Truman Capote escorted a nervous Marilyn Monroe along West 57th Street, not her favorite part of Manhattan. He’d instructed her to dress, act, and talk like Grace Kelly. He also told her not to be too apprehensive. “Garbo will be intoxicated by your innocence. I mean, your innocent look, and Katie will adore you because you have no skin blemishes.”
Arriving at the apartment door of Constance Collier, the “secretary” to the actress, Phyllis Wilbourne, showed them in to the dark, dank apartment where the furnishings had been young in 1901.
Although it was a luncheon date, Collier was attired in a mauve-laced evening gown. Looking like a character from an Oscar Wilde play, Collier sat on a battered sofa upholstered in a fading red velvet. She extended a frail hand to Marilyn, as Capote made the introductions.
“My dear,” Collier said, “I’m nearly blind, but the luminosity of your face and golden hair illuminates this old room.”
“I’m honored to meet you,” your highness,” Marilyn said, curtsying.
“Oh, Marilyn, Constance is not the Queen of England,” Capote said.
“That is true, Truman,” Constance said, “but I should have been. I’m regal enough.”
As they settled in and Constance was smoking her second cigarette, Capote explained that Marilyn wanted to take acting lessons from her. “In essence, she wants to reinvent herself as an actress.”
“I want to so much,” Marilyn said. “All the men, all the glamour, all the jewelry and gowns are not important. After all, I’m not using Elizabeth Taylor as my role model.”
Collier complained that she was losing feeling in both her hands and feet.
“I suppose I could teach you something about acting. At any rate, I need the money to supplement my meager income. My little darling, I could start you out by teaching you how to interpret the role of Ophelia. Once you master that, you can succeed in any part. The one thing I can’t teach you is how to play sexy.”
“I already know how to do that,” Marilyn said.
“I’m sure you do,” Collier said.
“You’re so elegant,” Marilyn said. “I wish I knew how to be elegant.”
“Darling, I’ve had decades to become who I am. Of course, I inherited exotic features.” Like all actresses on their last legs, she wanted to relive past glories. “I inherited some of my features from my Portuguese grandmother. Believe it or not, I was considered one of the great beauties of the early 20th century stage.”
“Queen Victoria must have adored you,” Capote said.
“Truman, you’re such a nasty little demon, but I always like to have you around to sharpen my sense of bitchery.”
She spoke in a fading voice that still retained a husky, contralto quality. “My mother was an actress. She wrapped me in a blanket and left me backstage, nursing me between acts. At the age of three, I toddled out onto the stage, cast as Fairy Peaseblossom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
As Collier wandered down memory lane, Marilyn took in the room, its walls covered with decaying, saffron-colored wallpaper highlighted with antique racing horse prints. On the sofa with Collier lay a little black fox terrier, which Collier stroked with one hand, holding a golden cigarette holder in the other hand. Marilyn also spotted the largest brandy inhaler glasses she’d ever seen.
With her weak eyesight, Collier followed Marilyn’s gaze, quickly adding, “Those glasses haven’t been used in years. I’m diabetic.”
Two views, each circa 1905, of Marilyn’s acting teacher Constance Collier
A large portrait hung on the wall. Marilyn asked, “Was he your husband?”
“Constance is not the marrying kind,” Capote quipped.
“Truman, sometimes you smart-ass bitches think you know it all, but get it wrong. Marilyn is right. I was once married to an Irish actor, Julian L’Estrange. It was a perfect arrangement. He traveled most of the time with a young pianist, Albert Morris Bagby, who took care of my wifely duties. Julian was a homosexual and beautiful husband and a marvelous companion if I ever needed to be escorted to a gala. He died in this apartment, in Albert’s arms, in 1918, while I sat in the corner having a brandy and smoking a cigarette.” Fortunately, the ringing of the doorbel broke Collier’s reminiscences.
With a forceful, confident stride, Katharine Hepburn came into the room wearing rose-colored slacks and a battleship gray jacket.
She’d applied only a slash of lipstick, no other makeup, and her hair was pulled back into a tight bun. “This divine creature must be Marilyn Monroe, America’s reincarnation of Helen of Troy.”
“Miss Hepburn, I’m honored. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve gone to see your movies. You were great as Mary of Scotland.”
“Oh, you sweet girl, never tell an aging actress you enjoyed her movies when you were but a toddler. It will only add another line to my face.”
“Your face will be eternal,” Capote assured her. “You’re one of the very few actresses from the Golden Age who will be appearing on the screen when you’re ninety.”
“Oh, Capote, you always say such flattering bullshit to old actresses. Later on, you tell your friends what you really think of all of us battle axes.”
Seated on the sofa with Marilyn and Collier, Hepburn learned that Marilyn was going to study acting with the aging duenna. “What a fabulous idea. Constance taught me every stage secret I know.”
“And a lot more,” Capote said with a smirk.
“Marilyn, why didn’t you lobby to get me that Jane Russell role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes? Hepburn asked. “I would have been terrific.”
Marilyn seemed taken aback. “I don’t know…I’m sure…”
Capote came to the rescue. “There is a role you could play. I’ve read an early draft. It’s from Tennessee Williams’ The Garden District. Katharine, you’d be ideal as the cold bitch of a tyrannical mother, Violet Venable. Marilyn could play the beautiful twenty-five-year-old who ran away with your poet son, Sebastian, one summer to write his annual poem. In the plot of the play, you’re trying to get a young doctor to lobotomise the girl and erase the memory of how your son was killed. She was used as bait to attract young men for his sexual pleasure.”
Katharine Hepburn
“Tennessee himself has told me about this play,” Hepburn said. “I’d be cast as a faded beauty who is now an old harpy. When I was younger and more beautiful, I was used as bait to attract the young men my son sexually desired. A play about perversion. From what Tennessee told me, the subject of incest, even cannibalism, is raised.”
“Oh, Miss Hepburn, you’re too much of a lady to undertake such a role,” Marilyn said.
“I wish you could convince Capote and Tennessee of that. The last I heard from him—he’s down in Key West—he told me he’s working on another Broadway play. He wants to co-star Bette Davis and me.”
“I’ve worked with Bette,” Marilyn said. “You know, on All About Eve. She’s not the actress you are—and not nice at all.”
“Truer words were never said,” Hepburn said.
“Oh Kate,” Capote said. “You survived Hollywood in the 1930s, going from John Barrymore to Marlene Dietrich to Howard Hughes. You’ve seen it all. If there’s something you missed, I’m sure Spencer Tracy will fill you in.”
“Capote, dear heart, you remind me of a naughty little chihuahua who has never been house broken.”
Hepburn turned to Marilyn again. “Constance is a wise choice as a drama coach—the very best, in fact. She has a real zest for all that is good and wonderful in life. You will blossom under her, find dimensions in yourself as an actress you never knew existed. I should know. She did wonders for me.”
The ringing of the doorbell signaled the arrival of the remaining guest, mystery and all.
Greta Garbo entered the room, an Hermès scarf covering most of her head and dark sunglasses concealing a good part of a fabled face that had not been seen on a movie screen since 1941.
Throughout the luncheon, Hepburn ate heartily as Garbo nibbled. She rarely took her eyes off Marilyn and seemed enchanted by her. Marilyn also seemed transfixed by Garbo, even more so than by Hepburn.
Collier retreated a bit, giving way to her age and a consumption of far too much alcohol.
Tanked up on pre-luncheon vodka and wine that had been set out on the table, Capote became even more provocative. “Katie, I’ve often wondered about something. Other than Bette Davis, female impersonators such as T.C. Jones like to imitate you. But I’ve never seen one of these drag queens do Greta.”
Collier suddenly seemed to revive. “Let me answer that. I know why. Among all the great film stars, Garbo cannot be impersonated. Her appearance and femininity are unique. She has the cold quality of an Arctic mermaid. She really is hermaphroditic on screen.”
Capote remained silent, but wanting to tell Collier that she’d stolen that impression from a magazine interview with Tennessee.
Garbo didn’t seem insulted to be hermaphroditic, and actually seemed proud of it. Hepburn was even more articulate. “Greta is to be congratulated for representing the aspiration of both sexes, uniting the two sides of her nature, the feminine and masculine, in every role she’s ever played. Her freedom from being trapped in either sex allows her to create a cryptic amorality in each part she plays.”
“I allowed a film-goer to create his or her own fantasy,” Garbo said. “I do not let them look inside me, only inside their own dark desires.”
“The miracle is that such a face as Greta’s can even exist,” Hepburn said before turning to face the star. “I know at times you must feel regret, even view it as tragic, that you were given the responsibility of owning such a face. Your look represents the apogee of the progression of the human female face.”
“Oh, please,” Garbo said, as if dismissive of all this praise. “Let me finish my salmon, and quit speaking of me as if giving a eulogy at the funeral. I am still alive, still enjoying the comforts of the damned, such as they are.”
Collier’s secretary served her favorite dessert. Before tasting it, Marilyn wanted to know what it was.
“It’s junket, my dear,” Collier said. “I first discovered it in my nursery.”
“What is junket?” Marilyn asked. “I thought that was a trip you took with some man.”
“It’s a British dessert,” Collier said. “It’s made with sweetened flavored milk with rennet. Rennet, of course, is the lining membrane of a calf’s stomach used for curdling milk.”
“I’d better skip it today,” Marilyn said. “I’m watching my figure.”
“So is everybody else at this table,” Capote added, his remark meeting with stony silence. Recognizing his gaffe, he quickly changed the subject.
He turned to Garbo. “When I was a twelve-year-old boy, I got very mad at you during one long, hot summer in the South. I’d had this awful mishap when a pack of ebony-colored boys, perhaps eight in all, brutally raped me. I was incapacitated for the rest of the summer. During all that time in bed, I wrote a play called The Most Beautiful Woman in the World. I sent it to you with a fan letter, asking if you’d star in it on Broadway. You never answered me, and I nursed this grudge against you until I was nineteen. I later burned the play.”
Greta Garbo as Mata Hari
“I’m so sorry I ignored you,” Garbo said. “Too bad I’m too old to play in it now, since I’m no longer beautiful.”
“But you are beautiful,” Marilyn said. “Amazingly so. People say I’m beautiful, but I don’t think so. I’m sexy-looking, but only after I’ve applied a lot of whorish makeup. Otherwise, I think I look like a milk maiden from Norway.”
“In my home country of Sweden, the young men always journeyed in summer to Norway to seduce its beautiful young women.”
“Miss Garbo, do you think you’ll ever return to pictures?” Marilyn asked.
“Thank God Marilyn didn’t use that awful word, ‘comeback,’” Hepburn said.
“That proves that she saw Sunset Blvd.” Capote chimed in. “Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond objected to the word ‘comeback’ too.”
“Over the years, I’ve considered it,” Garbo said. “I’ve always wanted to play Dorian Gray, based on the Oscar Wilde play. If I do, I’d like you, Miss Monroe, to play one of the girls that Dorian seduces and destroys.”
“Garbo and Monroe,” Collier said, “What box office! I could see a Best Oscar for Greta, but would you be nominated as Best Actor or Best Actress?”
“I’d be terrified to appear opposite you on the screen,” Marilyn said. “But since you’d be cast as a man, I guess I might pull it off if Miss Collier coached me. There’s no way I’d appear on the screen in a woman-to-woman role with you. I’d be mocked.”
“I, too, wanted to do a film with Greta,” Hepburn said. “Mourning Becomes Electra, with George Cukor directing. The year was 1947. I failed to convince Louis B. Mayer.”
After the luncheon, Garbo excused herself to go to the bathroom. Marilyn was next. After coming out of the toilet, Garbo slipped Marilyn her private phone number. “Call me,” she whispered. After thanking Collier and hugging Hepburn and Capote, she departed.
Likewise, Hepburn departed fifteen minute later, but not before inviting Marilyn to visit her at her home in Connecticut. Marilyn said she’d be honored.
Out on the street again, Capote warned Marilyn, “If you accept invitations from those two regal dykes, you might have to sing for your supper.”
“What in hell do you think I’ve been doing all these years,” Marilyn said. “Call me the canary.”
“I must congratulate you. You’ve come a long way from the days when you were the teenage bride of that sailor boy—I don’t care to remember his name. You’re sure dating from the A-list: John F. Kennedy, Katharine Hepburn, and Greta Garbo. Speaking of big name legends, who does that leave out? Let me see—Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein.”
“Been there, done that.”
Capote came to a stop in the middle of the sidewalk. “Like me, you’re known for telling some tall tales. A whoremonger like Chaplin I can believe. But you must admit that Einstein is a bit of a stretch.”
“Silly boy, didn’t you read in the papers that Einstein told an interviewer that I was his favorite movie star? After that, what could I do but get in touch with him? I wanted him to explain to me his theory of relativity. I simply cannot understand it.”
In the weeks leading up to her death, Marilyn visited Collier’s apartment two or three times a week for acting lessons. The two women became close. Marilyn later said, “She opened up doors within me that I had kept locked all my life,” without explaining to Capote exactly what she meant.
In April of 1955, Capote called to tell her of Collier’s death. She was deeply saddened.
As a remembrance, Collier had given Marilyn a playbill from her 1906 performance as Cleopatra, in which she appeared on stage crowned in silver and carrying a golden scepter and a replica of the sacred golden calf.
Capote asked Marilyn if he could be her escort at the funeral, and she gratefully accepted.
Arriving dressed all in black, with Capote on her arm, Marilyn sat through the service “gnawing an already chewed-to-the-nub thumbnail,” in Capote’s words, “periodically removing her spectacles to scoop up tears bubbling from her blue-gray eyes.”
After the service, she told Capote, “I hate funerals. I don’t want a funeral—just my ashes cast on the waves by one of my kids, if I ever have any.”
Collier’s “secretary,” Phyllis Wilbourn, whom Marilyn had come to know, was at the funeral, too. Marilyn offered her her deepest sympathy and was happy to learn that Hepburn was going to take her in. She would remain as Hepburn’s “secretary” for the next forty years—there was talk.
Long after Collier’s death, Capote published what the actress felt about Marilyn’s talent or lack thereof.
“Oh yes, there is something there—a beautiful child, really—I don’t think she’s an actress at all—certainly not in a traditional sense. What she has is this presence, a certain luminosity, a flickering intelligence. These marvelous traits could not be captured on stage because they are too subtle, too fragile. Her wonder can only be caused by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight. Only a camera can freeze the poetry of it. But anyone who thinks this girl is simply another Harlow or harlot or whatever, is mad. I hope, I really pray, that she survives long enough to free the strange lovely talent that’s wandering through her like a jailed spirit.”
***
After Collier’s death, and in need of an acting coach, Marilyn was invited by Paul Bigelow to a dinner party where he seated her opposite producer Cheryl Crawford, one of the original founders, in 1947, of the Actors Studio. Lee Strasberg would become its director four years later. Early members included Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando.
Crawford claimed that at early auditions, many of the young actors removed most of their clothing. “I suspect that they wished to show us how free and uninhibited they were. We certainly witnessed a good number of bare breasts and jock straps. Both Steve McQueen and James Dean showed off their wares in jock straps. Paul Newman appeared in boxer shorts, as he would do so many times in his films. Dean, more than anyone, helped create what was known as the Actors Studio style—that is, slouching, mumbling, and wearing dirty, torn jeans.”
At the dinner party, Marilyn shared with Crawford her hopes and future plans for what she wanted to become as an actress. Intrigued by her openness and sincerity, Crawford invited her the following day to go with her to the Actors Studio.
Crawford picked her up at the Waldorf Towers and drove her there, where she met Lee Strasberg, who would become her mentor and ultimately, the heir to her estate.
Norman Mailer characterized Marilyn’s meeting with Strasberg as tantamount to introducing Jacqueline Susann to T.S. Eliot. “An empty box office blonde ignorant of acting, theatre, culture, or technique.”
Author Maurice Zolotow described Strasberg’s appearance at the time: “He was on the small side, and he looked undistinguished. His cheeks had the dark stubble of men who always look unshaven. He was wearing a dark-blue shirt and no tie and a badly fitting rumpled suit. He looked like a harassed small businessman, a drugstore owner maybe, or a delicatessen store owner on the verge of bankruptcy. But when he began to talk, he became transfigured.”
Movie producer and Actors Studio co-founder, Cheryl Crawford
Lee Strasberg’s daughter, Susan, said, “Marilyn’s arrival in our lives was a double-edged sword. Father’s celebrity rose; he became more famous, almost infamous. When he publicly affirmed Marilyn’s talent, he was called soft in the head, a star fucker, an opportunist. Actually, it turned out that my father was risking more than he was gaining.”
Her words might have been true at the beginning of the relationship, but not beyond the grave. The Strasberg estate still takes in millions of dollars annually by licensing her image.
Director Elia Kazan, one of Marilyn’s lovers, saw the relationship between the drama coach and the star emerge. “Actors would humble themselves before Lee’s rhetoric and the intensity of his emotion. The more naïve and self-doubting the actors, the more total was Lee’s power over them. The more famous and successful these actors, the headier the taste of power for Lee. He found the perfect victim-devotee in Marilyn Monroe.”
Strasberg’s son, Johnny, said, “The greatest tragedy was that people, even my father in a way, took advantage of Marilyn. They glommed onto her special sort of life, her special characteristics, when what she needed was love.”
When word leaked to the press about Marilyn’s involvement with the studio, she was mocked in print, one reporter calling her “Sarah Bernhardt in a bikini.”
Almost from the beginning, she formed an affectionate bond with Strasberg, nicknaming him “Israel,” his original name when he was born in 1901 in a far corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She told this “patriarch of American Method acting” that she was more interested in “getting in touch with my feelings than in mastering Shakespeare.”
She met with him at his apartment at 135 Central Park West, with its towering bookshelves, whose décor she called “early Brentano’s.”
He sat her down in front of a fireplace. As the flames illuminated her much-photographed face, he fired off a number of questions at her, demanding fast answers.
“Describe what it feels like when a new lover penetrates you for the first time.”
“Do you indulge in sex for your own pleasure, or for the pleasure of the man?”
“You are not a stupid girl, so how do you manage to effectively play the dumb blonde role?”
At the end of the interview, he told his wife, Paula, that “Marilyn has limitless talent.” He also shared with his wife the questions he’d put to her, but didn’t reveal what her answers had been.
Cindy Adams, the columnist, called Strasberg’s feeling for Marilyn “So deep it’s beyond logic. She had to have been his childhood dream incarnate, the embodiment of all his fancied heroines, the epitome of everything a poor Jew from the Lower East Side could imagine. Yet it was he who was sought out by the Goddess. She needed him. She came to him.”
At some point, Marilyn seduced Strasberg, as she had a tendency to reward men with her sexual favors if she felt they were doing something good for her. She confided the details of her affair to friends such as Milton Greene and Shelley Winters. Somehow, Marlon Brando also found out, as did Lee’s daughter, Susan.
In spite of overwhelming evidence, including Marilyn’s own confession, Strasberg denied a sexual link. “She’s not my type,” he said. “My type is a dark-haired beauty like Jennifer Jones. Do I love Marilyn? I don’t know what people mean by such a question. All I can say is that I did like her very much.”
Word spread through the Actors Studio that Marilyn and their dream coach were having an affair, although Marilyn had yet to show up for classes. Paul Newman likened Strasberg’s infatuation with Marilyn to Professor Unrath (Emil Jannings), who was fascinated by the charms of Marlene Dietrich (Lola Lola) in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Others claimed that Marilyn was trying to turn the very serious Actors Studio into a circus act.
Strasberg had almost nothing to say about his private life with Marilyn, but he issued high praise for her potential as an actress. “When I finally got around to seeing her films, I was not impressed. But when I met her, I saw that what she looked like was not what she really was, and what was going on inside her was not what you saw on the outside, and that always meant there was something to work with. In Marilyn’s case, the results have been phenomenal. It was almost as if she had been waiting for a button to be pushed which would open a door to a treasure of gold and jewels.”
In spite of such praise, he was often a hard taskmaster and very critical of her work. Virtually echoing Josef von Sternberg’s words to Marlene Dietrich, Strasberg told Marilyn, “Only hard work and endless rehearsals will make a truly great star, either on the stage or the screen.”
“Marilyn was too shy and terrified to come to class at the studio,” said Susan Strasberg. “Eventually, she ‘graduated’ to sitting in on private classes with the other students. On one such occasion, she met Laurence Olivier, visiting from London, little knowing that she’d soon sign him to Marilyn Monroe Productions to make a film with her.”
Shelley Winters, her former roommate and longtime confidante, went with her on her first day of class at the Actors Studio. “She was very nervous. She came out of the building in a schleppy old coat, looking like my maid, and people on the street pushed her aside to get my autograph. She loved that.”
Once at the studio, she didn’t dare do a scene, but watched the other actors. She was mesmerized when George Peppard, that handsome, blond-haired hunk, came onstage to do a nude scene in bed with a woman. A lot of actors would have kept on their jockey shorts. But George was proud of his equipment. He walked out on stage completely nude and performed the scene in bed with some lucky gal. Marilyn was enchanted. Months later, she was so very disappointed when she didn’t get to perform her own love scenes with George in Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “ Audrey Hepburn got the man intended for me,” Marilyn complained.
Monty Clift’s close friend, actor Kevin McCarthy, later to be one of Marilyn’s co-stars in The Misfits, remembered sitting next to her, watching a scene being performed from Chekhov’s Three Sisters. In his words, the work was performed by “dimly talented humans struggling through the murk.”
He only vaguely noticed the woman sitting next to him, referring to her later as a “tousled piece of humanity, looking like nothing. Then, fifteen minutes later, I looked again. I realized that a breathing, palpitating Marilyn Monroe had developed out of nothing. I remember looking and thinking, ‘My God, it’s her—she’s just come to life.’”
