MARILYN AT RAINBOW'S END

“Here we are, Pussy, at this God-forsaken place, a land of shadows, a burial ground for prehistoric monsters. And your soon-to-be ex-husband, Arthur Miller, calls this drama The Misfits. Is that what we are, Pussy? Hollywood will use us, rip the flesh from our bones, and then bury us with those extinct reptiles.”

In the burning cauldron that was the summer of 1960 in the Nevada desert, a long, sleek, black limousine, carrying a precious, delicate cargo, Marilyn Monroe, in its back seat, came to a stop on the location shoot of her final film, The Misfits. The movie had been written by her estranged husband, Arthur Miller, and starred Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach, with John Huston directing. He’d helmed her once before, in 1950, when she was but a budding starlet in The Asphalt Jungle, with “Dirty Pillow Slip” blonde hair, her favorite shade. Before assigning her the role back then, he’d put her on the casting couch.

Dizzy from a sleepless night, she glided from the limo when a handsome young man opened the door for her. She reached back for her purse to retrieve her sunglasses before accepting his firm, masculine hand.

She stared into his eager face, so anxious to please, so willing to be seduced by whatever movie star, male or female, that came into his life. She’d met guys like him pumping gas in every station between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

She took in the vast landscape that threatened to engulf her. Miles of cactus- and shrub-studded sands stretched before her, against a backdrop of the dark camel bumps of the rattlesnake-infested Washoe Mountains. From where she stood, she spotted three Piute Indian trails shooting off in all different directions. “I bet these trails lead to no where,” she said.

They were fifty miles from Reno, but she told him, “I think we’ve landed on the fucking moon. We passed three little ghost towns on the way here.”

She studied his face. “Everywhere I look there is nothing but death, but in your face is life. Just who are you? A desert rapist? A serial killer, probably. Someone who looks too good to be true.”

“I’ve been assigned to cater to your every wish,” he said. “My name’s Sandy Paroe. I want to be a movie star myself, but right now, I’m assigned to be your gofer. Whatever you want, I’ll get it for you, even out here in the desert.”

“My every wish?” she said. “We’ll see about that. Sandy, a perfect name for someone in these sandy badlands. Just how old are you?”

She giggled and squeezed his muscled arm. “I’m told that when a boy is nineteen, he’s at his sexual peak. After that, it’s all downhill.”

“A film crew is the perfect place for that. This Hollywood crew will drain you dry. I was a nineteen-year-old Hollywood starlet, so I know what I’m talking about. Has Monty arrived?”

“You mean Montgomery Clift, my favorite actor?” Sandy said. “He left a note for you, telling you he’ll meet you tonight in the bar of the Mapes Hotel in Reno. I can’t wait to meet him. You’re my favorite actress, and Monty is my favorite actor. Both of you are beautiful.”

“Oh, Sandy, you have so much to learn. Don’t you know, honey, that we’re all fags in Hollywood, including me? We just drift across the desert like tumbleweeds bent on corrupting the innocent.”

“You’ll find no better teachers than Marilyn Monroe and Monty Clift. At least we can teach you what not to do.”

“Please stop calling me ma’am just because I’m thirty-four, on the dawn of middle age.”

“You’re not old—in fact, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, maybe the most beautiful woman in the world. All the boys at my college say that.”

“I’ve got to visit them one day if we ever get this stinking movie made,” she said. “Now show me to my dressing room trailer.”

Inside the cramped, scalding hot trailer, she gasped for breath. “Haven’t they heard of air conditioning in this hell hole?”

While he fumbled with the air conditioner, she pulled off her tight white dress, revealing that she wore no underwear.

“Miss Monroe, I have to warn you, I’m liable to get an erection. That shower is mighty small.”

“Well, I hope you aren’t, so get out of those clothes. When the day comes when Marilyn Monroe can’t raise a hard-on in a nineteen-year-old boy, I’m retiring.”

He slowly began to unbutton his cowboy shirt. “I’m a little nervous. I read movie magazines. Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, and Rock Hudson are tough acts to follow.”

“What’s this? A bedtime Who’s Who? Get out of those jeans so I can see what I’m getting.” She moved toward the shower in the back of the trailer. In minutes he was under the tepid shower stream with her, laughing and reaching for her breasts.

In the shower, she lathered his body with soap. “My God, your penis is a dead ringer for Dean Martin’s whang.”

Heading for Reno on an airplane, Monty was almost forty years old. On the plane, the flight steward had refused to serve him another drink. He almost pleaded for another round, even though he was clearly drunk. Five weeks before, he had been booked into Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, suffering from alcohol-induced hepatitis.

He’d agreed with both John Huston and Arthur Miller to accept the role in The Misfits of a thump-drunk bronco buster. To sustain himself on the set, he planned to keep tanked up on vodka and grapefruit juice from his thermos.

Making his way to the rear of the airplane, he went into the toilet and checked his face in the mirror. His days of being known as “the male Elizabeth Taylor” were over. He’d earned that title when the press contrasted his male beauty to her female beauty in A Place in the Sun (1951). Looking at his ruined face, he remembered that he’d told Elizabeth “the beauty butchers never put my face back together again.”

On the night of May 12, 1956, nearly four years earlier, Montgomery Clift had reluctantly agreed to attend a party at the home which she shared at the time with her now-estranged husband, Michael Wilding. Even back then, he was spending more nights with his lover, fellow British actor Stewart Granger, than he was with her.

Rock Hudson also attended the party at the Benedict Canyon house. Throughout the evening, Monty had begged Rock to follow him down that treacherous canyon road “to fuck me, really fuck me,” but Rock had turned down the drunken offer.

Eventually, tanked up on way too much alcohol, Monty had stumbled out of the house and gotten behind the wheel of his car, although Elizabeth feared he was in no condition to drive. He didn’t listen to his beloved “Bessie.”

Driving in the car in front of Monty, his longtime friend, actor Kevin McCarthy, agreed to go first, instructing Monty to follow him, slowly and carefully, down the dangerous road.

On the way down, McCarthy became alarmed that Monty was riding too close to his bumper. He was driving erratically. Hearing the screech of brakes, McCarthy looked back in horror as Monty’s car went over an embankment, plunging into a ravine and crashing into a telephone pole.

One of the world’s most celebrated faces, at that exact time being flashed across movie screens across the world, was smashed in seconds into bloody pulp.

Alerted to the wreck by McCarthy, Elizabeth, Wilding, and Rock raced down the hill. Rock and Wilding forced open the driver’s door to let Elizabeth into the car. There, she found Monty a bloody mess, his entire head looked like chopped meat. He was choking. She’d taken her delicate hand and reached into his throat, dislodging his front teeth, which were trapped there, cutting off his breathing.

Attracted to the scene by a police radio call, photographers rushed up the canyon road. Elizabeth jumped out of the car and started cursing them. “I’ll kick all of you bastards in the nuts if you take one picture of Monty.” At that point his head seemed to have swollen like a big blood-red pumpkin.

Thoughts of that long-ago accident surely crossed Monty’s mind, as he was scheduled to face the cruel cameras of John Huston the following morning. A limousine at the Reno Airport waited to take him to the Mapes Hotel, where Sandy met him. Monty asked to go directly to the bar while a porter carried his luggage upstairs. Monty seemed enchanted by Sandy and sat very close to him at a darkened table.

As Sandy sipped a Coca-Cola, Monty ordered a drink. Marilyn was nearly two hours late, so as the time passed, he had quite a few. When Marilyn finally arrived, all the men in the bar stopped talking and stared at her tight-fitting white dress studded with cherry-red polka dots.

The actress tried to conceal her shock at seeing Monty’s wrecked condition and his face. It was even more ravished than when she’d seen him last. But she wasn’t clever enough tonight pull that off in front of him. Her first glance, lasting for just a second, was enough to tell him what he didn’t want to know.

“Hi, Pussy,” he said, kissing her. “I know my face is a wreck. When I first met Sandy here, he asked me if I were ‘Mr. Clift’s older brother.’”

“Sandy should have known better than that,” she said, casting a scolding look at the teenager. “After all, he’s a more experienced man than the boy I met this afternoon.”

Marilyn kissed Monty on the lips and ran her porcelain-like fingers through his hair.

“Oh Pussy, Pussy, it’s so good to see you.” Monty told her, taking her hand. Their talk quickly gravitated to drugs. “What is it? Doriden? Luminal? Seconal? Phenobarbs? Nembutal? And plenty of liquor?”

“Don’t forget trusty Benzedrine,” she said. “Downers for the night, uppers to get me through another day.”

“Even with all that, you and I are famous for our sleepless nights,” Monty said.

“That’s a hell of a lot of drugs,” Sandy said. “One night when I went with some guys to Las Vegas, I smoked a marijuana cigarette, so I’m no stranger to drugs.”

“I still can’t sleep at night,” she said. “The only time I can sleep without taking drugs is on that rare night—that very rare night—when Jack sleeps with me and holds me in his arms.”

“I’ll see if that works for me tonight,” Monty said, “How about it, Sandy?”

“Well,” he said with hesitation. “Whatever the job requires. But no funny stuff.”

“I’m working on him, but he can’t divorce Jackie during his run for the presidency.”

“After our recent experiences, you and I both should stay away from married men,” Monty said. He turned to Sandy. “Are you married, kid?”

“No, and I don’t plan to get married,” Sandy said. “I want to devote my life to my movie career.”

“I hear you’ve lost your Frenchman,” Monty said to Marilyn. “I’ve also lost my Frenchman. The cute little fucker left me and has gone back to his wife.”

“Yves Montand is out of my life,” she said. “Back to the faithful Simone Signoret. I read in the paper that he told reporters that ‘it’s within any fool’s power to seduce a woman. The art form is knowing how to break it off.’”

“Paris-Match, that sarcastic rag, claimed that ‘the Montands have survived Hurricane Marilyn’” Monty said.

“I met Yves at Idlewild when his plane to Paris was delayed for four hours because of a bomb threat,” she said. “He wouldn’t go with me to the hotel suite I’d rented nearby. We sat in the back seat of the Cadillac where he drank my champagne and ate my caviar. He even turned down my offer of a final blow-job for old time’s sake.”

“I didn’t know there was any man on the planet who would turn down a blow-job from Marilyn Monroe,” Sandy said. “I’m learning things.”

“I’ve got a lot more to teach you, kid,” Monty said, bending over and nibbling on the boy’s ear.

“Please don’t do that,” he said, glancing around nervously. “The guys here in the bar will think we’re a couple of fags.”

While Monty was debating the point with Sandy, Marilyn reached into her compact and checked her own face. Perhaps Monty’s lost beauty reminded her of how fragile her own looks were.

She suddenly looked up as Arthur Miller entered the bar. He glanced just briefly at them and then walked out.

“I thought Arthur was my friend,” Monty said. “He didn’t seem to recognize me.”

“You made the mistake of hanging out with the enemy,” she said. “For appearance’s sake, we’re booked into the same suite, with Sandy next door to us and you across the hall. I decided Arthur and I will try to hold this ridiculous marriage together until the picture is finished—that is, if it ever is.”

Monty had been a friend to both Miller and Marilyn. But as their union was unraveling, he vowed his allegiance to Marilyn. Before flying to Nevada, he had told a reporter, “Marilyn’s marriage to Arthur is all but over. It’s just waiting for a burial in the cold, cold ground. He’ got to face that fact, as painful as it might be to him. Surely he knows by now it’s dangerous to fall in love with screen goddesses…or screen gods for that matter.”

No one really wanted to talk about Miller, so the conversation quickly shifted to the star of the picture, Clark Gable, once known as “the King of Hollywood.”

“You and I may be in bad shape, but I hear Gable is on his last legs, too,” Monty said.

“He flies in tomorrow,” Sandy said. “I’m dying to meet him. I saw Gone With the Wind. He was terrific.”

“Sweethearts, Marilyn Monroe has got to go,” she said. “I’ve got to face that craggy face of my bitter husband. He behaves like a three-year-old child.”

“All of us have our burdens, Pussy,” Monty said before turning to Sandy. “I feel another sleepless night coming on, and I want you in my room all night.”

“I guess that will be okay,” Sandy said. “But I warned you—no funny stuff.”

“Have fun, kids,” she said, kissing Monty on the lips. She rose and gave Sandy a long, lingering wet kiss.

“Thanks for this afternoon,” Sandy said. “I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“I know, precious,” she said. “Next time hold back a bit. A woman needs more time.”

“Don’t worry,” Monty said. “When the rooster crows, Sandy will know everything there is to know about sex.”

“Listen, kid,” she said, “you told me you want to be a movie star. Well, okay. Listen to the gal who became one. To become a star, you’ve got to suck half the cocks in Tinseltown.”

An hour later, John Huston arrived in the bar with Frank E. Taylor, the producer of The Misfits. The bartender told Huston that “Miss Monroe and Mr. Clift have left.”

“I don’t need them tonight,” Huston said. Turning to Taylor, he guided him to the bar’s far corner. “Let’s finish off a bottle. Tomorrow, we’ll deal with those two psychic twins, Miss Monroe and Monty Clift. They’re on the same wave length, but broadcasting from a planet not of this earth.”

When Miller flew into Reno, he didn’t need Monty to announce the demise of his marriage to Marilyn. He already knew about that. She’d told him that she’d fallen in love with Yves Montand Arthur Miller and planned to divorce him to marry the Frenchman. At that point in their fading relationship, Miller had not been made aware that Montand had dumped her.

Originally, the script for The Misfits was conceived as a valentine to Marilyn, a sort of macabre valentine in memory of the child they had lost through a miscarriage.

As he steadily kept working and revising the script, it was turning into a film noir Western.

In creating the character of Roslyn, Miller had ripped off Marilyn’s persona, capturing her depressions, nervousness, paranoia, insecurity, and panic attacks.

He had written Roslyn as a disillusioned divorcée living out her six-week residency in Reno as a means of ridding herself of her husband, as played by Kevin McCarthy. In the film, she was on the skids, sustaining herself through booze, pills, and sex.

Instead of a valentine to Marilyn, the script evolved into a portrait of their deteriorating marriage. Much of the dialogue in the script had actually been spoken by her at one point or another during their marriage.

After reading the first draft of The Misfits, she had told her husband that she didn’t like her dialogue, the plot, or any of the characters, especially her own which she described as that of a degenerate. “My God, you bastard, you’ve even written in a scene where I fuck a tree.”

Newly divorced on the screen, Roslyn takes up with a ruggedly independent, aging cowboy, Gaylord Langland (Clark Gable). They move into the uncompleted house of Gay’s friend, Guido (Eli Wallach), a part-time mechanic who has turned into an aimless wanderer.

This offbeat menagerie needs money, and Guido convinces Guy to round up some wild mustangs called “misfits” because they are too small to ride. Later in the plot, Roslyn learns that the horses are being rounded up to be slaughtered and turned into dog food.

Guy and Guido need a partner and come across a battered and disillusioned rodeo performer, Perce (Monty Clift), a part he called “that of a unisex mama’s boy.”

When Sandy retired with Monty to his bedroom across the hall, the actor told the boy, “The real fireworks won’t be with us tonight, but in that suite with Marilyn and Miller.” As it turned out, he was right.

In the middle of the night, Sandy, in Monty’s bedroom, heard the sounds of a crashing object and shouting between Miller and Marilyn. Jumping up from the bed, he put on his underwear and, not bothering to dress, raced across the hall way. Using his passkey, he entered the brightly lit suite, just as Miller in pajamas was retreating to his own bedroom.

Tables had been overturned, vases broken, and a glass coffee table cracked into two pieces. From Marilyn’s bedroom came a loud crashing noise. He rushed to discover that she’d thrown a champagne bottle at a large mirror.

