Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (37 page)

Whitey Snyder noticed as well. “Marilyn seemed deeply depressed one minute,” he said, “and almost giddy the next. She’d slip in and out of these moods very rapidly. One moment she’d be talking normally, and the next she’d become extremely agitated and upset. She thought, for example, that Fox had bugged her dressing room and that they were transmitting the tapes to the FBI. She insisted on hiring a private detective to sweep the room and ascertain whether there were any hidden recording devices. The investigator found nothing.”

While Agnes Flanagan styled Marilyn’s hair for the movie, the film
studio hired hairdresser George Masters to work with her on publicity appearances. Masters was astounded to find the actress in such an utter state of disarray.
“My first meeting with Marilyn Monroe is etched in my memory,” he said. “She was a mess. She was waiting for me in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel . . . in a terry cloth robe, one shoulder torn, her yellow hair hanging down around her neck, no makeup, champagne and caviar everywhere. Thus began my adventures with the world’s greatest sex symbol.”

Rob Saduski, a Hollywood costume designer and faithful friend of Masters’s, recalled the hairstylist talking about his initial reaction to Marilyn and how he took her in hand and tried to restore the glamour that drugs and her damaged self-image were slowly eroding. “She didn’t want people to know she had a hairdresser,” said Saduski. “She wanted people to think she just looked that good. She was as calculating and vain as she was innocent and confused. Whenever Marilyn had to make a personal appearance during the making of the film, George would have to duck down in the car so nobody knew he was there. He’d work on her hair, and when they reached their destination, she’d emerge from the backseat looking resplendent, and the press photographers would start blazing away with their cameras. He remained her private hairstylist on and off until the end of her life. She gave him a brand-new white Lincoln Continental as a gift. Suffice it to say, she was enormously generous and thankful to anyone who reached out to her.”

In an ironic twist of fate, the title of the picture—
Let’s Make Love
—soon became a moniker for a personal escapade that, in the end, created more interest among the press and public than the humdrum film that eventually emerged. Despite Marilyn’s apparent alliance with Simone Signoret, the distinguished French actress soon became a victim of Monroe’s promiscuous nature. Called back to Paris to discuss a new film project, Signoret found herself out of town at the same time that Arthur Miller happened to be in New York. Left alone, Montand and Monroe began an affair. Montand, naturally, blamed Marilyn for initiating the relationship, claiming she seduced him in her bungalow over vodka and
caviar, his favorite repast. “After we ate and drank,” he reportedly told friends, “she laid her head in my lap. What was I supposed to do?”

For roughly six weeks, Montand and Monroe were a couple. They were seen together at several Hollywood house parties, such as the poolside bash given by studio executive David Selznick. Gregson E. Bautzer, an entertainment lawyer and California socialite, spotted the pair at the party and walked over to them. Confronting Marilyn, he accused her of being ungrateful to Joe Schenck, her early benefactor. If she cared about him, spouted Bautzer, she would visit him in the hospital. He was seriously ill and quite possibly wouldn’t make it. Marilyn burst into tears and pleaded ignorance—nobody had told her about Joe. She went to see him the following day and spent two hours by his bedside.

Not long after the affair ended and while production on the film wound down, Montand told Hedda Hopper about his fling with Monroe. Montand’s “confession” resulted in a slag heap of predictable headlines. When Rupert Allan, Marilyn’s publicist, asked Montand why he’d gone public with the story, Montand responded, “Because too many people have speculated about it. Boo-hoo, I’m sorry.”

In a follow-up interview with Hopper several months later, Montand offered further commentary on the scandal:
“Marilyn is a simple girl without any guile. I was too tender and thought she was as sophisticated as some of the other ladies I have known. Had Marilyn been more sophisticated, none of this would have happened. Perhaps she had a schoolgirl crush. If she did, I’m sorry. But nothing will break up my marriage.”