Winters remembered another day when “Joan Crawford, of all people, showed up overdressed at the Actors Studio. She had made several nasty remarks about Marilyn. I knew that Crawford had the hots for Marilyn, and had seduced her in the past, until Marilyn rejected her. Crawford was seriously pissed off. Like Norma Desmond said, ‘Great stars have great pride.’”
“When Marilyn saw Crawford come in, she scrunched into the fartherest corner of the studio to avoid encountering Mildred Pierce. Later, she told me, ‘My pussy’s no longer for sale—even to Joan Crawford.’”
Weeks later, another Crawford, Cheryl Crawford, persuaded Marilyn to perform a scene in front of the class, arranging her pairing with Maureen Stapleton, one of Tennessee Williams’ favorite actresses. Maureen agreed to work with Marilyn and each of them set about selecting material that they found challenging.
Marilyn and Maureen jointly rejected a scene from Noël Coward’s Private Lives, settling instead for an excerpt from Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie. It was memorable as a key moment within the 1931 movie that had marked the first time Greta Garbo ever talked on screen.
Marilyn played Anna, a prostitute, and as such, had to deliver the same lines as Garbo: “Gimme a whisky. Ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.” Stapleton played a broken-down old hag—the role previously played by Marie Dressler.
Shelley WInters in 1959
A rumor persists to this day that Garbo, in disguise, came in to see the performance at the invitation of both Marilyn and Strasberg. Garbo entered the auditorium just as the lights dimmed, and departed just before the lights came back on again.
Marilyn’s performance had been cancelled several times, because of her fear. “Eventually, she went on,” said Cheryl Crawford, “and her performance was luminous, with exciting gradations of feeling.”
Norman Mailer also watched Marilyn perform. “She can exhibit every emotion but anger. Nothing of the near-violent anguish Garbo had shown in the film. For Marilyn, just the pain, no anguish. Even if her hostility would soon be visible everywhere in her professional relationships, it does not appear in her art.”
Greta Garbo (left) with Marie Dressler in a scene from Anna Christie
Marilyn Monroe (left) and Maureen Stapleton “And don’t be stingy, baby.”
Although she received praise from the Strasbergs and fellow actors who included Kim Stanley, Marilyn lamented, “I was bad, very bad. I could just feel it.”
The next day at the studio, Strasberg praised Marilyn for her “extraordinary and inviolate sensitivity. This sensitive core should have been killed by all that had happened to her in adolescence, including repeated rapes and forced sex, or so I’ve heard. But here she is, still fresh and alive. Her chief deprivation was the loss of her father, a role I hope to fulfill in the coming months.”
In his public pronouncements about Marilyn, Strasberg became absolutely purple: “She was engulfed in a mystic-like flame, like when you see Jesus at The Last Supper, and there’s a halo around him. There was this great white light surrounding Marilyn.”
So far as it is known, Strasberg was the only person who ever compared Marilyn to Jesus Christ.
The ties with Strasberg became so close that she invited him to go to Hollywood with her during the filming of the upcoming movie version of Bus Stop. She promised him that he could veto every scene if it wasn’t right, even over-riding the director.
But because of his intense involvement in New York with the Actors Studio, he turned down her offer, volunteering the services of his wife, Paula, instead. Paula agreed to become Marilyn’s new acting coach at a salary of $1,500 a week, which later rose to $3,000 a week on the set of The Misfits.
Arthur Miller detested both Lee and Paula Strasberg. He said, “Without Paula, Marilyn felt lost. In effect, Paula was Marilyn’s mother all over again. A fantasy mother who would confirm everything Marilyn wished to hear.”
***
Perhaps the meeting was inevitable. For the previous two years, Marilyn had just missed encountering James Dean, even though she had expressed a desire to meet him. She had been enthralled with his appearance on the screen in East of Eden, which she’d seen at a special screening with Shelley Winters.
As she was heading into the Actors Studio, she ran into Marlon Brando leaving with Dean. Her first impulse was to regret she had not made herself up as Marilyn Monroe. She wore no makeup, and a scarf covered her matted hair.
He looked like he’d just emerged from the set of Rebel Without a Cause, wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and the same red jacket he’d worn in the movie, a gift from Nicholas Ray. Her gaze traveled to his crotch and his scuffed brown penny loafers before she met him eye to eye.
“Marilyn, meet this asshole who thinks he’s a better actor than I am,” Brando said. “I forget the kid’s name.”
“Hi, Marilyn,” Dean said. “Wanna fuck?”
Coming from anybody else, she might have been insulted. But the way Dean extended the invitation with a challenging look made her giggle.
“How did you know what I want to do more than anything else on earth?” she asked. She looked skeptically at Brando. “I need to get it from somebody. I haven’t been seeing much of this guy’s noble tool, as he affectionately calls it.”
“Neither have I,” Dean said provocatively.
“Sorry, guys,” Brando said, “I guess I find too many other holes to plug. Speaking of that, I’m late for an appointment. I won’t tell you voyeurs with whom. Marilyn, do you mind if I dump Jimmy boy here on you?” He kissed both of them on the lips and left hurriedly, disappearing into the crowds on the street.
“‘C’mon, doll,” Dean said, taking her arm. “Forget this fucking Actors Studio. I’m taking you over to the Blue Ribbon Café. It’s where all the out-of-work actors hang out.”
“I’m out of work too,” she said.
On the way there, he confided in her. “I hate that Jew asshole Lee Strasberg. He humiliated me one afternoon, and I’ve never forgiven him. I don’t know why I don’t boycott the place.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“I had to perform a scene,” he said. “I came out in this bullfighter’s black cape with a red lining. I’d adapted a scene from Barnaby Conrad’s novel, Matador. After I did the scene, there was silence, as the jealous actors waited for the master’s words. Guess what he told me? ‘You fail to create a sense of being in an authentic place. You’re not doing the work. You’re acting, not being.’”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “East of Eden proved what a great actor you are. I can’t wait to see your next two pictures.”
Seated at a table in the café, they attracted almost no attention from the other patrons. Only a handful of other tables were occupied at four o’clock that afternoon.
“I guess I should ask the big question,” Marilyn said. “Which one of you, Elizabeth Taylor or yourself, got to fuck Rock Hudson first?”
He laughed. “Rock and I were assigned to live in the same house in Texas. So I guess that answers your question. I got him first. But it wasn’t a match made in heaven. He eventually drifted over to Elizabeth.”
James Dean
“They’re both big stars now,” Marilyn said, “and you’re going to rise up there with them. How one gets to be a star in Hollywood is another subject. I’ve been famously quoted as saying, ‘I sucked a lot of cock to get where I am.’ I don’t remember if I actually said that or not.”
“And I’ve had my cock sucked by some of the biggest names in Hollywood. When I started out, I was starving. In New York, I used to let guys give me a blow-job in subway toilets so I could buy a milkshake to give me some energy.”
“On Santa Monica Boulevard, I’d give it away, just to get a hearty breakfast, which could last me almost a day and a half.”
“Where are you crashing?” he asked her.
“At the Waldorf Towers,” she said. “Isn’t that posh?”
“I guess so,” he said, “as long as somebody else is picking up the bill. What’s his name?” Rosenberg? Cohen? Katz?”
“Milton. Milton Greene,” she said. “Jimmy, I didn’t know you were so anti-Semitic.”
“I’m not really,” he said. “I guess their money is as good as anybody else’s. Hey, I’ve got an idea. It’s getting late. Why don’t you invite me to your pad for an audition? I’m good. Really good.”
“Audition?” she said, looking at him skeptically. “To tell you the truth, after seeing Eden, I want to star in a picture with you. I guess we might as well start practicing our love scenes to see if we have any chemistry together.”
“You’re on. You won’t regret it. Fifty years from now, you’ll be writing about it in your memoirs.”
“I’ve got a better idea than the Waldorf,” she said. “Lee Strasberg, the man you hate, has given me the use of his cottage on Fire Island any time I want it. It’s a bit chilly out there this time of year, but there’s a fireplace and some electric heaters. We’ll have the place to ourselves. Who wants to go to Fire Island at this time of year but crazy nuts like us? I’ve got a car parked in a garage near the Waldorf. Why don’t you forget what you were doing tonight and run away to our cottage by the sea?”
“I think that comes under the category of an invitation a guy can’t refuse.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what were you planning to do otherwise?”
“I was going to go to Tennessee Williams’ apartment. He claims he’s writing a play about a repressed homosexual and his hot-to-trot wife named Maggie the Cat. He thinks the part would be ideal for me. I think my audition will consist of an expert blow-job.”
“Sounds like fun,” she said. “So you’ll be skipping out on him for a couple of days?”
“It’s a deal,” he said. “And I’d much rather be getting blow-jobs from Marilyn Monroe than from Tennessee Williams.”
“Those are about the most romantic words I’ve ever heard spoken to me.”
***
It was nightfall when Marilyn and Dean arrived at the Strasberg cottage on Fire Island. They rushed around trying to make the place livable, and he set ablaze the driftwood in the fireplace.
She rested a small nightbag on the floor of the living room. He had chosen not to bring a change of clothes. Before it got too late, she asked him if he’d go for a walk on the beach with her. Looking into the closet, she found a parka for him.
The moonlight on the water’s surface made it look like glass. Each of them stood silently, taking in the vast expanse of dark water.
Even though it was cold, both of them sat down on the beach, huddling together. Neither one of them said anything for a long time. She was the first to speak. “When I was a little girl, I would sit for hours just staring out at the sea. I felt that somewhere, someday, a sea captain, a beautiful, loving man, would want me. He’d take me away on a long voyage to a far and distant land.”
Suddenly, they both became aware of the penetrating chill of the night. She stood up and reached for him. Hand in hand, they walked back to the cottage, which, thanks to the driftwood fire, had become warmer.
Fortunately, she’d brought champagne with them in the car. It had already been chilled because of the cold weather. They sat on large cushions watching the flickering flames of driftwood. He had his arm around her. “I hardly know you, but I feel I’ve met my soulmate,” she said.
“Me too, babe,” he said. “From now on, it’s just you and me against the wind.”
“And all the storms at sea,” she said. “You know there will be many of those.”
She made ham sandwiches for their dinner, and was eager to retreat under the blankets with him. She’d later confide, “Now I know why he’s so desirable as a lover and why so many people, men and women, want him. He doesn’t leave you unsatisfied like so many other bastards.”
Exhausted, they huddled together until each of them fell asleep.
They awoke to the chill of a late morning. He put on his jeans and a jacket, and she wore jeans, too, with a heavy sweater. She wanted to cook his breakfast. He went outside to gather up more firewood.
After breakfast, he looked into her eyes. “Let’s call this our honeymoon cottage. When we get married, maybe we should book this cottage for a whole month, just the two of us.”
“Jimmy, you’re proposing!” she said. “Proposal accepted, but let’s wait until the autumn leaves start to fall before we get hitched.”
“That’s okay with me, but I demand conjugal rights now.”
The day was just beginning.
She would later refer to those two nights on Fire Island as the most idyllic of her life. When she returned to the city, Shelley Winters called, eager for news. “I heard you ran away with Jimmy Dean. I want to know everything, a blow-by-blow description. Don’t leave the slightest detail, regardless of how revolting. Did he make you crush out a cigarette on his overused butt?”
“Shelley, please,” she said. “He’s not like that. Nothing kinky. He was very loving, very romantic. I’ve agreed to marry him.”
“Please come to your senses, gal,” Winters said. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. Jimmy is a sicko.”
“Maybe he was on his best behavior. And I’ve agreed to marry him in October.”
“What drug are you taking?” Winters asked.
Marlon Brando called around lunchtime and was equally discouraging. He, too, wanted a full report of what had happened between the two of them. When she told him, he said, “Jimmy is my stalker and wants to be my clone. If you’re not careful, when you guys return to Hollywood, you might find him parked in front of your place, smoking cigarette after cigarette until all hours, waiting for you to return home. You won’t be able to get rid of him. He developed a fixation on me. In a way, it’s kind of creepy.”
“Oh, Marlon, you and Shelley are taking all this too seriously. Our romance will probably disappear like a summer wind. But then again…Who knows?”
During the days and months that remained for them, Dean and Marilyn would have a love affair conducted more or less on the phone. But the small amount of time they spent with each other would forever be etched in her memory, even if “forever” wasn’t far away for her…. and even less so for him.
***
In January of 1951, two best friends, director Elia Kazan and playwright Arthur Miller, boarded the 20th Century Limited on its New York to Chicago run, where they changed onto the Santa Fe Super Chief, taking them across the Great American Plains to Los Angeles. Both of them were hoping to interest a film studio in producing Miller’s latest play, The Hook. Mired in a marriage to his wife, Mary Slattery, Miller was “starved for sexual release,” in the words of Kazan.
Kazan had directed Miller’s first Broadway play, All My Sons, in 1947, and was eager to work with him again on a film project.
Two days after their arrival, Kazan took Miller to 20th Century Fox, where he planned to pick up “a blonde starlet” he was secretly dating. She was appearing in a film called As Young As You Feel, starring Monty Woolley, whom Miller referred to as “my father’s bête noir.”
Marilyn herself referred to Woolley as “that pervert.” The film also starred Thelma Ritter, who had known Marilyn on the set of All About Eve. Also in the cast was Jean Peters, more famously known as Mrs. Howard Hughes. Peters would eventually co-star with Marilyn in the upcoming movie, Niagara (1953), with Joseph Cotten.
Miller was immediately attracted to the beautiful blonde who appeared shy, almost lost. Her body was sexily showcased in a black, openwork, tight-fitting lace dress.
When Kazan introduced Miller to her, she said, “Monty Woolley told me you were born in Harlem.”
“Monty’s such a liar,” Miller said, “but in this case, he’s right.”
“I hope you don’t mind my asking, but are you a mulatto?” she said. “You don’t look it. You look more Jewish.”
Although he found Marilyn extremely attractive, in her form-fitting dress, he made no moves on her, viewing her as “Elia’s girl.”
It was Miller who made an indelible impression on Marilyn. She telephoned Shelley Winters that night. “Arthur makes me feel like a high school girl who’s fallen in love with her teacher.”
“Hell, I know Arthur,” Winters said, “but not as David knew Bathsheba.”
“He’s so Lincolnesque,” Marilyn said.
As her former roommate, Winters knew that Marilyn always kept a picture of Abraham Lincoln beside her bed. “She was nuts about him. He was her fantasy man.”
When Miller met Marilyn, his clothes were what author William Styron called “a gentleman farmer’s rumpledness.”
“With those craggy features of his, Miller’s no pretty boy,” Winters said. “Give me Errol Flynn or Burt Lancaster any day, even Clark Gable, though he isn’t great in the sack.”
“You know, I don’t go in just for pretty boys,” Marilyn said. “My men don’t have to be beautiful. I bring beauty to the relationship. My first husband, Jim Dougherty, was no beauty. Neither was Johnny Hyde.”
Hyde, her agent and lover, the Russian-born American talent agent, had died only a month before. He was thirty-one years her senior and had left his wife for Marilyn. But when he wanted to marry her, she repeatedly refused. On many an occasion, Marilyn had said, “I love Johnny, but I’m not in love with him.”
“You know that Miller is married?” Winters asked. “I know his wife, Mary. She’s a good woman.”
“The world is full of good women who love their husbands,” Marilyn said, “But the way Arthur looked at me sent me a signal. He wants me. Maybe he’s bored with his wife after all these years.”
“Watch it, you,” Winters warned. “You’re wandering into a garden of explosives.”
Kazan was staying at the home of producer Charles Feldman, who was launching the film, A Streetcar Named Desire, with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. Feldman was away, and Kazan as the host invited Marilyn and suggested that Miller drive over and pick her up.
Miller arrived with Marilyn at that party two hours late. She was already known as “taking forever” to get dressed. Perhaps that was the reason for her tardiness, or maybe it was something else. “Elia was pissed off when we got there,” Marilyn later said. “He suspected something.”
When Marilyn made her late entrance at the party, virtually every eye in the room focused on her. In his memoirs, Miller recalled how she looked. “She seemed almost ludicrously provocative, a strange bird in the aviary, if only because her dress was so blatantly tight, declaring rather than insinuating that she had brought her body along and that it was the best in the room.”
Knowing that Hyde had died, many men at the party in Feldman’s home, married or otherwise, moved in on Marilyn. Evelyn Keyes wanted to connect with Miller, having previously divorced director John Huston. She found him on the sofa in the middle of the living room. Marilyn had removed her shoes, and Miller was playing with her red-painted toes. “Miller seemed all wrapped up with Monroe, so I walked on,” Keyes recalled.
He became so amorous that at one point Kazan whispered to him, “Remember, I saw her first.”
Since his wife was returning that night, Kazan could not drive Marilyn home. The chauffeur duty fell once again to Miller.
He would later tell Kazan that he faced the “temptation of my life” when Marilyn invited him in for a drink, but he turned down the offer in spite of his urges. “My brain said not to go with her, but my body had a mind of its own.”
He did invite her for a luncheon the following day.
There, he learned that she had neither seen nor read one of his plays. After lunch, he took her to a bookstore in Hollywood that was patronized by actors. It had a large drama section, and in it, he found a copy of his play, Death of a Salesman. “I saw out of the corner of my eye a Japanese man masturbating in his pants. I quickly moved her away from the man, whom she had not seen.”
Brando called her early that evening, wanting an update about what had happened between Miller and her. It seemed that everyone at Feldman’s party had been speculating.
“Nothing much,” she said. “He’s very shy. But when I kissed him, I did reach down and feel an erection, so I know I was getting to him.”
“Don’t get too carried away,” he said. “Miller wants to be the Jewish pope.”
Miller retreated back to New York before, in his words, “satisfying my own unruly appetite for self-gratification.” In Brooklyn, he congratulated himself on “having escaped destruction,” yet wondered why he’d left Marilyn in California. Of course, a wife had something to do with it.
During one of Marilyn’s studio lunches with Winters, she told her, “Except for Fred Karger, that fuck who ran off with Jane Wyman, I always let men chase me. But in Arthur’s case, I’m going to chase him. I’ll catch him one day, too. I know I will.”
Miller not only yearned for Marilyn, but was professionally disappointed that he had failed to set a literary fire in Hollywood for his screenplay.
As he told her goodbye, she had promised to write him, but he made no such commitment to her.
Kazan continued to seduce Marilyn, although he complained to Brando: “I’m getting tired of hearing Marilyn talk about Arthur even when we are in flagrante delicto.”
“Most people admire their fathers,” she wrote Miller, “But I never had one. I need someone to admire as much as I admire Lincoln.”
He suggested that since she was so fond of Lincoln, she should read Carl Sandburg’s study of the assassinated president.
In her next letter, she was more candid. “I’ve decided you’re the man for me, the man I’ve dreamed about for so long, but never found.”
He wrote back to her: “Believe me, Marilyn, I am not the man of your dreams—in fact, I’m not the kind of man women dream about. I’m far from ever becoming a ladies’ man.”
“Good,” she wrote back. “That means I’ll have fewer women to fight off to get to you.”
She told him that all he had to do was call, and she would be on the next plane to New York. But he repeatedly turned down her offers, and continued to do so for the next four years.
Even though he kept refusing her, he later admitted, “There were parched evenings when I was on the verge of turning my steering wheel west and jamming the pedal to the floor.”
***
Before leaving Hollywood, Marilyn accepted Marlon Brando’s invitation to visit him on the set of Guys and Dolls. She chose a day when his co-star, Frank Sinatra, wasn’t there, since she didn’t want to become involved with the feud she understood they were having.
She had lobbied for the role of Adelaide in the film, which was based on the long-running Broadway musical filled with Damon Runyon’s colorful characters. In maneuvering for the part of Adelaide, she had once again begun a brief fling with the film’s director, Joseph Mankiewicz, who had given her the attention-getting role in All About Eve. To her great disappointment, Mankiewicz eventually cast Vivian Blaine in the part of Adelaide instead.
On the way to Brando’s dressing room, she encountered the director, but walked past him without speaking. Earlier, she’d told Brando, “Fuck Mankiewicz. I could have won an Oscar playing Adelaide, even if it’s a supporting role. He’ll never crawl in my bed again. He’s trying to sabotage my career.”
Welcoming her to his dressing room, Brando gave her a deep kiss before introducing her to his best friend, Carlo Fiore, who would later provide details about Marilyn’s visit to the set. When Brando learned that Marilyn had taken to drinking champagne at midday, he ordered Fiore to go to the commissary and bring back three chilled bottles of the best French champagne. Within thirty minutes, he was back in Marlon’s dressing room, popping the cork.
On the surface, Marilyn looked vastly more pulled-together than when she’d visited him on the set of Désirée. But after fifteen minutes with her, he concluded that it was merely an act. He was alarmed to learn that she was popping pills, surrendering to barbiturates.
Fiore would later recall that she opened up, if only for a moment, and became the frightened little girl, Norma Jeane, not Marilyn Monroe. As they drank the champagne together, she was very candid in the warm glow of Brando’s company with his adoring friend. Incredibly poised in front of the camera, she seemed vulnerable off camera, revealing that the mere thought of making a new acquaintances caused her “to break out in red blotches.”
She felt that the only way to face life was to “take a lot of sleeping pills. At three o’clock in the morning, I often take pills to put me to sleep, even though I have to get up at six o’clock and drive to the studio.” To regain consciousness, she said that she took the stimulant, Dexamyl.
