The Senator John F. Kennedy Marilyn had last seen in Washington was not the man she encountered at the Mayflower Hotel. Early in 1958, he came into the suite hobbling on crutches, and at first, she feared he’d been in an automobile crash.
She rushed to kiss him, but controlled her passion, sensing he was in agony.
Like a loving mother instead of a hot-to-trot mistress, she found the most comfortable place in the living room for him to sit, discovering it was a special rocking chair made for him in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Before her secret visit to him was over, she would have to go out and buy a medical dictionary.
She had read a definition of Addison’s disease, but she still wasn’t clear about how it affected him. The dictionary defined it as “a destructive disease marked by deficient adrenocortical secretions and characterized by extreme weakness, loss of weight, low blood pressure, gastrointestinal disturbances, and brownish pigmentation of the skin and mucous membranes.”
He threw out other words to her she’d never heard before. She was more than familiar with the concept of “testosterone—I’m on good terms with that myself,” she’d told him—and she had at least heard of steroids and cholesterol. “But the rest is Greek to me,” she said.
When the occasion was right, she could be very sympathetic to a man, very loving, very kind, and most attentive. That was the case on this visit. Actually, she was longing for the rough-and-tumble sex provided by her former husband, Joe DiMaggio. But she seemed willing to accept JFK on his special terms, which were different from those of every other lover she’d known.
Although the President’s health was a state secret, Marilyn indiscreetly provided a blow-by-blow description of her encounter with JFK with such confidants as Jeanne Carmen, Shelley Winters, and Peter Lawford. Only Lawford seemed deeply concerned with JFK’s health; the women were more interested in what JFK and Marilyn did in bed. Winters even wondered, “With all those ailments, you’d think sex would be the last thing on the President’s mind.”
Up until now, she’d more or less dismissed his ailments as a garden-variety back pain, unaware of the gravity of the senator’s medical condition.
For the first time, he explained to her just how serious his health issues were. He revealed to her that in September and October of 1955, he’d spent a total of twenty-two “of the most miserable days of my life” in and out of hospitals, submitting to and recovering from surgical procedures.
“Repeated bouts of colitis cause me horrible pains in my abdomen,” he told her. “I also suffer from bouts of diarrhea that cause me to lose weight, and I’m already thin enough. I also suffer prostatitis.”
“What in the hell is that?” she asked.
“It means I experience pain when I take a piss or even shoot off.”
“You mean it hurts you when you get your jollies? That’s supposed to feel good.”
“I know that. But god damn it, it hurts.”
“Then explain something to me,” she said. “If it hurts, why do you…”
He interrupted. “The proper term is ‘ejaculate.’”
“Then why do you pursue sex so much?”
“I’m given testosterone to deal with my sudden weight loss, and that heightens my libido.”
“You don’t make your life sound like much fun,” she said.
“It’s a case of grinning and bearing it and then pressing on. I come down with these fevers of unknown origin, and these fucking specialists Dad hires for me—neurologists, surgeons, urologists, gastroenterologists, endocrinologists, whomever—can’t explain them most of the time.”
It was later revealed that the steroids he was prescribed weakened his bones, increasing both back and leg problems. He told her that often, he couldn’t reach down to put on his socks. “Sometimes I can’t even bend my right knee. I take cortisone—sometimes orally, sometimes as an implant—for my Addison’s disease, and I gulp down penicillin and antibiotics for my abcesses and prostatitis.”
“I just take Nembutal…well, maybe some other drugs, too,” she said.
“At last we have something in common. I, too, take Nembutal to put me to sleep.”
“I don’t understand. With all these ailments, why do you want to be president?” I would think the job, with all its stress, might do you in.”
“I don’t think my ailments will prevent me from doing a good job. That’s why I’m beginning right now to run for president in 1960. I’ve got to build up a political machine in every state. For a New Englander and a Catholic to carry the redneck states will be a challenge. Southerners will not like my stand on civil rights.”
After her return to Hollywood, Marilyn would make a candid confession to Jeanne Carmen. “Actually, Jack turned me off. I was almost afraid to go to bed with him out of fear that I might catch something I couldn’t get rid of. Is Addison’s disease contagious? How can you get romantic with a guy who might suddenly be overcome with the world’s worst case of diarrhea? It’s hard to make love to a man sitting on the can smelling like runny baby shit.”
“Why don’t you drop him?” Carmen asked.
“Well, there is the remote chance he might become president, and I might sign on as First Mistress, or even First Lady if he divorces that uptight wife of his. I might even enter the history books like my hero, Abraham Lincoln.”
“Now, Marilyn,” Carmen cautioned. “That’s aiming a bit high.”
“Jeanne, the trouble with you is that you don’t aim high enough. All you care about is seducing another movie star and adding another notch to your garter belt. So you fucked Jack Benny and Errol Flynn. I like to pursue bigger game…like presidents. Going to bed with Jerry Lewis is no big deal any way you look at it.”
“Okay, okay,” Carmen said. “What I want to know is, did you get it on with this patient? He looks good on the outside, but inside he seems totally fucked up. A basket case.”
“We did, but it wasn’t one of history’s great rolls in the hay. Not when he blasts off and feels pain. I’ll let you in on a secret. When he comes in my mouth, I don’t swallow. I’m an actress and I can conceal it as I disappear into the bathroom to freshen up. I flush the toilet and spit it out. The toilet makes so much noise, he doesn’t hear what I’m doing. His sperm might contain something that would be hazardous to my health.”
“Good thinking, girl.”
Marilyn later revealed that JFK told her that he and Jackie had sold Hickory Hill to Bobby and Ethel, and that they had purchased a townhouse in Georgetown. He agreed to take her there, since Jackie was out of town.
“Later, I wandered around their house and inspected everything,” Marilyn said. “Jackie has good taste. This time, I didn’t try on any of her dresses. We did it on the same sheets where he’d slept with her. I could tell they hadn’t been changed. Of course, I don’t know if he actually fucked Jackie on those sheets.
I suspect she doesn’t get much.”
“What did you do when you weren’t hopping up and down on him?,” Carmen asked. “As he lay in pain on his back, I mean?”
“He talked about her,” Marilyn said. He claimed they hadn’t spoken in three days.”
“Jackie did something I’m finding hard to forgive,” JFK had told Marilyn.
“My wife hates my mother, Rose. She calls her belle-mère. At parties, she breaks everybody up with these devastating impressions of Rose. Perhaps to get even with me for my whoring, she made this special recording and played it for me. Here, put it on…you can hear it.” He motioned to a record which lay on the coffee table.
She started to play it and heard Jackie’s mocking voice. She’d never heard Rose speak, and didn’t know how accurate the imitation was, but his mother’s mock voice was telling an imaginary audience that, “I raised three young boys who grew up to be whoremongers.”
“Does Jackie know about us?” Marilyn asked.
“I think she does. She told me that she knew you were my favorite movie star because I’d watched your movies three or four times each. Jackie said that since Peter Lawford knows you, I should request an autograph from you as a souvenir.”
“That means she knows,” Marilyn said. “I’m sure she’s aware that I give you souvenirs that are a bit more than an autograph.”
Before she left Washington, JFK, according to Marilyn, made a request that might seem unusual except that male fans around the world were making the same request.
“Other than that autograph, what did the fucker want?” Carmen asked.
“He wanted me to pluck out at least three of my longest pubic hairs and give them to him to carry around in his wallet as a token to remember me by when his heart yearns for my special kind of loving.”
***
Marilyn had liked retreating from the city, and she and Miller shopped for a house in the Roxbury region of Connecticut, near the site of their former abode. She fell in love with a house built in 1873 and convinced him that they should buy it. “It’s where we’ll live out our final days,” she told him, suggesting they add a nursery for their future children.
Billy Wilder
Her money was used to buy the place, although her accountants warned her that her bank balance was running low. “I guess somebody around this house has to make some god damn money,” she told her husband.
Then, Billy Wilder sent Marilyn a short synopsis of his newest screenplay, Some Like It Hot. Marilyn was surprised to learn that each of its male stars would be required to dress in drag throughout most of the movie. Wilder said he was going to try to get Sinatra to play the male lead in drag.
Shooting was scheduled to begin in August of 1958.
Having not read the final script—it didn’t exist—Marilyn had no evidence that she was about to film what many critics would eventually hail as “the greatest screen comedy of all time.” She needed the money and took the role, calling it “another featherbrain blonde part.”
***
For years, Marilyn had defined Montgomery Clift as her screen idol. Before his car accident, which permanently marred his face, she called him “the most beautiful man in the movies, even more so than Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor in the 1930s.”
In contrast, Monty Clift had been dismissive of her. He was rumored to have attended her performance of Anna Christie at the Actors Studio, but walked out before it was over.
With one of his male lovers, he went to see Marilyn in Bus Stop and reportedly was dazzled by her performance. He expressed regret that he’d turned down the role of the cowboy, Bo.
Having avoided her for years, he abruptly changed his mind and expressed a desire to meet her. Rex Kennamer, who had known both actors for years, arranged a dinner that included each of them. To his surprise, they had little to say to each other. “It was a disaster,” he recalled. “Monty kept downing one glass of Scotch after another. Marilyn preferred Caribbean rum cocktails with a floating gardenia in them.”
Even Frank Sinatra, who had co-starred with Monty in From Here to Eternity, was said to have brought them together again for a weekend at his house in Palm Springs. Sinatra had bonded and even lived with Clift during the making of Eternity. But during the previous few years, he had lived through some conflicts with the actor over the issue of Monty’s homosexuality. Once, he threw Monty out of his home when he made an aggressive sexual pass at one of his male guests. But in time, they made up.
Sinatra told Dean Martin, “Both Monty and Marilyn are emotional cripples. Perhaps together they could re-learn how to walk.”
During the weekend they spent together in the desert, Sinatra more or less left Marilyn and Clift to themselves, as he devoted most of his attention to two blonde showgirls he’d “shipped in” from Las Vegas.
Eventually, Clift and Marilyn opened up to each other, and found that they had more in common than they’d imagined. Before the weekend ended, he was affectionately calling her “Pussy.” Their friendship would last until the end of her life.
Long before Marilyn ever met Clift, he had been befriended by Arthur Miller, who had once attended a dinner party where fellow guests included Arthur Laurents, Norman Mailer, and Monty. Miller later wrote, “Regrettably, except in sophisticated circles, homosexuality isn’t acceptable in any disguise in most of society. Monty has great guilt over his sexual preference. As an extremely sensitive man, he suffers more than most. But his struggle against his own urges seems to be destroying him. He’s always miserable. He drinks all the time, not wanting to grow up and face life as who he really is. He has my deepest sympathy.”
When Monty first invited Marilyn for a visit to his apartment in Los Angeles, she was shocked to see how Spartan it was. Empty pill bottles lay everywhere. “We have something in common. Both of us seem to be the druggist’s best friend.”
He admitted to her that if you’re a movie star, “you can get a doctor to issue a prescription in the names of your friends, lovers, or some made-up person.”
“We have to do whatever we can to keep us going in this rotten town where someone is trying to stick a knife in your back any chance he gets,” she said.
That led to a revelation from him about their mutual agent, Lew Wasserman. “Guess what he’s telling producers? That I’m unstable. Me, his fucking client. He was a father figure to me. I thought he’d help me.”
“So much for father figures,” she said. “I thought Arthur would be a father figure to me. But here I am, the woman, trying to bring home the bacon.”
When Truman Capote breezed into town, Marilyn had dinner with him, mainly to talk about “the new man in my life,” a reference to Monty.
Capote was dismissive. “He hangs out with street trash, guys with names like Dino, Buck, or Guido. He claims that lower class white boys have bigger dicks than the ruling class.”
Capote had worked on the script for Indiscretions of an American Wife, a 1953 film set in the Stazione Termini (Main Railway Station) of Rome and released in 1953. Directed by Vittorio De Sica, it had starred Jennifer Jones.
“Jennifer didn’t know Monty was a homosexual,” Capote said. “She developed this really big crush on him. When I confronted her with the truth, she went ballistic. She rushed to her portable dressing room and tried to stuff a mink jacket down her portable toilet, but only succeeded in flooding her room.”
What a strange reaction,” Marilyn said.
“Monty is wasting his life and his talent,” Capote claimed. “You’ve got enough trouble in your own life. You don’t need to take on his troubles, unless you want him to pass on some of that rough trade he picks up. I used to say that a movie star has to be ignorant to be good. Take Garbo, for instance. She never had a thought in her head. She brilliantly performed the words of the scriptwriter, taking her cues from whatever director was handling her. Monty’s different. For a screen actor, he’s smart. He knows what to do in front of a camera, unless he’s too drugged to realize what picture he’s making.”
***
It was the summer of 1946, right after the war. Nineteen-year-old Ohio-born Robert Slatzer had migrated to Hollywood for his summer vacation, hoping to find a minor movie star he could interview. His aspiration was to write articles about Hollywood and its stars.
In the waiting room at 20th Century Fox, where he’d already sat for an hour, out walked a female model. She was dropping off her portfolio, hoping for a screen test. “Hi,” she said to him.
“Hi, yourself,” he said. “I’m Bob Slatzer.”
“I’m Norma Jeane Dougherty,” she said. “Just recently divorced. How about you?”
“Never been kissed,” he said facetiously, making her giggle.
“By the way, you got any money for lunch? I could use a juicy hamburger and greasy fries.”
“I’m carrying around a hundred dollar bill, which is about all I’ve got to live on out here, unless my parents send more cash.”
“That should do it,” she said. “I won’t eat too much, I promise.” A cheap luncheonette offered a sixty-five cent luncheon for workmen at Fox. She skipped the hamburger and ordered the full sixty-five cent meal.
When it was over, he asked her for a date that night. “I could borrow a car from a friend. We could drive out to Malibu. It’s lovely there. I was there last night.”
“You got yourself a date, big boy. I hear the nicest people in the world live in Ohio.”
“I hadn’t heard that, but if you say so.”
He borrowed a car from a friend of his, Noble (“Kid”) Chissell, and drove her to Malibu. At a beachfront dive, she had that hamburger and fries, ordering a coke with it. Later, they went for a walk on the beach.
“Hey, let’s go for a swim,” she said.
“I didn’t bring a suit,” he protested.
“You go something to be modest about?”
“It’s not that...”
Before his stunned eyes, she stripped down for him. “Race you to the water.”
He chucked his clothes, but kept on his underwear, and he chased after her. In the cool waters, he swam to her. Up close, she hugged him, pressing her breasts against his chest.