Rupert Allan pointed out that when Yves Montand accepted the role to play opposite Monroe in the film, he was ecstatic: “A well-known actor in Europe, he’d been searching for a vehicle to establish himself in the States. The Montands and Millers became close friends. Then Arthur found out his ‘friend’ was fucking his wife. It goes without saying Arthur was deeply hurt. When I spoke with him, he said, ‘You know, Marilyn and I are breaking up.’ ”

When the movie finally wrapped, Montand called Rupert Allan
and asked him to become his publicist. “Once again,” said Allan, “he began chatting about his affair with Marilyn, as if this was his strongest selling point. He was a real prick—ungallant and indiscreet. He said when Marilyn came on to him, it was her time of the month, and it was awful. She smelled awful. She was dirty and unkempt. ‘That’s more information than I need,’ I told him. ‘Besides, I thought you Frenchmen were so liberated. Frankly, I’d take Marilyn Monroe with or without her period if I could have her.’ ‘First of all, I’m an Italian,’ said Montand. ‘But, anyway, hygiene is important to me.’ I told him to fuck off and find himself another publicist. I don’t know who ended up representing him, but I can safely and happily say that instead of
Let’s Make Love
enhancing his career, the film and the scandal attached to it all but buried him, at least in this country.”

Prior to Marilyn’s affair with Montand, Lotte Goslar went to dinner with Marilyn and Arthur Miller. “They’d just started the picture,” said Goslar. “That evening I saw a side of Marilyn I’d never noticed before. She acted very bitchy toward Arthur. First of all, she began talking about Joe DiMaggio and what a great dresser he was. ‘Arthur only owns two suits,’ she said. As we were leaving, she started ordering him around: ‘Get my purse, Arthur, I checked it.’ When he got back with the purse, she said, ‘Where’s my mink coat? They were on the same claim check. Get me my mink.’ She practically called him an idiot. She began yelling at him as he went back to the cloakroom to retrieve her mink. She treated him like a slave. She absolutely degraded him. It was terrible. And a little later, she conducted that very flagrant infidelity with Montand. I knew how audacious and bold she could be if she wanted something. Arthur Miller, by comparison, seemed an innocent, completely out of his depth. I felt for him. Everyone did. It was almost as if Marilyn had wanted to hurt him. I think she felt he hadn’t supported her emotionally. When we were alone, she said he was a great writer but a lousy husband. She remarked that the only reason he stayed on with her was to collect a paycheck for writing the screenplay to
The Misfits
, Marilyn’s next film.”

Monroe’s treatment of her third husband grew even harsher when she learned that he’d telephoned Simone Signoret in Paris to discuss the romance. “What does his wife have to do with it?” Marilyn asked him. “Instead of Simone Signoret, why didn’t you call Yves Montand? Why didn’t you belt him in the mouth? That’s what Joe DiMaggio would’ve done. Or why didn’t you slap me around? You should’ve slapped me.”

Simone Signoret’s only public comment regarding Yves Montand’s liaison with Monroe came after the filming of
Let’s Make Love
ended: “If Marilyn fell in love with my husband,” she said, “then she has good taste.”

•  •  •

“Can you believe this?” Joe DiMaggio asked George Solotaire one evening over drinks at Toots Shor’s. Joe had a copy of Hedda Hopper’s newspaper column in hand and was waving it in George’s face. “Why would Marilyn sleep with this guy?” Joe asked, not expecting an answer. “I don’t get it. Is she that insecure?”

Bernie Kamber, DiMaggio’s PR buddy, also present on this occasion, recalled Joe’s somewhat dramatic outburst—dramatic, that is, for Joe. “The first thing I did every morning,” said Kamber, “was read the New York, LA, and Washington, DC, papers. In my business, you had to know what was going on. So I’d already read about Marilyn and Yves Montand. But I hadn’t expected it to upset Joe to such an extent. Of course, I didn’t realize at the time that they were in touch again. I knew about some of his other ladies, including Phyllis McGuire, the youngest and prettiest of the McGuire Sisters, the popular singing trio. Phyllis had several other boyfriends, among them Sam Giancana, the Chicago Mob boss, a guy you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley—or anywhere else, for that matter. So she and Joe were bosom buddies, if you know what I mean. The truth is that half the eligible women in New York were after Joe, and a large number of the ineligible ones were as well. But Joe was obsessed with Marilyn. He was in love with her, plain and simple. In any case, I said to him, ‘Well, Joe, at least Yves
Montand looks like you. That should give you some satisfaction.’ I was kidding, but Joe wasn’t. Within five minutes or so, he knocked off about a half dozen shots of scotch. George Solotaire and I had to practically carry him home that night.”