She admitted that the reason she drank so much and popped so many pills was because of her fear of not only facing the camera, but even of another day. She claimed that she often sat for hours at a time, merely staring out the window into space and pulling on a lock of her hair. “At times I become so nauseated, I throw up when there’s nothing left to vomit.”
“I find it harder and harder to turn myself into Marilyn Monroe every day,” she said. “The public wants me to be one thing, which I’m not. I really can act, but no one wants me to. They want me to be Marilyn Monroe—nothing else.”
On this visit, she didn’t even mention Joe DiMaggio, but she seemed thrilled to talk about Arthur Miller. She quizzed Brando about his analyst and asked if he were doing him any good. She claimed that Miller had said that her own analysis had been a failure, and that if she continued with her sessions, they would eventually harm her career.
She quoted Miller, “Too much time on the analyst’s couch might destroy your creative spark, the very thing that makes you Marilyn Monroe. It might steal your charm from your very soul. You might emerge from that couch as some dreary, boring thing, removed of that magic that you possess and all your imitators do not. You have a wonderful quality of walking with two left feet. If you walk with a right foot and a left foot, the public might not want to go to your movies anymore.” Later, her director, Billy Wilder, would echo more or less the same sentiments about Marilyn and analysis.
She was also terrified that reporters for Time magazine had descended on Hollywood as a means of learning more about her. According to her, they planned to spend months of investigation for an upcoming cover story.
“They’re even talking to Norma Jeane’s schoolteachers,” she claimed. “I have spoken of my past. But these goons from Time seem to think I created my past. They’re telling people I know that I made up stories. Spun a myth, so to speak. They seem hell bent on exploding that myth. But in doing so, they might shatter Marilyn Monroe herself. I want to bury my past. I don’t want Time digging it up. I view my past like a body that should have been put into a coffin and the lid closed, never to be opened again.”
“Our past exists only in our minds,” Brando told her. “All the reality is gone. Those Time researchers might file massive reports on you, none of which will have anything to do with you. Remember that. All they’ll come up with are other people’s opinions. People who hardly know you. You once admitted to me that you don’t know yourself. How can other people know you? I have found that friends—acquaintances, really—exaggerate their role in a star’s life. They want to feel important. To bask in our glow. That will never change.”
Even while drinking with Fiore and Brando, she reached into her purse to take more pills. He issued another warning. “You don’t want to sleepwalk your way through life, now, do you?”
Marilyn need not have worried about the reporters from Time. Their cover story wasn’t published until May of 1956. Journalist Ezra Goodman claimed that Time editors locked away most of the damaging evidence its own staff had uncovered about Marilyn, and ran a rather reassuring report about her, focusing on her as an actress and a personality.
Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls
She admitted that she was visiting a gynecologist. “I’m contemplating surgery to tighten my vagina.”
Neither man had any vocal response to that startling piece of information. “I’m also consulting a doctor about injections to have my breasts enlarged.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Fiore assured her.
At one point Marilyn startled Fiore by revealing that, “I’ve had almost as many abortions as I’ve made films.”
“Surely you don’t mean two dozen?” Fiore said. She did not answer.
“I’ve sent at least that many women to an abortionist myself,” Brando said. “When will the god damn government make abortion legal so we won’t have to slip around back alleyways finding some quack?”
Marilyn had come to see Brando not just to talk about herself. She was also interested in doing business, telling him of a script in the works called Paris Blues. She was enthusiastic about it, feeling that it would be the perfect vehicle for launching themselves as a “screen team.”
“In the movie, we fall in love,” she said. “We’ll take long walks by the Seine until the sun rises over Paris. We’ll be seen at a café drinking endless cups of coffee and eating freshly baked croissants. You’re a drummer. The movie will show off your talent. Your character will be called Ram Bowen. I’ll be Lillian Corning. We’ll get to appear with two talented blacks, Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll. The producer even wants Louis Armstrong to appear in the film as Wild Man Moore.”
“Sounds like my kind of movie,” Brando said. “I’ve always felt that American jazzmen in Paris are treated like kings. Ram Bowen, huh? I’ve always wanted to play a character called Ram.”
Paris Blues would actually be filmed and released in 1961, but by that time, Brando and Marilyn had lost interest, the roles going to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
Before the afternoon waned, Marilyn revealed that she wanted to make movies with her independent film company “working hand in glove” with Marlon’s production crew. “We could become the greatest screen team in movie history,” she predicted before they finished their third bottle of champagne, “better than Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy and William Powell, or Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.”
Before finishing her final glass of champagne, she revealed her greatest dream: Starring in a film with “my two favorite actors in all the world: Charlie Chaplin and Marlon Brando.”
At that point, Brando rose from the sofa, signaling Fiore to leave. “Marilyn and I have some private business to transact, and we don’t need an audience.”
She giggled, standing up on wobbly feet and giving Fiore a sloppy wet kiss with the darting tongue of a snake.
Backing off from Fiore, she glided into Brando’s body as he protectively put his arms around her, almost like a loving father instead of a seducer.
She giggled again and nibbled on Brando’s ear. As Fiore was leaving, she called to him. “Do you know why I love Marlon so much? He’s the only man in the world who can bring me to orgasm. With my other lovers, I just fake it.”
***
Through Kazan, Marilyn learned that Miller was planning to divorce his wife Mary. On hearing the news, she flew to New York and tried to reach him. Apparently, they spoke briefly on the phone, but he refused to meet with her.
Feeling lonely and despondent, she put through a call to Senator Kennedy’s office in Washington. He invited her down and arranged for her to stay in his permanent suite at the Mayflower Hotel, which he maintained for just such an off-the-record rendezvous.
Before her flight to Washington, Marilyn read an underground newspaper published in Hollywood that listed all her known one-night stands. In addition to the familiar names (which included John Huston and Robert Mitchum), there appeared a bizarre list of names less often associated with her. They included Mickey Rooney, Humphrey Bogart, Johnny Weissmuller, Edward G. Robinson, Roy Rogers and Trigger, Cary Grant, Tom Mix, Jimmy Hoffa, Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields, Jimmy Durante, Mae West, Ava Gardner, Gloria Swanson, Eddie Fisher, Richard Widmark, Hopalong Cassidy, Robert Taylor, and Paul Robeson.
While still in New York, an aide to Senator Kennedy called her, referring to her as “ma’am.” He told her that when she landed at the Washington airport, a car and chauffeur would be waiting to take her to the Mayflower Hotel. “Oh, yes,” he said, “the Senator would prefer you to dress inconspicuously. A wig and dark glasses would be suitable.”
Fortunately, she always carried two black wigs with her whenever she traveled; otherwise, she’d be mobbed by her fans.
She hadn’t eaten that morning, and on the flight to Washington, she felt like vomiting, even though there was nothing on her stomach. With her credit card, she’d purchased a well-tailored spring green dress at Saks on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Edith Head, the lesbian wardrobe duenna of Hollywood, had once warned her that “No sex symbol should ever wear green—shocking pink, pumpkin orange, melon gold, cranberry red, whatever, but never green.” But she liked the dress and bought it anyway, hoping Milton Greene would pay the credit card bill when it came due.
Getting off the plane in Washington, she felt a distinct chill in the air. Wind was blowing in from the north. The chauffeur approached her in the arrivals hall and picked up her one suitcase. It was going to be a short visit.
A rather handsome fellow in his thirties, the driver said not a word to her but delivered her to the Mayflower. A young man, who identified himself as an aide to Senator Kennedy, hustled her into an elevator and up to his suite.
In addition to a living room, there appeared to be two bedrooms. She was ushered into the smaller of the two, but not before she heard a man’s loud voice coming from the master bedroom. Apparently, the senator was giving some-one hell on the phone.
The aide was very young, perhaps no more than nineteen. He spoke with a Boston accent, and he looked very fey, rather effeminate. Did he service the Senator when a woman wasn’t around? His face revealed his disdain for her. Instead of treating her like the star she was, he seemed to regard her as a call girl.
She’d remember all these details because Shelley Winters had said, “I want to know everything that happened.” Winters was dating Adlai Stevenson, who planned a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination yet again—even though a few years before, he’d lost in the 1952 presidential race with Eisenhower.
In the bedroom, Marilyn discarded her clothing and sat nude at the dressing table. Having removed her black wig, she adjusted her honey-blonde hair and painted her mouth scarlet red. She’d been warned by the aide that Senator Kennedy didn’t have a lot of time, so she readied herself for a quick seduction by putting on a see-through black négligée.
Back in the living room, she spotted a bottle of Dom Perignon chilling in a silver bucket on a glass-topped coffee table. The rail-thin young aide asked her if she’d like a glass.
“Yes,” she said, “and don’t be stingy, baby,” she said, imitating her line from Anna Christie which she’d performed at the Actors Studio.
The door to the master bedroom was cracked open. Perhaps JFK had entered the living room while she was getting made up. His voice was much softer, but he constantly referred to this caller as “Dad.” She knew at once that it was Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, who had once made love to her in 1950 in Palm Springs. She wondered if his son knew about that.
Apparently, he was arguing with his father about seeking some nomination. Surely he wasn’t planning to challenge Eisenhower for the Presidency?
After finishing her first glass of champagne, she was halfway through her second round of the bubbly when she decided it was time to check her face in her compact mirror, which she carried with her in her handbag. The bright fuchsia lipstick set off the creamy beauty of her face. She inspected her red alligator shoes, noting how succulent her big toe looked. A lot of men liked to suck on it, especially Sammy Davis, Jr.
The aide emerged from the kitchen of the suite, telling her that the Senator would see her now. He led the way toward the master bedroom.
Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. (“Papa Joe”)
Opening the cracked door slightly, he said, “Senator, Miss Monroe is here.”
“Well, show her in, for God’s sake,” JFK snapped at the young man. “You know I’m in a rush to get to the Senate.”
“Hi, Marilyn,” he said as she came into the room. “Great to see you again.”
“Glad to be here, Jack,” she said. What she saw shocked her. On the bed, he lay on three pillows and was fully dressed from the top, complete with a dark blue suit jacket, a reddish brown tie, and a white, stiffly starched shirt. But he’d pulled down his trousers and his white jockey shorts, exposing a limp penis that didn’t look all that promising.
To her amazement, the aide remained in the room, checking something in an appointment book. “Don’t mind him,” JFK said. “I’m expecting three important calls, and he’s got to take them and make a note or two for me. I’ve got to run real soon, but I’ll be back later tonight.”
He reached out an arm for her, and he placed his hand on the nape of her neck, bringing her to his mouth, where he kissed her long and passionately. When she came up for air, she noted the aide looking at her with disapproval. Perhaps he wanted to be in her place.
She didn’t even have time to remove her négligée. Still holding the nape of her neck, he directed her toward his groin. With his other hand, he reached in to feel her firm breasts. His penis began to rise. She knew what was expected. She descended on him, using her time-practiced technique, and he rose fully to the occasion.
During the act, the aide answered the phone and handed it to him. “It’s Senator Kefauver.”
He took the phone and talked to a man he called “Estes,” arguing with him over some issue she didn’t understand. JFK’s firm hand on her neck signaled that he wanted her to continue. As his conversation evolved into an argument, his penis weakened, but she worked even harder to keep him in a full state of arousal. Finally, he slammed down the phone, as the aide reminded him of what time it was. Her jaws were aching, but he signaled he wanted a release and began pumping it to her. Finally, he let out a little yell. “Swallow it!” he ordered. “Every drop.”
When she rose from his groin, he told her, “The other night this bitch didn’t swallow me and spat it out. A woman should view a man’s semen as a tribute.”
She didn’t answer, having spat out the semen of many of john during her days as a hooker.
Rising from the bed, and wincing with pain, he stood up. His aide kneeled down on the floor. With a wet cloth, he wiped the Senator’s penis clean. “My back hurts so much I can’t bend over,” he said. He seemed perfectly natural about having this menial task performed for him.
Suddenly, with his trousers pulled up, he was gone after uttering a vague promise about returning later that evening. “We’ve got some unfinished business.”
At eight o’clock, the aide left and another appeared. He was very masculine, appearing to be in his late twenties. He was much more appealing to her, and actually seemed to be a fan. She made herself as alluring as she could, but it was obvious that he viewed her as the Senator’s woman, and, as such, maintained a strict hands-off policy.
Room service brought her a dinner a nine o’clock. After that, she watched television and read from the first volume of Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln.
Around eleven o’clock, she felt sleepy, and the aide directed her to Senator Kennedy’s master bed. Around midnight, she fell asleep, feeling completely exhausted.
At around four in the morning, she was awakened. A nude man was on top of her, pressing against her, penetrating her. At first she thought of resisting, thinking it might be the aide. But when he whispered to her, it was the voice of JFK himself. He’d returned at last. Even though he, too, must have been exhausted, his climax came quickly and violently. Without so much as a kiss, he rolled over and seemed to fall asleep right away. Within minutes, a gentle snore was coming from him. There was no aide this time to wash his penis.
She lay awake for two more hours, afraid her slightest movement might disturb him. Somewhere along the line, she fell asleep and didn’t wake up until eleven the following morning. She felt for the Senator beside her, but he was long gone.
After showering, she put on her négligée and came back into the living room, where the effeminate young man had reported once again for duty. He had a cold breakfast and hot coffee waiting on the silver tray where the champagne had been placed the night before.
“Ma’am,” he said, “the chauffeur is waiting to take you back to the airport. Your plane leaves at one o’clock. I have a ticket for you to New York.”
“And the senator?” she asked. “Did he leave a note?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. He’s very, very busy these days. He’s going to seek the vice presidential nomination at the Democratic Convention, and he’s lining up support.”
“I see,” she said. “How very nice for him. Maybe he’ll get it. Maybe the Democrats will take over the White House. If it’s Adlai Stevenson again, maybe an assassin will gun him down, and Senator Kennedy can assume the presidency.”
“We can only wish that something like that happens,” the aide responded. “Imagine America with a very young president instead of one of those creepy old men.”
***
With his yacht, the Christina, occupying a prime berth in the harbor of Monaco, Aristotle Onassis wanted to be a player in the principality on the southeastern coast of France. “The place has unabashed opulence,” he told Prince Rainier III, “It has hedonism like no other place on earth. All it needs is for you to marry a movie queen. Get massive publicity around the world and lure rich Americans to your gaming tables.”
Onassis met with George Schlee, the Russian entrepreneur and former lover and mentor of Greta Garbo. The shipping tycoon suggested that Schlee become an ambassador-at-large, spreading the glories of Monaco to the rich and famous of the world. The hope was to lure them to Monaco, where they’d be encouraged to throw away their money at the gambling tables.
Schlee agreed to do that, but didn’t have much success. He brought the problem to Gardner (Mike) Cowles, Jr., the founder and publisher of Look magazine. The publisher came up with what he called a brilliant idea. “Have Rainier marry an American movie star, the biggest there is.”
“Well, Garbo is retired,” Schlee said. “That could mean only one woman—Marilyn Monroe.”
“Why not start at the top?” Cowles asked.
Many sources claim that Cowles pitched the idea directly to Marilyn. But she told Shelley Winters and also Peter Lawford that it was Aristotle Onassis himself who presented the idea to her.
The Greek thought it was a magnificent proposition, and when Marilyn returned from Washington, she received a phone call from him. Without telling her the reason, he invited her to dinner in his suite at the Hotel Carlyle, where she’d already become a familiar face.
Before that, she had spoken to Peter Lawford. “He’s not only the richest man in the world, but he could set you up like a Queen. You’d have your own private Greek island. Your own fleet of airlines. Your own fleet of ships. Unlimited credit cards.”
Rushing out to Saks on Fifth Avenue, Marilyn bought a clinging red gown with a white fox stole to go with it. She paid for it with her credit card, hoping that once again, Milton Greene would pay for it when the bill came due. For the final touches, she called in both a makeup man and a hairdresser.
Before heading out for her dinner with Onassis, she nervously dialed Winters, who claimed, “I’ve just been fucked by Burt Lancaster.”
“I’ve never looked more glamorous,” Marilyn told her friend. “As I was standing in front of this full-length mirror, I decided that if I ever met a woman as glamorous as I look right now, I’d turn lesbian.”
“A Greek as rich as Onassis can have any woman on the planet,” Winters said. “Elizabeth Taylor. Princess Margaret. Grace Kelly. Brigitte Bardot. Me. Even Marilyn Monroe, in spite of her being in love with Arthur Miller. Let’s face it: Money talks.”
Onassis had discussed Marilyn with Spyros Skouras at 20th Century Fox. The movie mogul told him that, “I think Marilyn is falling big for Arthur Miller.”
“That’s bullshit,” Onassis said. “What chance would a poor Jewish playwright—a one-hit wonder—have when stacked up against a prince who rules over a kingdom? Besides, beautiful women cannot bear moderation. Marilyn wants it all. Women like her, like Elizabeth Taylor, need an inexhaustible supply of excess.”
“I’m not for the deal at all,” Skouras said. “The executives at Fox have demanded that I get her out of New York, get her back to Hollywood, and into a movie at once. She can make millions for us.”
Making a grand entrance into Onassis’s suite, Marilyn found the tycoon “utterly charming, even though he isn’t the best looking animal on the planet.”
By the time the cork had been popped on the second bottle of vintage champagne, Marilyn heard the pitch. To her surprise, it didn’t involve her becoming his mistress.
“Prince Rainier of Monaco is looking for a suitable bride to reign as his princess in his kingdom, and I’ve spoken to him about you,” Onassis said. “He’s very interested in meeting you during his up-coming trip to America.”
“I’ve never been there, but I saw Marlene Dietrich in the movie.”
“No, that’s Morocco, and that’s in Africa. Monaco is a principality in the southeastern corner of France. You know, the French Riviera.”
“Oh, so he’s French?” she said. “I like Frenchmen. They’re so Continental.”
“He’s very rich, and he lives in a pink palace.”
“But what does he look like?”
“I knew you’d want to know that,” Onassis said. “I have an eight-by-ten glossy of him.” He went over to his desk and retrieved a portrait of Rainier. She studied it carefully. “I don’t think he’s very handsome. He also looks a little on the portly side. I’ll have to put him on a diet. What would it look like with me marrying a fat king?”
Aristotle Onassis
“Not a king. A prince. You’d be called ‘Princess Marilyn.’”
“What makes you think the prince would want to marry me?”
“Because he saw you in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and he thinks you are the single sexiest woman on the screen. I can set up a weekend between you two at an undisclosed location. Maybe arrange for you to sail off the coast of California with him. You’d be very private and would get to know each other.”
“Just give me two days with any man, and I could win him over, providing I want to. There’s just one problem. He’s only a prince. I’d rather be married to a king. That way I would be on the same footing as Queen Elizabeth.”
“Well, not quite that,” he said. “I can have my assistant come by tomorrow to show you a travelogue of how beautiful Monaco is. It’s very small. Actually, Rainier calls himself the Prince of Monaco. But I practically own the joint, thanks to my holdings in the SBM (Société des Bains de Mer). Monte Carlo is my plaything. The prince is a puppet.”
“What’s the big attraction there?” she asked.
“Gambling,” he said. “Haven’t you heard of breaking the bank at Monte Carlo?”
“I like gambling casinos,” she said. “I adore Las Vegas. Since he’s the prince, he could get me the highest salary to perform in the casinos.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “As a princess, you couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be dignified. You’d no longer have to work for a living. You’d attend charity functions, stuff like that. You would become the number one tourist attraction in Monaco. Hell, if the prince marries you, your fame would put that principality on the map. You’d attract the world’s richest tourists.”
“I’ve got to think about it,” she said. “I was toying with the idea of marrying Arthur Miller.”
“A communist pauper, come on,” he said. “Let me set up a rendezvous with you and the prince. That way, you can test him in the sack. If it doesn’t work out, I have a consolation prize for you.”
“And what in hell is that?”
“Me,” he said. “I could buy and sell Rainier and his whole principality any day.”
“Mistress or wife?” she asked.
“Wife.”
“Would you buy me all the clothes and jewelry my little heart might desire?” she asked.
“For you, anything.”
***
With fantasies of fairytale kingdoms dancing in her head, Marilyn flew back to Los Angeles. The most exciting event on her agenda was the seductive weekend that Onassis was arranging with Prince Rainier at a private address in Beverly Hills. He didn’t tell her who was the actual owner of the property.
Much of what happened that weekend still remains a mystery, although she provided a preview of it to Peter Lawford, among others. The end result was that she did not come away with a marriage proposal. That dream about becoming Princess Marilyn of Monaco was added to all the other many disappointments of her life.
When Onassis called Rainier to find out how it went, he was very frank. “I’ve fallen in love with Grace Kelly. She has the dignity and beauty to reign as queen. But I’d like to continue seeing Marilyn. In other words, Kelly for marriage, Monroe for mistress.”
What Onassis didn’t seem to consider was that Marilyn was not Catholic. She’d also been married twice before. “Did the Prince of Monaco really want to let Marilyn Monroe be the face of his public image?” asked David Niven, a friend and lover of Grace Kelly’s when he heard gossip about Rainier marrying Marilyn.
At a party, Niven encountered Elizabeth Taylor, and reported the news to her. “I approve of his choice,” the screen goddess said. “Grace Kelly is the absolute antithesis of Monroe. Grace might have been born the daughter of a bricklayer in Philadelphia, but she has the chiseled beauty and the proper manners, or whatever it takes, to be called your Serene Highness. Besides, she’s sown her wild oats, fucking everybody from Frank Sinatra to Bing Crosby to Gary Cooper. Grace can now become a respectable princess. As for Monroe, she’ll always be a slut.”