She stood nude before him. “I won’t make this fucking picture. He’s made me into something not quite human.”

Sandy rushed over and scooped her in his arms, afraid she’d severely cut herself on all the broken glass.

He carried her across the hall and put her in bed with Monty. She was sobbing and desperately reached out to both of them, needing to be comforted.

The next morning, they were huddled together like orphans in a storm when John Huston, with the aid of a passkey from the maid, barged into their room and spotted the three nude bodies in bed together. Marilyn was sandwiched between the two men.

Huston had come to their room when neither Monty nor Marilyn had shown up on the set.

“Rise and shine, my sweeties,” he said. “From the looks of things, this is going to be a hell of a picture.”

On the set, Marilyn sat with Sandy having a cup of black coffee served by a Chinese waiter from Reno. “Is that black book you carry around a diary?” she asked. “I keep a diary too—only it’s red.”

“No,” Sandy lied. “I’m sort of forgetful, so I write down any instructions I’m given.”

Actually, she’d been right. Realizing he was watching film history in the making, Sandy was writing down everything that happened, including details about the conversation between Marilyn and Monty in the bar last night. At the end of the filming, he planned to sell his notes to a magazine for enough money to buy a used car.

Arriving on the set was Eli Wallach, Marilyn’s friend from the Actors Studio in Manhattan. He rushed over to her, and she hugged him tightly and kissed him on the lips. Without asking him how he was, she poured out her grief. “Oh, Eli, Eli, my marriage to Arthur is on the skids. We’re just not compatible.”

“I could have told you that from the beginning,” he said. “You just aren’t the little Jewish wife making matzo balls for her husband.”

“I know that now, you silly thing,” she said. “Why didn’t you warn me about what he’s like? He’s a monster.”

“Have you ever met a writer who isn’t?” he asked. “Ever spent a night with Tennessee Williams?”

“Sounds like two divorces are coming up,” Wallach told her as Sandy listened intently.

“The shit has gone back to Paris and his wife, but he’ll probably write about our affair in some French magazine, maybe even in his memoirs.”

Marilyn was correct in her prediction. In his memoirs, Montand would write about how their affair began.

Wallach was also a friend of Monty’s, and the actor asked about his fellow actor.

“If you can believe it, Monty is even more fucked up than I am,” Marilyn claimed.

Miller appeared on the set and spotted Wallach, who was also his friend. He joined Wallach as the Chinese waiter also served him coffee. Miller ignored Sandy and devoted all his attention to Wallach, but Sandy was like a sponge, absorbing everything that was said.

As expected, Miller complained to Wallach about Marilyn, but this time, it was relatively philosophical—not the usual nagging gripe.

“The simple fact, terrible and lethal, is that no space exists between Marilyn herself and Marilyn the star. She has become Marilyn Monroe, and that is what is killing her. There is no real Marilyn Monroe. She never existed except as a fantasy creation of hers. She knows she will one day vanish, but not Marilyn on the screen. Since she was a teenager, she’s been creating this imaginary character for public consumption. But the character she’s created has become the living, walking Marilyn herself. She has slowly and deliberately murdered Norma Jeane, and now she’s ripping Norma Jeane’s rotting flesh from her body piece by piece. All that will be left is this cardboard caricature, Marilyn Monroe.”

Sandy didn’t really understand Miller’s point, but Wallach seemed to know what he meant.

The teenager looked up from this intense conversation and his coffee to see Clark Gable walking onto the set and heading to the chairs where Marilyn and Huston sat. To Sandy, he looked like his own grandfather, old before his time. He’d only seen Gable in Gone With the Wind, and this overweight actor didn’t resemble the dashing Rhett Butler he’d viewed years before on the screen.

Eli Wallach or even Arthur Miller didn’t make hot copy for a magazine. But Monty did, and so did Marilyn, and most definitely Clark Gable did, too.

Known for his “cobra grin,” John Huston stood up tall, lanky, and erect in his African safari suit, evoking Ernest Hemingway. This macho man under a ten-gallon hat extended his weathered hand to another macho man, Clark Gable.

Sandy was already moving toward the trio, when Huston signaled him to get more black coffee for all of them. Sandy had to introduce himself to Gable. Unlike Miller, Gable extended a firm handshake and met Sandy eye to eye.

“Sandy’s been hired to wipe your ass every time you take a crap,” Huston said.

“An honorable profession,” Gable said, flashing a smile. Gable also extended a hand to Marilyn. “Miss Monroe,” he said. “We meet again. It’s been years. I don’t recall how many. My memory isn’t what it used to be. That’s why John here cast me as the old bronco rider facing his last roundup.”

“I think since we once knew each other intimately, we should be on a first-name basis.” Gable said.

“I wanted our affair to last,” she said. “In fact, I was hoping you would propose to me.”

“You are a man of the ages,” she said. “Jean Harlow in the 1930s, Lana Turner in the 1940s, and Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s.”

“Time does march on, doesn’t it? You left out Carole Lombard. She was my true love. Just the other night, I told Carole that I will be seeing her soon.”

“Not that soon,” she assured him. “Rhett Butler is invincible, the kind of man who will live forever. That’s why you’re the King. If only you would make me your Queen.”

“I don’t think that will happen,” he said. “It’s too late. Maybe in our next lives.”

“Okay then, have it your way, Rhett,” she said. “If I can’t become Queen of Hollywood, I will become First Lady of America.”

Days later, when Sandy was keeping Huston’s ice fresh in his bourbon, the director sat quietly, waiting for Marilyn to show up. In the stifling head, Huston revealed that he knew all about that affair with Gable Marilyn had had back in 1950 when he’d cast her in The Asphalt Jungle.

“I introduced her to the director, Clarence Brown, and he was quite taken with Marilyn,” Huston told Sandy. “He took her to the set of a picture he was directing called To Please a Lady. It starred Clark and Barbara Stanwyck. Both of these big stars were quite taken with Miss Marilyn. Clark bedded her and so did Stanwyck. In fact, she got Marilyn a role in her upcoming movie, Clash by Night. Yes, Marilyn would lay for both men and women in those days, just like you’re doing with Monty and Marilyn today. Nothing ever really changes in Hollywood.”

As Norman Mailer would later write, “The filming of The Misfits proceeded with the pace of a wounded caterpillar.”

In less than a week into the shoot, Huston had to face endless delays from Marilyn. One morning, Sandy was unable to get her out of bed for the entire day. Sometimes, he’d usher her makeup man directly into her bedroom, especially when she was running so late her face was worked on even as she sat on the toilet.

“During the filming of The Misfits, I had a double-barreled shotgun aimed right between my eyes,” Huston recalled. “Not just Marilyn, but the Black Widow Spider herself.”

Onto the set during the second day of shooting arrived Paula Strasberg, the wife of Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio in Manhattan. Officially, she was announced as Marilyn’s acting coach, but Huston was well aware that she was actually there in the scorching desert heat to direct Marilyn in all her scenes.

She did not believe that one should wear white to reflect the rays of the sun. She dressed instead entirely in black—a black caftan, a wide-brimmed black straw hat, and a pair of large black sunglasses. She held a black palmetto fan in her hand, and always carried a large black umbrella. By the second week, she demanded that Huston shoot a simple scene with Marilyn a total of sixty-five times, even though he, as director, had approved the fifth take.

As Marilyn’s coach, Paula was making three thousand dollars a week. She’d told columnist Leonard Lyons, “Marilyn has the fragility of a female but the constitution of an ox. She is a beautiful hummingbird made of iron. Her only trouble is that she’s a very pure person in an impure world.”

Friends of Marilyn didn’t know exactly who Paula was describing, but it certainly wasn’t the Marilyn Monroe they knew.

Huston ordered the crew to “ice Strasberg out.” He did it with condescension, bidding her an elaborate good morning and bowing at the waist. If she had anything to say, he listened “as if she were delivering words writ by God.” At the end of the shoot for the day, a slightly drunken Huston would be even more condescending in his ritualized good night before heading to the gambling casinos of Reno, where he was losing big bucks.

His losses made him particularly grumpy on the set the following morning—that and the endless production delays caused by Marilyn not showing up.

“As his gambling losses mounted and as Marilyn caused more delays, Huston became almost sadistic to her,” Sandy later claimed.

The morning she had to shoot her first scene with Gable, she was so nervous, she’d swallowed a fistful of Nembutals. “We had to take her to the local hospital and get her stomach pumped,” Sandy said.

Throughout the shoot, her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, had prescribed 300 milligrams of Nembutal to put her to sleep at night, even though the maximum dose that was usually defined as safe was 100 milligrams.

Marilyn carried her feud with her husband onto the set, often denouncing him in from of everybody. In one of her drugged states, she accused Miller of “letting Monty suck your cock.”

She was wrong about that, but behind her back, love was brewing in the playwright's heart. It was not directed at Monty.

It was with a certain irony that Miller, married “to the most desirable woman in the world,” met the love of his life on the set of The Misfits. Four years older than Marilyn, Austria-born Ingeborg Morath was a freelance photographer who stood tall and attractive. Very discreetly, he began spending time alone with her away from the set of The Misfits. It is not known when their actual affair began, but he did tell Monty that “Inge is helping me mend a broken heart.”

After his eventual divorce from Marilyn in 1961, the playwright married Morath on February 7, 1962.

Her body ravaged by drugs and liquor, Marilyn had told Sandy and Paula, “I go to bed each night with a foreboding there will never be a morning.”

The first week of tolerating Marilyn’s endless delays made Gable call her “a self-indulgent twat.”

One afternoon, Marilyn came to Gable in tears. She’d read in a Las Vegas paper that gamblers were placing bets as to which of its trio of big-name but unbalanced stars would crack up or even die before shooting on The Misfits came to an end.

After that experience of showing him such raw emotion and pain, Gable became more sympathetic to her. From then on, he waited patiently for her to show up, sometimes for four or five hours at a time. He realized it was more than her marriage coming unglued—the problem involved Marilyn herself.

He could afford to wait. It was written into his contract that he’d be paid $48,000 a week for overtime. That was in addition to his generous salary of $750,000, plus ten percent of the gross. “I know there will be plenty of overtime on this picture,” Gable told Huston. “I’ll end up a rich man even if the film bombs.”

Throughout the entire filming, Marilyn constantly complained to Huston that she wanted to get paid as much as Gable. Previously, she and Miller had agreed to do the film for half a million dollars between them, plus a small percentage of the gross. She was sorry that she’d agreed to that. She told Huston, “Poor Monty looks awful and Clark looks like he could play Andy Hardy’s grandfather. As for me, I should have been photographed in Technicolor. The public will buy tickets to see me, not some broken down hayseed cowboys.”

When she did show up on the set, she looked physically exhausted, wandering around in a drugged daze. When Huston barked at her, as he frequently did, she would run to the “honey wagon” to vomit. The night before, Miller tried to rehearse her in new lines he’d written, but she couldn’t remember them, sometimes confusing them with an earlier script. The script girl had to write out cue cards for her.

Gable also objected to Miller and Huston constantly changing the script after he’d laboriously learned his lines. At one point, Gable found the working conditions intolerable and called his agent, threatening to walk off the set. Since he had script approval, he could have closed down the shoot.

It was Marilyn who went to see him and, even though she herself wanted to bolt from the set of The Misfits, she prevailed upon him to stay.

It was that very night she made a play for him, partly because she’d been told that his wife, the actress-socialite Kay Williams Spreckels, would be arriving in Reno the following afternoon. Gable had married her after his disastrous fourth marriage to Lady Sylvia Ashley, who had been previously wed to Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

Since the late 1930s, Gable had been Marilyn’s Hollywood fantasy man. She told people that he was her real father, and laughingly suggested that she wanted to make the relationship “incestuous.” A decade before, her dream had come true when he’d taken her to bed. She wanted him to stay and live with her, but he’d moved on. In her mentally deteriorating condition, she felt that by seducing him again, this time before his wife arrived in Nevada, she could once again prove that he was still attracted to her.

But an aging Gable, nearing the final days of his life, was in no mood for sex. That day, he’d drunk an amazing two quarts of whiskey over a period of several hours, and he’d smoked three packages of cigarettes. At one point, in the scorching sun, he’d developed uncontrollable shakes, and Sandy had to help him back to his dressing room.

Unaware of all that, Marilyn came to his door at around eleven that evening. Apparently, he’d been sleeping, something she rarely managed to do. “I’ve come by to give you a present, the same present you gave Scarlett O’Hara when you carried her up those stairs and raped her.”

“Not tonight,” he said. He kissed her lightly on the lips and patted her butt. “Now, fatso, go to bed and get some sleep so you’ll be ready to face the camera at ten in the morning.” He gently shut the door in her face.

She ran crying back to her own suite. Sandy was waiting there. “That was one fast fuck,” he said.

“He rejected me,” she said, sobbing. “He turned me down. No man turns down Marilyn Monroe.”

“Fortunately, you’ve got a young man like me, not a grandfather, to pork you tonight.”

“Yeah, right,” she said, looking at him. “Why don’t you get the fuck out of here?”

The next day, Gable told Huston what had happened. “Ten years ago, I would have fucked the hell out of her all night. But in my present condition, I can’t even satisfy Kay.”

The next morning, Gable tried to deflect Marilyn’s sexual interest. At lunch with Monty and her, he removed his false teeth and placed them beside his plate. Then he proceeded to do the most amazing impersonation of that old cowboy sidekick, Gabby Hayes.

In spite of that, Marilyn looked at him with a kind of adoration. “Teeth or not, you’re still Clark Gable.”

But the very next day, he filmed a scene in which she was nude in bed, covered only with a thin sheet. He bent down to kiss her, and at one point, he caressed her breast.

She later told Monty, “I was thrilled. I got goose bumps. I’ve never tried to seduce a man harder in my entire life. I must be slipping. The young Marilyn certainly had no problem seducing Clark.”

At the luncheon table, Sandy was shocked to see “The King of Hollywood with no teeth.” In the middle of Gable’s impersonation, he was tapped on the shoulder. “Call for Huston,” a grip told him. “Get him.”

Sandy rounded up Huston. He’d learned that the caller from Los Angeles asking for Huston was Humphrey Bogart.

Sandy eavesdropped on the conversation. Apparently, Huston’s friend was calling to learn how things were going on the set. Sandy heard Huston say, “Miller is sulking away somewhere with this photographer—female, that is—and Gable is dying. Marilyn is drunk, acting like the self-destructive slut she is. Monty is wandering around on Jupiter, and I’m losing big time in the Reno casinos and robbing the production money. The picture is way over budget. Now how are you, Bogie, running off with your mistress and leaving your young wife at home?”

Later that morning, Sandy escorted a wobbly Marilyn over to Huston, who sat in a director’s chair sipping a bourbon. She’d had a bad night. Sandy had been unable to get her into a cold shower to wake her up.

Huston studied Marilyn carefully, perhaps evaluating that she looked too dissipated to face the camera. “Honey, I have some advice for you. You’re a sweetie, but you really must bathe more frequently, particularly out in this desert heat. In Los Angeles, I encountered Bette Davis at a party. She said that a year ago, she ran into you at a party. She felt your odor evoked the offal market at the Chicago slaughterhouse.”

She ran from the set. On the way to her trailer, she told Sandy, “I could kick Huston in the balls.” Back in her dressing room, she was very agitated. “With Miller’s help, he’s making an anti-Monroe film. Not only that, but I’m coming off as anti-male, not to mention as a narcissistic bitch.”

Marilyn lay down on a sofa and instructed Sandy to tell Huston that she was unable to work that day. Back on the set, he found Gable and Huston in a deep conversation. He brought them fresh drinks and listened to what his director had to say. He was afraid that Huston was going to fire Marilyn.