“We made love that night right on the beach,” Slatzer wrote in his memoirs. “I’d known a couple of gals before Norma Jeane. You know, lovemaking in the cramped back seat of a car that was new before the war, that kind of thing. She was very experienced. She told me that her former husband, Jim Dougherty, used to fuck her before he left for work, when he came home all sweaty, and once again before he turned in for the night.”
She made it clear to him that night that she didn’t want to go steady. “I like to date a lot of men out here, but I’ll try to work you in any chance I get.”
She kept her promise in the years ahead. Still hoping to become a Hollywood gossip columnist, he was a quick learner about secrets unfolding behind closed doors.
As the months went by, as Norma Jeane transformed herself into Marilyn Monroe, she talked to him about her other boyfriends. He had by then been swinging on the Hollywood grapevine. According to what he’d heard, he was already aware of the gossip associated with her current boyfriends.
“There’s Nicky Hilton, for one,” she said.
“The Hilton heir,” he said. “Foot-long dick. Bisexual.”
“Yes to all three. Mel Tormé”
“Love his music,” he said.
“Eddie Robinson, Jr.”
“Mixed-up kid, lives in his father’s shadow.”
“James Bacon,” she said.
“I want to be the next James Bacon. He’s my favorite Hollywood writer.”
“Billy Travilla,” she said.
“Don’t know him.”
“He designs dresses for me,” she said.
“Just so he doesn’t wear them. After all, this is Hollywood.”
During the months they were getting to know each other, he worked odd jobs, usually as a waiter, although on a few occasions he was seen unloading bananas at Long Beach. “I helped her pay for her acting lessons whenever I could.”
Over the course of many months, Slatzer, like Jeanne Carmen, became one of Marilyn’s most influential confidants. “We both discovered that we had U.S. Presidents for ancestors—James Monroe for her, and Warren Harding for me, on my mother’s side.”
Between odd jobs, Slatzer became a caddy on a golf course for the likes of Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, and Gary Cooper. “These guys like me a lot—I’ve even been invited on fishing trips with them”
“I wish they’d invite me along too,” she said, “as a mascot.”
“Hell, they could use you as bait.”
Somewhere along the way, Slatzer secretly dated Jean Peters, the future Mrs. Howard Hughes, who would later co-star with Marilyn in Niagara.
“We were only occasional lovers at this point, as Marilyn was seeing a different man every night,” Slatzer claimed. “She liked to talk to me, really intimate stuff. She said that she’d saved up and paid for a tube-tying operation. She would later reverse that surgical procedure.”
“I did it because I knew having a kid could ruin my career,” Marilyn said, according to Slatzer, “Besides, I got tired of all those Back Street butchers. Right before I married Jim, I gave birth to a little girl, but those welfare people came and took her away from me. I was just a kid myself. Hell, at the time, I didn’t even know girls as young as I was could even have a child.”
Later, she would claim that it was a boy, not a girl, she’d delivered and given up.
She also confessed that while married to Dougherty, she’d once tried to commit suicide. “I turned on the gas in our small kitchen. I might have died had not the mailman arrived to deliver a package for Jim. He smelled gas in the oven and rushed into my kitchen and cut it off. I told him I was just a young bride and didn’t know my way around the kitchen. He was tall and handsome, with chestnut brown hair. I felt I owed him something. After all, he saved my life, and I had only one thing to give him.”
“Remember that Lana Turner movie, The Postman Always Rings Twice?” she asked. “Well, that postman rang more than twice as long as I lived there. He made me realize why I wanted to kill myself. I was not the kind of gal who wanted to face the same old dick every night for the rest of my life. Marriage is such a trap for a woman—it should be against the law.”
The influential columnist, Dorothy Kilgallen, learned about Marilyn’s affair with Slatzer and wrote about it on August 16, 1952. “A dark horse in the Marilyn Monroe romance derby is Bob Slatzer, former Columbus, Ohio literary critic. He’s been wooing her by phone and mail, and improving her mind with gifts of the world’s greatest books.” That same month, Kilgallen invited him to write a guest column about Marilyn, and he did, publishing it on September 12. Confidential picked it up and exposed the Slatzer/Monroe affair, thereby infuriating a jealous Joe DiMaggio.
Shortly before she married DiMaggio, Marilyn may have embarked on a strange adventure during a southbound excursion she took with Slatzer in his 1948 Maroon Packard convertible.
In a bitterly disputed assertion, Slatzer claimed that they were married on the weekend of October 3-6, 1952. Some researchers have disputed this claim, stating that Marilyn in Los Angeles wrote one or two checks during these dates. However, that evidence is not conclusive, because Marilyn paid little attention to the day of the month on many checks she wrote. “I’m not good with numbers,” she said. “Isn’t remembering the month and the year enough?”
As a result of that much-disputed marriage ceremony, before the end of her life, many sources listed Marilyn’s name as “Jeane Mortensen Dougherty Slatzer DiMaggio Miller.” In one of the books he wrote, The Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe, Slatzer presents a detailed portrait of their quickie marriage, an account which was witnessed and corroborated by “Kid” Chissell, Slatzer’s longtime friend, the man who lent him the car he used on his first date with Marilyn in 1946.
Actress Terry Moore, the mistress of Howard Hughes, remembered Marilyn telling that she’d married Slatzer in Tijuana. Jeanne Carmen also claimed that Marilyn told her that she’d married Slatzer. Marilyn later referred to the marriage as “my three-day folly, a madcap adventure South of the Border.”
Later, that same year, she’d participate in a mock marriage ceremony with Marlon Brando when she visited director Elia Kazan and him on the set of Viva Zapata!, so an impulsive move like this one with Slatzer was not out of character for her.
At Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck learned about the Monroe/Slatzer marriage and exploded in fury, summoning Marilyn to his office. Apparently, he told her that Fox had an enormous investment in her—and “you’re fucking up your career. Get your fat ass back over that border and get the God damn so-called marriage annulled. Are you out of your mind?”
Since Marilyn wasn’t really in love with Slatzer, and because she was beginning to have second thoughts about it, she quickly told Slatzer what she wanted. He drove her to Tijuana once again, dropping in on the lawyer who had applied for their marriage license. It turned out that the attorney had not filed the papers. According to Slatzer, many Tijuana lawyers who had been hired to arrange marriage licenses for gringos never filed the license with the Distrito Federal, pocketing the money instead.
Slatzer later asserted his suspicion that the Mexican lawyer he had hired might have recognized Marilyn from one of her film roles, and that he had salvaged a bona-fide marriage license to use later as blackmail. Slatzer demanded that the license be destroyed in front of them. “Our marriage just went up in smoke in a big ashtray filled with cigar butts,” Marilyn said.
Whether one believes that Slatzer actually married her or not, he provided very specific details, with witnesses to back them up. He wrote that Marilyn was barefoot when he’d married her because she’d left her shoes at the doorway to a church and that some thief had made off with them. He also claimed that she’d wanted to go nightclubbing at a joint “where Rita Hayworth once danced when her father was forcing sex onto her.”
Slatzer also wrote about their honeymoon night at the Rosarita Beach Hotel, where an investigative reporter drove south and subsequently learned that indeed, there had been a couple registered during that time period in that hotel as “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Slatzer.”
Slatzer’s claim became even more believable when he said that at least three times during his so-called honeymoon, he overheard Marilyn calling Joe DiMaggio and “talking lovey-dovey.”
She, of course, went on to marry DiMaggio for a brief union, and Slatzer eventually fell in love with an auburn-haired woman from Ohio and married her. Their union was stormy, even violent, and a divorce followed within two years. He went back to seeing Marilyn again whenever she made herself available to him, usually when she was feuding with some lover and wanted sympathy.
When she returned to Hollywood for her role as Sugar Kane in Some Like it Hot, she called Slatzer and invited him to come over for a reunion breakfast prepared by her maid.
Arriving at her home, he was let in by the maid. Marilyn emerged from her bedroom completely nude. “I couldn’t find my robe,” she told him.
“She never minded exhibiting herself, but I couldn’t help but notice that she’d put on weight. It wasn’t the body I had first seen on the beach on that long-ago night in Malibu.”
He said that she drank three Bloody Marys before the morning toast was served. Then, when the maid served breakfast, “she picked at her food and sipped a champagne split. From the living room came the sound of a Frank Sinatra recording. In fact, she played Sinatra records all during my stay.”
After breakfast, she invited him into her bathroom, where she took a bubble bath, inviting him to scrub her back. “She was bitter about almost everything,” he said.
“I can’t trust anybody anymore, you being an exception,” she told him. “Especially that Arthur Miller. He’s trying to use me to sell this fucking Western script he’s written. Once you become a big star, everybody tries to use you. You’re the only one who’s not a bloodsucker. If a guy doesn’t want my pussy, he wants to use me to make a buck.”
Actually Slatzer, after Marilyn’s death, would write two books about her and devote much of the rest of his life to capitalizing off his relationship with her. He would also extensively investigate the mysterious circumstances of her untimely death.
As the day progressed, and as Marilyn’s drinking increased, she told him, “My dream of becoming a serious actress is over. The Prince and the Showgirl is a flop, thanks to Laurence Olivier. He’s a lousy director, a lousy actor, and a lousy lay. I need money, and I’m forced to play Sugar Kane—another dumb blonde role. Isn’t that an adorable name? Sounds like a Las Vegas stripper working the Ohio Turnpike.”
“Marilyn was coming unglued,” Slatzer said. “She kept ordering her maid to bring her food—hamburger and French fries, later five small lamb chops, and by six o’clock that night a plate-size Wiener schnitzel. She also devoured a monster bowl of chocolate pudding.”
“I’m going to make myself so God damn fat that Billy Wilder won’t want me to star in his fucking picture.”
In spite of the setting—“and the nudity”—Slatzer later said he didn’t have sex, although he spent most of the day and night with her. “Sex seemed about the last thing she had on her mind. At one point, she invited me into her bedroom, where she was sitting in the nude playing a ukulele and singing ‘I Wanna Be Loved by You.’ She told me she was rehearsing to do that number with the ukulele in Some Like It Hot.”
Back in her living room at around midnight, she confessed to Slatzer that she was having an on-again, off-again affair with Senator Kennedy, who was laying the groundwork to run for President in 1960.
“I was born on the wrong side of the tracks, and Jack was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Even so, he’s madly in love with me. If it wasn’t for that presidency thing, he would divorce his wife and marry me right now. He’s intelligent, just like you, Bob. Both of you have read a lot of good books.”
Before he left at two o’clock that morning, he said she had clung to him and given him a passionate kiss. “You and I should have stayed married. Settled down somewhere on a small ranch in the Valley and raised six kids—three boys and three girls.”
“Well, we both live in Hollywood, the town of broken dreams,” he told her before giving her a good night kiss.” Welcome back home, darling. Hollywood’s biggest star has returned to reclaim her throne.”
***
In the summer of 1958, Marilyn made the Billy Wilder film, Some Like It Hot, based on an obscure German movie musical, Fanfaren der Liebe ( aka Fanfares of Love) first produced in 1932. For the American remake, the first version of the script was entitled Not Tonight, Josephine.
It’s the story of two unemployed musicians who witness the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago. To escape from the mob, they disguise themselves as women musicians in an all-female band named Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopaters. The lead singer in the band is “Sugar Kane,” the role in which Marilyn eventually starred.
As Wilder had envisioned it, Sugar was to be played by Mitzi Gaynor and the drag queens by Bob Hope and Danny Kaye. The director was hardly a casting genius. His original dream for Sunset Blvd. involved casting Mae West as Norma Desmond, the fading vamp of the silent screen.
A one time, Wilder envisioned Frank Sinatra playing Josephine, who falls in love with Sugar. Sinatra dropped out when he got the script. “There’s no fucking way I’m going to play a broad.”
Although Marilyn had been absent from the screen for two years, she was still listed among the film industry’s Top Ten Box Office Stars, a list that included Sandra Dee, John Wayne, Rock Hudson, and Doris Day.
She agreed to play the role after being offered $200,000, her highest fee ever, plus ten percent of the gross over $4 million. Her share would eventually come to $4.5 million, most of the money eventually going to Lee Strasberg’s second wife, Anna, whom Marilyn never met.
Fanfares of Love, the German-language inspiration for...
Some Like It Hot (left to right) Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn, with four musicians from Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopaters
Before shooting began, Marilyn learned that her male co-stars, both of them cast as women, were comedian Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. The film would represent a reunion of sorts, since during her early days as a struggling starlet, she and Curtis had briefly been lovers.
The producers arranged for the very gay Orry-Kelly, the costume designer, to design the men’s drag. Later, Orry-Kelly infuriated Marilyn when he announced “Tony has a more delectable ass than Marilyn.”
During pre-production, Wilder hired Judy Garland to coach Marilyn in the delivery of her songs as Sugar Kane. For years, Marilyn had virtually worshipped Garland, who was her favorite singer after Sinatra.
When Marilyn was first introduced to Garland at a party at producer Charles Feldman’s house, she followed Garland from room to room like a stalker.
The two stars had much in common. Both were known for alcohol, drugs, numerous affairs (with both men and women), pills, and emotional upsets that caused delays in film production.
Producers regarded both Garland and Marilyn as unreliable. The difference was that by the late 1950s, Garland was no longer big box office, and Marilyn was, so Fox was willing to put up with almost anything, as long as she kept the box office millions coming in.
On their first day of working together, Marilyn confessed to Garland, “I’m scared, so very scared. I’ve been so emotionally upset lately, I’m afraid to face those cameras.”
“Welcome to the club,” Garland said. “I’ve been scared all my life. The press has learned about some of my suicide attempts, but not all of them.”
“You, too?” Marilyn asked. “I first attempted suicide when I was sixteen.”
“And we’re still here,” Garland said, “although perhaps not for long. You and I are two dames who don’t believe in sticking around at the party when the host no longer wants us.”
“You’re still idolized,” Marilyn said.
“I still have my fans, who consist mostly of the boys today,” Garland said. “You’re riding high on the horse, but this town likes to push you off your saddle to make room for someone younger, prettier. In your case, that won’t be easy to do. I think you and I are unique show business personalities. There is probably no new Judy Garland, as there will be no new Marilyn Monroe.”
“Thank you for saying that,” Marilyn said. “It means a lot.”
“Now let’s get down to work, baby lamb,” Garland said.
The complete professional, Garland went through Marilyn’s three songs in the film, including “I’m Through With Love,” “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” and “Running Wild.” Although Garland and Marilyn had completely different styles, Marilyn later told Wilder that “Judy was a great help to me. By showing me how she’d do the song, I learned to find my way through the number.”
The two women were warm and cuddly with each other, with lots of kisses and hugs. Garland knew full well what Marilyn was suffering through, having been there so many times herself. Sometimes Marilyn would call Garland at three o’clock in the morning, and on several nights, she slept over with Garland.