Later, when that comment was relayed back to Marilyn, she remarked, “Who does Taylor think she is? Why would I be interested in the opinion of an international whore? I heard she even bedded Lassie. She’s fucked every man in Hollywood, even the gay ones like Montgomery Clift.”
Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, at his wedding to Grace Kelly
Onassis met privately again with Marilyn, this time in Los Angeles, to tell her about Rainier’s rejection of her. “So I’m not going to become a princess,” she said. “Maybe I’ll marry Arthur Miller after all. Or else…” She paused for dramatic affect. “Or else I’ll take your second option.”
“Exactly what is that?” he asked.
“That I marry you. I guess my becoming a rich bitch as your wife would make up for your lack of beauty. What the fuck? Most of the men I’ve gone to bed with weren’t raving beauties, except for my Tarzan, that Lex Barker.”
“I’ll get back to you on that,” he promised.
“If that high-faluting cow, Grace Kelly, hadn’t come into the picture, and Rainier not tossed me aside, what other actresses were you considering fixing him up with?”
“Eva Marie Saint, another blonde. If you switch hair colors, Deborah Kerr.”
“What the hell!” she said. “I heard Monaco is very small, like the Prince himself. I wouldn’t be getting all that much with that one, anyway.”
“I’m glad you could get your ass over here tonight. You may not know this, but Greek men look at a woman’s ass even before they check out her face or tits.”
“It’s fortunate for me, then, that Robert Mitchum broke me into sex that way when we made River of No Return.”
“Tonight, let’s celebrate. The world’s most vintage champagne. The best caviar just flown in from Iran. And, while we’re on the subject, me.”
“At least you’re serving two of my favorite things.”
***
“I’m miserable in Los Angeles, and I’m flying back to New York,” Marilyn told Shelley Winters. “I’m not working now, and there’s more going on in New York.”
She arrived in Manhattan in time to attend the benefit opening of East of Eden on March 9, 1955, a movie she’d already seen as part of a sneak preview in Los Angeles. To garner publicity, the producers of the film arranged for superstars to function as usherettes. When Marilyn learned that Marlene Dietrich and Eva Marie Saint had each volunteered to show ticket holders to their seats, she agreed to serve as an usherette, too.
The press was already hailing the event as the splashiest movie premiere of the year. As she told Walter Winchell, “A working girl needs to keep her name in the papers when she’s off the screen.”
Even though the studio and the stars were depending on Dean to show up, he called Marilyn three days before the event saying, “I know I promised, but I can’t make the scene. I can’t handle it. I’m flying to Los Angeles tonight.”
“It’s a benefit for a good cause,” she pleaded with him.
“Fuck good causes,” he shot back. “Don’t you know by now that I’m a Rebel Without a Cause?”
She begged him to change his mind, but after talking with him some more, she realized that he couldn’t face the public.
She followed through, however, with her own commitment. Members of the audience that night were shocked to see Marilyn taking their tickets and guiding them to their seats.
At the end of the screening, Dietrich approached Monroe and kissed her on the lips, “Why not a repeat visit to my apartment tonight, you lovely child? Love is so much better the second time around.”
***
In late spring, when the weather was warmer, James Dean returned to New York. Once again, Marilyn invited him for a holiday at the Fire Island retreat of Lee Strasberg. He eagerly accepted.
On the island, it was unseasonably windy and rainy throughout most of their stay, but they didn’t seem to mind. “The sun is bad for my skin anyway,” she claimed. Since it was during the week, and the weather was bad, the community was at low ebb.
She would recall the experience with Shelley Winters, claiming, “Both of us tried to be completely honest with each other.”
At one point, she asked him his real name. “I made up Marilyn Monroe. What about you?”
“My name is James Byron Dean.”
“Wasn’t that the name of a poet I’ve never read?”
“He was one of the romantic poets, I think,” he said.
“Forgive me, but I think it would have been better if you’d billed yourself as James Byron. That would look better on a marquee. Dean reminds me of some stern schoolmaster with a ruler in his hand.”
“It’s too late now,” he said. “In some ways, I preferred being anonymous. In New York I used to go to an all-night café and just sit there until the dawn, talking to strangers. I learned that there are a lot of people like us in the world who regard life as pretty god damn frightening.”
“Sometimes I’m so frightened I’m afraid to get up and face the day,” she said.
“With all of our hang-ups, it’s good that both of us drifted into acting. Acting is the most logical way for people’s neuroses to manifest themselves.”
Sometimes he kidded her about her image—and his, too. “I’m playing that ‘little boy lost’ for all it’s worth, and I stole it from your ‘little girl lost’ act.”
“Do you think behind that innocent victim image I’m a cold-hearted, calculating bitch?”
“I think both of us are bitches, using and manipulating people,” he said. “Sex is our weapon. Now gimme a kiss and let’s change the subject.”
She was eager to hear stories about how it had been working with director Elia Kazan, her on-again, off-again lover. “He flew with me to California to shoot Eden. It was my first time on a plane. I was frightened. He was amused when he saw my luggage: Two grocery bags tied with string.”
“Elia is always threatening to star me in one of his movies, but so far, nothing.”
“It’s nothing all right, nothing to look forward to. Being directed by him is like receiving electric shock treatments. Thank God for Julie Harris. Without her, I don’t think I could have gotten through the picture.”
As two stars talking shop, they inevitably came to the subject of salaries. “How much did they pay you?” she asked.
“A big $1,250 a week,” he said. “That’s better than living in New York on two dollars a day.”
“That’s the exact weekly salary that Fox paid me for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I was worth so much more—as you are, too.”
Both Marilyn and Dean were on a voyage of discovery with each other. They both suffered from insomnia. During their first night on Fire Island, they sat up talking until dawn.
Finally, they went to bed. When they awakened, at around noon, she tried to fix his breakfast. “I didn’t expect you to be a great cook,” he said, “but I’ve survived in New York on a hot dog a day, if I could afford it.”
They didn’t make love their first night there, but they did in the afternoon, as she’d later relate to Winters, who seemed eager to hear every detail.
“He works hard to satisfy a woman,” Marilyn said. Her opinion this time differed from her first appraisal of him as a lover. “You know he’s bi, of course. He said that when he’s fucking a man, he can maintain an erection until climax. But with women, he sometimes grows limp. He has to disconnect and masturbate himself hard again before entering a woman. I understand this, and was most sympathetic. Later, I asked him what he thought about when he jerked off. He told me, ‘Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood, Pier Angeli, Nick Adams, and Eartha Kitt.’”
“That’s not very flattering with the Love Goddess of the World lying underneath him,” Winters said.
“I didn’t get offended,” Marilyn said, “considering all the men I’ve dreamed about while getting plugged by some slob. I even fantasized about Rudolf Valentino.”
“He was another fag, too,” Winters said.
Marilyn revealed that Dean even talked about “getting hitched.” He told her, “Let’s admit the truth: both of us need babysitters. Maybe if we got married, we could become each other’s babysitters.”
“It wouldn’t work,” she said. “We both have destructive personalities. We’d end up destroying each other, without meaning to.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “In that case, let’s just be fuck buddies.”
As Marilyn told Winters, “Jimmy knows that I’m completely accepting of his personality. After all, he claims he doesn’t want to go through life with one hand tied behind his back. He even suggested that during our makeout sessions, he would like to invite a male friend in. ‘While I’m fucking you, he could plug me. It’ll make it more exciting for the both of us.’”
“Sounds like fun,” she told him. “I suspect that one of those guys you’d like to bring in is Marlon Brando.”
“Well, that one sure knows how to have a good time.”
She told Winters that Dean was almost as uninhibited as she was. “He has no false modesty. When he has to go, he goes, regardless of where he’s at. He said that he was filming a scene from Giant in Mafra, Texas, with Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, and he had to pee. He walked over to the edge of the set and pulled out his dick in front of some two hundred of the townspeople watching the filming. ‘I took a horse piss and to hell with them,’ he said.”
She claimed Dean “was a lot of fun, and sometimes we played games designed to reveal our darkest secrets. In one game, we both had to name four very unlikely people we’d slept with. He named Barbara Hutton, Howard Hughes, Tallulah Bankhead, and J. Edgar Hoover.”
“And who did you name, my dear?” Winters asked.
“You can guess one of them: Charlie Chaplin. But did you also know about Fidel Castro, Jimmy Hoffa, and Albert Einstein?”
“Oh, Marilyn, I never know when you’re telling the truth or fantasizing,” Winters said. “But knowing you as well as I do, I have to leave open the possibility that you’re telling the truth. I know Charlie fucked you, because I was also fucking his son, Sydney. But the other three? It’s hard for me to believe.”
Marilyn had brought two copies of William Inge’s play, Bus Stop, to Fire Island. One afternoon she asked Dean to read a few scenes with her, with him playing the dumb cowboy Bo, and with herself cast as the stripper, Cherie.
His interpretation of Bo, According to her, “was so tender, so real, so believable that I cried. But he said he wouldn’t play another cowboy.”
“I did that in Giant. I don’t want to get typecast as the next Roy Rogers.”
Months later, she’d tell Lee Strasberg that Dean gave the best reading of all the actors who wanted to play Bo. “If he had lived, and we could have made movies together, I think the chemistry between us would explode on the screen. Even though he turned down the role, he gave me some advice.”
“And what might that have been?” asked a very skeptical Strasberg.
“Live fast, die young,” she said. “He told me that way I would always be remembered by my public as being young. ‘Never live long enough to let them see you grow old and gray,’ he claimed.”
Because of Dean’s tragic auto accident that September, the cinematic pairing of Dean and Marilyn never became a reality, only in their dreams. Ironically, they became more linked in death as screen icons then they were in life. In bars in such remote countries as Nigeria, pictures of Dean and Marilyn often can be seen hanging on the walls.
As Dean biographer Donald Spoto put it: “At the end of the century, it is not outrageous to say that Dean and Monroe—even to those who have a low estimation of them—remain the most royal of deified Americans, if only because of the brilliant marketing strategies of their celebrity.”
Dean’s death mask at Princeton University has been placed beside those of Beethoven, Thackeray, and Keats; and Marilyn’s image during the second decade of the 21st Century is bigger than it was when she died.
***
Marilyn had walked out on Pink Tights, a film in which she’d been set to appear opposite Frank Sinatra, but she was eager to star with his nemesis, Marlon Brando. Her latest idea for a co-star for Bus Stop was Marlon Brando. “He’s from Nebraska,” she told Elia Kazan, something he already knew. “Aren’t there a lot of cowboys in Nebraska?”
When Brando flew into New York, Marilyn reached him by phone and made her pitch. “I’m getting some 4,000 fan letters a week, and many of them suggest that you and I make a movie together.”
“I’m getting some 6,000 fan letters a week, and I don’t recall any of them suggesting that. What makes you think our chemistry would work on screen?”
“It might not in just any film,” she said, “but Bill Inge’s Bus Stop would be ideal for the two of us.”
“Are you kidding?” he asked. “I’ve appeared in Shakespeare on the screen. Now you’re asking me to play a dumb cowboy chasing after a dumb blonde stripper?”
“It’s a great part,” she said. “You’d wipe up the screen. I can see an Oscar in your performance, and that’s for sure.”
“Okay, sugar,” he said. “Come over tonight and we’ll talk about it. At least I’ll get a good fuck out of it.”
“Oh, Marlon, how you talk.”
Over dinner, he told her he was getting at least one film offer a day. “That shitbag, Louis B. Mayer, is gone at MGM, and Dore Schary is far more appreciative of me. He just told his brass to let me play Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin if I want to. I think I’m going to settle for playing a Jap in Teahouse of the August Moon. That cowboy role wouldn’t mean anything for me.”
“I convinced Marilyn that her pitch was hopeless,” Brando later told his best friend, Carlo Fiore, when he reported on the incident. “But we made our own chemistry in bed together.”
Brando bragged to Fiore that “I could take Marilyn in a minute from Arthur Miller if I wanted to. But my trouble is, I can’t love anyone. I just can’t. I know I should, but I don’t trust a woman enough to fall in love with her…or a man, either, for that matter.”
He noted that while Marilyn was going around professing “all this love for Miller, she’s screwing both Jimmy Dean and me, plus god only knows how many others. She is the Queen of the One-Night Stand.”
The following night, Fiore went with Marilyn to a party at the apartment of Barbara Baxley. In Key West, during her filming of The Last Resort in the 1970s, she recalled the evening. “Marlon spent much of the night attacking Jimmy Dean for copying everything he did—the motorcycles, the jeans, the V-neck pullovers, and last year’s acting style. He was really furious, especially when some members of the press started referring to Jimmy as ‘the new Marlon Brando.’”
Later that night over a spaghetti dinner in a West Village tavern, Brando continued to attack Dean in front of Marilyn and Fiore. He was obviously aware of her involvement with Dean.
“Kazan offered me that fucking role in East of Eden,” Brando said, “and I turned the fucker down.”
Fiore asked Brando, “What do you think about Dean being called ‘the poor man’s Brando.’”
“Not much,” he said.
“I’m not so hard on him,” she chimed in. “All of us start out imitating someone. I used to go to any Lana Turner movie at noon and stay in the movie house all day until the midnight show. It’s just a phase we go through.”
“Not me,” Brando said. “I’m an original.”
“You’re an original who is changing every actor’s style in America—except for Clifton Webb,” she said. “Miss Priss.”
“Dean and I have only one thing in common—and not just our Midwestern origins. Both of us had fathers who claimed that all actors are ‘faggots and fairyboys.’”
“Well, aren’t they?” she asked provocatively, as she’d had too much to drink at Baxley’s party.
“I’m not as hard on Dean as I pretend to be,” Brando said. “Actually, he needs to be nursed like a baby. Sometimes, when he’s in need of a mother, I let him suckle at my breasts.”
“It’s getting late,” she said. “Why don’t we go back to your apartment, and do some suckling on my breasts?”
“It’s a deal,” he said, rising to his feet. “Get lost, Fiore.”
***
Frank Sinatra in 1953 had taken Marilyn to see a performance of the Broadway play, Picnic, on an evening when a young Paul Newman was filling in for its star, Ralph Meeker. She was intrigued with playing the female lead in the film version that was in development stages at the time. On Broadway, the role was interpreted by Janice Rule.
After the performance, over dinner that night, Sinatra applauded the idea of pairing Newman with Marilyn as co-stars in Picnic’s film spinoff . “You guys would be terrific,” Sinatra claimed. He was possibly spot-on accurate in his assessment.
But like many actors’ dreams, the Hollywood version of William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play reached the screen with a different cast, the roles eventually awarded to William Holden and Kim Novak, another blonde goddess.
The only reward for Marilyn and Newman was an extended “one-night stand.”
Since they had not been in touch for some time, Newman was surprised when he received a phone call from Marilyn during her time in New York.
With her shooting schedule, DiMaggio problems, and other extended (and chronic) pressures, he didn’t expect to hear from her. But she did reach him by phone to extend an invitation.
She wanted him to take her to see Bus Stop, which she’d previously viewed with Sinatra. Of course, she didn’t tell him she’d already asked Marlon Brando if he’d play opposite her in the film version.
Kim Stanley was very convincing as Cherie, but Marilyn was working on her own interpretation. Secretly, she’d felt Newman might be brilliant as Bo, the dumb cowboy.
He agreed to pick her up and take her to Broadway’s Music Box Theater. Both of them entered and took their seats as the lights dimmed. Throughout Kim Stanley’s performance, Marilyn kept squeezing Newman’s hand, indicating her eagerness to perform the role on camera.
When the curtain went down, she asked him if he would take her backstage to congratulate the cast, including its star.
He discouraged her, claiming, “Kim has her heart set on playing Cherie in the movie version. With you seeing the play, she’ll know at once that you want the role for yourself.”
Marilyn agreed, but began her exit from the theater after most of the audience had left. Tipped off that Marilyn was in the building, playwright Inge was waiting in the lobby to greet them. He asked them to join him for a hamburger and a beer at a nearby Broadway tavern, where they weren’t likely to be disturbed.
After some drinks, Inge sensed what both of these actors wanted. “I think you’re hot on stage, Paul, and Marilyn, you light up the screen. When I was writing Bus Stop, I had both of you in mind—you, Paul, as the perfect Bo, and you, Marilyn, as the ideal choice for Cherie.” Whether that was true or not is not known.
Remembering their previous encounters, a slightly drunk Newman said, “Marilyn and I can generate heat off the screen—why not on?”
She giggled and kissed him on the lips, as the playwright reached for both of their hands. “The two of you, a casting couch dream come true. I can see Oscar in both of your futures.”
“I can already picture myself rubbing my fingers over Oscar’s smooth ass,” she said.
It was midnight before Inge told them goodbye. They’d spent their time together discussing how the screen version might differ from the stage version.
Newman kissed one cheek of Inge’s, Marilyn the other.
“I’m going back to my hotel to make love to Paul all night,” she cooed.
“Lucky girl,” Inge said. “I wish I could make love to Paul all night.”
Jokingly (or not?) Newman promised Inge, “You’ll get your chance if I get that role of Bo. After all, both Marilyn and I aren’t strangers to the casting couch.”
In the next two weeks, and to Newman’s dismay, he’d heard from Kim Stanley that Elvis Presley had also attended a Broadway performance of Bus Stop. He’d come backstage and made his intention clear: “That character of Bo has my name written all over it.”
“That’s my shit sandwich for the day,” Newman told her after hearing about it.
“There’s more,” Stanley told him. She’d encountered Josh Logan, who was set to direct Bus Stop. “He told me that he thought Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, together on the marquee, would be the greatest thing since God invented cocks.”
“He’s got a point there,” Newman said. “Marilyn and Elvis would be the biggest box office draw of the decade. But there’s something Logan hasn’t considered. There’s no way in hell that Colonel Tom Parker is going to let his moneymaker play a mainstream dramatic part.”
William Inge
***
One of Marilyn’s all time favorite movies was A Place in the Sun (1951), which had starred Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, with Shelley Winters in a supporting role. Marilyn gave the film her own reviews. “Monty and Shelley were wonderful, marvelous acting. Taylor did no acting at all, merely tried to look beautiful.”
Marilyn had always fantasized about appearing opposite Clift on screen. Having reconciled herself to the fact that Dean and Brando didn’t want to get involved, she talked to Joshua Logan, who had signed to direct the movie version of Bus Stop. “I saw Monty in Red River with John Wayne. As you know, he played a cowboy in that and he was terrific. He’d be great in a very different cowboy role—in this case, in Bus Stop opposite me. Promise me you’ll at least talk to him about it?”
The idea of casting Clift and Marilyn in Bus Stop did not go over well in Hollywood. As Robert LaGuardia, Clift’s biographer, put it,
“Starting in the mid-fifties, no major movie company would use a star who could not be insured. Marilyn Monroe was a special case. Although there was the constant risk that she would be found dead from sleeping pills or in a sanitarium, there was also the inescapable fact that she was one of the biggest money-makers in Hollywood. With Monty, however, as with Judy Garland, there was no longer the same guarantee.”
Logan was well-acquainted with Clift, and, in honor of his promise to Marilyn, he invited him to lunch, noticing how nervous and shaky he was. He passed along Marilyn’s flattering appraisal of himself as a cowboy actor, and her desire to work with him in Bus Stop.
To Logan’s surprise, Clift not only rejected the idea, he was also dismissive of Marilyn as an actress. “In my view, she’s just a sex commodity—nothing else. Besides, I’ve played my last cowboy role on the screen.”
Ironically, in just a few short months, he would sign on to play a cowboy opposite Marilyn in The Misfits.
Bus Stop was still in pre-production, as various actors were discussed as candidates for the role of the cowboy. Marilyn had already accepted the role of Cherie when the actual filming began.
She was still shopping for a stage property that might be filmed with her in the lead. She told friends, “All the great women’s roles are being written by gay men these days.” Her reference obviously included Bill Inge’s Bus Stop and also Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which had announced a Broadway opening for March 24, 1955.
She asked Walter Winchell if he’d accompany her to its opening night performance, and he said he’d be delighted. The stars included Barbara Bel Geddes in the role of Maggie the Cat, playing opposite Ben Gazzara cast as her husband, Brick, a repressed homosexual who was not satisfying his wife sexually.
As Winchell noted, Marilyn sat through the play mesmerized. It was obvious to the columnist that she was seeing herself cast as Maggie the Cat.
Winchell went with her backstage to congratulate the cast. She wanted to meet Tennessee, but he had mysteriously disappeared.
Both Winchell and Marilyn were invited to the cast party, an event scheduled at Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York. She found that an odd venue, and wondered how Elia Kazan, the play’s director, had managed to arrange that.
She learned, with a touch of dismay, that Kazan had invited a few people, including Tennessee, to his apartment for a private party before the Gracie Mansion bash, and that Kazan had opted not to invite her, even though he was her sometime lover.
Wearing a skin-tight gold mesh gown, Marilyn made a grand entrance at Gracie Mansion, her hair a shining platinum. She even managed to attract attention away from the reigning stars already in the room—Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. “America’s Sweethearts” were on the honeymoon of a doomed marriage.
Marilyn had heard that Debbie often gave a devastating impression of her at private parties, and she hoped she would not use the occasion of the Gracie Mansion bash for a repeat performance.
Debbie was gracious to Marilyn, who was particularly intrigued with Fisher, even though she wondered why Marlene Dietrich, of all people, would select him as a lover.
She knew that Eddie was Mike Todd’s best friend, and she chatted with him about her having done “the pink elephant show” produced by Todd at Madison Square Garden. Without her realizing it, Debbie had wandered off to greet friends, leaving her new husband alone with Marilyn.
“Mike told me what a wonderful guy you are,” Marilyn said, moving closer to Fisher and appearing seductive. “I hope you and Debbie will be very, very happy, but she looks too wholesome for a man of the world like yourself.”