“I think this is Monroe’s last picture,” he told Gable. “She’s beginning to show her age. Her tits are starting to sag. Let’s Make Love, so I hear, is a disaster. I fear this dreary film noir will keep them away from the box office and at home watching TV. Her reputation in Hollywood is ruined. When these two pictures are released, she’ll be box office poison. She’s on her way out. Do you know how many movie stars fall from the sky?”

Gable lit a cigarette and took a stiff drink. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re looking at one right now.” He seemed to take umbrage at Huston’s comments. “You give me this over-the-hill broad and a sleazy little homosexual runt, and you expect me to carry the picture for these two zombies.” He turned his back on Huston and walked away.

After a night of great despair, Marilyn had stayed up until dawn, with Sandy offering her companionship, but not much else. He tried to arouse her at ten the following morning, but she seemed in a daze. He answered her phone, fearing an attack from Huston.

It was not a local call. He heard the voices of two operators. As it turned out, a call was coming in from Switzerland from Charlie Chaplin, who was living there in exile.

At first, Sandy didn’t believe that the real Chaplin was calling, thinking it was some kind of joke. Since he’d never seen a Chaplin talking picture, he did not recognize the sound of his voice.

When he became convinced that he was on the phone with “The Little Tramp,” he tried more aggressively to awaken her.

“A guy who says he’s Charlie Chaplin is on the phone from Switzerland,” he told her.

The impact of that name seemed to shock her awake. “Charlie is calling? I’ll take it!” She signaled him to leave the room and give her some privacy. As he headed out the door, he heard her say, “Charlie, you sweet man. I can’t believe it’s you after all this time!”

At the door, Sandy could hear her voice, but couldn’t make out what she was saying. He kept hearing the word “horses.” Why would Charlie be calling her about horses?

When he didn’t hear her voice any more, he came back into the room. She was on the bed crying. “Oh, my God, I couldn’t believe it. I’d once dreamed of doing a comedy with Charlie directing me. So my big break comes, but what did I get? He’s pitching a script about shooting horses. What is it with Arthur Miller and Charlie Chaplin? They both want to make a movie about shooting horses. What would I become on the screen? The enemy of all animal rights activists?”

She didn’t seem to make sense. “I could not believe that Chaplin would call her to make another movie about shooting horses,” Sandy recalled.

It wasn’t untill1969 when Sandy, in Las Vegas, went to the movies did he figure it out. Chaplin, at least back in 1960, must have acquired the rights to a property called They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Jane Fonda took the role originally offered to Marilyn, and it became of her finest films. It wasn’t about shooting horses at all, but about those grueling endurance contests, the dance marathons of the depression-plagued 1930s.

Back in the Nevada desert in 1960, the call from Chaplin seemed to have awakened Marilyn. She staggered out of bed and called for Sandy to come to the bathroom. He found her sitting on the toilet. She ordered him to look at the top of her head. “Am I getting a bald spot?” she asked.

For the first time, he looked beyond the glamorous façade of Marilyn Monroe and discovered an ordinary woman, who, like millions of other women throughout America at that very moment, was also “sitting in a crapper dumping a load,” as he would later so graphically describe the incident in his diary.

Back on the set, both Sandy and Marilyn were introduced to Rex Bell, the lieutenant governor of Nevada. He’d been a movie star cowboy like Gene Autry or Roy Rogers, appearing in such films as The Idaho Kid (1936) and such television series as Cowboys and Injuns (1950). He’d agreed to appear as an old cowpoke in a cameo appearance in The Misfits.

What thrilled Marilyn was not Bell himself, but the knowledge that he was the husband of Clara Bow, the silent screen vamp once known as “The It Girl.”

As a child, Marilyn had made Bow her role model until she switched her affection to that platinum blonde, Jean Harlow. After the release of the film, It, Bow had achieved international stardom as the sex symbol of the 1920s. In 1928 and 1929, she’d been the number one box office draw in America.

Marilyn had been greatly flattered when she’d read in the paper that Bow, long ago retired in Nevada, had claimed that “Marilyn Monroe is my favorite actress, but I’ve never met her.”

Like Marilyn, Bow’s life had been characterized by scandal, including one urban legend that asserted that she had taken on all the members of the 1927 University of Southern California football team.

In 1931, The Coast Reporter, a tabloid, published lurid allegations about her, wherein she was accused of “exhibitionism, incest, lesbianism, bestiality, drug addiction, alcoholism, and of having syphilis.”

Even though Bow never met Marilyn, there was an affinity between them. In the words of Bow’s biographer, David Stenn, “Both Clara and Monroe had mentally ill mothers and maternal grandmothers, all of whom were committed to asylums; both suffered physical and emotional abuse in their childhood; both had been catapulted to oppressive fame, then underpaid for their services and underrated for their talent; and both had been endowed with, then entrapped by, the same sexual-vulnerable, womanly babyish, stupid-shrewd image.”

Life magazine once hired Richard Avedon to shoot pictures of Marilyn as Bow in a red wig. Bow was flattered but nixed the idea of Marilyn portraying her in a film during her lifetime.

Later that night, Marilyn knocked on Bell’s door. He slept in the nude, but hastily put a robe around his body and answered the door himself. In 1960, lieutenant governors of sparsely populated states did not have much security.

From all reports, he was startled to see Marilyn there. He invited her in for a drink. But according to Sandy, he turned down her offer of a night of sex. He told her that if she had extended that invitation ten years before, “I would be willing to go at it all night. I’m not the man I used to be.”

Perhaps he knew that the only reason Marilyn wanted to seduce him was because he was the husband of Clara Bow.

After giving Marilyn that drink and a pat on her ass, he showed her to the door. He had only months to live before dying in office on the Fourth of July, 1962, at the age of fifty-eight.

His years of rough living finally caught up with him. It was only after his death that Marilyn learned that he no longer lived with his wife, but refused to divorce her. He’d fallen in love with a blonde divorcée ten years younger than Clara. Marilyn was equally disappointed to learn that Bell had split his estate among his sons and his mistress, Katie Jenkins. Bow got nothing.

Marilyn’s own death followed Bell’s a month later. Deeply saddened by the man she’d once loved, and by the fate of the star she’d never met, Bow told the press, “Marilyn was so lovely and far too young to die. Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry when one is tired, hurt, and bewildered.”

Silent Screen vamp Clara Bow (top), her husband, Rex Bell (middle), and (bottom) a scene from their unhappy marriage.

The Silent Screen vamp had only a short time to live herself. Clara Bow died in 1965 of a heart attack at the age of fifty.

Gable’s sympathy and understanding of Marilyn did not extend to Monty, at least not at first. During most of the shoot, a very shaky Monty tried to hold himself together, aided in no small part by his hip flask filled with a concoction of vodka, orange juice, and barbiturates.

One scalding hot afternoon in the desert, Monty could not seem to pull himself together in a scene he was shooting with Gable. Growing increasingly impatient, Gable finally lashed out at him. “You god damn little fag, why don’t you sober up? I’m tempted to smash the other side of your face. You can’t coast on your looks anymore.”

The Misfits, on location Counterclockwise from far left: Frank E. Taylor, Arthur Miller, Eli Wallach, John Huston, Clark Gable, MM, and Montgomery Clift

Seeing the oncoming fight from twenty feet away, Marilyn broke from Huston and ran between Gable and Monty. She pulled him away. On the way back to his dressing room, Monty shouted back at Gable, “Take out your fucking dentures and kiss my ass.”

During the next week, Gable refused to speak to Monty except in front of the camera. One afternoon, he watched as Monty and Marilyn shot one of their more memorable scenes in which she cradles Monty in her lap. Each of them seems to identify with the other as two lost souls. The scene and its dialogue could have been ripped from the pages of their own lives, which it probably was.“

Don’t say anything,” she murmurs to him. “Just be still. I don’t know where I belong—maybe this is just the next thing that happens. Maybe we’re not supposed to remember anybody’s promises.”

Gable was so impressed he turned to Huston and said, “I have to hand it to him. The little fag can really act.” Standing nearby, Sandy heard that remark to record in his diary.

The next day, Gable made peace with Monty. “Why don’t you give me some of that stuff you keep pouring from your thermos?”

Without telling him what it was, Monty offered him a drink. For the first time, the two actors really talked, but it was mostly about Marilyn.

“She once told me that when she was a fatherless little girl, she used to carry around this picture of you,” Monty said. “She told all the kids in school that you were her father, she your bastard daughter. She was so proud to be your daughter.”

Monty offered Gable another drink, which he accepted. But when Sandy asked for one, Monty turned him down.

Sandy noted that the story seemed to touch Gable’s heart. After that day, Gable was much kinder to both Marilyn and Monty. As Huston told Sandy, “Gable’s becoming a father figure to both the fag and the broken-down whore.”

Toward the end of the shoot, Sandy, Huston, Marilyn, and Gable began to notice that Monty was falling apart again. One day was particularly troubling when Huston insulted him on the set.

He disappeared in the late afternoon and no one knew where he went. A call came in for Taylor, the producer, that night to come and rescue Monty. Calling Sandy to go with him, the two men drove to a lesbian bar near Truckee River, Nevada, to take Monty back to his hotel.

When they got there, the bartender told them that Monty had pulled down his jeans and mooned the hard-drinking cowgirls at the bar, calling them bull dykes. Two of the burly lesbians had picked him up and carried him outside the building, tossing him into an alley with the stray cats.

That is where Sandy and Taylor found Monty. The two men picked up the drugged actor and drove him back to Reno.

Taylor later told Monty’s biographer, Patricia Bosworth, that “Around five in the morning, I was awakened by Monty’s naked form sleepwalking in the hall, heading toward the elevator. I vaulted after him and managed to sling him over my shoulders just as the elevator door opened and hordes of tourists poured out. I panicked. Here I was, holding Montgomery Clift bare-assed in my arms, but nobody blinked an eye.”

Paula Strasberg was almost on the verge of a nervous breakdown, like Marilyn herself, claiming she’d been “the whipping boy of a cabal that consists of Miller, Huston, and Eli Wallach, the traitor.”

In desperation, Paula summoned her husband, Lee Strasberg, and her actress daughter Susan to fly to Nevada to help her. “If I’m forced to quit,” Paula claimed, “Marilyn will walk off the picture.”

Stopping off in Reno, where their plane had landed, Lee and Susan attired themselves in cowboy gear. “We were just two Jewish greenhorns trying to fit into the desert scene,” Susan later recalled.

After embracing Lee, her longtime friend and acting mentor, Marilyn allowed him to go off to comfort his wife. Susan joined Marilyn in her badly air-conditioned trailer. “Oh, please, tell them I’m exhausted. I’m supposed to work six days a week here. I’m thirty-four years old, and I’ve been singing and dancing for five months in that lousy picture, Let’s Make Love. I need time to rest and get my spirits up. I’m so tired and hey, I’m not so young. It takes me longer to get my motor running.”

In the stifling trailer, Marilyn pulled off her dress and stood completely nude in front of Susan, searching for something cold to drink.

Susan had become comfortable with Marilyn’s nudity. Before she’d met Marilyn, she was very shy about taking off her own clothes, even using a large bath towel to protect her privacy as she changed at the gym.

One afternoon in Manhattan, Susan had gone shopping with Marilyn at Bloomingdale’s, looking for a sexy dress. “In the dressing room, Marilyn took off her dress,” Susan said. “She wore no underwear. I blushed and I thought the saleslady was going to faint. But Marilyn was as free as a child. She examined her breasts and even held them up for my inspection, wanting my opinion. She even examined her rear in a full-length mirror, complaining about what she called, ‘my nigger ass.’”

In her memoirs, Marilyn and Me, Susan recalled her first meeting with Marilyn during a filming in Hollywood. But it was in Chicago where they became better acquainted during a game of strip poker. “Both of us ended up naked as a jaybird.”

Even though Susan found Marilyn “sweet and lonely,” she claimed she didn’t befriend the star until later in New York. “I had too many friends like her, and I couldn’t handle it. Monty and Marilyn were birds of a feather.”

The friendship ripened when Marilyn began to stay over at the Strasberg home. Marilyn also befriended Johnny Strasberg, Lee’s son. He later claimed. “I knew my father and Marilyn were having an affair. It was something I felt when I saw the energy between them.”

Susan in her memoirs also confessed her own intimate moments with Marilyn. “We often talked about sexual things. She told me that she had to initiate relationships. ‘With men, it’s hands off. They don’t know what the hell to do with me. I almost have to say, ‘Do you want to fuck?’”

In her memoirs, Susan also relayed the details of her first intimacy with Marilyn when she came into her bedroom late at night. “She was out of it, her eyes glazed; she was groggy. She came over to where I was sleeping and we sat there together. She had on a bathrobe and nothing underneath, and I was thinking. Would I? Should I? Could I? I was a virgin still, and I sensed she would have done anything for comfort. There was a sense of sensuality because she was drugged, very loose.”

Back on the set of The Misfits, Sandy brought drinks to Lee and Paula. She told him, “I’m glad Susan is here. She’s the only person who can cheer Marilyn up.”

“She hasn’t smiled since filming began,” Sandy said before indulging in some teenage boasting. “Of course, I knew how to put a smile on her face.”

That night, Sandy saw Marilyn in better spirits than he’d ever known. “We had a cookout that night. Marilyn drank a lot. It was a fun evening. She put on a wig and some music and did a devastating impression of Mitzi Gaynor, an actress whom Marilyn claimed had once snubbed her. She sang Gaynor’s trademark song, ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.’ The crew went wild.”

Later, Marilyn learned that Miller had moved back into his suite. He’d been spending his nights in someone else’s bedroom. She wasn’t sure whose bedroom that was. Marilyn invited Susan to sleep over with her.

In the middle of the night, Miller heard drunken giggling and squealing coming from Marilyn’s bedroom. He barged in, only to discover Marilyn and Susan, both nude, engaged in a pillow fight.

“She’s staying!” Marilyn shouted back. “I have to get my jollies some way. Certainly not from the male penis, the most unreliable of all organs.”

The next morning, Miller told Huston and Sandy that he’d caught Susan and Marilyn in “a lezzie romp.”

On the set, Sandy took Susan over to talk to Gable, to whom he was bringing his morning coffee. After chatting about Marilyn for about five minutes, Gable made a strange statement. “I’m glad I’m not a woman having to look beautiful and not wilted in 110-degree desert heat. Of course, a lot of hetero-sexual men I’ve known told me they wished I had been born a woman, so they could make love to me,. On the other hand, maybe I did miss out on something by not being a woman. I guess I’ll have to ask Monty about that. He should know.”

Leaving Paula behind to face Miller and Huston, Lee and Susan headed for Reno after tearful goodbyes to Marilyn. Susan later claimed, “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was not confined to the opening scene of Some Like It Hot, where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon saw all those Chicago gangsters being gunned down. The real St. Valentine’s Massacre was taking place on the set of The Misfits.”

When Johnny Strasberg saw Marilyn for the final time, he told his sister, Susan, “I think Marilyn is a sick woman, a classic schizophrenic. She is dedicated to love. A schizoid will do anything for love. They are totally infantile, pulsing with life. They see the walls move. The amazing thing about her is that she has survived for as long as she has. People love her, but they have to cut her off or abandon her, which is the thing she expects. With Marilyn, you’re dealing with an abandoned infant who’s not an infant any more.”

In the midst of the chaos among the crew shooting The Misfits, a rumor spread that John Wayne would be driving up from Las Vegas for a visit to the film’s location. The word was that Gable had had a minor stroke, and that he’d been taken to a hospital in Reno, but that he had appeared two days later looking reasonably fit. His most difficult scenes, those requiring great physical stamina, were yet to be shot. He was insisting on doing his own stunts.