When filming began, Wilder spread the rumor that Garland was having an affair with Marilyn. Sinatra heard that, too, from Garland herself, and it was a secret he could not keep to himself. Neither could fellow Rat Packers Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis, Jr.
But, like that summer wind that Sinatra sang about, the Monroe/Garland friendship and their devotion to each other came and quickly went, as both of them moved forward to face their respective upcoming disasters. “It was an interlude,” Marilyn later told Wilder. “But for one shining moment, I felt I’d met one person who truly understood me—and it wasn’t my so-called husband, Arthur Miller, a total loser.”
Shooting for Some Like It Hot began on August 4, 1958. The dreaded Paula Strasberg, acting coach from hell, was on the set, Wilder regarding her as a “god damn annoyance.” Throughout the first week, she offered advice in a code perhaps understood only by Marilyn herself. “Play the scene like Mae West and Little Bo Peep combined.” Or else she’d say, “As Sugar, walk like Jell-O on springs.”
At the beginning of the shoot, Marilyn invited Curtis, her lover of long ago, to her room. After some talk about the movie, she moved toward him, signaling him to make love to her.
In a memoir, he wrote, “We spent the night together. We were affectionate with each other. I stroked her hair, and my hands moved all over her. Touching her, any part of her, never felt obscene or vulgar. I couldn’t be vulgar with her. I didn’t know what effect it might have on her. But how do you define vulgar? I didn’t know. That was my problem with her. I genuinely didn’t know what she wanted or didn’t want. That was probably because she didn’t know herself. She was a little girl with this incredible body. And I mean incredible. A body that had everything a man could want. She had hips like a Polish washerwoman. Not to the point that she was ungainly, but there was such a contrast between her hips and her back. She had that narrow back. And full breasts. And a long, graceful neck. She had an incredible, unique body. And she knew it. She used her sexuality.”
Judy Garland
After that night of passion, everything else was downhill for them. Her endless delays caused a rift between them. He was best during his first three or four takes. She was often at her best after she’d done three dozen. Naturally, since she was the box office attraction, Wilder had to use the scenes where she, not necessarily Curtis, appeared at her best. Curtis’ best takes usually ended up on the cutting room floor. “After forty-five takes, I wasn’t my best,” he confessed. “But she blossomed after a series of lackluster takes. Although I was hailed in some quarters for my interpretation of Josephine, actually my best work never made it into the movie because of her retakes.”
During the early stages of filming, Wilder hired three different female impersonators to teach Lemmon and Curtis how to “do drag.” When Wilder came into Curtis’ dressing room one afternoon without knocking, and caught one of the drag queens going down on Curtis, he fired the cross-dresser on the spot. “That’s not what I had in mind,” he told the bisexual Curtis.
When Marilyn first saw Curtis in drag, she said, “My God, you look like a cross between Joan Crawford and Frankenstein.”
Perhaps because of all her personal problems, Marilyn had never been more difficult during a shoot. Wilder, of course, had worked with her before on The Seven Year Itch. “To her, everybody was a cocksucker, a shithead, a bastard, a fuck-up,” Wilder said. “Only Elizabeth Taylor had a worse potty mouth.”
Later, Curtis’ emotional link with Marilyn collapsed. Because of her endless delays and foul treatment of everybody, he came to hate her. When asked what it was like to make love on camera to Marilyn, he said, “Kissing her is like kissing Hitler.”
Over the years, his attitude toward her mellowed, and he denied having ever said that. But he did.
When reminded of his remark, she said, “I don’t understand why people aren’t a little more generous with each other. I don’t like to say this, but I’m afraid there is a lot of envy in this business. If I have to do intimate love scenes with somebody who really has these kinds of feelings toward me, then my fantasy comes into play. In other words, out with him, in with my fantasy. He was never there.”
That was Marilyn’s public comment. Privately, she told friends, “Let’s face it: Tony would rather be sucking cock than making love to me. His boyfriends tell me he takes it up the ass.”
“She was the meanest woman I ever met,” Wilder said, “and I worked with the witch of Hollywood, Gloria Swanson, on Sunset Blvd.”
During an interview with Time Out, Curtis said, “She was a 600-pound gorilla. But she acted like a spoiled six-year-old brat. She told me that I was funnier than Jack Lemmon as Daphne, but she told him she wished she ended up with him and not me at the end of the picture.”
Marilyn put on weight during the filming. When she saw the first rushes, she denounced Wilder “for making me look like a fat pig.”
One day, she had been scheduled to show up on the set at ten o’clock that morning, but she didn’t appear until six o’clock that evening. She looked around the set and didn’t see anybody. Wilder had dismissed the crew, since he had to pay them overtime whenever they worked at night. Marilyn shouted to Paula Strasberg, “Where is the fucking Kraut? What in hell am I supposed to do with this shitty role, playing straight man for two drag queens?”
Tempers flared as expenses skyrocketed. On some days, Marilyn didn’t show up at all. On other days, she was too drugged or drunk to remember her lines. One piece of dialogue, “Where is that bourbon?” had to be shot fifty-five times.
“I got fucking tired of hearing about her God damn problems,” said Wilder. “I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the dame’s fucking problems. I wanted to get the film made. Thank God it was in black and white. A color film would have really run up the budget.”
When Marilyn got back to New York, she told Shelley Winters and others, “I hate Hollywood. It’s full of big tit blondes trying to look like me. Everybody hates everybody else, but pretends to kiss each other at parties. It doesn’t mean a fucking thing. It’s all shit! One thing I found out about most actors, producers, and directors out there. All of them, with an exception here and there, have tiny dicks.”
***
Arthur Miller arrived on the set of Some Like It Hot, and a writer there referred to him as “A New York Jew wandering in the Land of Oz.”
When he was informed by Wilder of how Marilyn was behaving and delaying production, he chastised her: “How can you show up and not know your lines? And how dare you be late and hold up the crew?”
“You can kiss my ass, Mr. Miller,” she said before storming off the set.
As if to make it up to her, Miller, the following day, approached Wilder and asked him, “Would you go easy on her? Let her off at four o’clock instead of making her work late?”
“My dear man,” Wilder said, “I might do that if she showed up for work. Many days at four o’clock, we are still waiting here for her.”
On some nights, Marilyn arrived back at their residence, in the words of one writer, with “the semen of another man leaking from her cunt and the stink of cigarette smoke in her matted hair.”
On the evenings she did come home to him, she spent it behind the locked door of her bedroom, sipping gin out of Sugar Kane’s flask, a prop she’d brought home from the set.
After perhaps the worst argument she’d ever had with Miller, on September 12, 1958, she locked herself away and took an overdose of sleeping pills. Sensing what was wrong, Miller broke down her door and found her comatose. He called an ambulance, and she was rushed to the hospital, where her stomach was pumped.
A month after her suicide attempt, she discovered she was pregnant once again. When Miller heard this, he was furious, because he knew that he hadn’t been sleeping with her.
Years later, in a memoir, Tony Curtis confessed, “I knew the kid was mine.”
Her gynecologist, Dr. Leon Krohn, warned her that her continued massive consumption of barbiturates and alcohol would damage the fetus. As a response, she told him that if she gave up drinking and pills, “I might not live long enough myself to have the baby.”
***
Tony Curtis with Marilyn in Some Like It Hot
A rare insight into Marilyn’s emotional state during the filming of Some Like It Hot appears in a memoir penned by David Conover, the first photographer to take pictures of her for publication. His contact with her occurred in 1944 when she was still known as Norma Jeane. Some one hundred pictures of women factory workers were submitted to Captain Ronald Reagan, who was stationed in California, handling public relations for the Army. He selected Norma Jeane as an ideal subject, and assigned Conover to photograph her, at work, as a feature to appear in Yank magazine about women at work on the home front turning out aircraft, munitions, and parachutes.
Years later, in the depths of her despair during the filming of Some Like It Hot, Marilyn heard from Conover. Normally, she might have ignored his letter, but he evoked a memory of a more innocent time. She wrote to him, saying, “I probably have you and Ronald Reagan to blame for putting me on the road to stardom. What you and Reagan didn’t tell me was how empty stardom is once you have it.”
In his memoir, Conover published her response to his letter, which she wrote that early day in September during a lull on the set of Some Like It Hot.
“I am pregnant again. God know I should be happy, but I’m not. I’m depressed—and to be honest, scared. The pain is growing worse and my breasts are intensely sore. Oh, how I want the child—I’ve struggled so hard—but now I don’t. Not really—not deep down. What am I to do? You see, our marriage is—well, it’s like a sinking ship and I have no one to cling to—like a life preserver. Arthur is cold and remote. He really doesn’t want the baby. Maybe this is why I’ve been such a meanie lately. I take out all my anger and frustration on everybody else. Marilyn”
By the first week of November, Wilder was no longer speaking to his star. He told a reporter he’d never make a third picture with Monroe. “I have discussed this project with my doctor and my psychiatrist, and they tell me I’m too old and too rich to go through this again.”
In spite of the downright hatred that was flourishing on the set, the movie ended in one of the funniest scenes in the history of Hollywood.
Throughout the shoot, comedian Joe E. Brown, playing the very wealthy Osgood Fielding III, had been chasing Daphne (played by Lemmon, in drag). During the film’s final reel, as they are fleeing together in the back seat of a speedboat on their way to his yacht, with Tony Curtis and Marilyn in the back seat, Osgood tells Daphne that he wants to marry her. Daphne pulls off her wig. “I can’t marry you—I’m a man.”
Without losing a beat, and just before THE END flashed across the screen, Osgood says, “Nobody’s perfect” and smiles demurely. The irony that only the most hip of the viewers of the 1950s understood involved the fact that Osgood had been aware all along that Daphne was indeed, a man in drag.
Marilyn with Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot
***
After flying back to New York, Marilyn settled in to leading a separate life, although living under the same roof as her husband. On December 17, 1958, she experienced acute pains and was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, where she was hauled in on a stretcher.
Dr. Hilliard Dubrow, her New York physician, rushed to her side. The last thing she remembered was his assurance that “Everything is going to be all right.”
When she woke up the next morning in a sedated daze, she learned that everything wasn’t all right. Once again, she’d lost her baby.
She blamed herself for the loss, “I killed it!” she yelled at her New York maid, Lena Pepitone. “I killed it just like I stuck a knife through its poor little heart. Gladys told me I wasn’t fit to bring a child into the world. I hate to admit it, but she was right. Gladys knows a lot about unfit mothers.”
She would stay out of hospitals until June of 1959, when she would go in again for some exploratory surgery to determine if she could ever give birth to a child. At Lenox Hill, Dr. Oscar Steinberg told her that she could not get pregnant again. “It’s just not going to happen. But I will name my firstborn in your honor.”
Marilyn spent a dull, depressing winter mourning the loss of her baby. But in the early spring of 1959, Miller persuaded her to attend the March 30 premiere of Some Like It Hot at Loew’s State Theater in Manhattan. Throughout most of the screening, she covered her face in embarrassment. The audience roared with laughter throughout the film.
When she returned home, she grabbed a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator and ran toward her bedroom. When he called to her, she screamed, “It was disgusting. Did you hear them laughing at me? I was a funny fat whore. That’s why they laughed.”
She locked her bedroom door to him. He hadn’t left the marriage yet, and The Misfits was yet to come, but for all practical purposes, both of them knew their marriage was over, as they confided to their respective friends.
Around the time one of Marilyn’s biggest fans, the writer Norman Mailer, went to see Some Like It Hot, he had heard that she was breaking up with Miller. “I do not think Marilyn Monroe would be married to anybody. She belongs to all men.”
The film was a hit worldwide. Even the government of Iraq allowed it to be shown, although censors there had previously banned Bus Stop, asserting that it was “dangerous to boys and young men.”
In Istanbul, a young Turk had slashed his wrists while watching Marilyn emote in How to Marry a Millionaire. During Some Like It Hot, many young men masturbated in the theater while watching Marilyn as Sugar Kane. In some countries, censors cut 105 feet out of one of her seduction sequences with Curtis.
The success of Some Like It Hot didn’t help Marilyn’s depression. Lena Pepitone, the maid, said, “Every day she was either angry, hysterical, or both.”
The film today lives in legend. The American Film Institute named it number one on its list of “100 Funniest Movies of All Time.”
***
Although many scripts were presented to her, Marilyn did not work in 1959. The role that interested her was that of Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, based on his best-selling novella.
“When I created the character of Holly, I had Marilyn in mind for the role.” Capote said.
To his friends, Capote referred to Marilyn as “unschooled, but enormously brilliant.”
At one point, Capote claimed that Marilyn had deliberately intended to “sabotage” Miller’s The Misfits through her lobbying for the role of Holly Golightly. As her biographer, Barbara Leaming, put it, “She seemed eager to subvert Arthur’s plans. If he was willing to put up with anything to get his picture made, then she, apparently, was ready to do anything to stop it.”
“Meeting with Tennessee Williams and his lover, Frankie Merlo, Marilyn presented her dilemma to him. “Which picture should I make? Arthur Miller’s The Misfits or Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”
“ It’s no contest,” Tennessee advised her. “Go for Capote’s Holly Golightly. Miller’s play is about rounding up mustangs for the slaughter house, where the meat will be canned as dog food. Is he out of his mind? Who would want to see a play about that?”
Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8
“Don’t condemn it too much,” Merlo cautioned him. “After all, you wrote a play about beach hustlers cannibalizing a homosexual in Italy. I’d rather eat horse flesh that human flesh.”
“Of course, Holly is another slut role for me, but you’ve made up my mind for me,” she said.
“Slut roles can be fabulous,” Tennessee said. “I hear Elizabeth Taylor’s going to play a slut in Butterfield 8.”
“ Call that type casting,” Marilyn said.
Capote went on to work with her during his creation of two of the scenes from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, excerpts which she performed in front of the highly critical Actors Studio.
Later, Susan Strasberg recalled Marilyn’s performance at the Actors Studio, but only after she’d seen the completed movie version. “It was a great moment for Marilyn and should have been captured on film. Audrey Hepburn, who eventually got the role, was wonderful, if you could believe such a delicate little creature could be a working whore. I don’t mean that Marilyn was sluttish, but she looked like she was familiar with the profession. Actually, she would have brought a dimension to Breakfast at Tiffany’s that Audrey didn’t. But Marilyn had earned such a bad press for all the delays on Some Like It Hot that Blake Edwards, the director, didn’t want to use her, fearing she’d break the bank.”