“She’s for home and hearth, perhaps to raise a family,” he told her. “Marriage doesn’t mean I’m out of circulation.”
“Glad to hear that,” she said secretively, passing him her phone number. “You must come up and see me sometime at the Waldorf Towers. Now, I’d better get back to Winchell. Every now and then he gives me a great plug in his column but, in return for that, he expects a plug-in himself, if you get my drift.”
“I’m always drifting,” he said, “and will call tomorrow.”
“Okay, but don’t let Debbie wear you out,” she cautioned. “It’s always good to leave something for the poor.”
Years later, she’d boast to Winchell, “I had two of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands before she descended on their crotches—both Mike Todd and Eddie Fisher.”
Marilyn would remember encountering Averell Harriman at the party. She didn’t really know who he was, only that he was some very important politician. She had once heard JFK refer to him. “I hear you’re very, very rich, and you’ve known all the presidents since FDR,” she said to him.
“I hear you know one of our future presidents,” he said, provocatively.
“I hear that you were the governor of a big state,” she said. “What state?”
“The one we’re standing in right now,” he said, seemingly amused. “You’ll have to forgive me. I know who you are. Could anybody who reads a newspaper not know who you are? Joe DiMaggio’s wife. I know Joe. I haven’t seen any of your movies, but I’m certain you couldn’t look as beautiful on the screen as you do in person.”
Before he was called away by an aide, she gave him a light kiss on the lips. “That’s to remember me by.”
In the corner sat a sulking Tennessee Williams, who had slipped into the party virtually unnoticed. He was all by himself.
A waiter had served him an entire bottle of white wine. Marilyn went over to him and congratulated him on his “stunningly brilliant play with a great movie role for a blonde bombshell.”
Pretending at least for a minute to be a Southern gentleman, he told her what an honor it was to meet her.
Tennessee Williams
After tonight, I know you’re the greatest playwright on Broadway,” she said. “Your cat on that hot tin roof is mesmerizing. For an actress, the role of Maggie the Cat is a dream part. With such a success under your belt, why do you look so sad?”
“It’s going to be a disaster—the critics will rip the flesh from my bones. I caught my agent, Audrey Wood, leaving the theater fifteen minutes before the curtain fell. She was like a rat fleeing a sinking ship.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “The reviews will be terrific. I just know it.”
One of the mayor’s aides came for him, and he excused himself.
She reached out to him. “Could we have dinner some night? I want to talk to you about the role of Maggie the Cat.”
“Of course,” he said.
“I’m staying at the Waldorf Towers,” she said. “I’d love to hear from you.”
“Consider it done,” he said before walking away. She suspected he was drunk. Even though she’d slipped him her phone number, he seemed so intoxicated, he might not remember.
Two weeks later, a call from him and an invitation to dinner came in to her suite. In the lobby, she met Tennessee and his Sicilian lover, Frank Merlo. He was young and dynamic. Tennessee told Marilyn that Frank was “the role model I used for Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire.”
On the way to an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, she sat between them for the bumpy ride south.
Frank knew the owner of the restaurant, and he went back into the kitchen to order the house specialties. Soon he came back, finding his lover and Marilyn talking about who might play the roles in the movie version of Cat.
“Would you believe that Elvis Presley wants to play Brick?” Tennessee asked. “I can just imagine what Colonel Tom Parker would say about his boy playing a repressed homosexual still in love with a dead football hero.”
“And for the Maggie role?” she asked.
“Would you believe they’re talking about Lana Turner? I once was hired to write a screenplay for her. I never got beyond the brassiere.”
“At least they’re not considering Bel Geddes,” she said. “She’s all wrong for the role. Just ask Howard Hughes. He told me that she doesn’t have it at all.”
“I fought with Gadge (Elia Kazan) over casting her. She’s not the kind of actress I appreciate. But, and I know you know him well, when he makes up his mind, it’s hard to budge him. He has this theory. Barbara was once fat. Of course, she slimmed down. Gadge thinks that women like that still doubt their sex appeal. That’s why they try extra hard to convey a strong sexual appetite.”
“That sounds silly,” she said, looking over at Frank, who seemed to be hanging onto their every word. “Maggie should be real sexy on screen. In fact, dare I say it myself, some people consider me real sexy.”
Frank Merlo, Elia Kazan, and Tennessee Williams
“I think you invented sex,” Frank chimed in.
“You might be terrific in the part,” Tennessee said. “Barbara is a cool, somewhat cold-looking blonde. But I conceived of Maggie as a sizzler on stage.”
“Well, if Marilyn can do anything, she can sizzle,” Frank said.
“I’ll try to lobby for you,” Tennessee promised. “As for the man, I was considering Marlon Brando, but he told someone that he will never appear again on Broadway in a Tennessee Williams play. Why, I don’t know. Maybe he’ll do it on the screen, but I hear he’s going to turn it down. I also hear Paul Newman wants to do it, but I think he looks too pretty boy Jewish to portray the son of a plantation aristocrat in the Deep South.”
“Ben Gazzara might want to repeat his stage role in front of the camera,” she said. “That reminds me. I’ll call him up and audition him at the Waldorf Towers to see if he and I have any chemistry. Regardless of who plays Brick, the one thing I know is that I am Maggie the Cat. Can’t you just hear me saying, ‘Skipper is dead. I’m alive. Maggie the Cat is alive!’”
“You would be electric in the role,” Tennessee said.
“Don’t give it to Elizabeth Taylor. She can’t act.”
“I’m considering playing Big Daddy myself,” he said.
“You’d be wonderful.”
***
Months later, Marilyn lamented to Brando. “I thought Tennessee adored me. So what happens? The role of Maggie the Cat goes to that damn Elizabeth Taylor. “You and I should have done it.”
“I hear she’s also going to film Tennessee’s Suddenly, Last Summer with Monty,” he said.
“Just my luck. I get the dumb blonde comedies, and Taylor gets the meaty dramas. Hollywood.”
***
The years had gone by swiftly, but in the spring of 1955, Marilyn had a reunion with Arthur Miller, as his own marriage to Mary Slattery was disintegrating. Actors Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson had taken her to a party at the Brooklyn Heights apartment of Norman Rosten, the poet and playwright, who would become one of her closest friends and confidants.
Marilyn’s opening remarks to Miller were boastful and sassy. “Four years ago when we met, I was a struggling starlet. Today, as you know, I’m an international movie star. Not bad.”
“Not bad at all,” he said, “and you look, if anything, even more dazzling than when I first saw you.”
“You look fabulous, too.” She said.
“I’m not so sure. My craggy face has a few more lines. If I were in the movies, a director would cast me as your father.”
“Sometimes a girl needs a father,” she said. As part of a subtle inquiry about his marriage, she asked, “Are you still living in Brooklyn?”
“Still living on Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights,” he said. “I recently in-stalled a cork floor in my study. It cuts down on noise.”
“That indicates you’re planning to stay there,” she said. “Eli told me that things are a bit rocky at home.”
“Perhaps,” Miller said. Nothing, even a marriage, is forever.”
“That was true of my marriage to Joe DiMaggio,” she said. “Today, I’m free, white, and twenty-one.”
“Marilyn, please, this is an integrated party, and that phrase is increasingly viewed as racist.”
“I’m not a racist,” she said. “In fact, I have black blood in me.”
He looked at her in astonishment, but didn’t question her further.
Throughout her life, she told people that she had black blood in her and often referred to her “nigger behind.” There seems to be no basis for her claim. Yet it could never be proven one way or the other, because of the uncertainty about who her father was.
On the way home with Anne Jackson and Eli Wallach, Marilyn denounced Miller. “The god damn bastard didn’t even ask for my phone number.”
Two weeks later, Miller called her at the Waldorf Towers. Apparently, he’d gotten her phone number from Paula Strasberg. He invited her to meet him again at the home of Norman Rosten. “Norman is away for the weekend, and I have the use of his apartment.”
Changing into three different dresses before one satisfied her, she took a taxi to the Rosten home, where she encountered the informally dressed play-wright wandering about in his bedroom slippers.
It was the beginning of their affair. As she would later tell Shelley Winters, “He’s not an athlete in bed like Joe, but he brings sincerity of purpose.”
“What in hell is that?” Winters asked, sarcastically. “Any other unusual characteristics?”
“There is one,” Marilyn said. “When we slip around to dine in out-of-the-way restaurants, he never picks up the check.”
“That I understand,” Winters said. “It’s been a long time since he’s had a hit.”
“Arthur is that mystery father-lover I’ve always been searching for, and he evokes my historical hero, Abraham Lincoln. Shelley, do you think Lincoln and Arthur have the same type of penis?”
“How in hell would I know?” Winters asked. “I’ve never fucked either of them. When Lincoln was president, I was still a virgin.”
When Marlon Brando called to find out what was going on, she told him, “If I was nothing but a dumb blonde, Arthur wouldn’t be in love with me. You can’t spend an entire lifetime in bed. You have to spend some time talking to your boyfriend. He respects me. He even said I have the makings of an intellectual.”
“That’s funny,” Brando said. “Miller told Norman Mailer that you’re an amazing girl with the breath of a turnip.”
“Breath or brain?” she asked.
“How in fuck do I know?”
As Miller’s affair with Marilyn intensified, the venue for their sexual trysts was often the apartment of Norman Rosten. Miller was also a frequent visitor at the Waldorf Towers. When the weather turned warm, they often slipped away to the Rosten summer place in Port Jefferson, on the north shore of Long Island. Miller was an occasional visitor to the farmhouse of Milton Greene in Weston, Connecticut, although Greene and Miller seemed engaged in a battle over possession of Marilyn.
Miller also resented her other mentor, Lee Strasberg. The playwright told her that she had the potential to become one of the great actresses of the stage. He resented Strasberg’s intrusion into their life, and criticized the drama coach whenever he had the chance.
In his enigmatic way, columnist Walter Winchell broke the news of Miller’s romance with Marilyn. He wrote: “America’s best known blonde moving picture star is now the darling of the pro-left.” Privately, Winchell said, “Miller is nothing but a big communist. Just ask J. Edgar Hoover.”
Sometimes, when Marilyn wanted to go to a party, she asked Eli Wallach to go with them. The actor served as her “beard.” At the party, she would “accidentally” encounter Miller.
When she moved from the Waldorf Towers into an apartment, Miller would continue to be her most frequent visitor. More and more members of the press were learning of the affair. When cornered, she told a reporter from The New York Daily News, “You must be kidding! Arthur Miller is a married man, and I don’t date married men, for your information.”
She told her maid, Lena Pepitone, “I’m extending my stay in New York. Arthur is going to make my life different, better, a lot better. He is the key to the existence I’ve always wanted, but never found.”
In her confusion, Marilyn continued to see her psychoanalyst, Dr. Margaret Hohenberg. She told the doctor, “I need sessions with you to get me through the day and barbiturates and vodka to get me through the longest nights.”
When Capote came to visit Marilyn at her new apartment, she threatened to have him bumped off if he went around New York gossiping about her affair with Miller. “I know people in Murder, Inc.” she said. “One call to Sam Giancana, and your wispy little voice will be heard no more.”
Miller had nothing to say when asked by the press. However, uncharacteristically, he did speak to Robert Ajemian, a reporter for Time magazine. “She is the most womanly woman I can imagine. Being with her, people want to die. This girl sets up a challenge for every man. Most men become more of what they are natively when they are around her. A phony becomes more of a phony, a confused man more confused, a retiring man more retiring. She’s kind of a lodestone that draws out of the male animal his essential qualities.”
***
As Marilyn packed up her possessions to fly back to Los Angeles during the waning months of 1955, she felt more empowered than ever, and although insecurities lingered, she was more experienced and confident as an actress. She was still $50,000 in debt, and Milton Greene had run out of money to finance both her and Marilyn Monroe Productions.
But a bail-out was on the way. The head honcho at Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck, who “treated me like a Saturday night whore,” was gone. Buddy Adler had taken over the studio. The silver-haired executive showed more belief in Marilyn’s star power than anyone else in Hollywood.
She was lured back for the filming of Bus Stop, with a contract that called for an upfront check of $150,000.
In addition to her fee as a star, more money was added to her bank account when she sold Fox a screenplay called Horns of the Devil, a film property which she had previously optioned with Milton Greene.
With this extra money coming in, Greene and Marilyn had purchased the film rights to Terence Rattigan’s new comedy, The Sleeping Prince, which was a year away from opening on Broadway with Barbara Bel Geddes and Michael Redgrave in the leading roles. In Marilyn’s view, neither actor had any chemistry at all.
Laurence Olivier (left) and Richard Burton
Although she was flirting with asking Laurence Olivier to star opposite her, during a period that lasted a few months, she felt that Richard Burton would be a better choice, and she wanted to set up a rendezvous with him.
Virtually unprecedented, Marilyn’s revised contract gave her approval of directors, and named sixteen—“and only them”—that she would allow to helm her. They included Billy Wilder, George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann, William Wyler, Elia Kazan, Carol Reed, David Lean, John Huston, Joshua Logan, John Ford, Lee Strasberg, Vincent Minnelli (for musicals only), Vittorio de Sica, Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, and Joseph Mankiewicz.
***
Back in Hollywood, preparing for her role in Bus Stop, Marilyn “rounded up the posse,” as she called her friends such as Jeanne Carmen, Shelley Winters, and Robert Slatzer. She also called Peter Lawford, the brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy, on whom she was showering lots of attention. Otherwise, as she told Carmen, “Peter would be yesterday’s news for me if not for his link to Jack.”
Lawford became more urgent in her life when JFK told her that he wanted his brother-in-law to be his liaison, arranging secret meetings between the two of them.
He explained to her that he wanted to see her any time she came East, and he also said that he’d be making several trips to California where he would have a suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, at least officially. “Unofficially, I’ll be staying with Peter and Pat in Santa Monica. My sister and my brother-in-law will be the perfect cover for us.”
Long before JFK had become a senator, she’d had a relationship with Lawford. It had begun in 1951 when she met him in the office of the William Morris Agency. Reportedly, he found the twenty-five year old “voluptuous,” and began dating her.
She wasn’t that physically attracted to Lawford, or so she said, but she accepted his invitation. She’d later tell Jeanne Carmen that, “When a big movie star asks you out, and you’re struggling up the Hollywood ladder, you go for it.”
When Lawford met Carmen through Marilyn, he began to date her, too, although neither of the blondes seemed jealous of the other, as neither of them regarded Lawford as “a big catch.”
Marilyn told Slatzer, “Peter wants me for arm candy—nothing more, nothing less. We’ve rolled around in the hay a few times, but it was no big deal. Most of the time I get a good night kiss on the cheek, maybe a feel of my breasts in the car going to a premiere.”
Carmen presented much the same story, telling Marilyn, “I think Peter is gay. You and I are the two sexiest things walking around on two feet, and you’d think he’d never let us out of his bed. But, no, not Peter.”
Marilyn claimed that Slatzer had told her that Lawford liked to cruise public toilets looking for “rough trade” on whom he liked to perform fellatio, his favorite sexual expression.
“I believe that,” Carmen said.
Lawford’s homosexuality became apparent to Marilyn when he showed up at her house with fellow actor Robert Walker, who was to die in 1951. “He wanted a three-way that night,” Marilyn told Carmen, “and I obliged. After all, Walker is a handsome actor in his own right and former husband of Jennifer Jones. It didn’t work out too well. Peter spent most of the night servicing Walker and not me. I felt like the third wheel.”
“Both of them are dating Nancy Davis, and I wonder if she goes in for that kinky stuff,” Carmen said.
“I don’t know,” Marilyn said. “But Peter told me that Nancy gives a better blow job than I do.”
“That’s why she’s called the Fellatio Queen of Hollywood,” Carmen said.
June Allyson, MGM’s “sweetheart,” gave a different version of Marilyn’s relationship with Lawford. Allyson and her husband, Dick Powell, had been invited as weekend guests of Gene Kelly. Allyson claimed that Lawford showed up for the weekend with Marilyn, and that they shared the same bedroom.
“In the middle of the night, maybe three in the morning, Marilyn pounded on our door,” Allyson said. “Wrapped only in a bath towel, she begged us to let her come in and sleep in our bed until morning. ‘Peter is just too kinky for me,’ she told us, but she didn’t explain what that meant. We let her sleep with us. She pulled off that towel and crawled in with us, but I insisted on sleeping in the middle.”
(left to right) Robert Walker, Peter Lawford, and Tony Curtis
Lawford confided to director George Cukor, with whom he’d had a long-ago affair, that he had liked Marilyn in the beginning “when she was still Norma Jeane. She was vulnerable and even shy. But when she truly became Marilyn Monroe, she turned me off. What is she doing? Trying to become another Jayne Mansfield? Those skin-tight dresses and a décolletage that plunges all the way to San Diego. Wanton women leave me cold, and I think Marilyn should wash her vagina more often.”
In an interview, Lawford seemed to forget that he’d had an affair during the late 1940s with the blonde goddess, Lana Turner. He told a reporter, “There are many girls with long blonde hair and a sexy figure whom men consider beautiful. But I don’t. To me, a girl with a well-groomed look, not the flamboyant type, but a quiet beauty who radiates health and vitality is the greatest beauty of all. I go for the college type, not movie sirens.”
When Marilyn read this, she told Carmen, “I guess that this is Peter’s way of telling me our dating days are over.”
She was ready to move on from Lawford, but when she became involved with JFK, she changed her mind.
Late in 1955, he called her and invited her to a party. He said that Tony Curtis would be delighted to escort her. In the late 1940s, Curtis and Marilyn had had a brief fling, and she was aware that he and Lawford “were a sometimes thing.”
Before ringing off, Lawford told Marilyn, “Have I got a surprise for you at the party.”
She had been at the party for only half an hour before Lawford approached her and whispered, “You have a visitor waiting upstairs behind the second door to the left. Tony will understand. He’ll be occupied with me later tonight.”
“It’s him, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Why don’t you go up the steps and find out for yourself? You don’t want to keep him waiting.”
Excusing herself, she did not rush up the steps, but walked slowly and seductively. Adjusting herself, she knocked on the door and heard a voice call for her to come in. When she opened the door, she was delighted to see JFK lying nude on the bed except for a pair of white briefs.
“Lock the door and come to papa,” he told her. “Let’s get down to business. We’ll catch up on all the gossip later.”
She did as instructed. As she’d later confide to Carmen, “I bent over to kiss him and with my right hand, searched inside his underwear. With one of his hands, he checked out my breasts. I kissed him so hard, his mouth ended up with scarlet lipstick.”
In some of their encounters, JFK had to get dressed and rush away after having sex. But on this particular night, he was sleeping over at the Lawfords and had plenty of time, it seemed. She watched as he took a shower, but didn’t want to join him because she’d so careful y made herself up that evening—“and didn’t want to look like a river rat.”
He liked to hear the latest Hollywood gossip, but on this night he seemed burning with a certain political passion.
Before the night ended, she felt she’d gained an insight into American politics that few others knew. She came away feeling more politically informed than her more activist friend, Shelley Winters, who was having a sometimes affair with Adlai Stevenson.
Before he flew out of Los Angeles, JFK told Marilyn that he and his father had it on good authority that Eisenhower was going to step down in 1956 and that Richard Nixon would be the heir apparent for the Republican nomination for president.
He also claimed that the ambassador had promised Lyndon Johnson financing if he’d make a run for the White House, providing “he’d name me as his vice presidential running mate.”
“Would you believe that Texas rattlesnake turned dad down?” JFK asked. “The arrogance of that shithead. I’m still seeking the vice presidency but, alas, maybe with Shelley’s boyfriend, Adlai Stevenson, at the head of the ticket. My goal is to serve as the vice president for 1956 and 1960 and then run as president in 1964 and 1968.”
“Ambitious plan, I would say,” she said. “For all I know, I’m shacked up with a man who one day will be in the history books, right alongside Abraham Lincoln.” In fact, I’ll be your chief supporter—read that, ‘athletic supporter.’”
“Come over here, kitten,” he said, “I’m not finished with you yet.”
The next day, Lawford called Marilyn. “I want you to take this as a compliment. Jack spent more time with you than any other woman. He’s sort of a rooster in the hen house. It’s bam, ba bam, and thank you ma’am, and then he’s on to his next conquest. I once gave this party for him, and he disappeared with this brunet e into my library. He placed her up on a desk, hiked up her dress, and did his business before she even knew the games had started. No sooner had he done that than he was back in my living room looking for his next victim. I had to remind him to zip up his pants.”
“Ever our shining knight,” she said. “You must realize that our future fame will lie in the fact that we knew and were intimate with this great man. Long after the world has forgotten Ladies of the Chorus and Son of Lassie, we’ll be remembered because of him.”
***
“She was a great teacher, but got really jealous of the men I saw. She thought she was my husband.”
Marilyn Monroe on Natasha Lytess
Natash Lytess, the acting coach at Columbia, met Marilyn in the early spring of 1948. In her unpublished memoirs, the Russian-born woman recalled the day:
“Marilyn Monroe wiggled nervously into my office dressed in a red frock of knitted wool that hugged her thighs. It was cut very, very low. It was clear that she did not wear a bra. There was a lump on her nose which needed a plastic surgeon. Her voice was like a knife clattering on a cafeteria plate. She had dyed, pale yellow hair, a petulant mouth, and a body…well, a gauche, vacuous-faced girl dressed like a trollop.”
What Marilyn saw was a very Slavic-looking woman with a pencil-thin figure, a thick mane of graying hair, and an imperial manner. Her face was so pale it looked like her body had been dug up from a graveyard. Her dark, men-acing eyes seemed to penetrate Marilyn.