Marilyn told Sandy and Monty that she was greatly concerned by the rumored possibility that all of her scenes with Gable would have to be reshot, perhaps with his replacement, John Wayne. “At the rate we’re going, The Misfits will reach the theaters in 1965 when John F. Kennedy will be in his second term as President of the United States.”

The night before Wayne’s arrival a drunken Monty wanted to talk to Marilyn about the tortuous relationship he’d had with Wayne during the making of the Western, Red River, in 1946, a picture that hadn’t been released until 1948.

During the evening, Sandy kept the drinks flowing and his ear tuned to what he could later record in his diary.

The director, Howard Hawks, had successfully lobbied to have Monty cast in Red River. Monty claimed that he’d told Hawks at the time that he feared he’d be no match for Wayne on the screen. “I’m rail thin and stand only five feet ten,” he said. “The Duke will blow me right off the screen like a tumbleweed.”

“You’re an actor, Clift,” Hawks had assured him. “Act big on the screen.”

Heavily in debt, Monty had agreed to do the picture. “Once Wayne got beyond all that shit about me being a fag, we bonded. By the time of our big fight scene in Red River, the director, Howard Hawks, had turned me into a crackerjack cowpoke with an old five-star cowboy hat that Gary Cooper had used in some of his westerns. I had to learn a few rodeo tricks too. It took four days to shoot that fight scene with Wayne. I was black and blue and bruised all over. But thanks to what I learned, I can convincingly play a cowpoke in The Misfits.”

Despite his memories of working with Wayne years before, Monty nonetheless had deep insecurities about encountering Wayne after the passage of so many years.

Marilyn was even more nervous, fearing that if Wayne were to commandeer Gable’s role in The Misfits, she’d have no onscreen chemistry with him. “He’s not the type of man I gravitate to.”

The next day, shortly after Wayne’s arrival on the set of The Misfits, he immediately began looking for Gable. It was Sandy who unearthed why Wayne had come for a visit. He wasn’t planning to replace Gable in The Misfits. He’d come instead to pitch a script to Gable, whom he wanted to co-star with him in an upcoming movie slated for filming in Africa, Hatari!, whose name translates as “danger” from Swahili. Scheduled for filming in Tanganyika (now northern Tanzania), the plot of the film involved a group of western expatriates who catch wild animals and sell them to zoos. Howard Hawks had signed on as director, but he believed that Gable would be more receptive if Wayne, as his potential co-star, made the sales pitch.

That night, Marilyn ordered Sandy to bring her a bottle of whiskey. After putting on her tightest dress, she headed for Wayne’s bedroom at the Mapes Hotel. She asked Sandy to wait up for her because she wanted him to give her a bubble bath when she came back.

He expected to wait for hours, but she was back in the room within twenty minutes, looking very agitated.

“Duke must be in bed like he is in the movies—quick on the draw,” Sandy said to her.

“It was nothing like that,” she said, her face looking pale. She began to pull off her clothes. “I knocked on Wayne’s door, and he answered it in his underwear, probably thinking it was room service. I sorta made my intentions known. But then I heard Monty’s voice. I looked into the living room. Monty was lying on the sofa with a drink. He was completely nude. I left quickly, knowing that boys will be boys.”

“I’m not exactly a duke, but maybe tonight is my lucky night,” Sandy said.

She looked him up and down as she removed her clothing. “You’re on, kid. Arthur is impotent with me. Gable can’t get it up any more. Huston hasn’t fucked me in twenty years. Eli Wallach, the idiot, is in love with his wife. Monty likes to be the fuckee, not the fucker. And Mr. John Wayne has secret desires I can’t fulfill. Just for the record, I’m known as the world’s most desirable woman. What bullshit is that?”

As she talked, Sandy was slowly doing a striptease for her, with his jockey shorts the last item to go. “Take a look at jumbo here. You’re getting a rise out of me even before I give you that bubble bath.”

As she headed for the bathroom, she turned to him. “The last time I had a bubble bath was with Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. He’s the man who’s going to become the President of the United States this year.”

As the filming of The Misfits neared its inexorable end during Nevada’s scorching late summer months of 1960, Sandy noticed Marilyn moving deeper and deeper into depression—not just a melancholy one, but the lament of a deeply wounded psyche.

She told him one night about how, during July of 1957, she’d learned that she was pregnant. “It might have been Arthur’s child, although I doubt that. The father could have been any of many many men. I don’t really know. What I knew is that I desperately wanted that baby. I wanted to be a mother. Intuitively, I believed that it would be a girl. Could you imagine the life that girl would lead as my daughter? Every straight man in America would want to fuck her.”

A month later, as she recalled, her doctor told her she’d been diagnosed as having an actopic pregnancy. “After hearing that, my life went on a roller coaster ride to hell. As a girl, I had dreamed of becoming the next Lana Turner, making love on and off the screen with Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, and Clark Gable.”

“After losing my little girl, I said ‘to hell with my career.’ My marriage was collapsing, my life falling apart. Instead of Arthur making a rare appearance in my bed, I preferred to sleep with a bottle of liquor and fifteen bottles of pills on my nightstand.”

“I’ve tried other men—Yul Brynner, Oleg Cassini, Sammy Davis, Jr., Elia Kazan, Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, Paul Newman, Franchot Tone, Darryl F. Zanuck, even pint-sized Mickey Rooney. These men are famous and could deal with my fame. But when I screw unknown men, I find they become impotent during their attempts to take on the world’s most seductive woman. Perhaps out of intimidation, even fear, their little weenies recede into their bodies. It’s awful. It’s like I’m the great castrator of the Western world.”

“I didn’t hear any complaints from you,” Sandy said. “And I’m not all that well known…yet.”

“Oh, honey, a boy of nineteen can get it up looking at a dirty postcard. Believe me, I know. After my miscarriage, the only man I could trust to rise to the occasion was Joe DiMaggio. When Arthur was away, I could rely on him to come over and fuck the stars out of my eyes. Trouble was, he’s only good for one round. Then he falls asleep and snores all night.”

“Far more devastating was a letter I got from my mother, Gladys [Gladys Baker Eley].”

“No ‘with love’…just nothing,” Marilyn said. “But she added a P.S.”

One afternoon, when Sandy arrived with two bottles of chilled champagne, she was standing nude in front of a full-length mirror. “Come over here and see how much fat you can bunch up around my stomach.”

Although reluctant to do so, he did as she instructed, meanwhile telling her, “These are love handles—very sexy.”

“Love handles, like hell! I’m fat. Fat!” With a little yelp, she rushed to her night table, where she removed two capsules from a bottle, sprinkling them into a champagne glass as he popped a cork. “Pour the bubbly over this powder.”

The following afternoon, he arrived once again with two chilled bottles of champagne. Once again, he found her standing nude in front of the full-length mirror. This time her dialogue was different. “I’m fat and I don’t give a rat’s fart if I am. In fact, I intend to become bloated, maybe weighing up to three-hundred pounds. A fat, obese Marilyn Monroe to spring on the world. I’ll call Hugh Hefner and sign on to do a double spread in Playboy. A roly-poly Marilyn Monroe, former sex goddess. For once and for all, I will destroy the image of Marilyn Monroe as a love goddess. I hate being a sex symbol All it means is having rotten sex from a lot of impotent men. Of course, there’s a downside. My nude spread of a fat Marilyn in Playboy will attract all the chubby chasers in the world.”

“Marilyn, after we finish this movie, you can take me back to Hollywood as your boy,” Sandy said. “My past performances have shown you that I can be called ‘Ever Ready.’”

She whirled around and confronted him, her soft features giving way to a harshness he’d never seen there before. He’d later write, “The kindly female Dr. Jekyll gave way to the hideous Miss Hyde. It’s like she’s a total split personality.”

“Like hell I can count on you,” she shouted at him. “You’re a two-minute man. You’re incapable of giving a woman an orgasm.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “Women don’t have orgasms—only men have those.”

“Fuck you, you stupid little brat. Why don’t you get the hell out of here and leave me alone? I can’t stand the sight of you. Go fuck Arthur Miller. That tight-assed son of a bitch needs someone to blast open that anally retentive rosebud.”

She looked up at him. “Are you still here? If you’re not gone in thirty seconds, I’m going to break this champagne bottle and castrate you with its jagged edge so you’ll never again leave another woman unsatisfied. Get out of here!”

At the door, as he was rushing out, he heard a different voice, a soft, alluring Marilyn, her words almost a purr. “Don’t leave me, Sandy…please don’t go.”

He slammed the door in her face wanting to turn to someone for help, but not knowing who to go to. Then he thought of Monty.

In Monty’s bedroom, he found him lying nude and drugged on his unmade bed. He was staring blankly at the ceiling.

Even in that condition, he seemed to comprehend what Sandy was telling him. Tears welled in Monty’s eyes. “Go to her. Rescue her. I can’t help her. I can’t even help myself right now.”

He kissed Monty on his forehead and, bracing himself, went back into the bedroom of Marilyn’s suite. There was no sign of Miller.

Like Monty, Marilyn was lying nude on the bed. On the floor, he noticed an empty bottle of pills. “Oh, my God,” he shouted.

In an ambulance on the way to the hospital, he made a note to remember the date for his diary: August 27, 1960. He’d forgiven her for her harsh words, because he didn’t think she really meant them.

With a young paramedic, he was at her side, holding her hand, trying to get her to stay awake, to talk. He’d told the ambulance crew that she’d swallowed a bottle of barbiturates.

The driver of the ambulance had alerted the nearest hospital in Reno that they would be arriving with a patient, her name—Marilyn Monroe—not revealed as a means of avoiding reporters and photographers.

“No, no, let me go,” she said softly. “I’m going…to a peaceful place. All around me…pink clouds.”

At twilight back on the set, Huston assembled cast and crew, including both Monty and Gable. “I’m shutting down the film until Marilyn recovers. She desperately needs rest. She won’t be with us for a while. The hospital in Reno pumped her stomach. Tonight, she’s being flown to the Westside Hospital in Los Angeles, if you want to send her a get-well card.”

Later, during a particularly realistic talk with Gable, Huston told a different truth. “Actually, I’m shutting down production because I’ve gambled away the film’s financing at those fucking casinos in Reno. All the tables are rigged.”

“With Marilyn in the hospital, I’ll have more time to come up with some more loot. I know it’s not very gentlemanly of me, but I’ll have to blame Marilyn for the shutdown, not the real reason, which is my gambling debts. When a picture usually shuts down in Hollywood, either the director or the star is blamed. In this case, let it be our flickering star.”

“That may be true,” Huston said. “Regret ably, I’ll not get out of life so soon or so easily. I’m a tough old hombre.” His gaze was cast upon the oncoming night of the desert. “I was born in Nevada…Nevada, Missouri, that is. We’re tough there. I’ve got steel in my guts, and I’ll survive. I might even make it to 1990, but Marilyn will not. Hollywood is destroying her, but she’s also giving Hollywood a lot of help.”

The day before, he told his family, “I’ve been fighting my body for twenty years, demanding that it keep me alive. But it’s winning the war against me. I’m sick and I’m tired of fighting. At some point, all men come to the end of the trail. Hell, I outlasted Bogie by thirty years.”

Marilyn would remain in L.A.’s Westside hospital until September 5, when she returned to Nevada to complete work on The Misfits. While resting and recuperating, she received a parade of distinguished visitors.

Later, Marilyn shared details of these hospital visits with her best girlfriend, another blonde bombshell, Jeanne Carmen, a struggling actress and model who bore an amazing resemblance to Marilyn herself. In Carmen’s case, that was no accident, but a deliberate choice in dress and makeup. She was called “a Marilyn Monroe clone” by her enemies.

In addition to being a B-movie actress, Carmen was a pin-up girl and trick-shot golfer. Until she was thirteen, she picked cotton in fields near her home town of Paragould, Arkansas, but ran away to New York.

Fully developed by that age, she landed a job as a dancer in Burlesque with Bert Lahr. She later told Marilyn, “I didn’t go hungry…I found a lot of men in New York who liked to have sex with a thirteen-year-old girl with big tits.”

In her twenties, she went to Hollywood to make a string of B movies such as Untamed Youth (1957), where she was cast as a teenage rock ’n roll delinquent. That same year, she appeared as an Indian girl, “Yellow Moon,” in War Drums, starring Lex Barker of Tarzan and Lana Turner fame. That devastatingly handsome, muscular star is still hailed on some web sites as “the greatest male beauty ever to appear in films.”

Naturally, Carmen went after him. She later recalled, “It was the greatest seduction of my entire life, and my lovers have numbered in the hundreds. Lana should have held onto this hunk even if she did discover him seducing her lesbian teenage daughter.”

Over the years, Carmen would seduce many of Marilyn’s lovers, including John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, and even Joe DiMaggio. Both of them shared tales of Elvis Presley’s seductions of them. Amazingly, both of them had also been seduced by Clark Gable. But the most dangerous lover they shared in common was the gangster, Johnny Roselli, who would have a far greater impact on Marilyn’s life than on Carmen’s.

Carmen claimed that Marilyn’s first visitor to the hospital was Patricia Kennedy Lawford, who was married at the time to the bisexual English actor, Peter Lawford. Patricia was well aware of her brother’s attraction to Marilyn. John F. Kennedy was also aware of his sister’s own adulterous affairs. Each of them, brother and sister, often covered for the other while committing extra-marital indiscretions.

Not wanting to be recognized, Patricia arrived at Westside Hospital wearing a ridiculous black wig and horn-rimmed glasses.

She later told Lawford and her friends, “At first, I thought Marilyn was dead. She had kicked off the sheet and was lying nude on the bed with her eyes closed and her mouth open. She looked like a woman in a casket at a funeral home. I almost screamed for the nurse, but felt her pulse. It was still beating. When I touched her, she opened her eyes and looked up at me. ‘Who in the fuck are you?’”

“I pulled off that ridiculous wig. Then Marilyn said, ‘Oh, Patricia, it’s you. Thank you for coming. I so desperately need a friend these days. By the way, get rid of that wig. It doesn’t become you.’”

As Patricia later recalled to her friends at her Santa Monica house, Marilyn, according to her, seemed like “she was indulging in a post-mortem review of her own life.”

She told Patricia, “All of my life as Norma Jeane Mortensen, I wanted to transform myself into this thing called Marilyn Monroe. Now, lying here in this damn hospital bed, I want to be simple Norma Jeane again, living in a bungalow with a loving blue-collar husband and three adorable children. I want nothing more than to kill off Marilyn Monroe. I don’t like her. I’m not that artificial woman. I’ve come to realize that if I don’t murder Marilyn Monroe, she will kill me.”

Patricia later admitted to her friends that the alliance—“a close bond, really”—that she’d formed with Marilyn during the final years of her life “was a case of the odd couple. After all, I was also a friend of Jackie’s, but I found her a bit distant. I didn’t feel that I was betraying my friendship with Jackie by being friends with Marilyn. I had the same feeling about my relationship with Ethel when Bobby became involved with Marilyn.”

Her closely knit family called Patricia “the Hollywood Kennedy,” although her father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, was the first of the Hollywood Kennedys and the first to seduce movie stars such as Gloria Swanson. All four of his sons, Joseph Jr., JFK, RFK, and Teddy would follow in their father’s footsteps, during their respective encounters with glamorous movie stars becoming notches on their belts.

A handsome young naval lieutenant, John F. Kennedy, would be the first to seduce Norma Jeane. In 1950, when introduced to her by John Huston, Joseph P. Kennedy would do the honors with Marilyn during a weekend jaunt to Palm Springs, followed with latter-day seductions by Bobby and Teddy.

In spite of his own involvements with movie stars, Joe Kennedy strenuously objected to his daughter, Patricia, marrying Peter Lawford, and not just because he was “a part-time homosexual.”