***
In September of 1959, the First Secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, the most powerful communist in the world, Nikita Khrushchev, embarked on an official visit to the United States. In anticipation of that event, Spyros Skouras, director of 20th Century Fox called Marilyn in New York and asked her if she’d fly to Los Angeles to greet him during his upcoming visit to Hollywood. Skouras told her that the visit of the Soviet chairman would be the media circus of the year, and he wanted Marilyn there to mingle with Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, Judy Garland, and Kim Novak. “If we’re having all those broads, why not the Queen of the Love Goddesses?”
That argument seemed to win her over, and she asked Arthur Miller if he’d accompany her. After thinking it over, he refused, saying, “J. Edgar Hoover already thinks I’m a card-carrying communist. If I flew across the country to shake the hand of Nikita Khrushchev, that’s all the evidence the fucker would need to nail me.”
Instead, Miller asked his friend and publisher, Frank E. Taylor, if he’d accompany Marilyn to the West Coast, and he agreed. At the time, Taylor was editor-in-chief of Dell Books, but within a few short months, he would become the producer of The Misfits.
Years later, in Key West, Taylor shared memories not only of that trip, but of the filming of The Misfits, with the author of this book. In fairness to him, some of his astonishing remarks were not meant for publication.
Reporters surrounded Marilyn as she landed at the Los Angeles airport. As Taylor remembered it, “She ambled down the ramp slowly, her pelvis thrown back, her chest thrust forward, her hips swimming rhythmically from right to left and back again. It took all of three minutes for her to reach the bottom of the ramp.”
A reporter waiting there asked, “Marilyn, have you come back to Los Angeles to make another movie, or to cozy up to Khrushchev?”
“I’m here to meet him,” she said, smiling provocatively. “That is, if he didn’t bring Mrs. Khrushchev.”
“Do you think he wants to meet you?” the reporter asked.
She threw him a hostile look. “I certainly hope he does, or else I’ve wasted my time flying across the country to say hello.”
After she’d settled into her bungalow, she placed a call to Frank Sinatra, who was filming Can-Can with Shirley MacLaine, a role that had originally been offered to her.
She had heard that he was going to marry Juliet Prowse, the star dancer in Can-Can. Until that time, Marilyn had held out some vague hope that Sinatra would marry her after she divorced Miller.
“I like what we have between us,” Sinatra told her, and “I’d like to continue it. Let’s don’t spoil it with marriage.” He’d later change his mind.
Marilyn called Jeanne Carmen and told her that she was devastated by the rejection. “I can’t believe Frank would treat me this way. He told me he loved me and wanted to spend the rest of his life with me.”
“Oh, Marilyn,” said the more realistic Carmen. “How many men have told you that?”
At her bungalow, Marilyn arose at seven that morning to prepare herself for her audience with Khrushchev. She summoned her friend, Ralph Roberts, “the masseur to the stars,” to give her a wake-up massage. Agnes Flanagan arrived two hours later to work on Marilyn’s body makeup. Soon, Whitey Snyder, her favorite makeup artist, entered the bungalow to “help me put on my warpaint.” Then, her favorite hair stylist, Sidney Guilaroff, was the last member of her support team to show up.
Nina and Nikita Khrushchev
“Paint a face on me that says ‘fuck me, Nikita,’” she instructed.
When she was fully made up and camera-ready, Skouras dropped by her bungalow. Then he told Taylor, her escort, “I want you to make sure she shows up. She’s got to be at that luncheon…and on time. You see to that.” Looking her over like his choicest slab of beef, the Fox executive predicted, “You are going to steal all the attention away from the chairman.”
In a black net dress that was rather transparent in the bosom, Marilyn made her way to the limousine where her chauffeur, Rudi Kautzsky, had been waiting to begin the ten-minute ride to the Fox Studios on West Pico Boulevard.
When she saw the almost empty parking lot, Marilyn went into a state of panic. “Oh, I’ve done it again. We’re late. Everybody is gone.” Taylor assured her that for once in her life, she was actually early for a scheduled event.
Inside the Fox Studio, she turned to Taylor once again for reassurance. “How do I look?”
“You’re bulging out in all the right places,” he assured her.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “Nikita Khrushchev is a hell of a bigger name than President Sukarno of Indonesia.”
As the other guests began to pour in, Sinatra was among the first to greet her, giving her a big kiss. “Oh, Frankie, don’t spoil my makeup. It took me five hours to get ready for this show.”
“Don’t worry about it, kiddo,” he said. “You’re a natural beauty.”
Frank Taylor later claimed that Sinatra whispered in her ear that he’d try to knock off “a quickie before you fly back East and into the arms of Arthur Miller.”
One of the guests was Richard Burton. He told Marilyn that he was sorry that he hadn’t been available to play the role of her co-star in The Prince and the Showgirl. “I would have played that role completely different from Larry. I’d have made the fucking prince a little more human.”
Elizabeth Taylor was among the stars filing into the luncheon. She walked past Marilyn without speaking. She may have noticed Burton, but this event occurred months before their affair in Rome on the set of Cleopatra.
Elizabeth had already visited Moscow during January of 1958, a cold, dark month. Khrushchev was made aware of her during her time there. When Elizabeth made her first appearance in Moscow, wearing fur-lined red leather boots and a mink coat, several fans approached, asking her for her autograph. “Every god damn one of them asked me if I was that Marilyn Monroe thing.” As she later reported, “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. On the arm of her then-husband, Mike Todd, later to be tragically killed in an airplane crash, Elizabeth discovered that most Russians did not know who she was. At an official dinner, Khrushchev, according to reports, kept casting an eye at her. The serpent eyes of Nina Khrushchev, Nikita’s wife, followed those of her husband. She asked an aide, “Who is the pretty young lady?” after staff members of virtually every foreign embassy in Moscow had fawned over her.
Khrushchev was already familiar with Marilyn’s image, however, before his arrival in America. He had attended the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, at which she had appeared as Sugar Kane on sixteen side-by-side movie screens at the same time. Some forty thousand Soviets cheered wildly. The chairman had attended the event after his much-photographed debate with Richard Nixon within a replica of a model American kitchen.
Shelley Winters later recalled that she’d attended a film festival in Moscow. She made an entrance in a slinky white jersey evening gown with diamond earrings, wearing a white mink cape draped around her shoulders. “That night I was constantly asked if I were Marilyn Monroe.”
Guests at the Fox luncheon began filling in, each attired in their finest noon day outfits.
Marilyn received kisses from Cary Grant, her former co-star in Monkey Business; Gregory Peck, with whom she wanted to co-star in her next film, Let’s Make Love; Bob Hope, who propositioned her; and then-lovers, David Niven and Rita Hayworth.
Niven whispered “something naughty” into Marilyn’s ear, which, if she had been the blushing type, might have caused her to turn red. As she’d later confide to Jeanne Carmen, “He told me he’d get around to me after he finished off Rita. Then he added, ‘ever had a beer can?’”
Hayworth glared at her during her lover’s exchange with Marilyn. In front of the 1940s-era screen goddess, Marilyn actually curtsied, calling the fading star, “Your Majesty.” Rita had, after all, been married to Prince Aly Khan. Marilyn had no way of knowing if Hayworth was aware of the brief but torrid affair she’d had with her former husband, Orson Welles.
At last, the formalities at Fox began. Khrushchev stood at the head of the receiving line to greet his guests.
Sinatra stood by, looking helpless as MacLaine cut into line. “How the hell are you, Khrush? I’m god damn glad you’re here. Welcome to our country, and welcome to 20th Century Fox. I hope you enjoy seeing how Hollywood makes a musical. I’m going to perform the Can-Can number without pants in honor of you.”
Marilyn paid almost no attention to the dour and unphotogenic matriarch of the Soviet Union, Nina Khrushchev. She later told Sinatra, “I didn’t know she was the First Lady of the Soviet Union. I thought she was a bag woman who had slipped into the room looking for a handout.”
A photographer stood by, hoping to get a snapshot of the First Soviet Secretary gazing down Marilyn’s bosom, but at the last minute, he was chased away.
After Marilyn extended her hand to the Soviet dictator, he smiled at her and held it for a very long time, thereby stopping the progress of the receiving line. “You are a very lovely young lady,” he told her in Russian. A translator was at hand. “I insist you sit with me at the head table.”
She said to him, “My husband, Arthur Miller, sends his greetings. There should be more of this kind of thing. It would help both our countries understand each other.”
In New York at the time, Miller would later say, “The Soviet chairman was very obviously smitten with her, and she in turn liked him for his plainness.”
Sinatra said, “When Marilyn met Nikita, the atmosphere oozed with sex with a capital S. I would almost bet my left nut that she made a date to meet with him afterward. Elizabeth Taylor and I both felt that was true. We saw them in a huddle, after the luncheon, with a translator.”
One snippet of luncheon conversation between Marilyn and Nikita was later revealed, thanks to a loose-lipped translator. Marilyn asked the Soviet chairman, “Have you seen anything in America you like?”
“Yes, he replied through the translator. “You.”
She giggled. “Anything else?”
“Yes, again. Those bumper stickers that read ‘BETTER RED THAN DEAD.’”
At table, Spyros, a long-ago Greek immigrant, told Khrushchev that he and his brothers had arrived in America with only a few carpets to sell and the clothes on their backs. “Now I am the president of 20th Century Fox. This is the kind of opportunity America offers.”
Khrushchev reminded him that he was the son of a poor coal miner. “Now I am the head of the Soviet Union.”
Marilyn later said that she thought that was a fantastic reply. “Like me, Nikita is the odd man out.”
During the luncheon at Fox, Khrushchev and Skouras debated the merits of communism vs. capitalism. Khrushchev’s remarks incensed a drunken Richard Burton, who threatened to “go up on that stage and beat the shit out of that fucker.” Two Fox security guards arrived to restrain him.
Sitting at a distant table, Elizabeth Taylor turned to her husband, Eddie Fisher. “That Welsh actor is foaming at the mouth. Leave it to him to make a public spectacle.”
Later, talking to Skouras, she stood about ten feet from Marilyn and Khrushchev. “Pandro Berman wants me to play a whore in this piece of crap called Butterfield 8. And he was the man who produced National Velvet. I told him I won’t do it, but he’s threatening me financially. If he wants a whore to play the role, why not Marilyn Monroe?”
Marilyn, of course, heard the voice, whose harsh tone evoked the one Elizabeth would later use in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She whispered to Sinatra, “I know why Elizabeth is so upset. I’ve been to bed with Eddie Fisher. She got short changed on that one.”
It had been Sinatra’s idea to stage a performance of the can-can for Khrushchev on Fox’s Sound Stage 8, on a set that evoked Paris in the 1890s.
Marilyn was seated in the audience next to Gregory Peck. Three seats away sat Elizabeth and Fisher. She was still obsessing about Burton. “He’s always ranting about something. Doesn’t he ever know when to shut up?”
“I don’t give a fuck what he says, just so long as he stays away from you,” Fisher said.
“I won’t let him get ten feet near me,” Elizabeth said. “I know his reputation. I don’t intend to become another notch in his belt.”
Hearing that, Marilyn whispered to Peck, “When am I going to become a notch on your belt?”
“When we make Let’s Make Love,” Peck responded.
Khrushchev, the old perv, was secretly thrilled by the racy dance, especially the ending when the can-can dancers turned their backs to the audience to reveal their butts.
Ideologically, at least, Khrushchev had to pretend to be shocked by this open display of the sexuality associated with decadent capitalism. After the show, he said, “The face of mankind is prettier than its backside. We do not want that sort of thing for the Russians. The dance is lascivious, disgusting, and immoral.”
More than any of the other dancers, Juliet Prowse, Sinatra’s girlfriend-of-the-moment, attracted the most attention during the can-can she performed in front of the Soviet chairman. She later said, “Nikita, such a big teddy bear, was my greatest press agent. Before him, I was unknown. After his visit, I became a household word like Frank Sinatra himself. My career took off, thanks to the Red Menace.”
Soviet austerity meets Hollywood: Nikita Khrushchev, Marilyn Monroe
According to Frank E. Taylor, Sinatra admitted that, “Before going back home to Arthur, Marilyn shacked up with both Gregory Peck and me.” Marilyn also claimed during conversations with Taylor to have had a quickie with Khrushchev in his hotel suite. She even described to Taylor what happened:
Through a translator, according to Taylor, Khrushchev and Marilyn had arranged to meet later over some vodka and caviar. “Nina was out shopping, I presume. After the preliminaries, Khrushchev told his security guards to beat it.”
“I knew that the time had come,” Marilyn told Taylor. “I did a striptease in front of him, but he kept all his clothes on. Finally, he stood up in front of me and I got his signal. He wanted me to give him a blow-job. I unzipped him. It was already erect. I don’t know how long it took Nina to bring him off, but it took me six intense minutes, and I think he really enjoyed it.”
“How’s he hung?” Taylor asked.
“Short, fat, and knobby, a mushroom head that tapered at the base. Not the world’s most beautiful cock, I can tell you that.”
Frank E. Taylor, with his wife, Nan, in 1951
Long after Marilyn was dead, and long after he’d produced The Misfits, Taylor, in Key West, reflected on the bizarre encounter Marilyn had relayed to him about being alone with Khrushchev. “At first I didn’t believe her, but she could be very convincing. After thinking it over, I felt it might really have happened. It made sense in a funny sort of way. This unwanted child had become the most desirable woman on the planet. She could boast of the distinction of having given blow-jobs to two of the most important men in the world, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. Marilyn may be the only woman in the world who did both of them.”
She also claimed that when Khrushchev returned to Russia, he sent her an expensive present, although she never said exactly what the gift was. He did extend an official invitation for her to visit Moscow.
She later told Robert Slatzer that “Nikita was the most fascinating man I’ve ever met. But I think Carl Sandburg is more interesting.”
Then she said, “I could tell that Nikita liked me the most of all the pretty girls there. But there’s a problem, however. He’s got too many warts on his face. Who would want to be a communist, with a president with all those warts?”
***
“Working the boondocks,” in his own words, Senator Kennedy pursued his conquest of the presidency, quietly but efficiently organizing a vast political machine for his run during the upcoming year.
Actually, Bobby Kennedy and Ambassador Kennedy ran the machine themselves. JFK confessed to Marilyn, “I am merely the showhorse they bring out to exhibit. They’re making all the decisions for me.”
She may have felt uneasy sleeping under the same roof in Santa Monica with Peter and Patricia Lawford, but JFK assured her that it would be all right. “Pat and Peter—don’t you like the easy sound of those names?—are currently sharing the same beach boy. I’ve seen him. He’s a knockout in this town of knockouts. He’s sort of a combination Tab Hunter and Lex Barker. Not my type, but Peter’s. You’re my type.”
