, and she could star in a film every year or two, but the films would be of a serious nature, and she would make far more than she currently earned as a “studio slave”—he would see to that.
Marilyn turned him down, though not necessarily forever; she had to think about it. They argued. Joe told her she was killing herself, giving up all potential happiness, sacrificing all normal human emotions, and for what? For the sake of the studio dictators who’d imposed upon her the role of a super sex symbol and little else? “Now they’ve even got you posing in the nude!” he yelled, before slamming the door behind him.
She later admitted to Ralph Roberts that she’d been high on pot and LSD when Joe proposed to her, but even if she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have gone along with it. They had a good thing going now, so why ruin it by getting married again? They would only repeat all the same patterns and make the same mistakes that had befouled their first marriage.
According to Richard Ben Cramer, DiMaggio’s biographer, Joe boarded the next flight to New York and headed straight for Toots Shor’s. When he recounted his conversation with Marilyn for the saloon keeper’s benefit, Toots said something like, “Aw, Joe, what do expect from a whore like that?” DiMaggio told his longtime buddy to go fuck himself. He never spoke to Toots Shor again.