Being an independent spirit, Patricia married Peter anyway, even though her father had warned her against it.

She wanted to be in show business herself, but realized she didn’t have the looks for it, thanks to her sharp nose, longish face, and that toothy Kennedy grin.

To those who didn’t comprehend her relationship with Marilyn, Patricia said, “I was Jane Russell to Marilyn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

Marilyn always spoke fondly of Patricia. She once told her friend, Jack Benny, “Pat has bigger balls than either Jack or Bobby.”

Patricia was well aware that her husband and Marilyn had had an affair years before. “If I excluded the women from my life who had affairs with Peter—Lana Turner, etc.—that would eliminate most of the femme fatales of Hollywood, not to mention the pretty boys. The trouble with having sex with Peter is I don’t know what black hole he stuck it in the night before. A girl can come down with something with a philandering husband like mine. After all, Jack came down with a venereal disease on the night he lost his virginity in a whore house in Harlem.”

Christopher Lawford, Patricia’s son, said his mother treated Marilyn “like she was my little sister. I, too, loved her in my own way. She’s so out front with her emotions. I came from a family that repressed their feelings.”

In a story that is little known, on rare occasions Marilyn functioned as the Lawford family’s babysitter during times when Peter and Patricia wanted to visit Frank Sinatra in Palm Springs. Patricia had a wicked sense of humor. “I trust you were merely playacting when you starred as that psychotic babysitter in Don’t Bother to Knock with Richard Widmark.”

“Peter will never babysit for our kids,” Patricia told Marilyn. “He can’t stand to smell of babyshit. When Christopher was only two months old, Peter had him moved out.”

“Peter found an apartment across the street from us and moved Christopher into it,” Patricia said. “Of course, we had to hire a nanny to look after him.”

Patricia became such a confidant of Marilyn that the two women even discussed the sexual performance of men they’d seduced in common, and not just Lawford. Both of them had been seduced by Porforio Rubirosa, the famous playboy who had married two of the world’s wealthiest women—tobacco heiress Doris Duke and Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton.

“When Rubi dropped his shorts, I screamed,” Marilyn said. “Seeing was not believing. I didn’t know men came in that size.”

“I’m well acquainted with Mr. Rubirosa,” Patricia said. “He’s a good friend of Jack’s but not such a good friend that he won’t fuck his sister behind Jack’s back.”

Marilyn confided to Patricia that her own marriage to Arthur Miller was crumbling, and Patricia claimed that the same thing was happening with her marriage to Lawford. “He is truly weird. He’ll drink himself to death. He hires prostitutes in Las Vegas to bite his nipples until they bleed. He likes to be spanked at least three times a day. He claims that his mother, Lady Lawford, spanked him a lot when he was a young boy. She also dressed him in girl’s clothing and tried to make a girl out of him, although she detests homosexuals. You figure. He’s always trying to get me to participate in orgies with various men and women. He also vies with Sinatra as a pimp for Jack.”

She later confided to Peter and others that on her return visit to see Marilyn, “I did something I later regretted. I brought her pills. She claimed she couldn’t live without them.”

“I’ve taken pills for so long they don’t have an effect on me like they do most people,” she told Patricia. “I have to take heavier doses of them every year I live, although I don’t know how much longer that will be.”

“You’ll live forever,” Patricia told Marilyn on her last visit to the hospital.

Patricia later explained herself, claiming that she meant Marilyn would live forever as an image on the screen.

A surprise visitor during her stay in L.A.’s Westside hospital was Marlon Brando. The attending nurse was startled when he walked over to Marilyn’s bed and planted a wet kiss on her lips. “And how is Mrs. Brando today?

The nurse later told a reporter, after receiving a twenty-dollar tip, that the actor had referred to Marilyn as “Mrs. Brando.” Both the nurse and the reporter were puzzled.

To understand the complexities of the relationship between these two stars—the “sexiest man on the planet” and his female counterpart, one would have to dip into their respective pasts. Only a few were privy to the length and depth of their complicated relationship. They included directors Elia Kazan and Fred Zinnemann, as well as Jeanne Carmen and Brando’s closest male friend, Carlo Fiore.

Brando had told Fiore that he’d first met Marilyn at a bar on Eighth Avenue in New York City way back in 1946. According to Fiore, Brando had offered her fifteen dollars, the going rate at the time, to return with him to his rented room, where he claimed that he’d made love to her all night. In the morning, while he was still asleep, she’d left his room. He would not see her again until he filmed The Men (1950) in Hollywood.

During the day, Marilyn, then known as Norma Jeane, worked in an aircraft factory during the week and moonlighted on weekends as a model while her young husband, James (Jim) Dougherty, served in the Merchant Marine. On Saturday, she was usually off somewhere with a photographer who expected to seduce her as part of whatever fee he’d agreed to pay her.

At one point, according to Sally Broyne, a fellow worker at the factory, “Marilyn had saved up the fare to fly to New York. She announced she was going “to break into show business,” suggesting that she’d be hired to dance in the chorus line of a Broadway musical.

Nothing worked out, including a promised modeling job from a New York-based photographer. Norma Jeane found herself wandering broke on the streets of New York, or so Marilyn told Broyne after her return to California.

Lena Pepitone, who functioned as Marilyn’s maid from 1957 until her death in 1962, revealed that Marilyn admitted to “turning tricks” for fifteen dollars each during the 1940s in Los Angeles. Pepitone, author of Marilyn Monroe Confidential, stated that Marilyn had told her that she’d picked up men in bars “for pocket money, but mainly to eat a square meal. I like food. A girl needs it to keep her figure.”

Brando’s second encounter with Norma Jeane—now Marilyn Monroe—occurred in front of an apartment house in Los Angeles. Details are sketchy, but what happened between Marilyn and Brando has been pieced together from remembrances of director Fred Zinnemann and Carlo Fiore. Although their respective versions differed slightly, Brando told each man essentially the same story about interchanges between Marilyn and himself. He said to Zinnemann, “I wouldn’t call her a rising starlet. Seems to me she spends more time on her back.”

It is believed that one night, he was waiting for blonde-haired Barbara Payton, who would become a scandalous movie star during the Fifties, but at that particular moment, he stood her up for Marilyn.

Rushing out of Payton’s apartment building was a beautiful woman with a stunning figure, as Brando later recalled to Zinnemann. Seeking a man in a car parked on the far side of the street, she apparently mistook him for her date for the evening. She was breathless when she peered inside the car. “You’re not Sammy,” she said, stepping back. “But you look familiar. You’re Marlon Brando!”

“You don’t recognize me with my new hair color,” she said. “I’m Norma Jeane, but now I’m known as Marilyn Monroe. You don’t remember the time we got together in New York, and you invited me back to your place?”

“That could fit a thousand encounters,” he said. “Get in the car. Perhaps you can do something to me to joggle my memory.”

She giggled and ran around the rear of his car, wiggling her shapely butt onto the passenger’s seat. “I didn’t want to be with Sammy tonight anyway. He’s fat and bald.” As he started the car, she ran her hand across the back of his neck. “You’re very good looking but not as pretty as before. Did you do something to your nose?”

“Adds character in my view,” she said. “I don’t like men who are too handsome.”

“What I mean is you’re a handsome man now. When we met a few years back, you were just a pretty boy. I never go to bed with pretty boys. Of course, in my present situation I have to go to bed with almost anyone to get ahead. Get it? Give head to get ahead. But when I become a big-time movie star, I’ll never suck another cock again—unless I want to, of course.” Sexily, she looked over at him. “Unless I’m in the mood.” She cuddled closer to him.

Zinnemann, according to reports, repeated this story at a number of dinner parties. Thanks to his repeatedly telling that story, the tale of young Brando meeting young Marilyn as early as 1946 was, for a while at least, an oft-repeated topic of gossip in Hollywood.

“Forgive me, but I still don’t remember you,” Brando is alleged to have said to Marilyn. “Perhaps if you’ll go back to my place, you and I can repeat what you said we did in New York. I’m sure that will bring it all back to me.”

“That would be fine with me,” she said. “I hope you’re not pretending that you don’t remember because I’ve become too old for you. I mean I was young when we met. A teenager, really. Some men out here like only teenagers, not an old broad like me.”

“You’re not an old broad,” he said. “In fact, with your sex appeal, your allure will be timeless.”

“Do I desire you?” he asked. “Put me to the test. Back at my place, we’ll get naked together. If my noble tool rises to do its duty, then I still desire you. Fair enough?”

“The suspense is killing me,” she said. “I can’t wait.” Leaning over him, she began to unfasten his trousers. As he later told Zinnemann, “I practically had three accidents before we got there. Since that night in New York, someone had been teaching Marilyn new tricks. Maybe a lot of someones.”

The next morning, Marilyn lingered over breakfast and stayed with him “for a matinee performance,” as she called it. Later, he said, “I didn’t think she had any place to go.”

She shared her dreams about becoming a movie star with him. “I know a lot of gals arrive in Hollywood dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I have one up on them.”

His ongoing affair with Marilyn would stop and go, heating up in the mid-Fifties, but never completely disappearing, until her mysterious death in 1962.

Despite what he revealed to a handful of close friends, he had very little to say “officially and on record” about Marilyn. He never demeaned her and spoke about her only in the highest regard. “Marilyn was a sensitive, misunderstood person,” he said, “and much more perceptive than was generally assumed. She had been beaten down, but had a strong emotional intelligence—a keen intuition for the feelings of others, the most refined type of intelligence.”

“Marlon lived through the whole Marilyn legend,” Fiore later said. “The nude calendar scandal, her lesbian relationships with such movie queens as Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck, her tortured affair with the Kennedys—you name it. He was privy to her secrets and often gave her very good advice. She never seemed to heed Marlon’s words, but still continued to call him for guidance she rarely followed.”

Marilyn herself made few comments about Marlon, telling anyone who asked that, “He’s very sweet and tender, not at all the Stanley Kowalski rapist people think he is.”

Reporters clamored around her at an actors’ benefit in December of 1955. She was escorted by Brando. One reporter asked, “Miss Monroe, are you very seriously interested in Mr. Brando?”

Brando kept Zinnemann up to date about his affair with Marilyn. He once told his director, “Marilyn’s studio is claiming her bust measurement is 37. However, Marilyn herself disputes that. She says her bust measurement is 38. As for me, I have a built-in tape measure in my brain. I’m never wrong about these things. I’d put her bust at 35, and I should know.”

After much infighting at 20^th Century Fox, Marlon had agreed to star in Viva Zapata!, despite the objections of Darryl. F. Zanuck, the studio head who held out for Tyrone Power. In this 1952 film, Elia Kazan directed not only Brando but Jean Peters (otherwise known as Mrs. Howard Hughes), and Brando-hating Anthony Quinn. With a script by John Steinbeck, it was a vibrant film about a Mexican peasant’s ascendency to power and the presidency of his country.

Marilyn showed up on the film’s location. At first, Marlon thought she’s shown up to continue their affair, but he discovered that she actually had arrived to sleep with Kazan, hoping he would cast her as the female lead in his new movie, whatever that was. She didn’t know.

For the first three nights, she avoided intimacy with Brando. But that situation changed one morning at three o’clock, when there was an urgent rapping on his door. Stumbling nude to answer it, he discovered it was Marilyn wrapped in a white terrycloth robe that probably belonged to Kazan. She rushed into his room, and, as he’d later relate to his director, she said, “Something dreadful has happened. Molly Kazan and Gadge’s kids have arrived unexpectedly. They weren’t due until next week but decided to come a week earlier. Gadge sent me to be your girlfriend while his family is here.”

Pulling her into his arms, he told her, “We’ll have a wonderful time pretending you’re my girlfriend.”

During the week she spent on the set of Viva Zapata!, Marlon got to know her as never before. She revealed to him that Kazan had introduced her to his longtime friend, the playwright, Arthur Miller, and that, “We’re a threesome. I don’t mean all three of us go to bed together. Sometimes I’m with Arthur, and on other nights when he’s not with Molly I’m with Gadge. Gadge told me he doesn’t think I’m star material, but Arthur has great faith in my talent and my future as an actress. He told me in time I might even become a modern day Sarah Bernhardt. To do that, however, I’ve got to stop playing all these dumb blonde parts.”

During the time Kazan was preoccupied with his wife, Brando kept him posted on what he and Marilyn talked about. They spent hours discussing acting, Lee Strasberg, and the Actors Studio. “Lee told me that one day I could star in plays by Eugene O’Neill. Anna Christie, for example. He even told me that he’d like to direct me as Lady Macbeth one day.”

“You’re going to become a big star, Marilyn,” Brando told her. “But beware of Strasberg. You’re his ticket to the big time. He’ll just use you and exploit you, and take you for all you’re worth.”

Brando could not have known how prophetic his comment was. Even post-millennium, Marilyn’s estate, left to Strasberg, still brings in millions of dollars a year in royalties and residuals associated with the use of her celebrated image.

Every male member of the crew was captivated by Marilyn—all except one, Anthony Quinn, who called her “an empty-headed blonde with a fat rear. Oh, Monroe was pretty enough to look at, but there were hundreds of better looking actresses poking around Hollywood. Even after she hit the big time, with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I never could see what all the fuss was about. All knew was that she walked around our dusty Texas set in a slinky dress that showed the crack of her ass. There seemed to be precious little going on beneath her glorious blonde mane.”

One hot afternoon, according to Kazan, Brando approached him with a deadly serious look on his face and asked him what his intentions were regarding Marilyn. He wanted to know if Gadge (as he called Kazan) was going to divorce his wife, Milly, and marry Marilyn.

“Hell, no!” Kazan told him. “Marilyn will never be anybody’s wife again. She’s not wife material. Girlfriend, yes. Mistress, definitely. Wife, never. Watch out for her, Marlon. She’s in a marrying mood. She might be laying a trap for you.”

Kazan also told him that, “even as we speak, Marilyn is also trying to get Arthur Miller to divorce his wife and marry her. The woman is absolutely capricious. If some fool man marries her, he’ll sit home at night wondering what man—or in her case, what woman as well—she’s out fucking that night. Joe Schenck. Joan Crawford. Darryl F. Zanuck. Maybe even Rock Hudson, and he’s gay. Marilyn told me she likes to fuck gay men for variety.”

Not satisfied with any of these answers, Brando again pressed Kazan to explain fully how he saw his own future with Marilyn. “You’re going to keep fucking her? Is that right? Exactly what will she be to you?”

“Okay, if you must know, I can tell you,” Kazan said. “A mascot—nothing more!”

On the fifth night in Roma, Texas, Marilyn confessed to Brando that she was pregnant. She said that condition was “not unusual for me. I prefer natural sex, and I’ve had several abortions before. I don’t remember how many.”

He wanted to know if she knew who the father was. “I honestly don’t know,” she said. “I suspect one of four men in this order: Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Fred Karger, and Marlon Brando.”

“Why do I come in last?” he asked. “My noble tool is as fertile as any of those jokers.”

A year or so later, Kazan confided in Tennessee Williams and his companion, Frank Merlo, “the most outrageous event that took place during the filming of Viva Zapata! You’re not going to believe this.” The director’s claim was that some time during the shoot of Zapata!, Brando and Marilyn slipped away from the set. Using assumed names, according to Kazan, they somehow obtained a license and were married one weekend in some Texas border town.

“Later on, when she was sleeping with me,” Kazan said, “she called herself Mrs. Brando and told me that since I was married and since she was married we were committing adultery. I told her I had no problem with that.”