Her night with JFK represented another of the few times in their years-long relationship that she actually got to spend a full night with him. She loved him, even his light snoring, or so she had convinced herself. She liked to cuddle in his arms, even though it didn’t seem to be his favorite thing. In describing all the details of her night with JFK to Jeanne Carmen, she confessed, “Prez wasn’t much of a cuddler. But he did make love to me twice that night in spite of those damn back problems of his.”
She only saw him briefly when he woke up the following morning. His wit and charisma were still there, but the morning light revealed a slightly battered face. He looked older than she’d ever seen him before. His eyes were bloodshot from all that champagne the night before. He seemed to have a wincing headache. “It’s this god damn intestinal flu that I can’t seem to shake off,” he told her.
He emerged from his shower still unshaven. She toweled him off. After that, he stood nude in front of the mirror, shaving. His hair was still damp and uncombed. She’d never seen him shave before. Had Jackie ever seen him shave? She doubted it.
As he shaved, she planted kisses on that tortured back of his, as if she could make it well again. She wanted to remember every single detail of her night and morning with him. Jeanne Carmen and Shelley Winters would demand blow-by-blow descriptions.
He seemed in a rush as her tongue traveled a familiar trail, and she wished she’d had more time. She was surprised at the number of freckles on his body, “The curse of red-haired Irish men,” he once said.
He was in California to raise campaign money, and she didn’t know when she’d see him again, as he was flying to San Francisco that afternoon.
She had been hoping that he would invite her to go with him, but his plans in Northern California didn’t include her. She’d heard stories from Lawford that he was frequenting a mysterious figure called Judith Campbell, who had been Frank Sinatra’s girlfriend before gangster Sam Giancana discovered her charms.
Giancana had told her that JFK was seeing a lot more of Judith than he was seeing of her. She was anxious to meet her competition. “I want to see what she has that I don’t have,” Marilyn said.
“The best way to do that would be to suggest a three-way,” Carmen said. “You know your lover boy is famous for organizing three-ways. How better to discover what her special talents are than by seeing the bitch in action?”
“You’ve got a point there,” Marilyn said. “I’ll have to think about that.”
Lawford was already in the kitchen when JFK and Marilyn came down together for breakfast. She wore white shorts and a pink halter, but Jack was fully dressed. Lawford, meanwhile, was wandering around in an open terrycloth robe that exposed his nudity.
“Where’s Pat?” JFK asked.
“Still asleep,” Lawford said. He motioned toward a Mexican maid standing near the stove. “Tell her what you want. Tamales or tacos?”
“A glass of ice water,” JFK said. “I’ve got pills to take. A cup of black coffee—and that’s it.”
Since she didn’t want to consume food like a fat pig, she settled for coffee, a small orange juice, and a piece of toast (“no butter”).
JFK looked at Lawford. “Tell me all the rumors going around Hollywood about Marilyn.”
“Okay, buddy,” Lawford said. “Marilyn, you’d better leave the room.”
“I’m sure I’ve heard worse,” she said.
“The latest story I’ve heard is that you lived for eight months with two fag junkies, and that they peddled you to support their habit. The other rumor is that you’ve fucked every Jew in Hollywood.”
She brushed off the charges. “How nice,” she said.
“And what do they say about me?” the senator asked.
“Not much, not much at all,” Lawford said. “Believe it or not, a lot of show business people don’t know a hell of a lot about you. Of course, they still tell stories about my dear old father-in-law.”
“Well, I’ve got to change that. I want to become a household word. If you’re trying to become President of the United States, you can’t be an unknown.”
After the Senator had consumed his coffee, he went to make some phone calls. She wondered if he were calling Jackie, but she didn’t think so.
Seated in the harsh, revealing morning sunlight of Los Angeles, Peter was no longer the pretty boy he’d been in the 1940s. Graying temples and puffy jowls were descending. His frantic lifestyle was catching up with him. The eyes that greeted her seemed to conceal self-loathing. After all, being a faded movie star and functioning as the senator’s pimp were hardly roles he welcomed.
After a quick kiss, the President was off, without having expressed any commitment about seeing her again.
It was the pimp who remained behind and extended an invitation to her. “Pat and I are going to a club tonight in Malibu. We want you to come with us. The drag queen who’s performing there is attracting big crowds. It’s said that he does an impersonation of Marilyn Monroe that’s better than your own.”
“Okay, I’ll go,” she said, “but I want to invite William Holden.”
“Haven’t you already fucked him?” Lawford asked. “Everybody else has. In fact, I once heard him say that when he was a young actor, new to Hollywood, he used to service actress after actress, most of them far older than him. He also said, ‘I’m a whore…all actors are.’”
“That’s not the issue,” she said. “John Huston is considering him for the role of the cowboy opposite me in The Misfits.”
“Okay, I’ll call him,” he said. “Hell, I could go for him myself.”
“There’s another reason I want to bed him tonight. I’ve heard that Jackie is shacking up with him.”
“That’s one I hadn’t heard,” he said. “You little devil. You want to take Jackie’s husband away from her, and you want to take her lover away, too.”
“All’s fair in love and war,” she said, rising from the kitchen table. “Now, give me two hours to make myself beautiful for the day.”
***
The 1960s had dawned, signaling the beginning of Marilyn’s final years. It was January and cold in Los Angeles, as Marilyn and Arthur Miller moved into bungalow no. 21 at the swanky Beverly Hills Hotel. Over their heads, occupying the bungalow’s second story, were the French actor, Yves Montand, and his actress wife, Simone Signoret.
They were in Hollywood for Montand’s filming of a musical comedy entitled Let’s Make Love, to be shot in CinemaScope and in color, a production supervised by Jerry Wald, directed by George Cukor, and based on a script by Norman Krasna. Marilyn and Montand were the designated stars, with supporting roles by Tony Randall and Frankie Vaughan, along with brief cameo appearances from Bing Crosby, Milton Berle, and Gene Kelly. Frank Sinatra had turned down the cameo role that eventually went to Crosby.
At the last minute, Gregory Peck had dropped out of Let’s Make Love, which turned out to be a smart decision. Cukor had also sent a copy of the script to Cary Grant (“It’s shit!”) James Stewart (“Maybe I’d do it with Kim Novak”); Yul Brynner (“I’ve already fucked Marilyn”); Peter Lawford (“Marilyn would devour me onscreen”); Tony Curtis (“With Marilyn, never again”); Charlton Heston (“You’ve got to be kidding”); and Rock Hudson, who asserted that he’d be delighted to appear in a movie with Marilyn. But Universal wouldn’t release him. “Too bad,” said Cukor. “At least I could have gotten a mercy fuck from Rock.”
In the surprise casting decision of the season, the role eventually went to Montand, a song-and-dance man from Paris. Ironically, the role of “The Billionaire” (which was the project’s original title) called for an actor who could neither sing nor dance.
For a prolonged period, Montand had avoided visiting the United States, because of his refusal to sign a document asserting that he had never been a member of the Communist Party. Early in 1959, that requirement was eliminated, and Montand was allowed to fly to New York for his role in a one-man song-and-dance act on Broadway.
Montand had previously met Arthur Miller during one of the playwright’s visits to Paris for a performance of his play, The Crucible. Montand first met Marilyn some time later, when Miller escorted her to Montand’s debut on Broadway.
Other than defining Montand as “mesmerizing” both on and off the stage, Marilyn was shocked to discover that he spoke very little English. She did not feel, however, that that would be a barrier to his ability to co-star with her. “I’m sure he’s a fast learner,” she told her husband.
When he was introduced to her for the first time, Montand said, perhaps with irony, “To the people of France, America is Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe.”
Although Montand was a household word throughout France, he was eager for international stardom, which he felt could only be obtained through a success in American movies. He viewed his debut as Marilyn’s leading man as a major achievement on the road to his dreams.
When it was announced that Montand would be her co-star, Marilyn told the press that the three most attractive men in the world, in her opinion, included, number one, her husband, followed by Marlon Brando and Yves Montand. “Actually, Montand looks like my former husband, Joe DiMaggio.”
She may have been correct in comparing Montand to DiMaggio. Biographer Fred Lawrence Guiles summed up Montand’s look: “His appeal is a projection of primitive sexiness. Despite the disadvantages of a broad mouth, gaunt cheeks, and a weak chin, he has smouldering eyes sunken deep into their sockets, a natural grace of movement, a tremulous voice as forlorn and as tinged with Parisian back alleys as Piaf’s, and a Gallic charm that appeals to men as well as to women.”
The script had already undergone several rewrites, but Cukor was still not pleased with it, finding it lackluster. Then the Writers Guild called a strike. In desperation, Cukor turned to Miller to “touch up” some of the scenes and to rewrite others. The playwright was offered $15,000 for his work, even though screenplays were not his forte. As it turned out, Miller’s role consisted of enlarging Marilyn’s part and diminishing Montand’s. Miller refused, however, to allow his name to be listed in the movie’s credits.
Marilyn later referred to Miller’s role in the film as “scab labor” and said to him, “Some fucking communist union man you are. Don’t ever claim to me again that you’re a champion of the underdog. And I once thought of you as a modern day Abraham Lincoln. Another of my illusions shattered.”
In Hollywood, Cukor was known as a woman’s director. Although he’d been fired by David O. Selznick back in the late 1930s as the director of Gone With the Wind, Cukor had continued to direct Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland, from the privacy of his home, for their roles within that film. Cukor was also one of the closest friends and admirers of Katharine Hepburn.
Marilyn had always listed him as one of the few men in Hollywood whom she would allow to direct her. However, the relationship between them began on a sour note the first day she showed up for work. As if she were not insecure enough, he made her even more so. Cukor’s first words to her were, “You’re thirty pounds overweight.”
As filming began, the Montands and the Millers often shared dinners together, the most memorable being a spaghetti dinner that Marilyn cooked for all of them. “I learned how to make spaghetti from the DiMaggio family in San Francisco,” she told them.
While Miller and Montand bonded—they shared the same left-wing political views—Marilyn and Signoret often had long talks. She confessed to the French actress that the only time she had ever been happy was when the famous photographer, Richard Avedon, photographed her as a series of three incarnations of earlier film icons: Dietrich, Garbo, and Harlow. “Other than that, I am filled with nothing but fears and regrets.”
Gallic charm: Yves Montand
It seemed that Marilyn spent a lot of time fretting over her perceived inadequacies associated with her hair style—particularly her “widow’s peak.” Eventually, she found “the one woman in California who I can trust to dye my hair.” Previously, that hair colorist had maintained Jean Harlow as a platinum blonde when the legendary star had been part of MGM during the 1930s.
The elderly hairdresser was flown from San Diego to Los Angeles at weekly intervals to transform Marilyn into a blonde. Unfortunately, the roots at the front of her hairline didn’t take to the dye very well. That deficiency usually had to be concealed with a lock of Marilyn’s hair artfully draped across her forehead.
Marilyn always stuffed the hairdresser with plenty of gourmet food before her coloring sessions, during which the woman entertained Signoret and Marilyn with shocking stories about Harlow in her heyday. Marilyn told the colorist that her greatest dream involved interpreting Harlow’s role onscreen as part of a film biography based on her life.
In her memoirs, Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be, Signoret had little to say about Marilyn’s subsequent affair with her husband. But she did provide some insights about what life was like between the Montands and the Millers when the French acting team lived above them in a hotel bungalow on the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
During their communal dinners, Montand often amused the Millers with stories about his early life. Born in Italy, his family fled to Marseille to escape the rule of the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.
Montand said that at one point in his career, he became a hairdresser. His shop was adjacent to a nightclub for female impersonators. Montand told them that most of his clients were drag queens, who brought their wigs for him to repair. As he “decorated” their heads, they constantly groped him. “I was a big attraction for these guys,” he said. He also told fascinating stories about when he lived with and loved Edith Piaf. “I was her boy. The little sparrow was so short, she hardly came up to my beltline.”
“How convenient,” Marilyn said.
The first jealousy Marilyn showed toward Signoret did not involve her possession of Montand, but the fact that Signoret had been nominated for (and later won) an Oscar as Best Actress for her role in Room at the Top. Marilyn was furious that she was not nominated for her interpretation of Sugar Kane in Some Like It Hot.
Later, Miller said that Marilyn was “horrified” that Shelley Winters went on to win an Oscar for her role in The Diary of Anne Frank. “All the bitches around me are taking home Oscars,” she shouted at Miller, “but there’s nothing for the Slut of Hollywood.” She got so drunk on champagne that night that she couldn’t report for work the next morning.
It was Simone who first advised Marilyn to buy the rights to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a book whose dramatization she’d previously interpreted in French, in France, right after World War II. Ironically, it was Charlie Chaplin who would eventually acquire the rights and (unsuccessfully) offer its leading role to Marilyn.
One night, Marilyn and Miller engaged in a bitter argument over changes he had proposed in his rewrites to her character. “You rarely agree with me on anything,” she said. “You engage in all these intellectual conversations with Simone. She’s too old for a man like Yves. Much more your type. Perhaps we should switch partners. I’m sure that both of us would be much happier that way.”
“I just might do that,” he said before storming out of their bungalow.
When Miller was out of town, Signoret saw Lex Barker, the movie world’s former Tarzan, coming and going from Marilyn’s bungalow.
One evening, the Montands were astonished when Marilyn invited them to dinner. Her guest was DiMaggio. “Marilyn couldn’t keep her hands off this athlete, even during dinner,” Signoret recalled after Marilyn’s death.
On another night, Signoret spotted Marilyn disappearing inside the bungalow of Howard Hughes, who was also in residence within one of the nearby bungalows.
At one point during the filming of Let’s Make Love, Marilyn retreated to her bungalow, refusing to work, thereby shutting down production. She informed Signoret that every member of the film crew was a homosexual, and that they were deliberately making her appear fat and ugly before the camera. “It’s no secret that they hate women, because they want the men for themselves. They’re probably sucking the cocks of our husbands right now.”
Signoret assured her that neither Miller nor Montand had any particularly large gay following. “Gays are more attracted to men like Rock Hudson, who, as you know, was originally intended as your co-star. You also have a large gay following, so don’t say anything against these fellows. In France, we appreciate them more than you Americans, especially in the arts. When he’s been away from home, Yves has occasionally been sucked off by some homosexuals. But I’m not jealous of them. At least he’s not with another woman.”
“Even the film’s director, George Cukor, is the gayest goose in Hollywood,” Marilyn said. “Incidentally, you’d better watch him. He’s known for sucking off all the leading men in his films.”
Simone Signoret
That might not have been just idle speculation on her part.
Billy Travilla, who had frequently functioned as Marilyn’s dress designer, claimed that “Cukor was smitten with the French star. He often favored him at Marilyn’s expense. Aware of this, Yves played Cukor for whatever it was worth. He also invited him out for cozy dinners.”