Natasha had been shown a screen test Marilyn had made at Columbia and was not impressed. But on second thought, she claimed that she saw “some potential there.” Harry Cohn had just signed Marilyn to a six-month contract at $125 a week, and he was “seriously pissed off when she wouldn’t let me fuck her.”
Marilyn was taken on as a pupil in some of her communal classes, and Natasha also agreed to give her private acting lessons. For these, a check arrived from Howard Hughes.
Although Marilyn and Natasha were the odd couple, as they were called at Columbia, a working relationship was nonetheless cemented between them. Natasha worked particularly hard on Marilyn’s delivery, although she taught her the unfortunate habit of moving her lips before actually speaking. Slowly, very slowly, Natasha seemed to make Marilyn feel more secure. “When I met her, she was afraid of her own shadow.”
“You’ve named yourself Marilyn Monroe,” Natasha told her, “but you’re still Norma Jeane. Under my instruction, I will make you into this thing…this Marilyn Monroe.”
Almost from the beginning, Marilyn came to realize that Natasha had a lesbian fascination with her. Marilyn confided to Shelley Winters, “She’s falling in love with me, and I don’t really want to submit, but I guess I’ll have to.”
In her autobiography, Natasha admitted that after three weeks of training, she told Marilyn, “I want to love you.”
As Marilyn confided to Winters, “I told her that she could make love to me, but that I would be passive. I said I appreciated her instruction, but that I could not really return her love. She agreed to those terms. After the war, when I decided to become a star, I knew I’d have to fuck a lot of men in Hollywood, guys like Joe Schenck, but I didn’t realize that included women, too.”
“I might have lesbian feelings,” Marilyn once said. “I know many men who picked me up claimed I must be a lesbian because I didn’t really respond to them. Of course, I might not have responded because they were such turn-offs.”
During the early stages of their relationship, Natasha and Marilyn had many confrontations, especially when Marilyn started spending more and more time with Johnny Hyde, her aging mentor. Natasha mockingly referred to Hyde as “the hunchback.”
Although Marilyn occasionally walked out on Natasha, she came back eventually, her relationship with the acting coach enduring for six long years. She even lived for a time in Natasha’s small apartment. But when Hyde left his wife, and moved into a luxury rental, Marilyn moved out and went to live with him. She still continued her acting lessons with Natasha, however.
As the months went by, Natasha came to accept how very limited her relationship with Marilyn would be.
As she wrote, “I was the older woman holding out for a crumb from the cake. Marilyn knew how much I cared for her, and she exploited my feelings, the way a beautiful young boy will take advantage of an aging homosexual. Actually, I found that Marilyn, in spite of the fact she always pictured herself a victim, was not so innocent. She was very manipulative. She was willing to do anything to get ahead, to use anybody who came into her life.”
“Natasha and Johnny were enemies,” claimed Winters, “because each of them wanted to possess Marilyn.”
After the death of Hyde, Marilyn tried to commit suicide, according to Natasha. “I saved her life. If it were not for me, there would be no Marilyn Monroe strutting her stuff before the camera.”
When Marilyn made a movie, Natasha was always on the set, telling her what to do, even if she contradicted the director’s wishes, which she often did. Jane Russell on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes found Natasha annoying. Once, Natasha clashed with the director Howard Hawks, who subsequently banned her from the set.
Natasha claimed that Marilyn was not a natural actress, but that in time, she could become a good one. “She has to learn to have a free voice and a free body to act. Luckily, she has a wonderful instinct for the right timing.”
Natasha Lytess
Natasha also had conflicts with producer Nunnally Johnson on the set of How to Marry a Millionaire. “That dyke broad is going to ruin Marilyn’s marriage to DiMaggio, and she may even end up ruining Marilyn,” Johnson charged.
During his brief marriage to Marilyn, DiMaggio detested Natasha so much that he referred to her as “Morticia.”
By 1954 and 1955, Natasha’s long reign with Marilyn was coming to a sad ending. Whatever role she had played in Marilyn’s life was being usurped by Milton Greene and Lee Strasberg in New York.
At the Actors Studio, Maureen Stapleton claimed that Marilyn often talked to her about her problems with Natasha. “Imagine the difficulty of rehearsing love scenes with a female drama coach who’s in love with you,” Stapleton said. “Marilyn knew that Natasha wasn’t play acting, but really meant it. Few actors could hold up under that kind of pressure.”
Under Marilyn’s orders, Fox had added Natasha to its payroll. But during Marilyn’s long sojourn in New York, the checks began arriving later and later and, finally, weren’t mailed at all.
Since the Fox money was her sole means of support, Natasha was thrown into a desperate situation. Her calls and letters to Marilyn in New York were not answered. She was finally reduced to calling Marilyn “that ungrateful little bitch.”
To support herself, Natasha gave acting lessons to bottle blondes who wanted “to become the next Marilyn Monroe.”
Even after Marilyn returned to California, she continued to ignore Natasha, refusing to take her phone calls. “I want a new beginning,” she told friends, “and I don’t want to wander down memory lane with Natasha. I’m a different person today from that little girl who walked into her office in 1948. Paula Strasberg has replaced Natasha in my life, although at times I think she has the hots for me, too. It’s a curse that comes with being too sexy.”
Ignoring what Natasha had done for her, Marilyn began to blame her for all those “cutie pie dumb blonde roles” she’d starred in. “I keep playing the same character, and I’m sick of it. With Paula and Lee, I can grow as an actress. Natasha has nothing else to teach me.”
As tensions mounted, Natasha virtually stalked her, forcing Marilyn to call her attorney, Irving Stein, to warn her “to back off.’
In her plea to Stein, Natasha claimed, “My only salvation is Marilyn, an actress I created. At the studio, I fought for her, making myself the heavy. When I call her house, she refuses to speak to me. I am horrified. I feel she’s my private property, since I molded her into this thing called Marilyn Monroe. I’m in ill health and have no savings. I’m totally dependent on her. Let me spend just half an hour with her, and I can change her mind. I know I can.”
“No way!” Stein shouted into the phone. “Stay away or else I’ll swear out a complaint against you for harassment!” Then he slammed down the phone.
Natasha made one final effort to reach Marilyn, even going to her home in Beverly Glen. Milton Greene answered the door and refused entrance to her. “I have cancer,” she sobbed. “I’m dying.”
“Okay, I’ll have Marilyn send you a check for a thousand dollars. A farewell gift. Now get out of here!”
Feeling completely morose and dejected, Natasha headed back to her car. She looked up at the second floor window to discover Marilyn looking down at her through parted curtains.
By 1964, two years after Marilyn’s tragic death, Natasha was living in a small apartment in a ghetto in Rome. Her doctor told her that her cancer was growing worse. She took a train to a cancer clinic in Switzerland, where she subsequently died.
***
Paul Newman’s words about Elvis Presley had been prophetic. Colonel Parker adamantly rejected the idea of Bus Stop as a suitable vehicle. Parker’s exact words were, “I’m not gonna let my star appear in some play by a queer. The next thing I know, Elvis will be asking for a role in a play by Tennessee Williams.”
Bus Stop was still running at the Winter Garden in Manhattan when shooting on the film version began in February of 1956. The play would run until April 21, 1957.
During the shoot, Norma Jeane Mortensen legally and officially changed her name, in court, to “Marilyn Monroe,” informing the judge that she found “my real name is a handicap in motion pictures.”
Her acting coach, Paula Strasberg, showed up on the California set to direct Marilyn, even though the picture already had a talented director in Joshua Logan. What a New Yorker like Paula knew about rehearsing Marilyn in a cornpone drawl and as a “bad singer” remains a mystery.
Almost until shooting began, Marilyn held out for “any actor except Don Murray” to play Bo Decker, the bronco-riding obnoxious but hunky braggart. After her disappointment about her first choices—Marlon Brando, Monty Clift, Elvis Presley, and Paul Newman—having either dropped out or being turned down for the role, Marilyn then decided that she and Rock Hudson would cause combustion on the screen. Although Hudson seemed willing to be her co-star, Universal would not release him, even though Marilyn promised to make a picture for them as part of a casting deal.
Paul Newman
At the debut of filming for Bus Stop, the cast, crew, and executives at Fox were sharply divided over Marilyn’s makeup, which was supposed to simulate “a girl who never saw sunlight.” Whitey Snyder was instructed to apply plenty of white, cornstarchy face powder with just hint of a pale pink rouge, although he later claimed that it made Marilyn “look like hell.”
Marilyn herself rejected the original costume she was to wear as the saloon singer Cherie. She went to wardrobe and finally found a flea-bit en costume off the rack, a goldish-green lamé with a ratty monkey fur. Logan said it was “something that Ida Lupino might wear playing a roadhouse whore in a 1940s picture.”
When Marilyn encountered the female supporting star of the picture, Hope Lange, she told Logan that he had to insist that she darken her fair hair. “The picture already has its blonde star,” she said.
John Springer, publicist for the film, told the author, “Marilyn also became jealous of Lange when she saw that Murray was falling in love with her. They would later marry. Marilyn did not find Murray sexually attractive, but she seemed to resent that he fell for Lange and not her.”
Springer also hired another publicist, the attractive and well-educated Patricia Newcomb, who had impeccable credentials as a “bluestocking” woman of culture and breeding.
At first, Marilyn got on with her, but later accused Newcomb of trying to lure a boyfriend in his 30s away from her. Even though “madly in love” with Miller, Marilyn nonetheless slept with a number of men during the filming.
Newcomb vaguely resembled Marilyn, both of them standing five feet six. She also had blonde hair and that little girl smile that evoked the on-screen Marilyn. Logan referred to Newcomb as “a jungle cat in repose.” After Marilyn got into a jealous fight with Newcomb, she demanded that she be fired. Ironically, Newcomb would eventually come back into Marilyn’s life as one of the key players in Marilyn’s final days, during August of 1962.
A powerful director like Logan was bound to clash with Paula Strasberg. One afternoon, when he approved a scene, Paula objected and demanded that it be shot again. “I threw the cunt off the set,” he said, “and told her never to come back.”
As if to retaliate, Marilyn came down with bronchitis, probably because she’d been overexposed to the cold while wearing a flimsy outfit. Greene drove her to the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles and checked her in.
When Greene came by for a visit to Marilyn’s hospital room the following afternoon, he found Joe DiMaggio putting on his pants. It was obvious that the baseball hero had had sex with the patient. Apparently, she took the occasion to tell DiMaggio that she was going to marry Arthur Miller, who was currently residing in Nevada, establishing a residency requirement before his upcoming divorce from his loyal wife, Mary Slattery.
Logan wondered how the love scenes between Bo and Cherie would go, since Marilyn obviously held Murray, who was making his first movie, in contempt. Their first shoot together had been a disaster.
As a rambunctious and tactless cowboy who’s far from home, Bo has accompanied Cherie (Marilyn) to a dive called the Blue Dragon Café. As she tries to escape his amorous advances, he grabs her costume and rips off the sequined train. She yanks it back from him. “Give me back my tail.” Her jerky movement was so violent that she hit him in the face, causing two cuts and a seriously damaged eye.
Logan hoped she would apologize—in fact, Murray demanded it. But instead, Marilyn yelled at him, “Damn you, damn you, and damn you. I will NOT APOLOGIZE! You don’t belong in this picture. It’s only justice that you got hurt.” Bursting into tears, she ran to her dressing room and wouldn’t come out for the rest of the afternoon.
In spite of that, Logan was able to make peace between his two actors, and even enticed her into a passionate kissing scene, which also became a bone of contention. Forgetting her true feelings about Murray, she kissed him almost violently. It was so passionate she even drooled, the camera catching a string of saliva pouring out of her succulent mouth and running down her chin.
When Marilyn wanted the scene kept in, “the prissy film editor” [her words] cut the scene, infuriating her. She unfairly blamed Logan, accusing him of being a homosexual. “You don’t know what love between a man and a woman is like. I bet you drooled a lot when you sucked Paul Newman’s cock.”
The next day, Logan forgave her and, being the professional director he was, continued with the shoot. Perhaps from the Strasbergs, she’d learned about Logan’s closeted life as a homo-sexual in New York.
Even so, at one point she became so frustrated that she placed a hysterical call to Miller in Nevada. “I can’t make this picture. I’m going to walk off the set. The crew, including Logan, hates women. They are cruel to me. I’m trying my best, but everybody is plotting against me. I no longer trust Milton Greene. He’s just trying to use me as a meal ticket.”
Marilyn as Cherie in Bus Stop
Miller finally got her to cool down, and eventually persuaded her to hold out until the end of the shoot. Suspecting during the call that she was heavily drugged, he promised her that he’d be with her soon.
“Papa, you’ll protect me, won’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, Norma Jeane, I’ll be there for you.”
After a bad night, the following morning she tried to enlist Logan’s sympathy. “I’m nearly thirty years old,” she said, “and some mornings I don’t know if I can get up to face the camera. My rough life, the abuse of my body, is beginning to show in my face. When I have a close-up, I die a thousand deaths.”
At the end of the shoot, Marilyn did not say goodbye to Murray.
During her farewell to Logan, she said, “I’m getting ready to join Arthur Miller in New York. Cooking for my husband, Jim Dougherty, was easy: a slab of beef, mashed potatoes, and peas and carrots. Joe DiMaggio liked only his family’s Sicilian recipes. But Arthur’s mother is having to teach me all of his favorite dishes—chopped chicken liver, chicken soup with matzoh balls, gefilte fish, and borscht. As for potato pierogies, forget it. He can go home to mother for that dish.”
Upon its release, Bus Stop, Marilyn’s twenty-fourth film was, according to many critics, her finest performance.
In spite of all the difficulties between them, Logan told the press, “She can become one of the greatest stars we’ve ever had if she can control her emotions and guard her health. I don’t think she ever really had two days of happiness in her life.”
Hope Lange, Don Murray
Before leaving the set of Bus Stop, she presented him with a picture of herself portraying Sarah Bernhardt. “Please, every morning, place a yellow rose beside this picture. Please.”
He was taken aback, finding that an odd request. “I won’t even have to go to a florist. I grow yellow roses at home.” Of course, he did not honor such a ridiculous request.
Most of Marilyn’s fans liked her portrayal of Cherie, although many critics blasted her. Columnist Sheilah Graham praised Marilyn’s performance, but Alain Brien lambasted her, claiming she never looked less glamorous. “Her blue saucer eyes are chipped at the edges. The soft yellow hair is as synthetic as springy as oak shavings. And her voice has the flat whine of a Liverpudlian doing a bad imitation of Shirley Temple.”
Privately, Miller was critical of her performance, calling it a burlesque. And he found Murray’s acting hardly worthy of a daytime TV soap opera.
She dreamed of an Oscar nomination, but didn’t get it. Ironically, the most criticized actor on the set, Murray, was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor.
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote the film’s most sensitive review, noting that she’d “gone beyond previous roles where she would wiggle, pout, and pop her big eyes playing a synthetic vamp. Joshua Logan has gotten her to be the beat-up B-girl of William Inge’s play, even down to the Ozark accent and the look of pellagra about her skin. He has gotten her to be the tinseled floozie, the semi-moronic doll who is found in a Phoenix clip-joint by a cowboy of equally limited brains. He has also gotten her to light the small flame of dignity that sputters pathetically in this chipper and to make a rather moving sort of her.”
***
Marilyn’s link to the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) has never been fully explained. Every year or so a document turns up shedding more light into the shadows of her past.
It is known that mobster Sam Giancana was linked to the Kennedy administration in the 1960s and to a rogue group within the CIA, plotting the assassination of Fidel Castro in Havana. But Giancana’s link to the CIA actually went back years earlier—to the Eisenhower administration.
Because of Giancana’s links to Marilyn, agents of the CIA recruited him in an attempt to accumulate blackmail evidence on President Kusno Sukarno of Indonesia during his state visit to the United States in 1956. Because of Sukarno’s links to communist countries such as China, he received a chilly welcome from John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State.
Before his visit, the CIA agents set out to learn all they could about this controversial Third World leader, a hero to the people of Indonesia during a four-year struggle which culminated in Indonesia’s independence, in 1949, from the Netherlands.
One spy learned that Marilyn was Sukarno’s favorite movie star, and that he’d watched both Niagara and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes nearly eighteen times each.
At CIA headquarters, it was suggested that Marilyn could be used to entrap Sukarno in a sexually compromising situation. But first, someone had to enlist her, someone who had influence over her. It was known at the time that Sam Giancana could blackmail her into doing his bidding. Consequently, he was the one designated to approach her.
This revelation appears in a controversial book, Double Cross, written by the brother of Sam Giancana, Chuck Giancana, and his son, also named Sam Giancana. “Marilyn’s desire to achieve stardom, coupled with her childlike desire to please, was exploited by the Mafia and the CIA as well,” the Giancanas wrote. “Her sexual charms were employed by the CIA to frame world leaders, among them President Sukarno of Indonesia. ‘Mooney’ [meaning mob boss Sam Giancana] lined Marilyn up as bait. Marilyn, perhaps more because she enjoyed the attentions of the world’s most powerful men than for reasons of patriotism, became a willing participant in the intrigue.”
Before she actually met Sukarno, she received a call from Senator Kennedy, who had been made aware of the plot through his own contacts within the CIA. Before Sukarno had flown out of Washington, JFK had met privately with him. Kennedy’s reputation as a ladies’ man was known to Sukarno, a womanizer himself who would go on to have more wives than Henry VIII.
JFK referred to Sukarno as “the commie prince.” “He wanted to know the names on my list of whatever pretty girls in Hollywood put out,” JFK told Marilyn.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “By the time I finish off this little brown man, he won’t be fit to seduce any other pretty gal.”
The organizer for some of the events scheduled for Sukarno in Beverly Hills was Joshua Logan. It was he contacted Hollywood’s most elite couple, William and Edie Goetz, asking them to sponsor a “Welcome to California” party for Sukarno at their Beverly Hills mansion. As the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, Edie had an address book that included the Hollywood A-list, such as Dore Schary, Samuel Goldwyn, and Jack Warner, plus such stars as Clark Gable and Tyrone Power.
Joshua Logan
Fred Lawrence Guiles, author of Legend, wrote, “Marilyn was invited and when she stepped into the salon, she was instantly surrounded by little men from Southeast Asia. Logan said that he had never before heard such a spontaneous sexual roar as came from the excited throats of the diminutive Asians.”
Columnist Drew Pearson was one of the guests. He later wrote “Throwing her arms around President Sukarno, Marilyn exclaimed, ‘I’m so pleased to meet the President of India.’ ‘I’m the President of Indonesia,’ prompted Sukarno.’ ‘Never heard of it,’ said the frank Marilyn. A friendship thereupon ended before it began.”
This story is probably apocryphal. If indeed it really happened, it was just a ruse to throw off the press. Before their meeting, Marilyn had been briefed by an agent from the CIA who had been driven to Marilyn’s apartment by Sam Giancana himself.
In Jane Ellen Wayne’s biography, Marilyn’s Men, she’d written, “Sukarno took a shine to Marilyn at the Beverly Hills party. She responded and, to the delight of the other guests, the sensual sparks flew between the two of them.”
On the final day of her twenty-ninth year, Marilyn looked radiant at the party. She also felt more confident than she had in years.
She was definitely on the A-list, with her handprints in cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater, her apartment on those movie star maps, and a bronze star on the sidewalk at Hollywood and Vine.
Sukarno was very discreet. His Nehru jacket was seen leaving the party a good forty-five minutes before Marilyn’s own departure. Outside, she got into the back seat of a long stretch limousine and was delivered to Sukarno’s luxurious hotel suite. He was waiting for her with champagne and caviar.
Unknown to the president, Giancana had arranged to have his bedroom install ed with equipment that would photograph Marilyn’s sexual tryst with the Indonesian leader. Giancana had employed Fred Otash, Hollywood’s most notorious detective and an expert on secret taping of stars, to perform the bugging.
After Sukarno’s departure from Los Angeles, Otash removed the tape from the hotel and shipped it to the CIA in Washington. It is unclear exactly what agents there planned to do with this incriminating and embarrassing piece of evidence.
In his book, Goddess, the Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, Anthony Summers wrote: “The CIA wanted to curry favor with Sukarno by using Marilyn as bait, but nothing came of it.”
While it is true that nothing but a one-night stand came of it, the tape might one day have had some potential use as blackmail.
Marilyn later admitted to Robert Slatzer, “I seduced Sukarno. I started out by stripping down nude in front of him and telling him, ‘Now that you’ve got what you want, what are you going to do with it?’ He rose to the challenge.”
President Sukarno of Indonesia
“How was it?” Slatzer asked. “Not as good as me, I hope?”
“Not as good as you. You look like an average Joe, but you’re okay between the sheets. With Sukarno, I got smaller equipment but faster action.”
***
After Elvis had seen Bus Stop, he was greatly disappointed that he did not get to play Bo. “The role would have been perfect for me,” he told his cronies. “Instead, I got to make some quickie shit called Loving You” (1957).
Nearly all biographies ignore the fact that Elvis and Marilyn met in the mid-50s. Those books will have to be rewritten in the wake of revelations in October of 2006 by Byron Raphael, a retired William Morris agent who worked for Elvis. He spilled the beans on a salacious secret he’d been harboring for nearly half a century, revealing a “one-night stand” between Elvis and the blonde goddess in 1956.
Raphael claimed that he received a call one night from Elvis, requesting that Marilyn be brought to him at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The agent called Marilyn, doubting if she’d accept such a request. But even though she was involved at the time with Arthur Miller, Marilyn took the bait and agreed to the rendezvous.