No record has been found to show that Brando actually married Marilyn, but it’s entirely possible. Kazan later said, “It was amazing what a hundred-dollar bill could accomplish in those days in those little Texas towns. Both Marlon and Marilyn were two crazy mixed-up kids. They may have gone through a wedding ceremony on a lark, finding it an amusing thing to do. Marlon was a practical joker, and I could see him going along with that. Marilyn was so reckless she’d definitely do something like that. If they were telling me the truth, and I suspect they were, then Marlon’s subsequent marriages to those three women, and Marilyn’s marriages to Miller and DiMaggio would make both of them bigamists.”

After she returned to Los Angeles, Marilyn the following week placed an urgent call to “my husband,” telling him, “There will be no little Marlon Jr. No, you’re Marlon Jr. There will be no Marlon III. I’ve had a miscarriage. What a great little guy he would have been with Marlon Brando as his daddy and me as his mommie.”

“Don’t be a silly goose,” she told him. “Women have an instinct for knowing things like that.”

“If you want a kid at some future date—I mean, one with me—just think of me as your sperm bank.”

Resting in her hospital bed in Los Angeles, some eight years after their “marriage” during the filming of Viva Zapata!, Brando behaved like a husband.

As she’d later tell Carmen, who also had an affair with him, “Marlon was more of a husband to me than Arthur Miller, the son of a bitch. He was very solicitous, really concerned if I lived or died.”

He told Marilyn that both of them should run away to an island in the South Pacific and live there for several months, making love every day and eating coconuts. “We both need to forget about Hollywood,” he told her. “It’s no fucking dream factory. It lives on nightmares. It’ll kill you, like it’s killing me. Except in my case, I don’t destruct easily.”

As he kissed her good-bye and was leaving her hospital room, she called him back and, with a certain desperation, she clutched his hand. “There will be a divorce here or there, but maybe we should get married. Make that drunken pretend wedding of so long ago the real thing.”

“That’s damn good thinking, Marilyn,” he said. “Both of us will have to ask each other the ultimate question. Will destroy you? Or will you destroy me first?”

Two days after Brando’s visit, another on-again, off-again lover, Frank Sinatra, showed up unexpectedly, with white roses and a diamond bracelet.

Marilyn had first met him in Los Angeles in 1954 while she was still married to Joe DiMaggio. Her marriage was heading for a disastrous ending, as was Sinatra’s marriage to Ava Gardner.

Sinatra, who already knew DiMaggio, had invited him to dinner at Roman off’s, and he requested that Marilyn come along, as he was anxious to get to know her.

During dinner, when DiMaggio got up to go to the men’s room, Marilyn slipped him her phone number. Imitating Mae West, she said, “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime? Joe’s visiting relatives in San Francisco next week.”

“No red-blooded male turns down an invitation from Marilyn Monroe,” he said. “Kid, you’re the hottest ticket in America.”

According to Marilyn’s friend and photographer, Milton Greene, the first sexual tryst between Marilyn and Sinatra occurred on the night of the second day after DiMaggio left Los Angeles for San Francisco.

Over pillow talk, Sinatra and Marilyn shared a mutual dream of starring together in a movie musical. She told him that she’d been offered the chance to star in a movie called Pink Tights, a remake of a film her screen idol, Betty Grable, had made during World War II called Coney Island. This was the turn-of-the-20th-century story of a saloon entertainer who becomes a famous musical star. Grable herself remade the film seven years later, calling it Wabash Avenue.

At first, he was reluctant to take on the role originally played by George Montgomery. He told Marilyn that he’d be playing second fiddle to her. But she could be very persuasive, and she finally got his agreement to co-star with her in Pink Tights.

What he didn’t know was that DiMaggio was dead set against Marilyn starring in the role. His main objection involved the low salary she would be paid. “You’re the star of the picture; you’re the one who will have them lined up at the box office to see you in those skimpy costumes. But Sinatra will be walking off with the big bucks. What you’ll get is a bag of peanuts.”

Not knowing any of this, Sinatra showed up on the lot of 20th Century Fox ready for work on the first day of the shoot. When Marilyn hadn’t reported to work by noon, he began to curse and steam. He’d already smoked a pack of cigarettes before the lunch break was called. Phone calls to Marilyn’s home were not answered. Fox even sent studio emissaries to the DiMaggio residence, but no one seemed to be home.

Back at the studio, Sinatra, comforted with a bottle of Jack Daniels, waited until closing time. At five o’clock, he stormed out of the studio, telling Fox, “I’m off the picture. Leave a message for that two-bit blonde whore. Tell the cunt never to call me again.”

It wasn’t until four days later that he learned that Marilyn had flown out of Los Angeles with DiMaggio. They’d landed in San Francisco for a reunion with his Italian family. News of this reached Fox executives, who suspended their hottest star on January 5, 1954.

Back in Los Angeles, Marilyn made several attempts to reach him at his villa in Palm Springs, but he was not taking her calls. He sent her a telegram: “TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE, KID. WE’RE THROUGH!”

She was not a star who took rejection lightly. One Saturday afternoon, she put on her most alluring dress, with a plunging décolletage, and showed up on his doorstep in Palm Springs. Although reluctant to do so, Sinatra invited her in, especially when he saw how she was attired. As he later told Sammy Davis, Jr., “I could say no to working with Marilyn again, but I could hardly Betty Grable: Marilyn’s role model say no to a chance to bang the hell out of her. I invited her in, and she delivered…and delivered. By the time she drove back to Hollywood, I was one exhausted dago stud.”

In Palm Springs on her first day there, Marilyn and Sinatra had enjoyed a nude swim in his pool. Later, as they rested on chaises longues she gave him her version of why she didn’t show up that morning at Fox on the set of Pink Tights. “I liked the script,” she told him, “but Joe found it too risqué. It was also the money thing, meaning I wasn’t getting enough. Joe feels Fox is just exploiting me. There’s more. Joe told me that he absolutely wouldn’t allow me to make a movie with you. ‘I know him too well,’ he said. ‘Sinatra will spend more time in your dressing room than in front of the camera.’”

“Old Joe was right about that,” Sinatra said. “Now get your sweet ass over here and give daddy a sloppy wet one.”

Before she left Palm Springs, she told him that she was splitting from DiMaggio. “I’m my own girl again. I control my own life.”

Marilyn’s trip to Palm Springs came at a time when Sinatra was at his most despondent from the loss of Ava Gardner. He was virtually in mourning for her. And although Marilyn wasn’t Ava, in 1954, she was the most sought after woman in the world.

Before leaving Palm Springs, Marilyn made a tempting offer: She wanted to move in with him as his mistress.

As Dean Martin later advised him, “That’s an offer no man can refuse. Let’s face facts: Ava Gardner is the most beautiful woman in the world, but Marilyn is the sexiest. If you can’t have Ava, God has sent the next best thing. No man on the planet can sympathize with you over your loss of Ava if you’ve replaced her with Marilyn. Hell, man, you’ll be the envy of every dude with a hard-on.”

In spite of friends such as Martin urging him to accept Marilyn’s offer, he was still hesitant. She began to call him repeatedly, often late at night. She sounded more and more desperate.

James Whiting, a close friend of Sinatra’s, claimed that Marilyn was becoming dependent on him. “She always had to have a man in her life. With DiMaggio gone, she had to have an immediate replacement of a male authority figure. Frank was that lucky man if he could just get over that hangdog, lovesick illness he had about Ava.”

She was elated, telling Whiting, “If you have any problem in the world, Frankie is the man to turn to. He can solve anything, even rescuing a damsel in distress like myself.”

She sought out her friend, Robert F. Slatzer. He was her long-time confidant who later claimed that he and Marilyn had been married in Mexico, although only briefly.

After Marilyn’s death, he wrote two books about his relationship with her, revealing “the naked truth.” One was called The Marilyn Files, the other The Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe. Both exposés claimed that the star had been murdered.

As Marilyn herself later admitted, “Bob was always in love with me, but I could tell him everything about my other love affairs. He was the best listener in the business.”

After a week, she told Slatzer, “Frank Sinatra is the most fascinating man I ever dated. He has always been kind and understanding. When we’re together, I feel I don’t need pills. He makes me laugh. He makes me feel secure. He makes me happy. He’s the man who taught me to love life—not be afraid of it. A real gentleman. Of course, he’s still so upset over Ava that he’s sometimes impotent, but I’m curing that.”

In J. Randy Taraborrelli’s Sinatra: A Complete Life, he wrote: “Marilyn cured Sinatra of his impotency, at least for a while. She said she didn’t care how long it took. She was determined that he was going to perform in bed with her. They were innovative sexually. For instance, they began sharing intimacies outdoors. Sinatra had never done that before Monroe, and it excited him. According to Sinatra’s friends, he and Monroe engaged in sexual activity at night on the roof of the Sands Hotel above the Las Vegas strip.”

He told Whiting that after Ava left to “to fuck every bullfighter in Spain,” he became impotent. “But Marilyn is the best cure for that. At home she never puts on clothes, but runs around naked.”

With the passage of each day he spent with Marilyn, he thought less and less about Ava, although he was still in love with her, a bond that would last a lifetime.

Those close to him claimed that he actually fell in love with Marilyn after his divorce from Ava in 1954. “He was still in love with Ava,” Dean Martin said. “But he also loved Marilyn in a different way. Frank was capable of loving two women at the same time.”

During the first two weeks, he and Marilyn lived in harmony. But he gradually began to be irritated by her flaws, and she also witnessed firsthand that he wasn’t always the gentleman that she’d originally thought he was.

Sinatra’s right-man man for many a year, George Jacobs, said that his boss came to regard Marilyn as “a total mess. She was a drunk, and he could put up with that. But he was a very neat man, and he couldn’t tolerate Marilyn being a dirty pig. She often didn’t bathe. She ate in bed and left foodstuff like pizza under her mattress, sleeping in the filth. Her hair became matted because she didn’t wash it. Often she was more than twenty-five pounds overweight, although going on a crash diet right before filming a new movie.”

He found it “particularly disgusting” that MM didn’t use tampons or sanitary napkins and left her sheets with blood on them.

Although he was protective of Marilyn when he thought she was being abused by others, he could turn suddenly on her when he was in a foul mood.

Marilyn always liked to walk around naked. “Clothes inhibit me,” she told her maid, Lena Pepitone.

One night he called a “Summit” of his fellow Rat Packers—Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Dean Martin.

“We were drinking and shooting the shit,” Davis recalled. “In walks Marilyn. Jaybird naked. I think all of us got an erection right away, except Joey. I never saw anything popping up in his pants, but he was true blue to his wife. After that night, and behind Frank’s back, all of us ‘rats’ were determined to fuck Marilyn. One by one we knocked off that piece.”

On another night in front of the Rat Packers, a teary-eyed Marilyn was detailing stories of childhood rape, whether true or not. Finally, Sinatra could tolerate it no more. “Listen, Norma Jeane, toughen up or get the hell out. We’ve all gone through shit. Get over it!” She ran in tears from the room.

One night at Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica home, a drunken Marilyn was talking to Davis, Dean, and Lawford about her ambitions of becoming a serious stage actress. She claimed that she was considering touring America with Marlon Brando in a repeat of his Broadway and film success of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. “Marlon would get a chance to be Stanley Kowalski again, and I, of course, would play the doomed heroine, Blanche DuBois. I’m sure that darling Tennessee would love the idea.”

“Shut up,” Sinatra shouted at her. “You don’t know what in the fuck you’re talking about. As Blanche DuBois, you’d be laughed off the stage. Stick to those dumb blonde roles.”

She ran in tears from the living room and locked herself into one of the guest bedrooms. Sinatra stormed out of the house. But in a few weeks he apologized to her, and he and Marilyn started seeing each other again.

Still plagued by impotency, Sinatra, according to Davis, flew to Las Vegas for a gig. Once installed in a suite at the Sands, he ordered the most expensive prostitutes, who tried to give him an orgasm. Reportedly, he went through a rainbow of women hailing from Senegal to Thailand, from Canada to Brazil. But no hooker succeeded.

When he returned to Los Angeles, he found that Marilyn hadn’t quite given up on trying to “get him off.” As has been revealed, she took bubble baths with him and went down on him in a giant bathtub. He later told Davis, “Sometimes I get so excited I hold her head down too long. If she’s ever found drowned, you’ll know who the culprit is.”

One morning, unusual for him, he awoke early and found Marilyn gone from his bed. In his jockey shorts, he walked into his kitchen. There he discovered a nude Marilyn standing in front of his refrigerator, trying to determine if she wanted orange juice or grapefruit juice.

“I took her right there on the kitchen floor,” he later told his friend Whiting. “She cured my impotency. I shot off. Marilyn got her orgasm, rare for her, or so she said. From that morning on, my plumbing was in working order—and to hell with moaning over Ava.”

After Marilyn moved out of his house in 1954, he saw her only occasionally and rarely for sex. Sometimes when he was performing in Los Angeles, Marilyn visited him “for that occasional blow-job in his dressing room,” according to Lawford.

During the course of their relationship, and in spite of their blow-up over Pink Tights, Sinatra and Marilyn continued to discuss starring in a film together. The most improbable suggestion came when Billy Wilder offered Sinatra the role of Joe/Josephine in Some Like It Hot, Marilyn’s classic comedy. But when Sinatra heard that he’d have to play the role in drag, he immediately turned it down. Tony Curtis took it and gave his most memorable performance.

A more workable idea involved a remake of Born Yesterday which brought Judy Holliday her Oscar opposite William Holden and Broderick Crawford. Sinatra was suggested for the gangster role, but he eventually decided it would be bad for his image.

Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, discouraged her affair with Sinatra. On call for her day and night, Dr. Greenson said, “I try to keep her from being destructively lonely. During such times, she often retreats to drug use. I told her to avoid destructive people like Sinatra. I viewed their relationship as sado-masochistic, with him acting the role of the sadist. Even though she was seeing me two or three times a week, she would cancel at a moment’s notice if Sinatra invited her to his villa in Palm Springs.”

Dr. Greenson also claimed that Marilyn confided to him that when she made Sinatra angry, he was given to violent out-bursts. “He could hold his liquor, but he never forgave a woman who couldn’t,” she said. “I couldn’t.. at least, not always.”

One night, when she was staggering around drunk, he tossed her into his pool. She nearly drowned, as she was too drunk to swim and no one, especially Sinatra, seemed sober enough to dive in and rescue her.

On another occasion, Carmen confessed to Marilyn that he had made her pregnant, and that he had subsequently arranged and paid for an abortion. “If I ever become pregnant with Frank’s child,” Marilyn said, “I’d go ahead and have it and wouldn’t even tell him. Could you imagine the talent a little boy or girl would have with Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra as his mama and papa?”

All those memories came flooding back to Marilyn when Sinatra visited her at the Westside Hospital in Los Angeles. Before he left that day, she felt their relationship was on a steady course again, as was their love-making. After slipping a nurse a twenty-dollar bill to stand guard at the door, he gave Marilyn a long, passionate kiss—“and a hell of a lot more”—as she later told Carmen.

Previously, he had vaguely discussed marrying Marilyn, and in her hospital room, feeling despondent, she brought up the subject again. He told her he’d consider it.

She had only recently considered marrying Brando. As Carmen later said, “Marilyn wanted a guarantee of a strong man in her life after Arthur Miller—Sinatra or Brando, it didn’t really mat er. I’d gone to bed with both men, and considered none of those two whoremongers husband material.”

“But once Marilyn was determined,” Carmen continued, “she wouldn’t listen to anyone else, only to her inner voice, which I guess you’d call her feelings. My God, she even discussed marriage to her former husband, Joe DiMaggio. Around the time of her divorce from Miller, she definitely wanted another husband, preferably one who was famous like Miller. She could have had all the well-hung gas jockeys in Los Angeles. I should know.”