Crew members became more or less aware that at some point during a day of filming, Montand would disappear with Cukor to get a blow job.
Shelley Winters, who visited Marilyn on the set, later said, “Cukor really turned on Marilyn because she was running around with Montand. That seriously pissed off her director. He was incensed when Marilyn began an affair with a man he sexually desired.”
Rupert Allan, Marilyn’s publicist, concluded, “Montand used both Cukor and Marilyn to gain a foothold in Hollywood. He used her shamelessly, just as he used his lovesick director.”
Montand told the press, “I welcomed the chance to be working with Marilyn Monroe. Can you imagine, this babi from Marseille ending up in Hollywood starring opposite this film goddess?”
Marilyn’s affair with Montand began when Signoret left for Europe to make a film, and Miller went location hunting in Nevada for The Misfits with that film’s director, John Huston. Thus began a two-month romance.
Someone leaked the news to the press. Suspicion about who actually made the leak fell on “the gossipy gay,” George Cukor.
***
Marilyn’s confusion over her upcoming divorce from Miller, which she hadn’t filed for yet, and her love affair with Montand drove her into the care of yet another doctor, the controversial psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who would forever after be associated with legends surrounding her death.
Sometimes Marilyn, without telling Cukor, would leave the set to visit him. The psychiatrist would loom large during the final months of her life.
In New York, Marilyn had been dependent on Dr. Marianne Kris for her mental stability. But she quickly transferred her allegiance to Dr. Greenson, who in time became far more important in her life than Dr. Kris had ever been. Greenson often wrote to Dr. Kris about Marilyn and her treatments, and spoke with her frequently over the phone as a means of better understanding Marilyn’s particular anxieties. In a letter that later surfaced, Dr. Greenson wrote, “Marilyn is such a perpetual orphan. I feel even sorrier as she tries so hard and fails so often, which also makes her pathetic.”
In February of 1960, as Valentine’s Day rolled around, Cukor was no longer speaking to Marilyn. Instead, as a means of communicating his wishes and intentions, he would tell the film’s choreographer, Jack Cole, what he wanted her to do, and then Cole would relay the director’s wishes, which Marilyn rarely, if ever, followed. She was often intoxicated during filming, drinking gin from a teacup, which fooled none of her fellow workers.
Reportedly, Miller became a direct witness to his wife’s affair with Montand when he returned to Los Angeles a day sooner than he had announced and caught the couple naked and in bed together.
Marilyn told Dr. Greenson that “physically, Yves is like Joe and that is what excites me about it. He doesn’t just look like Joe…there are other similarities, if you get my drift.”
When news of her husband’s affair became public, Signoret was flooded with letters, many women expressing their sympathy for the fact that her husband appeared to have fallen into the arms of “this sluttish vixen” or “this bottle blonde tramp.”
Also to her amazement, Signoret received hate mail from Marilyn’s fans, even though it was clear that she was the injured party. As she described in her memoirs, most of these letters were “pornographic, scatological, and patriotic.” Some letters even suggested that she should become a sex slave of Arab men, “whose amorous aptitude is so well known. Your fat ass would make you desirable to these pigs.” Several anti-Semitic letters even claimed that, “It serves Jew Miller right!”
Signoret later recalled, “I never detested Marilyn for going after my husband. What woman wouldn’t want to go to bed with Yves? He’s a great lover.”
Later, Montand said, “I thought Marilyn was more sophisticated about affairs. Most French wives are. She had this schoolgirl crush on me—that’s all. If she thought otherwise, she was mistaken. I have no intention of breaking up my marriage. If I were not married, and if Marilyn were not married, I would not object to marrying her. But I am married, and she is married, so let’s leave it at that. All Frenchmen worthy of the name have an occasional affair. French wives, too, have affairs. These affairs come and go. In France, we do not put much emphasis on them.”
Lena Pepitone, Marilyn’s maid, recalled going to see Let’s Make Love when it opened in New York. Dressed in a disguise, Marilyn attended the movie with her. At the end, after her character is reunited with the character played by Montand, who wants to marry her, Marilyn burst into tears. “Why is it, Lena, that the saddest words in English are ‘what might have been.’”
George Cukor
***
As Dr. Greenson loomed larger and more essential in Marilyn’s life, Miller became adamantly opposed to the long hours she spent with him “dredging up all your past horror. You need to live in the present and deal with today’s problems instead of thinking about getting raped a long time ago.”
She called Greenson “Romeo,” which was his real name, having been born in Brooklyn in 1911 and named Romeo Samuel Greenschpoon. His fraternal twin, a sister, was named Juliet, since their father was an avid fan of Shakespeare.
From the beginning, Greenson had trepidations about taking on such a high profile client as Marilyn. “I knew my name would be dragged through the mud. Taking on Marilyn was tantamount to having a grenade tossed into my office.”
Greenson became known among Hollywood stars when Vivien Leigh came to Los Angeles to shoot the interiors for William Dieterle’s Elephant Walk, the bulk of which had been filmed in Sri Lanka. A manic depressive, Vivien had suffered a nervous breakdown. During the seventy-two hour flight to California, Vivien had raved, raged, ranted, and torn at her clothes. She later claimed that appearing as Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire had “tipped” her into madness.
“If Romeo could bring some help to Scarlett O’Hara, maybe he could save little ol’ me,” Marilyn said.
Greenson frankly admitted, “I failed with Vivien. Maybe I can save Marilyn.”
He was a friend of Dr. Anna Freud, who had put Marilyn on the couch in London during her time there filming The Prince and the Showgirl. Ironically, while shooting Let’s Make Love, Marilyn was offered the leading female role (“Cecily”, a patient of Dr. Freud) in an upcoming movie entitled Freud. John Huston had already cast her friend, Monty Clift, as Freud.
Anna Freud had been sent a copy of the script. She later claimed, “I detested it.” In a strongly worded letter, perhaps motivated by fears of what the experience might do to Marilyn’s fragile emotional health, and also by her commitment to preserve the dignity and accuracy of her father’s therapeutic legacy, she wrote to Marilyn in Los Angeles, pleading with her to turn down the role of Cecily, which Marilyn did.
Years later, reflecting on what might have happened if Marilyn had participated in the film, Gloria Steinem wrote, “Marilyn would have been called upon to enact the psychotic fate she feared most in real life, and to play the patient of a man whose belief in female passivity may have been part of the reason she was helped so little by psychiatry.”
Frank Sinatra approved of Greenson, asserting that, “I went to him after the breakup of my marriage to Ava Gardner. It was a time of slashing wrists.”
Even though he objected to the long hours Marilyn spent alone with Greenson, Miller approved of the doctor’s politics. He was on the Communist Party’s list of analysts who were deemed suitable for the counseling of party members.
Making matters vaguely incestuous, Greenson was the brother-in-law of Mickey Rudin, the attorney who legally represented both Sinatra and Marilyn.
“I went with Marilyn to one of Greenson’s parties,” Shelley Winters recalled. “Our gal was certainly moving in a circle of Freudian-Marxists. That crowd of intellectuals definitely played ball in left field. I bet ‘Nellie’ Hoover was on Marilyn’s trail. In fact, she went home with a tall, good-looking guy that I felt was a G-Man from back East. He probably reported directly to Hoover what fucking Marilyn Monroe entailed.”
Based on his first visit to Marilyn’s bungalow and base of operations on the set of Let’s Make Love, Greenson learned that throughout most of the filming, she had been heavily sedated most of the time, consuming Amytal, sodium pentothal, Phenobarbital, and Demerol. He became furious when the evidence was spread before him. “You’ve got a fucking pharmacy here. Those idiot quacks prescribing all this for you should lose their license.” He demanded that in the future, she deal with only one medical doctor, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, a well-known internist in Beverly Hil1s.
“I think I’d like a man named Hyman,” she quipped.
Although they had emerged from radically different backgrounds, Marilyn bonded with Greenson during a five-hour session with him in her bungalow at the film studio. It evolved into a therapeutic interlude that delayed production of Let’s Make Love and once again provoked Cukor’s hostility.
“I’m a Jew, too,” she told Greenson. “And as you know, I’m married to a Jew, too, the coldest and most distant man on the planet.”
She began to call Greenson “my savior.” During a phone call to Lena Pepitone, her maid in New York, Marilyn said, “Dr. Greenson is Jesus. He’s doing wonders for me. If he wants sex, I will gratefully give it to him, but he hasn’t asked me yet, although I know he is very, very interested. A woman knows.”
“He’s chasing away my ghosts,” she said. “He listens to my stories of how cruel Arthur is to me, and I know I’ve won him over to my side. Dr. Greenson has convinced me that I’ve got to get out of this hopeless marriage. I can’t stand Arthur Miller.”
Winters claimed that Greenson was “in everybody’s crotch. Not just Marilyn’s, but he was also the therapist to that dago bastard, Sinatra. More and more, Greenson was taking control of Marilyn’s life. He even tried to force her to dump her best male friend, Ralph Roberts, her masseur and confidant. That creep told Marilyn that there was room for only one Ralph in her life—and that was Ralph Greenson himself. Personally, I think the fucking shrink is a charlatan.”
Patricia Kennedy Lawford, at a luncheon with Marilyn at the Beachcomber Restaurant in Malibu, warned her not to become too dependent on Greenson. “He wants to be your Svengali, taking over your career like Milton Greene did. You trust Jews too much. My father warned me about Jews. He also gave me some other good advice: Never marry an actor.”
Greenson kept Marilyn’s New York psychiatrist, Dr. Marianne Kris, informed. In one letter, he wrote: “I think she has terrible, terrible fantasies about mistreatment she suffered as a girl. I don’t believe most of her stories. Her delusions and hallucinations, as you well know, are a feature of her schizophrenic disorders. She has many paranoid reactions. She even believes that J. Edgar Hoover has assigned FBI agents to follow her and tap her phone lines. She claims Hoover wants access to damaging information on John Kennedy that could be used against him if he ever becomes president.”
In a phone call to Dr. Kris, the contents of which were later revealed, Greenson said, “Marilyn told me another tall tale yesterday afternoon. She claimed that her first husband, Jim Dougherty, once brought home Robert Mitchum to fuck her while he watched.”
“You mean, the movie star, Robert Mitchum?”
“Yes, her co-star in River of No Return. It’s true that Dougherty and Mitchum once worked side by side in a factory. She claimed that Dougherty took nude pictures of her and showed them to Mitchum, who got excited.”
“Do you believe her story?” Kris asked.
“It certainly occurs in marital relations, and from what I heard, Mitchum will do just about anything. I’m inclined to halfway believe her, because she’s had some wild adventures. Who knows? Sometimes I think she has come to believe the stories she told about her early life, whether they’re true or not.”
“Well, as we both know, there’s much to be learned through a person’s fantasies,” Kris said.
Greenson also told Kris that Marilyn claimed that she gave birth to a baby when she was about fifteen years old. “One time, she said it was a girl, but later became adamant that it was a boy. She sobbed for about an hour when she told me, ‘They took my baby from me. My beautiful baby boy.’”
“It was a boy!” she told Greenson. “I lied to you earlier when I said it was a girl. I had a boy, with a little pee-pee growing inside me. A boy, God damn it! I should know the sex of my own baby!”
During her third week of her counseling with Greenson, Marilyn confessed that she planned to commit suicide one day. “I want to go out like James Dean, while I’m still young and beautiful. I want everything in the room to be white, very Mae Westy. All white satin on the bed. White walls, white furniture. I want to be wearing a white négligée. It will be in New York. I’ll have my maid, Lena Pepitone, come in before the photographers arrive. She can close my eyes in death. Of course, I’ll have my makeup man and my hairdresser in. Then I’ll swallow a bottle of sleeping pills.”
She also discussed with Greenson that she wanted surgery both to tighten her vagina and to enlarge her breasts. She’d even acquired the name of two doctors who specialized in such treatments. “I want a vagina as tight as an asshole. Men like to fuck assholes because of the tight fit. I also want to enlarge my breasts to a forty-inch bust.”
Marilyn told Peter and Pat Lawford, “The Greensons became the family I never had.”
Dr. Greenson would later be criticized by some of his fellow professionals for allowing Marilyn to become such an integral part of his family life. Not with other patients, but with her, he encouraged her to participate in his private life, sleeping over, having meals at his table at night, often breakfast the next morning. She’d had an equivalent relationship with the Strasbergs, insinuating herself into their family life as well.
The doctor and his wife occupied a hacienda-style home on a hillside in Santa Monica. Marilyn often stood there at night taking in the views from the second-story balcony. She became friends with Greenson’s wife, Hildi, and especially their teenage children, Joan and Danny.
President Kennedy’s outspoken sister, Patricia Kennedy Lawford
She gave Joan tips on boyfriends and how to do the latest dance step. Danny was viewed as a bit radical in his left-wing views. Years later, he said that he had expected Marilyn to be “just another rich bitch movie star,” but that he became attracted to her warmth and charm.
“She didn’t play movie star with us,” Joan said. “After a long session with my father, she came into the kitchen and helped with dinner. She even stayed around to wash the dishes.”
Both Winters and Jeanne Carmen later claimed, as have some biographers, that Marilyn’s relationship with Greenson at some point became sexual. “How typical of Marilyn,” Carmen said. “She liked to reward men like that agent, Johnny Hyde, with sex if she felt she was being helped. And she certainly felt Greenson was helping her, whether he was or not.”
Winters also claimed that Marilyn’s relationship with Greenson was sexual. “She told me it was. It was obvious to me she was giving her body in gratitude to Greenson. There was no passion involved on her part. She even complained to me that she didn’t like giving blow-jobs to Jewish men because they were circumcised.
“I think he’s falling in love with me,” Marilyn told Winters. “What should I do? I don’t want to break up his home. He has such a wonderful family.”
“Hell, Marilyn, you’re fucking the guy. You don’t have to break up his family. Just love ‘em and leave ‘em when the time comes. That’s what I do.”
“Do you think Mrs. Greenson will detect that he’s not coming to her bed that often?” Marilyn asked.
“Of all the problems you have in the world, I would worry about that one the least,” Winters said.
“I’ve got another problem,” Marilyn confided. “I’ve got to talk it over with Dr. Greenson. Jack Kennedy is getting increasingly excited by three-ways. Of course, I’ve participated in some of those. He said his all time fantasy would be to have Elizabeth Taylor and me in bed at the same time.”
“I know Elizabeth,” Winters said. “Unless she has drastically changed since we made A Place in the Sun together, she’ll never go for it. Count her out.”
“But if Jack becomes president, he could command it,” Marilyn said.