Raphael reported that when Marilyn came into Elvis’s suite, the famous pair started kissing even before saying a word to each other. Finally, she broke the silence, telling Elvis, “You’re not bad for a guitar player.” After only a few minutes on the living room sofa, according to Raphael, they got up and disappeared into the bedroom. He waited in the living room to take her home, but fell asleep, awakening hours later to find Marilyn and Elvis, both nude, emerging from the bedroom.
Not knowing when their sexual gymnastics would end, Raphael said he “bolted” from Elvis’s suite. Five days later, when he encountered Elvis, Raphael asked how it had gone with Marilyn. “She’s a nice gal, but a little tall for me,” he said. She was also nearly a decade older than him, but he was too much of a Southern gentleman to bring that up.
Raphael got the “historic” coming together of Elvis and Marilyn right. But there was much more to the story than what he knew.
One night in 1966, at an actor’s hangout off Times Square in New York, Shelley Winters, Marilyn’s roommate when she first hit Hollywood, revealed to actor John Ireland (star of the 1949 version of All the King’s Men) and to the author of this book a lot more about the interaction of Marilyn with The King. She claimed that their one-night stand blossomed into an on-again, off-again affair that lasted throughout the rest of the 50s, interrupted only by Elvis’ stint with the U.S. Army in Germany.
A lifelong friend and confidante of Marilyn, Shelley said that Marilyn also told her that Elvis as a lover didn’t match the allure of baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. She also claimed that Elvis “didn’t have Joe’s bat to hit home runs with.”
When Shelley asked Marilyn why she continued to see Elvis over the years, MM said, “Other than me, he’s the most famous person there is. How could I refuse? I don’t think Albert Einstein would be a great lover either, but if he called me to his bed, I’d come running. After all, I think he invented the atomic bomb or something.”
The author of this book also knew a young actor, Nick Adams, who arguably was Elvis’s best all time male friend. Nick had appeared with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), but is remembered today chiefly for his 1962 TV series, The Rebel. Nick died, allegedly from a drug overdose, in 1968. Many Hollywood insiders, including actor Forrest Tucker, insisted that he was murdered.
In 1964, when he was making Hell Is for Heroes, Nick confirmed to the author details about the Elvis/Marilyn tryst, telling much the same story that Shelley did.
“Elvis was never really that attracted to Marilyn,” Nick claimed. “Not only was she an older woman, she wasn’t really his type. He much preferred Ann-Margret.”
“Then why did he keep seeing her?” the author asked.
“It was an ego trip for him,” Nick said. “At the time, she was the world’s most beautiful and sexiest woman. And she probably found it thrilling to fuck with the man every other woman wanted. Hanging out together was a thrill for both of them. The sex was mere icing on the cake—not the cake itself.”
Although Shelley kept most of Marilyn’s secrets when she was alive, she privately told indiscreet stories about her after she’d died. “Marilyn and I fucked some of the same guys, but I never got around to Elvis. From what I hear, I didn’t miss all that much. Give me Burt Lancaster or John Ireland any day.”
Elvis Presley
Nick Adams as “The Rebel”
When Elvis began to see Marilyn secretly, he expressed his great regret that he had not co-starred with her in Bus Stop.
“Don Murray was no Elvis,” she assured him. “The two of us would have at least had the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. We would have created a nuclear blast that would have made us the screen team of the century.”
Sometimes Elvis didn’t want sex at all with Marilyn, and told her, “I just want to cuddle.” During some of these evenings, he would talk about his beloved mother, Gladys. Marilyn confessed to Elvis that mental illness ran in her family and that her maternal great-grandfather, Tilford Hogan, had hanged himself at the age of 82. Her maternal grandmother, Della, had died in a mental asylum at the age of 51—one year after Marilyn’s birth. She also told Elvis that her grandmother tried to smother her before being shipped off to the mental ward. But it is unlikely that Marilyn could remember such an incident, since she would have been barely 13 months old at the time. Elvis later confided to Nick Adams that “Marilyn fantasizes a lot about her past. Shit, man, she even told me that Clark Gable was her father.”
Marilyn’s most memorable evening with Elvis—at least according to Shelley—was when he danced “Jailhouse Rock” for her in the nude. “I giggled as I watched him flipping up and down. It was very funny and strangely erotic. Elvis could deliver, I guess,” Marilyn confessed to Shelley. “But he sure wanted to postpone penetration as long as possible. In my opinion, I think his ideal form of sex would be mutual masturbation. He sure likes to play with you down there. But he likes to use his fingers more than he likes to use the rod. One night, I was a bit drunk and jokingly kidded him, ‘Spare the rod, spoil the fuck, Elvis.’ He didn’t like that at all. In fact, he got up and put on his pants and told me to go home. But he called the next day and apologized.”
Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock
Elvis read less than one percent of the fan mail he received, and Marilyn read even less of her own. But the two of them liked to share some of their more outrageous letters with each other. Men throughout America sent Marilyn nudes of themselves, telling her in graphic detail just what they’d like to do with her in bed. And dozens of lesbians wrote with similar requests.
Most of Elvis’ mail—some ten thousand letters a week—came from young girls. Many of them wanted Elvis “to take my virginity,” and most enclosed photos of themselves ready, willing, and eager to be deflowered. Some of them threatened suicide if Elvis didn’t agree to meet them. The strangest letters came from distraught parents, who threatened to kill themselves if Elvis didn’t “cool down his act.”
“You’re turning my girl evil!” was a typical comment among these parental letters.
“I don’t see how I could be a threat to any parents’ daughters. I’m just up there on that stage doing what comes naturally,” Elvis said.
“Forget it,” Marilyn told him. “You’re doing fine. Just keep doing what you’re doing. Speaking of doing what comes naturally, why don’t you come over here and join me in bed and we’ll let Mother Nature take her course?”
After Elvis and Marilyn stopped dating, around 1960, and as a token of his gratitude, he bought her a moon-shaped bed whose headboard was upholstered in “shocking pink” leather with scarlet-red sheets and accessories.
When a truck pulled up with the bed at Marilyn’s bungalow, she refused to accept delivery. “Tell Mr. Elvis that I don’t rock and I don’t roll in a Valentine box,” she told the deliverymen. “I would never sleep in a bed that would attract more attention than me. After all, I’m the star!”
***
In a letter to Cecil Beaton, Truman Capote wrote: “By the time you get this, Marilyn Monroe will have married Arthur Miller. Saw them the other night, both looking suffused with a sexual glow. I can’t help feeling this little episode will be called Death of a Playwright.”
The saga of the Miller/Monroe romance became tabloid fodder, one headline citing them as THE INTELLECTUAL AND THE NAKED VENUS. Robert Levin, a magazine writer, claimed, “The upcoming marriage of the pinup girl of the age and the nation’s foremost intellectual playwright seems preposterous.” The New York Post referred to the coupling as, “America’s number one representative of the Body & the Mind.”
Marilyn told her friends at Actors Studio “We’re going to have the greatest kids in America. With my beauty and his brain, how can we go wrong?”
On June 21, 1956, during the peak of the McCarthy era’s “Red Scare,” Marilyn was caught up in a political scandal as Miller was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Ostensibly, the hearings dealt with his application for a passport so that he could fly with Marilyn to London for the filming of The Sleeping Prince, later retitled The Prince and the Showgirl.
But he knew that conservative lawmakers would make intense efforts to link his name with any communist party affiliations he might have had during the early 1940s. Like Elia Kazan, his friend, Miller would be asked to name names of “fellow Reds.”
At first, he was tempted to cooperate with the committee, if only to free himself so he could continue his career as a playwright and author. It was Marilyn who talked him out of it, not wanting to bring any more pain to the already troubled lives of Hollywood writers.
The hearing virtually went nowhere, as Miller evaded most questions until he was threatened with a contempt of Congress charge. Then, the Democratic Representative from Pennsylvania, Francis E. Walter, told Miller that if he could arrange for him (Walter) to be photographed with Marilyn, he would drop the contempt charges. Both Miller and Marilyn refused the offer.
After endless wrangling, Miller was granted his passport so that he could travel to England. It was valid for only six months.
Marilyn was delighted, but on occasion, when she got mad at Miller, she referred to him as “that fucking communist” to her maid, Lena Pepitone.
It was later revealed that Senator Kennedy intervened on Miller’s behalf, using his influence with the State Department to get Miller’s passport validated.
The case of the U.S. government against Miller would drag on for months. On July 19, 1957, a judge ruled that the Congressional committee did have the right to demand that Miller inform a Congressional committee about members of the Communist Party who he had known. For contempt of Congress, he was fined $500 and given a suspended jail sentence of one month. Miller’s lawyers continued to appeal through the courts until the U.S. Supreme Court reversed charges against him in August of 1958.
During the 1956 hearings, Miller announced to the world that he was going to marry Marilyn. She was furious. “He hasn’t even proposed yet,” she shouted at Milton Greene. Actually, she wasn’t sure she wanted to marry him and break up his family. At times, she seemed content to continue with their affair.
By June 22, she’d changed her mind and held a press conference announcing her intention of entering into her third marriage (or was it her fourth?). On June 29, 1956, in a brief civil ceremony in front of Judge Seymour Rabinowitz at the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains, New York, she married him. On July 1, she married him again in a Jewish ceremony with only family and such friends as the Milton Greenes and the Strasbergs invited.
The second time around, Rabbi Robert Goldberg conducted the ceremony at the home of Miller’s literary agent, Kay Brown. Marilyn appeared resplendent in a champagne-colored chiffon dress, carrying a bouquet of purple roses. Both she and Miller exchanged Cartier wedding bands.
Marilyn shocked many of her fans when she announced that she was converting to the Jewish faith. From Goldberg, she was given the tenets of the Re-formed branch of Judaism. The rabbi, who seemed a bit mesmerized by her, asked that she take along a copy of the Torah to study during her honeymoon.
Spyros Skouras, President at the time of Fox Studios, sent her not a telegram of congratulations, but one expressing his fears that patriotic Americans would boycott her future movies because of her association with Miller.
The coverage of her wedding to Miller was topped only by the oceans of ink devoted to the marriage of the abdicated King Edward VIII of England to the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. On the back of her wedding portrait, Marilyn scribbled: “HOPE! HOPE! HOPE!”
***
As early as February 9, 1956, it had been announced that Marilyn Monroe Productions had acquired the screen rights to Terence Rattigan’s play, The Sleeping Prince, which Milton Greene and Marilyn would later re-title as the more commercial The Prince and the Showgirl. Apparently, Laurence Olivier, the world’s leading Shakespearian actor, was going to be her co-star, although the contracts were yet to be signed.
Until the contract was signed, Marilyn secretly wanted Richard Burton to play the prince to her showgirl. Her history with the Welsh-born actor is muddled. When Burton was dating Susan, the daughter of Lee Strasberg, Marilyn told Susan’s father, “I had Burton back when he was making My Cousin Rachel with Olivia de Havilland. It was so very easy to take him away from that uptight bitch. He seduced me with that voice of his. As for his pockmarks, I told him they made him look vulnerable.”
Helen Hayes was cast on Broadway in a romantic French comedy, Time Remembered, with Burton and Susan as her co-stars. Burton wasn’t particularly enamored with Susan, but Susan fell madly in love with him.
Marilyn went out on several occasions with Burton and Susan. The younger actress may never have found out that behind her back, Burton was also in hot pursuit of Marilyn. She told Peter Lawford, “When a man like Burton chases after me, he usually catches me because I can’t run all that fast, especially in high heels.”
Negotiations with Burton didn’t work out because of other commitments, so Marilyn offered the role to Olivier. In England, he’d previously starred onstage in The Sleeping Prince alongside his mentally disturbed wife, Vivien Leigh, the screen’s immortal Scarlett O’Hara. Vivien had been horribly miscast as the American showgirl and was also considered too old for the movie version. Besides, Marilyn told the press, “The part is mine. I own it.”
At a press conference with Olivier in New York, Marilyn appeared in décolletage with a rather stiff and formal Olivier, a study in contrasts. Already, the press had hailed them as the greatest combination since the mating of black and white.
Her dress was held up with spaghetti straps, and one of the straps broke—deliberately or accidentally—during the confab. Reporter Judith Crist rushed to the rescue with a safety pin.
At this point, Olivier seemed annoyed at being upstaged. He told photographers, “No more leg pictures, boys.” He might as well have said “no more breast pictures.”
Privately, he whispered to an aide, “I’ve checked my zipper—I don’t want anything else falling out. I’m sure my very English cock would generate far more publicity than Miss Monroe’s already overexposed breast.”
When asked about Marilyn’s sexiness, Olivier said, “She has the extraordinary gift of being able to suggest one moment that she is the naughtiest little thing, and the next that she’s perfectly innocent. The audience leaves the theater gently titillated into a state of excitement by not knowing which she is, and enjoying it thoroughly.”
En route to England, a grumpy Arthur Miller complained about Marilyn’s twenty-seven pieces of luggage and having “to live in a goldfish bowl.” The Greenes and the Strasbergs flew to England with the honeymooning couple, and apparently this displeased Miller even more than the extra baggage.
Not since the arrival of the Spanish Armada had a foreign invasion created such chaos. On July 14, 1956 nearly one-hundred bobbies could not control the crowds. Cameras were crushed in the stampede. One reporter fell to the floor and was trampled upon by the mob. An ambulance arrived to rush him to the nearest hospital.
Waiting for them at the airport were Sir Laurence Olivier and Lady Olivier. If Vivien were jealous of the American star flying in to “take my role,” she masked it completely and was most gracious to Marilyn.
“Is this how you’re usually greeted?” Vivien asked her.
“Not bad for California orphan #3,463 who is now the most famous woman on Planet Earth,” Marilyn said. Perhaps Vivien found that statement immodest.
Vivien later regretted her decision to pose with Marilyn for the tabloids. “I should never have posed next to a woman twelve years younger than me. It was more than the age. No woman should pose next to Marilyn.”
Initially, the British press lauded Marilyn, although as reporters learned more about her, they turned against her and wrote unflattering copy. From the beginning, no reporter seemed to like her very dour husband. Miller got horrible reviews, one reporter calling him “as cold as refrigerator fish—not like a hot lover, more like a morgue keeper left with a royal cadaver.”
That night the London Evening News proclaimed, “She’s over here. She walks and she talks. She really is as luscious as strawberries and cream.” Reporters noted it was not only her first trip to England, but her first trip to Europe.
Hounded by the British press, Marilyn denounced them as “a pack of sex-starved schoolboys.”
The Oliviers had arranged for them to stay at Lord Moore’s country mansion, Parkside House, on ten acres of land outside Englefield Green, adjoining Windsor Park. “Sir Laurence told me it was a cottage,” Marilyn later said. “It’s a big drafty castle with no heat.”
She did ask Lord Moore what lay ahead down a long, dark corridor. “I don’t know, old girl. I always found the walk too boring to go down there and find out. I’d rather sit in the living room and enjoy a gin and tonic. How about you?”
Still recovering from working with Marilyn on Bus Stop, director Joshua Logan sent Olivier a telegram. “Load up the camera and put Marilyn in front of it, and keep Paula Strasberg off the set. Know in advance that she’ll never be on time. Perhaps she won’t show up at all.”
Olivier called Marilyn and begged her to show up for the press conference the following morning. She was an hour late. Olivier remarked, “At least she’s living up to her reputation.”
Olivier had first met Marilyn at a gala in Hollywood thrown by his lover, Danny Kaye. Years later, at their joint press conference in New York, he’d said, “One thing was clear to me: I was going to fall most shatteringly in love with Marilyn. It was inescapable. I thought she was so adorable, so witty, such incredible fun, and more physically attractive than anyone I could have imagined. I went home like a lamb reprieved from the slaughter just for now. Poor Vivien.”
He’d predicted to friends such as Noël Coward, another of his former lovers, “Marilyn and I will be wonderful in bed.”
From the very beginning, Marilyn had planned to seduce Olivier. “That’s the only way I know how to win him over to my side.”
Oswald Frewen, Olivier’s longtime friend, visited the set on several occasions. On his first day there, he said, “It was obvious to me that Larry had developed a crush on Marilyn. Her radar picked up on that. I knew it would be just a matter of days before they were fucking.”
The actual seduction may have occurred at Pinewood Studios when Marilyn stayed late one afternoon “to go over a scene in my dressing room with Sir Laurence.” Vivien had invited Miller to accompany her that night to the performance of a play in the West End.
Other than Paula Strasberg, Milton Greene may have been the only person to whom Marilyn admitted her seduction of Olivier. She told Greene, “I’ve known some great men—John F. Kennedy, Arthur, and now Sir Laurence. But sometimes they are better in their public performances than in the shows they put on in private.”
Soon after their unsuccessful seduction, Olivier soured on Marilyn. As he told Miller, “She does not care about who she keeps waiting, whose money she is spending. I also feel she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. My patience has worn thin. We should place Vivien Leigh and Marilyn Monroe in the same insane asylum. I’m going bonkers.”
Marilyn later confessed to her maid, Lena Pepitone, “He hated me. At parties, I wore tight, revealing gowns which I thought might help him overcome his English reserve. It didn’t help. He looked at me like he had just smelled a pile of dead fish. Like I was a leper, or something awful. He’d say something like, ‘Oh, how simply ravishing, my dear.’ But he really wanted to throw up.”
John Gielgud attended a party Rattigan threw at his country estate. “Poor Larry,” Gielgud said. “He has to deal with Vivien, a manic depressive, and now Miss Monroe, who seems so emotionally unbalanced she would make Frances Farmer look like a temple of mental health.”
From the beginning, Olivier found Paula Strasberg more difficult to handle than Marilyn herself. Paula was, in fact, directing her star. One day he overheard Paula tell Marilyn: “My dear, you are the greatest sex symbol in human memory. Everybody knows and recognizes that, and you should too. You are the greatest woman of your time, the greatest human being of your time, of any time. You can’t think of anybody, I mean—no, not even Jesus—except you’re more popular.”
Olivier was flabbergasted. In all his life, he’d never heard such flattery. “What was worse, Marilyn was eating up every word like it was the Ten Commandments or something.”
When Olivier challenged Marilyn on a particular scene, she reminded him that she was President of Marilyn Monroe Productions. “I own this film, and I own you, at least when you’re the director. You work for me, remember that, Mr. Director.”
Sometimes he would try to give her a very articulate direction, but she would look at him with a blank gaze. Then she’d go over to Paula, who would give her her marching orders for the scene. “Marilyn, honey, just think of Coca-Cola and Frankie Sinatra.”
Privately, Olivier told Rattigan, “Paula Strasberg knows as much about acting as a cleaning woman out in the foyer.”
Olivier claimed that Marilyn often showed up “looking like one of those witches in the opening scene of Macbeth. Bad skin. Matted hair. But she’d later emerge looking stunning. She was a real schizoid. She could literally transform herself into a completely different person. She became Marilyn Monroe, what-ever that was—perhaps an illusion onto which we could project our fantasies.”
Paula would order Marilyn to play a scene one way, and Olivier would give a contradictory direction. Confused and usually drugged, Marilyn would in-variably blow her lines.
The most infamous scene was when Marilyn tasted caviar. Her line was simple: “Oh, you poor prince.” But it took two days, more than three dozen takes, and twenty tins of caviar.
When she asked for better direction, Olivier told her, “Just look sexy.”
She ran from the set, screaming that Olivier had no respect for her as an actress. She rushed to her dressing room and called Lee Strasberg in New York, and kept him on the phone for three hours. He agreed to fly to London at once.
When Norman Mailer learned that Olivier had ordered Marilyn to be sexy, he claimed “that was like asking a nun to have carnal relations with Jesus Christ.”
When Lee Strasberg arrived at the gates of Pinewood Studios, Olivier had him barred from entering. Later, Strasberg met privately with Marilyn. But instead of helping her, he pressed an outrageous demand on her. Seeing her in a weakened condition, he concluded how dependent she was on Paula. He demanded $3,000 a week, with a ten-week guarantee, for Paula’s services. “Plus expenses, of course, and double pay for overtime.”
In her drugged condition, Marilyn conceded, although she’d have to pay a lot of that out of her profits. Milton Greene was furious, and his fight with Marilyn over Paula’s bill was the beginning of the end of their working relationship. Their love affair had ended long ago.
Miller sided with Greene on the matter, calling Paula “a hoax and a charlatan.” Dr. Margaret Hohenberg had flown in from New York as well to provide Marilyn with counseling. When Miller heard that the doctor was urging her to give in to the “Strasberg extortion,” he charged that she was in on the deal.
Strasberg had one final suggestion for Marilyn before flying back to New York. “Fire Olivier as director. I can fly in George Cukor to do the picture. Olivier is fucking it up.”
Miller, Greene, and Paula only increased Marilyn’s insecurities in dealing with Olivier. Miller told Marilyn that “Olivier is a notorious homosexual like John Gielgud. He’s trying to compete with you like one woman competing with another woman in the same film. Think Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. He’s like a coquette wanting to draw the attention to himself and away from you in the film.”
Greene also amplified her suspicions about Olivier: “This ham actor is fifty years old if he’s a day. His days as a romantic leading man are over. He puts on more makeup than you do. He also insists on photographing your bad side so he can turn his right side, his so-called good side, to the camera. He wants you to look as unattractive as possible.”
Paula set out to prove that Olivier was in love with himself. She relayed a comment he’d made to director William Wyler after viewing his appearance in Wuthering Heights. “ I was so beautiful, I could go down on myself.”
Not content to merely direct Marilyn, Paula one afternoon approached Olivier, charging that “your acting is totally artificial.”