DiMaggio evidently made no mention of Montand to Marilyn. They continued as before with telephone calls and infrequent meetings at Paul Baer’s Central Park West apartment. Art Buchwald remembered seeing “quite a bit of DiMaggio in 1960. That’s the year Edward Bennett Williams made arrangements to purchase the Washington Redskins. He paid around four million dollars for the franchise. A bunch of his buddies, including DiMaggio, bought shares in the team. I think Joe anted up a hundred thousand dollars. He’d come to Washington on weekends to take in the home games. He’s the only guy I ever knew who insisted on wearing a business suit to a football game. Besides myself and DiMaggio, the regulars in the group included
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee, Senator Edmund Muskie, John Daly, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Williams’s law partner Colman Stein, and Ethel Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy’s wife. This was the year John F. Kennedy ran for president, and it was before JFK became involved with Marilyn Monroe. But even though nothing had happened as yet, Joe couldn’t stand the Kennedys. Ethel didn’t realize this, and she kept trying to sit next to DiMaggio at the games. ‘You sit next to her,’ he’d say to me under his breath. It turned out to be kind of prophetic, I thought, given Marilyn’s death a few years later. Among those DiMaggio held responsible for her death were the Kennedys. He accused Jack and Bobby Kennedy of having ‘killed’ the woman he treasured and loved. ‘They might as well have put a loaded gun to her head,’ he told me, ‘and pulled the trigger.’ ”

D
URING THE FILMING OF
Let’s Make Love
, following the termination of her affair with Yves Montand, her marriage to Arthur Miller all but over, Marilyn Monroe called Milton A. (Mickey) Rudin, her new West Coast attorney, and asked if he could provide the name of a Los Angeles psychiatrist. Deeply depressed and sedated to the point where she could barely speak coherently, Marilyn somehow managed to explain that Dr. Marianne Kris, her New York therapist, had gone to a medical conference in France and couldn’t be reached. Rudin felt he could help. His brother-in-law, Dr. Ralph Greenson, lived in the area and happened to be one of the nation’s foremost practitioners of classic Freudian psychoanalysis. The lawyer offered to arrange an appointment for Marilyn, setting in motion a doctor-patient relationship that would ultimately become a contributing factor in the patient’s untimely death.

Born Romeo Samuel Greenschpoon on September 20, 1911, in Brooklyn, the psychoanalyst’s family was Russian in origin. He and Juliet, his twin sister—the pair was known by name as “Romeo and Juliet”—were the eldest of the family’s four children. Elizabeth, his younger sister, a talented cellist, had married Mickey Rudin. Ralph Greenson (Romy to his friends after he legally changed his name) had completed his undergraduate studies at Columbia University and
attended medical school at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where he met his future wife, Hildegard (Hildi). The Greensons were married in 1935 and had two children, Daniel and Joan.

After completing an internship in psychiatry at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, Greenson established his practice and simultaneously held the position of professor of clinical psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. He would later become the subject of a feature film,
Captain Newman, M.D.
, starring Gregory Peck as Greenson. The film was largely based on Greenson’s work with American soldiers during and after World War II.

In late 1959 Greenson visited London and there met Anna Freud and Anna’s good friend Marianne Kris. One of the topics they discussed was the case of Marilyn Monroe. Hence, Greenson knew about Marilyn before he even met her.

The intial encounter between Greenson and Monroe took place in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel shortly after he’d been contacted by Mickey Rudin. He quickly noticed her slurred speech and unfocused gaze, both of which he attributed to her drug habit, particularly her dependence on medication to combat her insomnia. She was taking enough medication, he told her, to sedate a basketball team and put all five players to sleep. She confessed to her drug regimen, placing the blame on compliant doctors who plied her with whatever pharmaceuticals she requested.