“The last time I checked, the United States was a democracy, not a kingdom. Besides, he’s not president yet, and I don’t think he’ll ever be. Now that my lover boy, Adlai Stevenson, no longer has to compete against Ike, he’s going to run yet again, in this case, a third time, for the office of U.S. president. This time, I think the country is ready for him. That means that I’m going to be the mistress of our next president—not you.”
***
In July of 1960, at the dawn of the Democratic Party’s national convention in Los Angeles, John F. Kennedy, the leading contender, was growing more and more kinky in his sexual tastes, arranging and participating in orgies at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington and indulging in three-ways with various pairs of women.
Wanting a rest, JFK visited his friend and supporter, Frank Sinatra, at his villa in Palm Springs. Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, asked Kennedy what he wanted arranged during his vacation.
Kennedy was blunt. “I want to fuck every woman in Hollywood.”
Later, when Sinatra asked JFK what he might arrange for him during his stay, JFK told the singer, “I want to have a Naked Lunch.” Kennedy was making a hip reference to the scandalous and avant-garde William Burroughs’ novel, Naked Lunch, but Sinatra misunderstood.
“Okay, George can arrange that by the pool,” Sinatra said. “I’ll show mine if you’ll show me yours.”
“You don’t get it,” JFK said. “My favorite naked lunch is shaved pussy sprinkled with cocaine.”
After he recovered from his surprise, Sinatra said, “I can arrange that, too, I’m sure.”
According to JFK’s aide, David Powers, the presidential candidate maintained fantasies of two women he’d like to seduce simultaneously: Shirley MacLaine and Elizabeth Taylor were the leading stars for his dream act, but neither actress seemed available for three-way hookups.
Finally, JFK confided to his close friend, Senator George Smathers of Florida, “I’ve settled on Judith Campbell—you known her—and Marilyn Monroe as my women of choice. I’m going to arrange something before I go before the convention and accept the nomination. I always like to have a sexual release before any big event in my life.”
“I’m just the opposite,” said Smathers, as relayed directly to the author of this book, “I always try to save my testosterone before I appear at some big event.”
Perhaps through Lawford or through insider gossip, Marilyn had become increasingly aware of JFK’s preference for three-ways. She asked Lawford about her competition, Judith Campbel. He described her as “a little bit of Jackie Kennedy, a little bit of Elizabeth Taylor. She’s the perfect Eisenhower-era pinup of the girl next door.”
Of course, at the time Lawford said this, Judith’s looks were misleading, as she was the fourth corner of the quadrangle that included Sinatra, JFK, and mob boss Sam Giancana.
In a call to Judith, JFK told her exactly what she wanted, and she’d agreed, as he’d previously talked her into equivalent sexual trysts like that before. At that point, she was more or less doing his bidding. “Marilyn detests Elizabeth Taylor, so I know I can’t get those two into my bed at the same time,” he told Lawford. “Marilyn will be real thing, of course, but as a stand-in for Elizabeth Taylor, I’ll have to settle for Judith.”
JFK thought that his pitch to Marilyn might be more difficult, although he’d heard rumors that she’d occasionally indulged in lesbian romps.
Instead of making the arrangements himself, JFK appointed his brother-in-law (Lawford) to set them up.
The next day, Lawford called JFK with the results of his negotiations: “Marilyn didn’t take much convincing. She’ll go for it. I think she’s curious about her competition. Frankly, dear brother-in-law, if I were you, I’d drop Marilyn in favor of Judith. I’ve had them both, you know.”
On July 11, the opening day of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, JFK summoned Judith to his hotel suite. “He told me he was highly nervous about the convention and needed to relax,” Judith later told interviewers. “On our previous encounter, when we’d kissed passionately, and with his lips on mine, he’d asked me, ‘Do you think you could love me?’”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Judith said into his open mouth. “I love you. When I said that, he plunged his tongue in my mouth. At this point, I was under his spell.”
After her passionate declaration of love, Judith said she was shocked when JFK told her that there was another woman who would be arriving soon. “I just couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I thought he was satisfied with me, but he seemed insatiable.
We were sitting in robes in the living room of the suite when this other woman was ushered in,” Judith later said. “To my surprise, it was Marilyn Monroe. I’d heard stories that Jack was having an affair with her. I knew that a three-way was in the offing. It had become his favorite thing, or so I’d heard. I’m about the last woman on earth who could ever be called a lesbian, but I found Marilyn attractive. She kissed each of my cheeks before turning her attention to JFK.”
“She pointed a finger at Jack like he was a naughty boy,” Judith said.
“You brought along this lovely girl,” Marilyn said to JFK. “She looks like Elizabeth Taylor. What fantasy are we having tonight, Mr. President?”
“He was not president yet, but she had already started calling him that,” Judith said. “Right in front of me, she went over to the sofa, where Jack was sitting. She unzipped his trousers, took out his penis, and began to give him a blow-job. She took her mouth off him and looked at me. ‘This is just to get the party going,’ she said. ‘Come over here and give it a try so I can rest for a minute.’”
Marilyn later told Jeanne Carmen, “Jack was Cock of the Walk that night, having two beautiful women—one blonde, another brunette—make love to him. Surprisingly I wasn’t all that jealous. Judith was a bit of the reluctant debutante. It’s hard to explain. In hours, Jack would officially set out on the road to the White House. Power is a great aphrodisiac. A woman wants to do everything for a man with such power. At least some women feel that way. I certainly do.”
***
After JFK won the Democratic nomination for president, Peter and Patricia Lawford tossed a wild party for him at their sprawling beach house in Santa Monica. JFK personally telephoned Marilyn to invite her and suggested, “You might bring along a girlfriend.” She understood the intent of that invitation, and called Jeanne Carmen to ask her to go with him.
What happened next was later revealed by Carmen as part of a red-hot story in the tabloid newspaper, The Globe, which ran a four-part series entitled True Confessions of a Hollywood Party Girl. In the series, Carmen claimed that the wild party at the Lawford home quickly evolved into an orgy.
She said that after a swim with some of the other pool partiers, who were nude, she retreated to a bedroom at the Lawford home to take a shower. Marilyn, she claimed, knocked on her door and told her that JFK wanted her to come to his bedroom.
In the article, Carmen said that she at first rejected the offer, telling Marilyn, “I don’t do that.”
In print, however, Carmen was far too modest about her past.
She had had three-ways before, notably with actor Brad Dexter. Marilyn and Carmen had also each indulged in lesbian trysts, including with one another. Carmen admitted to this in her candid memoirs.
She claimed that Marilyn had to plead with her, saying, “We should think of it as doing something for our country.”
There is serious doubt that Marilyn had to plead very hard. Without a lot of persuasion, Carmen entered JFK’s bedroom, with Marilyn immediately behind her. The candidate for U.S. president was lying on the bed wearing nothing but his jockey shorts.
The notorious Judith Campbell Exner
He summoned Carmen over and began to massage her shoulders. He whispered that Marilyn and she should think of themselves as “prisoners of the New Frontier of the 1960s.”
Carmen admitted that finally she relented—“overwhelmed by Jack's extraordinary charm, good looks, and a buzz from the alcohol I’d consumed at Peter’s party.”
As she looked up after JFK had tongue-kissed her, she saw Marilyn dropping her towel and moving toward the bed.
Later, JFK told Senator Smathers, Sinatra, and Lawford, “If I live to one hundred years old, I don’t think I will ever have so much fun. Seducing virgins is one sport, and we’ve all done that, but being worked over by the two master whores of Hollywood is a treat few men will know. I was insatiable, demanding, wanting everything, and they delivered.”
***
With John F. Kennedy installed in the White House, Marilyn was greatly disappointed that during first weeks of his administration, he didn’t even phone her. In repeated calls to his secretary, she was told that “the President is in a meeting” or some other excuse.
She was also hearing rumors that he had taken up with yet another woman, not just Judith Campbell, but perhaps Angie Dickinson. There was even talk that he’d had a fling with Jayne Mansfield, whom Marilyn always defined as “my caricature.”
Zsa Zsa Gabor, Lana Turner, Janet Leigh, Gene Tierney, Lee Remick, Susan Hayward, and Joan Crawford were also rumored to have shared his bed. “Next thing I’ll hear is that he’s fucking Mae West,” she said. “When does Jack Rabbit ever go to bed with Jackie? I wonder if William Holden is still doing the honors with our beloved First Lady?”
True Confessions of a Hollywood Party Girl, a four-part autobiographical (and confessional) newspaper series by Jeanne Carmen
Not fully recovered from the making of The Misfits and her divorce from Arthur Miller, Marilyn, within her Manhattan apartment, sank deeper and deeper into despair.
According to Lena Pepitone, on many days, she didn’t even get up from her bed except to use the toilet.
Monty Clift was her most frequent visitor. “He showed up in rumpled clothing and a three-day growth of beard, looking like a bum from the Bowery, and she received him in a dirty old white robe,” Pepitone claimed. “They sure didn’t look like movie stars once hailed across the world for their beauty.”
Clift prevailed upon Marilyn to get out of bed and make herself look dazzling for the premiere of The Misfits at the Capital Theater in Manhattan on January 31, 1961. He even pulled himself together for the event.
At the theater, she was mobbed by fans. “At least they’re still loyal to us,” she said.
“Speak for yourself,” he said, noting that all the screams were for MARILYN! MARILYN! MARILYN!
She hated the picture, Miller’s dialogue, John Huston’s direction, and the way she had been photographed—“Like a big, fat whore.”
Back at her apartment, she sobbed in Clift’s arms. “I’m washed up. Let’s Make Love was a disaster. So is The Misfits. I dread the box office and the empty theaters where it will play. After the release of Some Like It Hot, I was getting offered every role in Hollywood. Now I just get a few offers for some slut-of-the-month parts.”
In the immediate aftermath of the release of The Misfits, Monty saw more of her. He, too, hated his role. “I looked like a truck ran over my face,” he complained.
She was alarmed at his weight loss. During his visit to her apartment, she asked Pepitone to prepare a thick, juicy steak for him, but he preferred only caviar and vodka.
They talked a lot about his upcoming role in Freud, a picture she had already turned down.
“Mostly, they discussed drugs,” Pepitone recalled, “especially the latest ones on the market. The next day, Marilyn would order the flavor of the month.”
Truman Capote visited one night for dinner, and tried to convince her that Monty was one hundred percent gay—“and not the least bi.”
She wasn’t convinced. “Why would he be gay when he could have any girl he wants?” she asked Capote.
The next morning over breakfast, Marilyn continued to be fascinated by the subject of Monty. “I know Elizabeth Taylor fell in love with him when they made Raintree County,” she told Pepitone. He calls her Bessie, but he calls me Pussy. That should tell you something. I know he lived with Taylor when they made Raintree. The question is, did she get to fuck him? Tonight is the night Monty is going to get lucky with a genuine female and not some drag queen like Taylor. If Taylor can seduce Monty, and I’m sure she has already, I can, too.”
She spent a good part of the day preparing herself, even calling in a hairdresser and a manicurist. She picked out a very sexy outfit—white Capri pants with a matching white silk blouse from Japan. The pants were so tight, Pepitone had to help her fit into them. With the pants, she wore a pair of matching white high heels. She sprayed Joy perfume on her knees, her arms, and her stomach.
Nervous before he arrived, she finished off a bottle of champagne by herself. She answered the door, and Monty seemed stunned by her gorgeous appearance. “Are you seeing Rock Hudson later tonight? To convert him, perhaps?”
“Just you, baby,” she cooed.
On her white sofa, she cuddled up to him, feeding him caviar as he downed vodka.
“When I came into the room, she was practically smothering him,” Pepitone said. “But he was not responsive. She’d later tell me he was oblivious to her charm. All her gimmicks had made men such as Lex Barker or Paul Newman rise to the occasion. But not Monty.”
Angie Dickinson
After three hours, Monty had had enough. He rose abruptly to his feet. “I’ve got to go.” She followed him to the door, where he gave her a swat on the rear. “You’ve got the most incredible ass. I know a lot of guys who’d like to plug it.”
“How about you?” she seductively asked him. “Robert Mitchum taught me how to be a rear door girl.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said, kissing her lightly on the lips. “I’m heading out tonight cruising. I want to suck the biggest cock I can find in New York.”
After he’d gone, she fell down on the sofa, laughing at herself. “So much for the seductive power of the Love Goddess of the 20th Century,” she said to Pepitone. “So much for the 20th Century’s Helen of Troy.”
“Honey lamb,” Pepitone said. “Monty prefers Frank Sinatra’s big ding-dong. He wouldn’t know what to do with a real woman like you.”
“I need a man tonight, and I don’t want to walk the streets of Manhattan soliciting like I used to. I’d be mobbed. Who’s in town that we know?”
“I read that Sammy Davis, Jr. is here,” she answered.
“I’ve got his number. Let’s ring him up. I’m what he likes, blonde all over. He’ll really go for what I have.”
Later that night, the brilliantly talented black entertainer took advantage of everything that Monty had turned down.
On the way out the door, Davis turned to Marilyn, giving her a wet kiss. “The less Frank knows about this, the better, okay, sweetheart?”
***
The next day, Marilyn complained to Lee Strasberg that she feared she was washed up as the number one screen goddess of Hollywood. “Taylor seems to be sitting on that wobbly throne. But other than that bitch, Hollywood is for women in their twenties.”
Sensing that she was aware of the ongoing march of time, Strasberg persuaded her to draw up a will. She needed one. Because of her divorce from Arthur Miller, she didn’t want to leave him anything.
“I thought wills were something only old people signed. I’ve got a lot more movies I want to make.”
She finally relented, and Arthur Frosch, a famous attorney, met with her and drew up a will. Except for minor bequests, Strasberg would become the major heir to her estate, with a lesser amount (25%) bequeathed to Dr. Kris.
The ultimate beneficiary, the heir who would survive to collect millions, was Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, whom Lee married after the death of Paula in 1966. After Lee’s death in 1982, Anna became his sole heir, pocketing millions for the licensing of all those coffee mugs, T-shirts, pens, and memorabilia over the decades.
Strasberg came up with what he called a brilliant idea, a television dramatization of W. Somerset Maugham’s classic play, Rain, which had previously been brought to the screen by Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, and Rita Hayworth. “Another slut role,” Marilyn said. But Strasberg could be very persuasive, eventually steering her into an acceptance of the role. She said, “My character of Sadie Thompson is the kind of gal who knows how to be gay even when she’s sad. That’s important, you know.”
The script was pitched to the executives at NBC, who eagerly went for the idea, offering Marilyn $100,000 to appear in the telecast. Negotiations proceeded. Fredric March agreed to be her co-star, playing the angry and sexually repressed Reverend Davidson. His wife, Florence Eldridge, agreed to sign on with NBC in the role of the uptight Mrs. Davidson.