He gave her his famous “gray-eyed myopic stare that can turn a person into stone.”
When Paula had to fly back to New York to attend to a personal emergency, there was a temporary respite on the set. Her departure gave Marilyn time to pursue her private life. Miller was sequestered in his study most of the time and didn’t want to go out at night, except for the rare occasion he accompanied Olivier to see the latest offerings in the theatres of London’s West End.
In his memoirs, Hollywood in a Suitcase, Sammy Davis, Jr. revealed one affair that Marilyn had that summer “with a close friend of mine. They met at my house. We had to arrange all sorts of intrigue to keep the affair secret. I used to pretend we were having a party, and Marilyn would arrive and leave at different times from my pall.”
Senator George Smathers of Florida told the author that that pall of Davis was none other than John F. Kennedy. He had lost his bid for the 1956 Democratic vice presidential nomination to Estes Kefauver, the conservative, coon-skin cap-wearing senator from Tennessee, by a narrow margin of only thirty votes. After that ordeal, then-Senator from Massachusetts JFK wanted a vacation, and he invited Smathers and Teddy Kennedy to go along, leaving a pregnant Jackie back in America.
Their ultimate destination was the French Riviera, where they rented a forty-two foot yacht. They hired a skipper and a French cook, and took along a “bevy of blondes.”
Feuding with Olivier, Marilyn refused for three days in a row to show up on the set. Vivien went to see her at her mansion, hoping to intervene as a peace-maker. Vivien shared her personal anguish with Marilyn and spoke of her own breakdowns, especially when she collapsed on the set of Elephant Walk in Ceylon (aka Sri Lanka). Elizabeth Taylor had been hired to replace her.
“That cow is probably waiting to replace me any day as the Queen of Hollywood,” Marilyn said.
Vivien told her that she’d fall en in love with her co-star, Peter Finch, and “at this very moment I’m carrying his child. I know it doesn’t belong to Larry.”
Vivien shared her impression of Marilyn with her friend Oswald Frewen. “The girl is rather vulgar and not the brightest bulb in the chandelier.”
Frewen later wrote, “Monroe had the brain of a poussin and one dress for day and evening: black and cut low.”
Later, Marilyn was saddened to learn that Vivien suffered a miscarriage on August 13, 1956.
The press had staked out Parkside House, and one sharp-eyed reporter spotted the Queen’s gynecologist paying a visit to Marilyn’s mansion. As a result, the tabloids accurately concluded that she was pregnant.
She’d hoped that a child might improve her ailing marriage, but it didn’t. Miller had to fly back to New York to attend to his ailing daughter. Before he departed, he left his diary on the desk in the library. When Marilyn went looking for something, she spotted it and could not resist the temptation to read it. The passages he’d written about her broke her heart, as she’d later claim. He called her “a troublesome bitch—not worth the effort. What a waste of love!”
She was fearful that she was going to have a miscarriage like Vivien. She began to drink vast amounts of champagne while still pill popping. She didn’t seem to be aware of the possible damage she might be causing to her fetus. When served English tea, she liberally poured gin into the teacup from a silver flask she carried around with her. Dexamyl was shipped in from New York, as each day she went through a never-ending cycle of uppers and downers. When Olivier tried to direct her, he found her in a barbiturate haze.
Gossip maven Louel a Parsons, on a visit to London from Hollywood, noted what was happening on the set. She later claimed that Marilyn “was like a child asking to be spanked.”
After several delays, Paula returned to London from New York. On her very first day back, she confronted Olivier with allegations she’d heard the night before from Marilyn, who claimed that without her in London to protect her, Olivier had been verbally abusive to her. When she delivered these accusations to Olivier, he called her “an overpaid cunt. You’ve already ruined this film. What other damage do you want to cause?”
Miller’s return to England did little to improve his marriage. On his first night back, he told Marilyn he’d accepted an invitation from Olivier to see a play in the West End. She screamed hysterically at him, referring to Olivier as “a cocksucker,” and accusing Miller of having an affair with him.
In New York, he’d told such friends as Stanley Mills Haggart, “I deliberately left my diary for her to read. I knew from the first day our marriage was a disaster. It should never have happened. Artists should not marry the Marilyn Monroes of the world—a brief fling, perhaps, but no exchange of wedding bands. Marrying Marilyn made about as much sense as marrying Jayne Mansfield.”
Vivien Leigh
Hoping for reconciliation, the next day she told him she was pregnant. “Who’s the father?” he asked.
That drove her to a psychiatrist, Anna Freud, the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud and one of the founders of child psychology. When Marilyn’s own analyst, Margaret Hohenberg, had to return to New York, she arranged for Marilyn to see Freud.
At one point, Miller talked to Freud herself, and both of them agreed that Marilyn was “but a child.”
Miller told Freud, “Larry Olivier calls my wife a spoiled brat, and I’m inclined to agree with him. She’s not as intelligent as she thinks she is. Maybe she is that dumb blonde she projects onto the screen.”
When Marilyn was later asked what it was like to be analyzed by one of the Freuds, she claimed, “She put me on the couch, the casting couch.”
It is not known if Marilyn was relating what really happened, or whether she was being witty.
***
The highlight of Marilyn’s visit to England was an invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II at a reception following a Royal Film Performance.
For her role in the movie, Olivier had already taught her how to curtsy. Before going to meet the Queen, he warned her how inappropriate it would be to show a lot of cleavage.
In the receiving line, Marilyn stood next to the handsome Victor Mature. She’d heard many stories about his sexual prowess, and had long been anxious to meet him. She’d once told Shelley Winters, “I need to find out what thrilled Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Lana Turner, Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, Betty Hutton, and Elizabeth Taylor.”
Winters told her that when author Gore Vidal saw that infamous nude picture of Mature taken when he served in the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II, he said, “If the Nazis had seen that picture, they would have surrendered immediately, bringing the war to an end.”
She later complained, “Victor’s dick is too big. He made me bleed. He wanted repeats. I said, ‘No way!’”
Marilyn would later claim, “Meeting the Queen was the most exciting thing ever to happen to me. I really didn’t know what to say. I just curtsied but I nearly lost my balance and fell over.”
Back in Hollywood, Marilyn told Peter Lawford and Jeanne Carmen, “Let’s face it: It was a case of the Queen of Hollywood meeting the Queen of England. Before Her Majesty extended her hand to me, I caught her running her eyes up and down my figure and looking right at my breasts. Do you think she has lesbian tendencies like her sister, Princess Margaret? Marlon Brando told me all about that one.”
To make small talk, the Queen asked Marilyn, “Do you like your new home? We’re neighbors, you know.”
“I thought you lived in Buckingham Palace!” Marilyn said.
“We often stay at Windsor Castle, so that makes us neighbors, doesn’t it?”
Oh yes, Windsor Park,” Marilyn said. “My husband and I have permits to ride our bicycles in your park.”
She was later introduced to Prince Philip and could not stop talking the next day about how handsome he was. “His Royal Highness undressed me with his eyes,” she claimed.
After meeting the Royals, she disappeared with Victor Mature, spending the night in his hotel suite. She arrived the next morning at Pinewood Studios.
She would later confess to Shelley Winters, “It was reading Arthur’s diary that drove me into the arms of Jack Kennedy, Victor Mature, and Prince Philip.”
“I can buy Kennedy and Mature, but aren’t you fantasizing about Philip? You know in the past you’ve told some tall tales. Albert Einstein comes to mind. Need I go on? When I first met you, you told me that Clark Gable was your father.”
“You can believe me or not,” Marilyn said. “I don’t give a fuck. I know the father of my baby is Prince Philip, and I also know it will be a boy. Do you think that one day he’ll become King of England, if some Irish terrorist blows up the Queen’s family?”
“Oh, Marilyn, I’m not sure that the crown is passed on that way in the Windsor family.”
It is not known if Miller knew of the various affairs Marilyn was having during the course of their so-called honeymoon. However, on one page of his diary, he’d scrawled the word “WHORE!”
Paula became increasingly worried about Marilyn and would later tell both Lee and Susan Strasberg, “Marilyn is delusional. At least I think so. She told me that Prince Philip has promised to divorce Queen Elizabeth and marry her. Of course, I realize men like Jack Kennedy will say anything and promise anything to screw Marilyn. Perhaps Philip did say something like that to her in a moment of passion. But perhaps he said nothing at all like that. Perhaps he was never alone for a moment with Marilyn. It could all be in her mind.”
Somehow, the story made its way around tout London. John Gielgud told a visiting Truman Capote, “A rumor is going around that Prince Philip is the father of Marilyn’s baby. How ridiculous!”
Dr. Anna Freud
Don’t be too skeptical,” Capote warned Gielgud. “I’ve found that Marilyn tells many a preposterous story, but later on, I learn that some of her tales are true.”
From Pinewood Studios during a break, Marilyn sent a telegram to Marlon Brando. “So many men, so little time. I love London. Unlike Arthur, the men are uncut here, just like you.”
Marlon showed the letter to his closest pall, Carlo Fiore. “Isn’t that the oddest letter any woman ever wrote on a honeymoon? Miller’s wrong for her. Only I can handle Marilyn, but I’m not volunteering.”
While at the studio, Marilyn received a letter from her mother that was signed: “Love, Gladys Baker Eley.” In the letter, Gladys asserted: “I am writing personal letters to J. Edgar Hoover about you. There is much that he wants to know about your life.”
Marilyn was furious, but had long ago decided she could not control Gladys.
***
After his return to London from the States, Miller remained friends with Olivier as part of a relationship that evolved into that of two serious men of the theater. But Miller’s attacks on the Strasbergs and Greene made Marilyn’s relationships with her mentors increasingly difficult.
Miller referred to both Paula and Lee as “poisonous and vacuous,” and he denounced her ties to them as “religious dependency.” The author also fought with Greene, accusing him of purchasing valuable antiques in London and shipping them to Connecticut, after charging them to Marilyn Monroe Productions.
Dame Sybil Thorndike
The Prince and the Showgirl marked the beginning of the end of Marilyn’s relationship with Milton Greene. Back in New York, Marilyn told Stanley Mills Haggart, who was also having legal troubles with Greene, “He’s served his purpose, and I want to get rid of him. The trick will be how to do so without his suing me.”
Greene blamed Miller for his growing tension with Marilyn. “He wants her for himself. He wants her to work for him. Perhaps star in one of those dreary plays he writes.”
In the months ahead, Marilyn would dump Greene and manage to buy him off for only $100,000.
At Pinewood Studios, Marilyn had scenes to shoot with Dame Sybil Thorndike. She kept her waiting for two hours, but Dame Sybil was most gracious when introduced to Marilyn. “Thank God you’re not known as Dame Dike,” Marilyn said.
“I’ve been called worse,” said the dowager actress.
“I’m sorry I’m so late,” Marilyn said.
“Don’t concern yourself with it, my dear. You’re the most sought-after woman in the world, and I’m sure you have to concern yourself with your affairs instead of some silly little film written by that twat Rattigan. I love gossip. Is it true that Prince Philip propositioned you the other night? He’s known for doing such things.”
“Yes, he wanted me. I don’t truly understand royal protocol. If a royal prince summons you to his bedchamber, isn’t a girl obligated to go?”
“Indeed, Dame Sybil said. “That has been true since the days of Henry VIII.”
Before she flew out of London with Miller, the British press had come to view Marilyn as some sort of “Hollywood monster.” As she departed on November 20, 1956, one tabloid reporter wrote that her exit from the U.K. was “like the thud of a soggy carpet.’
Nonetheless, Sir Laurence and Lady Olivier decided to put up a brave front and were at the airport to see Marilyn off. After her plane was airborne, Olivier was overheard telling Vivien, “Good riddance to that bloody cunt!”
The next day, Olivier called Dame Sybil. “I detested the little bleached blonde whore. She can act only when the camera is rolling. She has bad hygiene. She’s a selfish little tart who fucked her way up the ladder. In front of the press, we put on a show for the cameras—and that’s it. Monroe and I are finished. The picture is a disaster. Only in Hollywood would a two-bit hooker like Monroe get to act opposite Sir Laurence Olivier, and I say that in all modesty. Do you know what the silly cunt told me at one point? She said she’d like to play Lady Macbeth opposite me.”
Marilyn Monroe with Laurence Olivier
Stepping off the plane at Idlewild, a pregnant Marilyn looked dazzling in a black Chanel dress with a mink coat. Technically, her marriage to Miller would continue into the early months of the 1960s. But as she’d later tell Peter Lawford, “Our marriage ended on our honeymoon.”
In New York, a reporter asked her how she’d liked London. “It rains there all the time, and I mean that both symbolically and realistically.”
***
Marilyn dreaded reading the reviews of The Prince and the Showgirl. Even some of her most loyal fans found the movie “a waste of her talent.”
In London, Noël Coward, told the press, “Larry is superb. Marilyn Monroe looks very pretty and is charming at moments, but there’s too much emphasis on tits and bottom.”
In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote, “The main trouble with The Prince and the Showgirl is that both characters are essentially dull. And, incidentally, the scene shown in advertisements of Sir Laurence kissing Miss Monroe’s shoulders does not appear in the film.”
Actually, the advertisement shots were taken in New York after the film was wrapped. Before his photo shoot with Marilyn for the posters, Olivier told Milton Greene, “I can’t stand being in the same room with Miss Monroe. I’d rather make love to that repulsive old sod, Charles Laughton. But, what the hell, it’s show business.
***
Back in New York, Marilyn and Miller leased a large apartment on the thirteenth floor of a building on 57th Street. Miller still owned a farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, but it was under renovation.
So that they would have a summer place outside the city, the Millers, in 1957, rented Story Hill Farm in Amagansett, a two-hour drive from Manhattan, near the eastern tip of Long Island. While Miller wrote in his study—or tried to—Marilyn, awaiting the birth of her child, took long walks on the beach, read Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln, cooked meals as best she could, read scripts she hated, made a lot of phone calls back to Hollywood, and tried to keep her weight down.
In England, Marilyn had been convinced that her baby was going to be a boy. But during those long walks along the shorelines of Long Island, she abruptly changed her mind. She announced to Miller, “You are going to be the father of a baby girl.”
On occasion, she still took the train into Manhattan to see the Strasbergs, although her passion and devotion to them had lessened. She saw more of her psychiatrist, Dr. Marianne Kris, than anyone else. Kris had been recommended to her by Anna Freud in London. As regards the time and attention she devoted to her therapy, Miller complained that, “It was all too much, spending five days a week on the couch re-living all that childhood trauma.”
Since he was also having professional troubles with Milton Greene, author/photographer Stanley Mil s Haggart and Marilyn formed a bond. He often drove out to visit Marilyn and Miller on Long Island. His primary friendship was with Miller, whom he’d known and befriended since the 1940s, when he presided over what was known as “a literary salon” in Greenwich Village, attracting the likes of Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, and Carson McCullers.
Since Miller didn’t like to be disturbed during daylight hours, Stanley got to enjoy walks and chats with Marilyn, and sometimes they prepared that evening’s dinner together.
One afternoon, Marilyn was seized with a panic attack. “I’m going to lose my baby,” she blurted out. “I just know it. I’ve given up sleeping pills and even champagne…well, almost. I can’t completely give them up or else I’ll have a nervous breakdown.”
Even though Stanley was primarily Miller’s friend, Marilyn nonetheless poured out her frustrations about her playwright husband to him. “Arthur is such a distant husband. He’s always in his study. He claims he got this idea about writing a movie for me while waiting out his divorce in Reno. He calls it The Misfits. As you know, I can’t even play music around here, and I have to tiptoe around the house all day out of fear of disturbing our genius in residence. These intellectual husbands aren’t a lot of fun. As for Mr. Joe DiMaggio, he spent all day in front of the TV watching games. My first husband spent day and night fucking me.”
Marilyn also complained to Stanley: “At dinner, he always takes a book or a magazine to table and reads while he eats. I guess he thinks I’m too much of a dumb blonde to talk to. When his parents come to dinner, I’m not included. They talk in Yiddish. Even when they explain their jokes to me, I don’t get it.”
Marilyn’s fantasy, Abraham Lincoln, with his biographer....
Carl Sandburg
“Arthur does everything by himself…” She paused. “Well, almost. I don’t think he jerks off because he does visit my bed on occasion. He’s got his own bathroom and virtually lives in his study as you well know. He has lunch alone in that study. Stan, did you know that Jewish mothers cut off the foreskins of their infant boys? I don’t know why. Men tell me that a circumcised penis has less sensation for the man. Maybe their mothers don’t want their sons to enjoy sex that much.”
One afternoon, Marilyn began to scream in pain. At last, Miller left his study. “I’m going to lose my baby girl,” she shrieked at him.
He found her in the garden, where she’d been tending to some flowers. She clutched her belly. For some reason, he decided not to check her into a hospital on Long Island. He called a local ambulance service and accompanied her as it made the two-hour journey into Manhattan, where she was rushed into emergency at Doctors Hospital, close to the Broadway theater district.
After a valiant struggle—her screams could be heard up and down the hall—her baby was lost. It was an ectopic pregnancy. (Editor’s note: Ectopic Pregnancy (def.): An abnormal pregnancy that occurs outside the womb, often in one of the fallopian tubes. The fetus rarely, if ever, survives, and is usually lost within the first trimester.)
“We did the best we could,” her doctor assured Miller. The doctor also told him that if her baby had been brought to term, “It would definitely have shown fetal alcohol damage, perhaps a deformity, and it would have been born a drug addict.”
Stanley brought her tapioca pudding, and Miller’s mother, Augusta, arrived with her homemade chicken soup.
Marilyn wasn’t so far lost in mourning that she neglected her appearance when she checked out of the hospital. She even called in “Mr. Kenneth” to do her hair. Miller brought her a special wardrobe from home.
Marilyn told him, “You’d think I was dressing for a premiere.” She wore heavy dark sunglasses to conceal the red in her eyes. As she exited from the hospital, reporters cheered her, and she resented it. “I lost my baby. Why in hell are the jerks applauding me?”
Back at home, she pulled off her clothes, revealing blood-stained panties. “The nurse insisted I wear them.”
Miller retreated to his study, and Stanley arrived the next day. He found her sitting in the bedroom, crying. “It was my last chance,” she sobbed. “See the little pink cradle I had bought for her.” She rose from the bed in anger and tried to smash it, until he restrained her, gently lowering her back into bed.
He knew she was on pills again. “I hear Milton Greene is taking you to court over a contract dispute,” she said. “I hope you win. He’ll probably be suing the hell out of me, too, any day now.”
Miller knew that Marilyn needed help, and he hired a maid for her, Lena Pepitone. She would remain with Marilyn until her death, and she became a virtual surrogate mother to Marilyn, who took to calling her, “Baby Lamb.”
After Pepitone prepared her first dinner, Marilyn pronounced her “one of the best Italian cooks in Manhattan.” She had learned the recipes in her native Naples in southern Italy, where she’d married an American soldier at the end of World War II and subsequently moved to New York City. Starting out as a personal maid and wardrobe mistress, Pepitone in time became one of Marilyn’s closest friends and most trusted confidantes.
“After the loss of her baby, Marilyn seemed to have lost her self-confidence, almost a will to live,” Pepitone recalled later. “One morning over a late breakfast, she seemed enraged.”
“Not one card of sympathy,” Marilyn said. “Not a god damn one. Fuck the jerks in Hollywood. Fuck the jerks in New York. You’d think Lee and Paula could have sent a shitty ten-cent card.” She sighed. “Call me the loveless love goddess.”
That night, after Pepitone had left for the day, Miller arrived home to find that Marilyn had fallen onto the floor of the living room. He attempted to revive her. She was still breathing but unconscious. He feared she’d deliberately taken an overdose of sleeping pills, or some other drug.
He called an ambulance, which rushed her to Doctors Hospital, where three doctors worked to save her life.
When Pepitone visited her in the hospital the next morning, she asked her boss, “Why did you do it, Marilyn?”
“I did it because Arthur has found out the truth about me. I’m a monster threatening to devour him.”
“That’s not true,” Pepitone said.
“Yes, it is. That’s exactly what he wrote in his diary, and it’s true. He knows I’m not the beautiful innocent I present to the world.”
She spent nearly a week in bed recovering from her ordeal. Miller occasionally looked in on her, but she told Pepitone there were no conjugal visits. He often went out a night, claiming he was going to the theater or being entertained by friends.
Late one afternoon, he came in and presented Marilyn with some pages from The Misfits he’d been laboring over for months. The next morning, when Miller left for lunch in Greenwich Village, Marilyn gave Pepitone a review of what she’d read.
“Arthur let me read his crap,” she said. “He may be a great playwright, but he’s a failure as a movie writer. Baby Lamb, I’ve seen hundreds of film scripts, and I know a turkey when I read one. I hate my character of Roslyn. She’s completely one-dimensional. Where is Truman Capote when I need him? Arthur says he’s writing The Misfits as a tribute to me. To show his love for me. Some tribute! Some love! It shows his hatred of me. I have figured out what he’s doing. He’s using his movie star wife to cash in—that’s what.”
The next day, complaining that he was suffering from writer’s block, Miller told Marilyn and Pepitone that he was going to the farmhouse where he could write in peace and quiet.
When he’d gone, Marilyn shut her bedroom door. Pepitone heard her making a number of calls. When she finally came out of the room, she told Pepitone to pack two suitcases for her.
“Don’t tell Arthur where I’ve gone if he calls,” she said.
“Will you tell me where you’re going in case of an emergency?”
“I will if you’ll keep it a secret,” Marilyn said. “I’ll be at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. At least there, I’ll get some loving from a man who really cares about me.”