Every day that Marilyn spent in the Westside Hospital, Carmen visited her and gossiped with her until she was tired and wanted sleep. On one afternoon, as Carmen was talking, a nurse came in with a special delivery letter for Marilyn, who asked Carmen to open it.

Carmen tore open the envelope, finding a segment of toilet paper with the word WHORE written on it in fecal matter. She tossed it in a nearby wastepaper basket.

Marilyn told Carmen that she’d talked to John Huston and told him that she planned to return to the Nevada set of The Misfits within four days.

While still in the hospital, Marilyn’s next famous visitor—and her most anticipated—was escorted into her room by Carmen herself. DiMaggio slipped into the hospital on a rear elevator as a means of avoiding the press, who had staked out the front of the building. If Marilyn were aware that her former husband was having an affair with Carmen, she gave no indication, but greeted him warmly and kissed him passionately.

Since their divorce, DiMaggio had been having sex with Marilyn Monroe clones, including Jayne Mansfield and starlet Liz Renay, who had won a nationwide Marilyn Monroe lookalike contest.

Carmen knew that DiMaggio wasn’t in love with her, and that he’d seduced her only because she reminded him of Marilyn.

The country was filled with Monroe impersonators, both male and female. Since divorcing Marilyn, he’d dated dozens of them. “If DiMaggio was drunk enough, I don’t know if he could even determine their gender,” Carmen said. “Some of those girlie boys with their big breasts and G-strings hiding their little weenies looked more like Marilyn than Marilyn herself. Except for me, or maybe one or two others, DiMaggio went in only for one-night stands. Marilyn herself specialized in those. I estimated that both of them made at least 2,000 seductions each—maybe more. They often preferred a love ‘em and leave ‘em pattern of conquest.”

In the hospital room, DiMaggio stood looking down at Marilyn in bed. “I should never have let you leave me,” DiMaggio whispered to Marilyn, loud enough for Carmen to hear.

Carmen realized that was more of a romantic illusion that anything based in reality. Perhaps it would be forgotten in the cold dawn of another day. She had delivered DiMaggio to Marilyn’s hospital room for a reason.

The previous afternoon, Marilyn had been blunt: “Round up Joe. I need a good fuck. Bring him here. So he’ll have his full energy, tell him to lay off the blonde bimbos the night before. Let him know that if he comes over, he can experience the real thing—not a Mamie Van Doren type.”

Since time was limited, a deal was struck. Carmen was to be stationed outside the door as a guard to prevent anyone from entering Marilyn’s room while she and DiMaggio had intercourse. Actually, Carmen would have preferred to stay to watch, or to join in. DiMaggio and Marilyn having sex would offer no surprise for her. She’d seen them in action before, but although Marilyn had orchestrated it, DiMaggio had not been aware of it. Ever since she’d been dating DiMaggio, Marilyn had bragged to Carmen about the athlete’s bedroom prowess.

Once, when Carmen was visiting Marilyn for girl talk—“mostly about men, what else?”—they heard DiMaggio’s key rattling in the lock. In fear, Marilyn bustled her into the bedroom’s closet, because, as she explained, “He’ll think we’ve been having sex.”

DiMaggio had heard rumors that Marilyn had been involved in a lesbian relationship with her drama coach, Natasha Lytess, and that she’d also endured “casting couch” auditions with screen divas Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford, among others.

The details of this strange encounter were revealed in Carmen’s memoirs, Jeanne Carmen, My Wild, Wild Life.

While Marilyn and DiMaggio were engaged in their mutual seductions, Carmen believed she was suffocating in the cramped closet behind all of Marilyn’s clothing. She heard noises from the living room and kept wondering when she could escape. Marilyn was trying to get him to take her down to the Villa Nova because she said, “I’m starving.”

But DiMaggio told her he was hungry for something else—“and it’s not food.”

Marilyn ran into the bedroom and whispered to Carmen, “Hang in there a little more. He’s got to have it and have it now.”

Within minutes, he had entered the bedroom with Marilyn, who was giggling and stripping down for action. Through a crack in the closet, she saw DiMaggio disrobing.

She later recalled that when he pulled his pants off, she saw for herself what Marilyn had been bragging about for so long. “That was one well-hung baseball player.”

Carmen claimed that Marilyn seemed to enjoy tormenting her as she and DiMaggio engaged in “gymnastic sex for almost an hour. At one point, I got so hot I almost came out of the closet and cut myself in on some of the action.”

“Those lovers who claimed Marilyn was not capable of having an orgasm didn’t see her being ridden with DiMaggio in the saddle.”

True to what Carmen had been told, DiMaggio fell into a deep sleep after intercourse, which allowed Marilyn to slip her out of the house.

At the door, Marilyn kissed her goodbye on the lips and then shooed her off. “Just think, you saw the Greatest Show on Earth, and I didn’t even charge ad-mission.”

Thinking of that long-ago evening as she stood guard by the hospital door, Carmen re-created in her mind the “second act” that Marilyn and DiMaggio were performing in that hospital bed without her voyeuristic eyes overseeing them this time.

She feared that even though she had a date with DiMaggio that night, he would be of no use to her after his workout with Marilyn. She knew that she’d have to wait until he woke up the next morning before he’d swing his bat her way.

In addition to watching DiMaggio in the saddle, Carmen had ridden with Marilyn through her romance, marriage, and eventual divorce from DiMaggio.

In the spring of 1952, DiMaggio had met Marilyn on a blind date at the suggestion of press agent Roy Craft, who was hoping to generate some newspaper coverage for the emerging star.

She’d been reluctant to go after him, fearing she’d encounter some sports-talking jock in a loud jacket and a pink tie. But the graying man she met was twelve years her senior and different from what she’d expected.

Mickey Mantle once claimed that, “Off the field, Joe dresses, looks, and acts like a dignified senator.” That’s what Marilyn encountered when he picked her up at her apartment. He wore a tasteful, charcoal gray, pin-striped suit, a conservative tie, and he looked elegant and well-groomed, with not a hair out of place.

Stories still persist that Marilyn didn’t know who DiMaggio was on their first date. “Of course, I’d heard his name,” she told Hedda Hopper. “Who hasn’t? I’ve never been to a baseball game, but I played soft ball at the orphanage.”

Joseph Paul (“Joe”) DiMaggio, nicknamed “Joltin’ Joe” or “The Yankee Clipper,” spent his entire thirteen-year baseball career playing for the New York Yankees and was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955. He was a disappointment to his father, Giuseppe, who wanted all his five sons to grow up to become fishermen.

“But the smell of dead fish makes me puke,” DiMaggio told his father who denounced him as a “good for nothing.”

In the Depression-stricken 1930s, DiMaggio became America’s icon as the immigrant boy who made it big. He became a national hero partly because of an astonishing string of home runs, (a 56 game “hitting streak”) he executed between May 15 and July 16, 1941. Despite his acclaim at the time, he styled himself as “the loneliest hero who ever lived.”

It was Darryl F. Zanuck who explained DiMaggio’s claim to fame to Marilyn, telling her that in 1941 he’d hit 56 runs in 56 consecutive games, even using a borrowed bat since his own had been stolen. Thanks to that sports triumph, The New York Yankees won the pennant and the World Series that year. The legend of Joltin’ Joe was born.

She was unaware that DiMaggio had been married before. In 1939, he’d wed a New York night club singer, Dorothy Arnold. They had a son together, Joe DiMaggio, Jr., who would figure into Marilyn’s later life. After four years of marriage, DiMaggio’s wife had divorced him on grounds of mental cruelty. DiMaggio never wanted to talk about his ex-wife, and he certainly didn’t want to talk about previous conquests.

Nevertheless, Marilyn was blunt with him to the point off embarrassment. “I hear you’ve gone to bed with really big stars, like Marlene Dietrich.”

The press got wind of Marilyn’s first date with DiMaggio, and one Hollywood newspaper ran the headline JOLTIN’JOE STRIKES OUT. To contradict that, Marilyn confided to author Ben Hecht that, “On our first date, Joe gave me multiple orgasms, unlike Ronald Reagan who in 1950 was forty minutes in the saddle, with few results.”

On the set of All About Eve (1950), Marilyn had told Bette Davis, “I like distinguished, successful older men.” Years later, Davis said. “From what I heard, DiMaggio likes young, sexy blondes. So it should be an ideal coupling.” Between puffs on her cigarette, she didn’t bother to disguise the sarcasm in her voice.

Marilyn bragged to her women friends, or even her gay buddies, that “Joe always scores a home run. When he first drops his shorts, you don’t think you’re getting all that much.”

As she began to date DiMaggio, their romance supplied tabloid fodder across the nation. As one reporter asked, “If Mr. America marries Miss America and they split, who gets custody of the Wheaties?”

Author Roger Kahn wrote, “Ten million shopgirls and schoolboys had dreams, both dry and wet, that Joe and Marilyn would wed.”

Marilyn’s first photograph with DiMaggio was posed with Cary Grant on the set of Monkey Business (1952). Privately, Hedda Hopper joked, “The contest will be between Cary and Marilyn as to who is going to get Joe.” The columnist, of course, was referring to Grant’s homosexuality, the worst-kept secret in Hollywood. In most of the newspapers that ran the picture, Grant’s face was cropped.

After a final night with Marilyn, DiMaggio had to return to New York on business, promising to call her every day.

Shortly after that picture with Grant was taken, Marilyn began to experience stomach pains that caused her to cry out in agony. The studio called for an ambulance which, with red dome flashing, rushed her to the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. She was suffering from acute appendicitis.

Before she was given an anesthesia, she’d written a note to the doctor and taped it to her belly.

After the operation, she recovered very quickly and with her new beau, Joltin’ Joe, on the East Coast, she began her usual pattern of seeing other men. In New York, the manager of DiMaggio’s hotel reported that a steady stream of beautiful young women came and went from his suite.

Marilyn also had men coming and going from her home or dressing room, an occasional new conquest, but often a favorite of yesterday. Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, and the film director, Nicholas Ray, were in that category.

Around the time she met DiMaggio, she also launched an affair with a young actor, Nico Minardos, a dark and handsome Athens-born stud working on the set of Monkey Business while going to UCLA.

He later claimed, “I was involved with Marilyn before she met Joe, during her marriage to Joe, and for a few weeks after her divorce. She was a lousy lay, but beautiful, and I was a young buck. What can I say? Trouble was, I could never bring her to climax, but I sure as hell tried.”

Hoping for better roles, she was also shacked up with that mogul at Fox, Spyros Skouras. “One night, he caught us in her apartment with my pants off,” Minardos said. “He was sure pissed off at me.”

It was also revealed that at the same time, Marilyn was battling Jane Wyman, the ex-Mrs. Ronald Reagan, as to who would get Fred Karger, the bandleader and musician. Eventually, Karger became Wyman’s fourth husband. She later divorced him, but, like Elizabeth Taylor with Richard Burton, Wyman would remarry Karger only to divorce him again.

Marilyn married DiMaggio on January 14, 1954 at the San Francisco City Hall, although he’d suggested Reno instead.

A divorced man, DiMaggio was excommunicated from the Catholic church on the day of his wedding. The secretary to the archbishop at San Francisco’s St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s church said, “If Mr. DiMaggio is concerned about the sulfurous fires of eternal hell, he doesn’t seem unduly worried.”

Their honeymoon was at the cheap truck stop, the Clifton Motellin Paso Robles, California, some 175 miles south of San Francisco. The cost was ten dollars a night, but DiMaggio managed to negotiate the price down to six dollars and fifty cents. All he asked was that the small room contain a TV set and a double bed.

The manager reported that they checked in at eight one evening and didn’t depart until one o’clock the following afternoon, although they were supposed to check out at ten that morning.

The Clifton didn’t make all that much profit on the room itself, but the manager sold the soiled sheets for five-hundred dollars, stains, and all, to a MM devotee.

A two-week honeymoon in Palm Springs was followed with a trip to Tokyo, where Marilyn’s Japanese fans numbered in the thousands. To his dismay, DiMaggio discovered that he had married a woman far more internationally famous than he was. The Tokyo press wrote about “the honorable buttocks-swinging madame.”

While in Japan, Marilyn received an invitation from the U.S. Army to entertain its troops in Korea. She was thrilled, although DiMaggio demanded that she turn the invitation down. Defying him, she flew to Korea anyway, where thousands of randy soldiers cheered her arrival. Many soldiers later claimed that when she came out in a low-cut dress, help up by spaghetti straps, they produced erections. She opened with her hit number, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

During the number, a light snow was falling on her bare shoulders, and some of the young men masturbated, concealing their erections under their caps.

Back in Tokyo, Marilyn told DiMaggio, “Joe, you’ve never heard such cheering.”

After her honeymoon, and back in Los Angeles, she had lunch with her favorite columnist, Sidney Skolsky, speaking strictly off the record.

He was astonished, at first thinking she was joking. “You just got back from your honeymoon. You must be crazy. Was Joltin’ Joe a dud in bed? I thought you would have found that out before you married him.”

“No, Joe’s a real slugger in bed,” she said. “Really great. Even so, I’m going to marry Arthur Miller.”

Later, Skolsky recalled, “She wasn’t bull shitting that day. She really did marry Arthur Miller, of course.”

She forced DiMaggio to return to Hollywood with her, which he called “the land of the phonies.” She was unable to iron his shirts, as he had expected, since she had to report to work on There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954) which co-starred Ethel Merman, who made a pass at her, and Donald O’Connor, who also made a pass at her. Mitzi Gaynor snubbed her, but Johnnie Ray, also in the cast, hung out with her. He didn’t make a pass at her, but he was gay. Dan Dailey, one of the stars, used to come to her dressing room for a drink with her. He, too, didn’t make a pass at her because “Johnnie Ray drains me dry,” he confided to Marilyn.

There’s No Business Like Show Business, whose theme was devoted to the music of Irving Berlin, was an unfortunate choice for Marilyn. Her rainbow skirts and fruit salad head gear evoked Carmen Miranda at her campiest. Writing in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther called “Miss Monroe’s wriggling and squirming embarrassing to behold.”

When DiMaggio showed up on the movie’s set and saw the skimpy costume she was wearing, he sulked for five days, refusing to speak to her at their big empty house on North Palm Drive that cost them $750 a month. Her marriage was collapsing, but somehow there was always time for a nightly bout of sex.

Once, at a party, Marilyn encountered Jean Peters, with whom she’d appeared in Niagara (1953). They did not discuss their mutual interest in Howard Hughes, but Marilyn did speak candidly about DiMaggio.

“He prefers to live in San Francisco. I’m a Los Angeles gal. He likes golf, but I told him all the other men I’ve met are interested in plugging another hole. Nights are devoted to jock chatter with his cronies and five hours in front of the TV set. I like to flirt with anything in pants. He’s possessive and jealous. I like to spend an hour sucking cock, and he prefers to go to the missionary position. He likes me to dress conservatively like Irene Dunne or Myrna Loy. I prefer to go out the door in a ‘ Hello, of icer! ’ dress.”

Marlon Brando said, “Marilyn talked about settling down, becoming a housewife, and having six kids. Maybe DiMaggio fell for that line. But once married, he learned that she wanted not six kids, but six Oscars.”

One day, she received a call from the prominent agent, Charles K. Feldman, with whom she occasionally had a sexual rendezvous. He wanted to visit her to show her a newly written script and perhaps to arrange for what he called “love in the afternoon.”

In her dressing room, the love-making preceded his pitch of the script, The Seven Year Itch, in which she would play “The Upstairs Girl” who kept her panties in the refrigerator during a hot summer in Manhattan. There was a role for “the summer bachelor” who lived downstairs. The gay actor, Tom Ewell, was being considered for the male lead, though she found him unattractive. “Wouldn’t Rock Hudson be a better choice?” she asked Feldman.