Ironically, it was Strasberg who sabotaged the deal when he insisted that NBC define him as the project’s director, which they were not willing to do.
At this point, Strasberg still had great influence over Marilyn, and she agreed to pull out, even though she needed the money, along with him.
She complained to him that, “Now that I’m on the road to forty, I think the parts will start drying up for me. I can’t see myself doing Thelma Ritter wise-cracking old lady roles.”
“Forget about Ritter,” Strasberg said. “Do something far more imaginative. When you’re old enough, we can turn you into a media event as Tallulah Bankhead the Second.”
She felt that a return to film work might be the answer to her sleepless nights and “blue, blue days.” In Hollywood, she still owed Fox a movie, and they were pushing a script on her called Goodbye, Charlie It was based on a play about a tough gangster who dies but returns to earth as a woman. She detested it and told Spyros Skouros her opinion. When he threatened her with legal action, she shouted at him, “The script is about as good as you are in bed.” Then she slammed down the phone on him.
Fox shopped the script to a long list of directors, some of whom had worked with Marilyn before and didn’t want to repeat the horrendous experience. Candidates included George Cukor, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Joshua Logan, Elia Kazan, William Wyler, George Stevens, John Ford, Carol Reed, and Alfred Hitchcock. Each director turned it down, and not just because they didn’t want to work with Marilyn. Like her, they too thought the script “a piece of shit,” in the words of Huston.
Goodbye, Charlie would be released in 1964. The studio finally found a director who’d handle it. He was Vincente Minnelli, who cast Tony Curtis in the starring role, with Marilyn’s role going to Debbie Reynolds. Marilyn had been right in her judgment. The movie turned out to be a tasteless flop.
Lee Strasberg
***
Marilyn may have reached the depth of her greatest despair sometime in February of 1961. Clark Gable was dead, and she was being blamed for it. Her divorce from Arthur Miller had been finalized. Her last two movies, Let’s Make Love and The Misfits, had each been defined as box office failures. Even more troubling, John F. Kennedy was to an increasing degree making himself unavailable.
Her one salvation, Dr. Ralph Greenson, was occupied with his family life and with his practice in California, and she found herself turning more and more to her New York psychiatrist, Dr. Marianne Kris, who was not as satisfying.
Miller’s warning about Lee Strasberg had caused her not to trust him, even though his involvement in her career and personal life remained strong. His wife, Paula, seemed increasingly ill, and Marilyn no longer trusted her advice as much as she had during the filming of The Misfits.
Miller called Pepitone and asked if he could come by and retrieve his type-writer, papers, and books from the study. During his visit, Marilyn refused to come out of her bedroom. After he’d gone, she went into the stripped-down study with Pepitone, discovering only an autographed portrait of herself that she’d signed “with eternal love.”
She sobbed when she saw that he’d taken all of their possessions, even three paintings she’d paid for herself. “He left only my autographed photo, a gift from me on our first anniversary. He didn’t care enough for me to take it with him. So much for that eternal love I vowed.”
Marilyn didn’t want to leave the apartment and refused to see most people, even her friends. “Wherever I go, people stare at me, often unkindly. I can’t walk into a room but what every woman is searching my face for telltale lines. Every man wonders if he can fuck the old broad that night.”
Friends who came by to see her were turned away. Sometimes, visiting celebrities tried to arrange a rendezvous with her and were refused. Desi Arnaz, “one cocky bastard,” in the words of Pepitone, successfully researched her apartment’s address and knocked on its door.
Pepitone answered, but told him that Marilyn wasn’t receiving visitors. Furious, Arnaz lashed out at the maid. “I hear she likes to get fucked, and I’m the man to do it. Tell the bitch she’s missing out on a big thrill.” Before he stalked away, he delivered a final insult. “In a few years, when I’m casting a grandmother role, I’ll think of her.”
Marilyn was not without men in her life. Pepitone revealed that she employed a handsome masseur who came early some mornings to massage her and take care of other needs. The maid heard “the craziest giggling and screeching coming from Miller’s former study. The masseur always emerged looking exhausted after a session with Marilyn, but he always had a smile on his face.”
Marilyn also took up with an Italian chauffeur who worked for a limousine company. Pepitone said he was a dead ringer for the late Rudolph Valentino. Marilyn called him “The Sheik.” He told Pepitone that his real name was “Johnnie.”
Desi Arnaz
When Marilyn didn’t need a limousine, which was most of the time, The Sheik showed up anyway, and usually spent the night. “More squealing coming from her bedroom, more giggling, more crazy noises,” according to Pepitone.
When Monty Clift came by, Marilyn complained that she could find no miracle drug that really satisfied her. “When are those shits in the laboratory going to come up with a miracle drug, a little pill that a gal can swallow and make the world right again?”
One night, she told both Clift and Pepitone that, “I think I’m going crazy, just like my mother and my grandmother. It’s the asylum for me.”
He told her, “The saner you are, the harder it is to prove it.”
“I’m tired of living, tired of being Marilyn Monroe.”
***
Pepitone revealed in a memoir that the only bright spot for Marilyn had been that Christmas in 1960 when Joe DiMaggio showed up on her doorstep with large bouquet of red roses. Pepitone prepared one of his favorite dishes, spaghetti with sweet Italian sausages.
“I hadn’t seen Marilyn so happy in months. She reminded me of that morning-after scene with Scarlettt O’Hara when Rhet Butler takes her up those antebellum stairs and presumably fucks the hell out of her.”
The next morning, when Pepitone was preparing breakfast for DiMaggio, and Marilyn was still in bed, she asked him, “Why don’t you marry Marilyn again? She still loves you. It would be wonderful for her.”
He shook his head. “I love her, but remarriage is out of the question. There are just too many differences. It didn’t work out the first time around. It won’t work out the second time around.”
By the time Marilyn woke up, Joe had already left the apartment. She told her maid, “I will never let Joe go. Never!”
She spent the rest of the day listening to romantic ballads by Frank Sinatra.
The relief that resulted from her reunion with DiMaggio had a short life span. Her depression returned, even darker than before. Early one evening, Marilyn told Pepitone, “Nothing in my life has worked out. Last night was the worst night I’ve ever had. It seemed so easy to leave this earth.”
She confessed to Clift, to Pepitone, and to Dr. Kris that she had barely been able to stop herself from jumping out of one of her thirteenth floor apartment windows. “I squeezed my eyes shut at the open window and clenched my fists. It was only in the last second that I lost the courage.”
The next afternoon, her psychiatrist, Dr. Kris, suggested she enter a hospital—“where every comfort will be provided for you—and you’ll get some much-needed rest and recuperation.”
At first, Marilyn didn’t want to go, but Dr. Kris suggested that it was imperative. “The next time, you might not hold back, and you might make that suicide leap.”
Dr. Kris made the arrangements, and on February 5, 1961, she accompanied Marilyn to Cornell University-New York Hospital to check her in under the name of “Faye Miller.”
After saying goodbye to Dr. Kris, two orderlies—a Hispanic and a black man—arrived to escort Marilyn to her room. She remembered walking and walking down long corridors and into another building. “We passed through steel doors,” she said. “It was not like any hospital I’ve ever known. I never felt so alone in my life.”
The orderlies seemed to be manhandling her, and she objected to being treated so roughly. Finally, she realized what was happening, discovering that she was a virtual prisoner within the walls of the Payne Whitney Clinic, whose reputation was already known to her. It was known as “a crazy house for rich people.”
When she came to realize that she was in an insane asylum, she struggled to break free from the grip of the orderlies. She screamed and scratched the face of the Latino. Later, she realized that she was actually demonstrating that she was a dangerous patient.
She was dragged kicking and screaming into a sparsely furnished padded cell with barred windows. A small sign on an unbreakable plastic door read TOILET, but even it was locked. She was just dumped on the floor, as she heard the steel door close. She sat up and studied the walls, which bore scratches from the previous occupants, who no doubt had been struggling to free themselves from captivity.
For two hours, she banged on the steel doors with clenched fists, causing her hands to bleed. Two burly nurses finally came to her room. They warned her that if she didn’t quiet down, they would return with a straitjacket. When they stripped her of her clothes, she denounced them as lesbians. After that, they forced her to put on a green-colored hospital gown. Before leaving that night, they switched off the room’s only light. She was left in total blackness, sobbing until dawn and crying out for her medication. She’d later learn that the term for what she’d experienced was “going cold turkey.”
Dr. Marianne Kris
The next day, when two doctors came to see her, she shouted at them, “You can’t do this to me. Don’t you know who I am? I’m Marilyn Monroe.”
Then when the nurses returned, she kept insisting, “I’m not insane.” She noticed an observation window, measuring about one foot square, through which anyone strolling along the hallway could stare in at her. It seemed that the entire staff, at one point or another during the day, appeared at that window to gape at her.
She’d later tell her publicist, Pat Newcomb, “Hour after hour, I keep seeing those Peeping Toms staring at me through that window. I decided to put on a show for them for free. If they were going to treat me like a nut, I’d become one. I lay on the bed masturbating, giving them a good show. Those eyes stayed glued to the window. One guy had to be pulled away so another could take his place to gape at me. And then another, and another…”
Norman Mailer, in his biography of Marilyn, wrote: “Perhaps as one drifts toward a state of near-insane, there is some impulse to turn inside out, reverse habits, fling off clothes, morals, and one’s relation to time. Does psychosis, like death, move back into the past?”
While confined, Marilyn coerced a nurse and fan of hers to mail a note she’d written to Lee and Paula Strasberg. In her note, she pleaded with them to go to Dr. Kris and get her released. “I’m locked up with all these poor nutty people. I’m sure to end up a nut if I stay in this nightmare. Please help me! This is the last place I should be.”
The Strasbergs did not respond to her letter, and they also refused to call Dr. Kris
In a letter to Dr. Greenson in California, Marilyn wrote: “There were screaming women in their cells—I mean they screamed out when life was unbearable for them. I guess—and at times like this I felt an available psychiatrist might have talked to them, perhaps to alleviate even temporarily their misery and pain.”
She later claimed that every member of the clinic’s staff brutalized her. However, a hospital nurse in an interview made a different claim to a reporter for Life magazine. “We felt so protective toward her. She made us all feel like we wanted to hold her in our laps. We wanted to soothe her, wanted to say, ‘It’s all going to be all right now. ’It was the feeling lonely, small children give you. You know, sort of dry their tears and pat them on the head, and hold their hands.”
One strange man in a doctor’s smock entered her padded cell. With his horn-rimmed glasses and profile, she was struck by how his looks evoked the memory of Arthur Miller. He introduced himself as Milton Faber, claiming his assignment involved examining her both mentally and physically. He informed her that “the mind and body are as one. Mental problems can destroy a perfectly healthy human body.”
The first question the doctor asked her was, “I understand that you created quite a distubance last night, complaining about what a small tube of toothpaste you were given. Is that correct?”
“Yes, I want a big tube of toothpaste,” she said.
“Do you realize, Mrs. Miller, that a large tube of toothpaste is actually a phallic symbol?”
She did not answer him.
She was nude under the sheet, which he pulled back to reveal her body. Slowly, ever so slowly, he began an extensive examination of her torso that would not be rivaled until she lay on a marble slab in a Los Angeles hospital undergoing an autopsy.
At one point, he placed his head on her breasts. According to him, this was the best way to determine a heartbeat. When he rose up, he told her, “I understand a woman of your sexual appetite requires at least two or three men a day.”
“No, a dozen, at least,” she said sarcastically. “Sometimes I take on the entire UCLA football team.”
“Since you are deprived of sexual satisfaction in this room, do you masturbate a lot?” As he said that, he inserted his finger in her vagina.
She jerked away. “Don’t touch me there. Go away!”
“Please, there was nothing sexual about my doing that. After all, using rubber gloves, of course, I stick my finger up men’s assholes every day—it means nothing.”
“Sexual or not, get out of this room,” she ordered. “I’m reporting you to the administration. I may even sue this hospital.”
Taking his chart, he abruptly left the cell.
A half hour later, another doctor entered her cell. He was fat, bald, and looked like Sydney Greenstreet’s younger brother. He introduced himself, telling her that he had recently been assigned to her case, and that he’d just finished reading her medical records.
“But I was just examined by a doctor,” she protested.
“Forget about that,” he said. “A mistake. That was Joseph. He got out of his cell, but has been returned there now. I told that new nurse on duty to keep your door locked at all times. Steel doors only work if they’re locked.”
“I should sue,” she threatened.
“Please, don’t do that,” he said. “He’s one of your biggest fans, and right at this point in your life, you need all the loyal fans you can get, or so I hear. I am legally entitled to give you a thorough examination. If in doubt, you can verify my credentials with the front desk. We are so sorry about that intrusion. Please forgive our lapse in security. Now please turn over. I need to insert this thermometer. I’m sure you’ve had bigger things inserted there.”
***
Back in Hollywood, she would relive her final night at Payne Whitney through a dialogue with Jeanne Carmen. “I was heavily sedated and lying nude in a restrainer. I struggled hopelessly, trying to free myself. But even if I did, I was still in a padded cell with a steel door. I couldn’t sleep in spite of the sedation. I might have dozed off for a minute or two. When I came to, I still felt I was in a coma.”
“Suddenly, I became aware of these two shadowy figures descending over me. I opened my eyes as wide as I could. They were the two orderlies who took me to the cell in the first place—one Hispanic, the other black. The Latino gagged me. I was vaguely aware of the other guy stripping down. I knew what they were going to do. I struggled, but I was overpowered. When he entered me, it was like a knife stabbing into me. I thought the ordeal would never end. When he pulled out, I was bleeding.”
“That Spanish guy wasted no time. He jumped right on me. It didn’t hurt like the first one, but I felt humiliated. He said something like, ‘Could you believe I’m fucking Marilyn Monroe?’ It seemed to go on and on. Then the other, bigger guy came back for repeats. I passed out.”
“It was around noon when I woke up. I was in pain. Two of the nurses examined me. They claimed I must have deliberately hurt myself, but how could I have done that? I was restrained.”
“Are you sure this actually happened?” Carmen asked. “After all, you admitted that you were heavily sedated.”
“Of course, it happened. I said it did. Isn’t that enough for you? Do you think I have fantasies of men raping me? Don’t ever tell Joe what happened to me. He would go to that hospital and kill those two brutes.”
“I just don’t get it,” Carmen said. “I’m struggling to get the most minor of acting or modeling jobs, and you’re the Queen of Hollywood. You can have any role or any man you want. Why is it so empty for you here?”
“The answer is simple,” Marilyn said. “I’m back in Hollywood, the land of make-believe. Nothing is real here. Everybody is living a fantasy. I guess that’s why they call it Tinseltown.”