Marilyn complained that DiMaggio refused to see any of her friends, although he would sometimes invite one of his own pals over for dinner and to watch sports on TV. Joe Nachio, his longtime companion and confidant, often came over, “sometimes while Joe and I were watching a game, Marilyn would come in and remove Joe’s socks and start sucking his toes. Imagine having a woman with red, succulent lips like that sucking your toes?”

As DiMaggio’s biographer, Richard Ben Cramer wrote: “DiMaggio seemed to resent anybody she was with. Even with girlfriends, Marilyn conspired to meet them away from home, or get them in and out of the house while Joe was away, so he wouldn’t get mad. Sometimes, days would pass and she wouldn’t see anyone.”

Ever since Marilyn and Dexter had been cast in The Asphalt Jungle in 1950, they’d had an ongoing affair, although they didn’t see each other that much. He went on to marry singer Peggy Lee, and she hooked up with DiMaggio.

Both Marilyn and Dexter referred to their marriages as “weddings in hell.” And each of them would be married to their spouses for only nine months.

Marilyn was also intrigued that Dexter had acted as a stud to Mae West when he was cast alongside the aging diva in Diamond Lil.

Square-jawed, like Charlton Heston, broad-shouldered, and handsome, Dexter appealed to Marilyn. He loved men as much as women, and had an ongoing affair with the closeted Paul Newman. Film critics called him “the sweetest meanie to ever slug a hero or tussle with a lady.”

At three in the afternoon, Dexter pulled up in front of the DiMaggio/Monroe household, knowing that her retired baseball player wasn’t expected until seven that evening.

Marilyn and Dexter wasted no time in heading for the bedroom she shared with DiMaggio. They wanted to have sex and be done with it in case her slugger returned home early.

She suggested he stay for dinner, thinking that DiMaggio might relate to him. He agreed. In the words of DiMaggio’s biographer, Richard Ben Cramer, “Dexter was a man’s man—a poker player, racetrack fan, a friend of Sinatra’s—she thought Joe and Brad might get along. But as Dexter remembered, he was in the house with Marilyn when Joe walked in, and it was obvious DiMaggio only wanted to know what the hell he was doing with his wife. As Dexter said, ‘the whole house went creepy with DiMaggio’s suspicion. So I pretended to have another appointment, and I didn’t stay for dinner.’”

Brad Dexter (top photo) and Marilyn (lower photo) in a scene from The Asphalt Jungle

Sam Gilman was a minor actor whose bond with Marlon Brando became so close that the bigger star almost adopted him. Brando moved Gilman into his home and used him somewhat like a servant to cook his meals, shine his shoes, or remove some unwanted girlfriend from the premises.

Gilman had evolved more or less into his assistant when Brando was oddly cast as Napoléon during the filming of Desirée (1954). Gilman was on the set when Marilyn showed up when she was working nearby on There’s No Business Like Show Business.

She giggled when she saw him dressed as Napoléon. Dressed in a formal gown, she posed for pictures with him. On the surface, everything seemed all right. One major star calling on another major star.

But in his dressing room she showed him where makeup concealed black and blue marks on her right arm. “Marilyn abhorred violence of any kind,” Gilman said. “Marlon was furious to learn what a mean shithead DiMaggio was in private, in contrast to his public image. He’d come home drunk and accuse Marilyn of continuing her affairs with both Marlon and Frank Sinatra, and countless others, even though married to him. That may have been true. Even so, violence was not the answer. Marilyn told Marlon that DiMaggio had started beating her and that she’d run into their bedroom and locked the door. He broke down the door and continued beating her, avoiding her face so that she could still appear before the camera. At least he knew enough to do that. He didn’t want the press to learn what a shit America’s hero really was. Marlon became incensed when he learned of this. He wanted Marilyn to move out, and he told her she could come and live with him until she found a place of her own. He also advised her to file for divorce. Two nights later, he told me that Marilyn’s marriage to DiMaggio wasn’t legal anyway, because technically she was still married to him and had not gotten a divorce. I still don’t know to this day if Marlon was actually married to Marilyn—or whether he was just putting me on.”

Publicly, she was informing the press, especially her favorite columnist Sidney Skolsky, that, “Marriage is something you learn more about while you live it.” Privately, she told Brando that the marriage to DiMaggio was all but over except the formalities.

“I think Marlon and Marilyn seriously discussed marriage—the real thing for all the world to see, not that fake ceremony, or whatever in the hell it was, that they had on location with Viva Zapata!” Gilman said. “Marlon told me that Marilyn agreed to the marriage, providing that she would not be expected to have children.”

Three nights later, when Marilyn came over for a dinner cooked by Gilman, Brando said, “DiMaggio’s going to be a tough act to follow if I take up with Marilyn.”

“Marilyn told me, ‘Joe’s biggest bat is not the one he uses on the baseball field.’ She also told me that, ‘If sex is what it took, I’d stay married to Joe.’”

“I’ve never heard any woman complain about your noble tool,” Gilman said to reassure his friend.

One week later, as Gilman recalled, a new and different Marilyn fled to the set of Desirée to see Brando. “Instead of a formal dress, she wore a tat ered bathrobe that was last washed in 1913,” Gilman said. “She wore no makeup and looked awful. At first I didn’t recognize her. Marlon later explained to me that Marilyn Monroe was just a show business concoction. The real girl wasn’t anything like Monroe.”

During her second visit to the set of Desirée, Brando saw at once that Marilyn was in serious trouble. “He just walked off camera,” Gilman said, “and headed for Marilyn. Wrapping a strong arm around her, he led her once again to his dressing room where he put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign. All shooting had to be suspended for the day. The director was furious. I hung around in case Marlon needed me later. I never knew exactly what drove Marilyn in such a condition to the Desirée set. Later Marlon quoted her to me. ‘My brains are leaving me just like they did with my mother,’ Marilyn told Marlon. ‘They’re going to come for me. Lock me away in some hospital.’ Perhaps without knowing it at the time, Marilyn was having a prophetic vision of her future.”

Brando said that Marilyn begged him to run away with her. “Any place in the world,” she told him. “Just a place where we can hide out forever.”

“I fucked her,” Brando told Gilman. “That was the only way my noble tool knew how to calm her down.”

“Marilyn did hide out for several days with Marlon before everything blew up between Jumpin’ Joe and her,” Gilman claimed.

“I told Marilyn good-bye,” Gilman said. “I even saw the man who had come to take her away. It was Frank Sinatra. I told Marlon that Marilyn had left in a taxi. If I’d ratted that it was Sinatra, he would have exploded on me. God, did he hate Sinatra. And believe me, the feeling was mutual.”

He said that later, during Marilyn’s filming of The Seven Year Itch, Brando forgave her for running out on him without a good-bye.

“They would be close until the day of her death,” Gilman said. “But never again did I hear talk of marriage.”

In Nevada once again, Marilyn reported back for work on the set of The Misfits after she was released from the hospital in Los Angeles. Momentarily at least, she forgot about Brando, Sinatra, and even DiMaggio. She thought mostly of how she, Clark Gable, and Monty Clift were going to hold themselves together to finish what she had taken to calling “Miller’s awful god damn picture. If anybody’s a misfit, it’s Miller himself, thinking he knows how to write a western. Naturally, he’s cast me as a degenerate whore.”

The Misfits became the last movie that Gable and Marilyn would ever finish. Both were soon to die, although Monty lived on a while longer, dying four years after Marilyn on July 22, 1966, at the age of forty-five. After a lifetime of drugs, liquor, and dissipation, his heart just gave out.

The movie the star-crossed actors left behind as their legacy went way over budget, costing more than $4 million. It was a flop, its first run on opening week at the box office netting only $55,000.

Marilyn treasured her last scene with Gable, cast as Gaylord, and herself cast as Roslyn. They’re seated together in the front seat of a truck, driving into an uncertain future in the desert.

“Just head for that big star straight on,” he told her. “The highway’s under it. It’ll take us home.”

It wasn’t in the script, but she hastily add, “Oh, to go home but where. I never was there.”

On the night of November 16, 1960, Gable was lying in a hospital bed, where he’d been taken after having a stroke at his home while changing a tire. That very day, he’d received a telegram from President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In his hospital room, Gable kissed his final and fifth wife, Kay, good night. At the age of forty-four she was pregnant and also suffered from a heart condition.

“I think I’ll read a bit before shutting my eyes,” he told her. These were the last words ever spoken by the King of Hollywood.

He was reading a book about the making of Gone With the Wind. He was discovered at around 10:30pm when the nurse came in to check on his. She spotted the book on the floor and Gable dead in his bed, his open eyes staring up at the ceiling, seeing nothing.

Within hours, the Associated Press was moving a bulletin to newspapers around the world: THE KING IS DEAD!

In New York, at 3am, Marilyn, still awake after a sleepless night, received a call from John Huston. “Clark is gone,” he told her. I just heard the news.”

She dropped the receiver and ran screaming into the living room. Seeing no one, she raced toward the bathroom. “I killed Clark Gable! I’m going to kill myself!”

Sleeping in another room, her maid, Lena Pepitone, heard her, got up, and hurried to the bathroom.

There, she discovered Marilyn swallowing capsules from a bottle. “Don’t try to save me this time,” she commanded. Of course, Pepitone didn’t listen to her, but helped her induce vomiting through means never clarified.

The maid later said, “Somehow, Marilyn got it into her head that she was responsible for Gable’s heart attack after all that stress she put him through on making their last picture. Her awful nightmares started after finishing that picture. Every night, she found it impossible to sleep. She lost her appetite. For days after coming home, she would lie on her back in her bed, her eyes bulging out, wringing her hands in frustration.”

Her recovery came slowly. Pepitone found her standing nude by the window, looking out at a dreary, rain-soaked New York cityscape. “Clark is gone now. I think Monty and I are next. I don’t know which will go first, Monty or me.”

“Neither one,” Pepitone said. “When you’re eighty-five, you’ll be mounting some stage in Las Vegas, dressed in a low-cut gown in shocking pink, singing ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.’”

Days after Gable’s funeral, his pregnant widow, Kay, told the press, “It wasn’t the physical exertion of The Misfits that did it. It was the horrible tension, that eternal waiting, waiting, waiting. He waited for everybody. He’d get so angry waiting that he’d just go ahead and do anything to keep occupied. That’s why he did those dangerous stunts.”

Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, and later, 34th President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower

Marilyn burst into tears when she read that. Even though Kay didn’t mention her by name, she knew that the widow was singling her out.

Once again, she became consumed by guilt over Gable’s death. In her New York apartment, she stood in front of a window at three in the morning, contemplating jumping to her death. When Pepitone told her good night, she’d burst into sobs, claiming, “I did kill Clark. Yes, I did, and Kay Gable and half Forces in Europe, of the world know that.”

“It’s Christmas, Marilyn,” Pepitone told her. “The city is filled with lights. You can disguise yourself, and we’ll walk to Rockefeller Center tomorrow.”

“Of all the women in the world, Marilyn Monroe has the most to live for. If you’d pull yourself together, you can have a great life.”

The next morning, Marilyn told Pepitone that “I came that close to jumping out of the window this morning, but Joe called. He’s coming to New York to do his duty as my husband.”

It was Kay Gable who helped Marilyn recover from Gable’s death. She invited her to attend the christening of her son, John Clark Gable, who was born in March of 1961 after a difficult pregnancy.

At the christening, Kay approached Marilyn and hugged her. “I’m sorry I was misquoted in the press,” Kay said to her. “Clark never had anything unkind to say about you during that troubled shoot.”

“Oh, thank you for telling me that,” Marilyn said. “Oh, please, may I hold him?”

With great affection, Marilyn held the infant son of the dead Gable as if he were the most precious treasure she’d ever seen. She looked into his face. “You wonderful boy. You don’t know it now, but you’re going to grow up to rule over Hollywood like your papa did. You are going to be the reincarnation of Rhett Butler.”

Back in the Nevada desert, Sandy would always remember sitting with Marilyn after the shooting of The Misfits was finished. She got in the back seat of a large limousine which would take them to the airport at Reno.

Miller approached the car and tried to get in after her, but she slammed the door on him, nearly trapping his hand. She ordered the driver to go on.

“I’m going to divorce the son of a bitch.” Both of them looked back, watching Miller standing in the desolate wasteland with no other car in sight. Every other vehicle had already gone. Lowering her window, Marilyn yelled back at her husband, “Eat my dust!”

“She truly had washed that man right out of her hair.” Sandy said. “Ignoring the driver up front, she unzipped my jeans and gave me a goodbye present, a great blow-job. Her final words to me were, ‘Honey, your cock is made more for sucking than for fucking.’”

“Two months later, I tried to sell my story of working with Monty, Clark, and Marilyn on The Misfits,” Sandy recalled. “All the editors read it with fascination, but no one would publish it—even for free. Remember, this was 1960. Journalism was different then.”

Gable never lived to read the reviews of The Misfits, but Marilyn did. Time magazine reviewed Miller’s screenplay, comparing the on-screen Roslyn with the real-life Marilyn. “Like Marilyn, Roslyn is a fractured, manhandled woman always searching for relationships. Helpless, yet flush with appetite.”

Bosley Crowther in The New York Times wrote, “The characters are shallow and inconsequential, and that is the dang-busted trouble with this film. film Miss Monroe is completely blank and unfathomable.”

Miller’s biographer, Martin Got fried, wrote: “Monroe’s acting is all but non-existent in The Misfits. Her expression is almost always distracted, even va-cant, while her interpretive efforts are transparent and sad, for she is plainly in a scary condition, unable to make contact with her fellow players. The Marilyn Monroe who could be so disarming in comedies and so magnetic simply as a presence on the movie screen is not to be found in this picture.”

On January 20, 1961, Marilyn obtained a Mexican divorce from Miller, then rushed back to her hotel to watch “the love of my life,” John F. Kennedy, be inaugurated as President of the United States.

The next day, the Soviet magazine Nedelya reported on the divorce, the article claiming that Marilyn Monroe represented “another broken life on her climb to the stars.”

Ironically, many newspapers gave Marilyn’s divorce priority over President Kennedy’s taking the oath of office at his inauguration.

It is commonly assumed that journalists did not report on the Kennedy/Monroe liaison during his presidency. Actually, prior to the president’s inauguration, Art Buchwald in The Los Angeles Times wrote an item about Kennedy and the “Monroe Doctrine,” asking if his first order of business in January would involve “Marilyn Monroe, now that she was divorcing Arthur Miller.” Because Buchwald was also a humorist, most of the press at the time dismissed his question as a joke.

Sandy Paroe himself never made it as a star, although he became a popular bartender in Hollywood, working at three different hotels before he died of AIDS in 1991. He was always open and willing to talk about his life, although it was obvious that the greatest event of his career had involved being a “gofer” on the set of The Misfits, back in 1960 and 1961, with Marilyn and Monty.

“The other day I read in the paper that Arthur Miller told a reporter that Marilyn was a Sixties person a whole decade before the Sixties really began, that she launched the Sixties back in 1950. It took the rest of the world ten whole years to catch up with her.”

“Honey, we’ve all gotta go sometime, reason or no reason. Dying’s as natural as living. A man who’s too afraid to die is too afraid to live!”

—Clark Gable to Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits

In Memory of a Monument: The Mapes Hotel in Reno, Nevada

Opened in December, 1947, the Mapes Hotel was the grandest hotel in northern Nevada, and the setting for some of the dramas described in this chapter.

In 1984, it was imploded and demolished, (photo, right), carrying with it the memories of when Marilyn Monroe and the cast of The Misfits were lodged here during the filming of a movie that was pivotal to the lives and careers of everyone involved.

PART ONE THE MISFITS

PART ONE

THE MISFITS