Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (45 page)

The same month proved to be much more problematic for Monroe. In April she attended costume and makeup tests for
Something’s Got to Give
. A remake of
My Favorite Wife
, a 1940 comedy starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, the never-to-be-completed
Something’s Got to Give
was about a shipwrecked woman, thought to be deceased, who returns home after several years only to learn that her husband has remarried.

The ill-fated project was doomed from the start. One of the major problems was that Twentieth Century–Fox began shooting long before having a completed and approved script in hand. The other major problem was Marilyn Monroe herself. “Her chief gripe,” reported Whitey Snyder, “was that Fox had given Elizabeth Taylor a million dollars to star in
Cleopatra
, whereas she was being paid one-tenth that amount. She said she should never have disbanded Marilyn Monroe Productions or gotten rid of Milton Greene, and she blamed it all on Arthur Miller. From the beginning, Marilyn had it out for Fox’s bosses, all of whom she contended were corrupt. As usual, she was constantly late on the set, arrived high and hung over and unable to recall her lines. To complicate matters, Dr. Ralph Greenson had convinced Fox to hire him in a sort of supervisory capacity to keep Marilyn going. He felt she needed the picture for her own self-esteem. In my opinion, he should never have been directly involved with the project. There seemed to be something strange and phony about Greenson’s relationship with Marilyn.”

Shortly after production on the film began, Marilyn received an unexpected and highly disturbing note from C. Stanley Gifford, the man
she believed to be her birth father. Claiming that he wished to “make amends” for his refusal in the past to acknowledge or meet Monroe, Gifford’s brief letter wished her luck on her latest film venture and ended with the words:
“From the man you tried to see some ten years ago. God forgive me.”

Upon receipt of the card, Marilyn contacted Lotte Goslar and read it to her. “She was in tears,” Goslar recalled, “and she kept saying, ‘It’s too late, much too late.’ ”

A week later, according to Goslar, Marilyn received a telephone call at Fox from a woman in Palm Springs who claimed to be Stanley Gifford’s private nurse. Gifford had suffered a heart attack and wasn’t expected to survive. That’s the reason he’d sent her the note. He wanted to talk to her before he died. Monroe responded by telling the nurse exactly what she’d been told ten years earlier when she’d approached Gifford: “Please assure the gentleman I have never met him, but if he has anything specific to say to me, he can contact my lawyer. Would you like his number?”

That was the last Marilyn heard from Gifford, and vice versa. As it turned out, Gifford survived his heart attack and outlived his daughter. Their interaction during the filming of
Something’s Got to Give
brought to an abrupt halt Marilyn’s lifelong search for her real father. It likewise, no doubt, contributed to Marilyn’s mounting slag heap of personal problems, earmarked most profoundly by her addictions and difficulties in front of the cameras. Director George Cukor
lashed out at Pat Newcomb one day for bringing a bottle of champagne onto the set. “Stop acting like a fucking social director,” he yelled, “and start acting like a publicist!” Following a series of arguments with Monroe, who constantly complained that the script kept changing, Cukor sent Darryl Zanuck a memo expressing his disdain for Monroe and her lack of consideration for the cast and crew: “Marilyn is the least professional performer I have ever worked with.” To which Zanuck replied: “If I could, I would launch a torpedo from here—aimed directly at her dressing room.” Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson sent Henry
Weinstein, producer of the picture, a letter complaining that Marilyn Monroe “represents everything that’s wrong with Hollywood. She’s spoiled silly and drugged out of her mind. I saw some footage yesterday, and she seemed to be moving in slow motion, as if in a trance. It’s difficult to watch.”

The situation grew progressively worse. Three weeks into production, Marilyn came down with a viral infection and refused to go to work. Peter Levathes, acting head of the studio, dropped in on Monroe at her Brentwood house. He thought she looked and sounded fine. He made an appointment with Mickey Rudin, her attorney, and pointed out that Marilyn had certain contractual obligations, which she wasn’t meeting. He told Rudin, “All I ever hear, every single day, is, she’s not feeling well, she has a cold, she has a virus, she’s under the weather. The point is, she’s never on the set, and on those rare occasions when she’s around and in front of the cameras, she either massacres her lines or forgets them altogether.” Rudin communicated with Ralph Greenson, noting that Levathes had threatened to terminate Marilyn and shut down the production. The psychiatrist “guaranteed” that Marilyn would show up punctually every day and would apologize to the director and producer for her absences. Although Greenson had come to disapprove of Joe DiMaggio’s presence in his ex-wife’s life, he turned to the ballplayer in an effort to convince Marilyn to resume work on the project. Reluctant to become involved with Twentieth Century–Fox, DiMaggio nevertheless spent two days with her in Brentwood, attempting to raise her spirits.

It was at this stage, following DiMaggio’s departure, that Marilyn surprised both Greenson and Cukor by vanishing from Los Angeles and flying to New York for three days on what she termed “a top-secret” mission. The mission entailed singing the “Happy Birthday Song” to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962, in celebration of his forty-fifth birthday.

It had been Peter Lawford’s idea to have Marilyn Monroe sing for the finale of the president’s birthday gala, a Democratic Party fund-raiser
held before eighteen thousand paying supporters and a television audience numbering in the millions. In Monroe’s absence, shooting on
Something’s Got to Give
once again ground to a halt. As Marilyn and Peter Lawford flew to New York, Bobby Kennedy telephoned Milton Gould, the chairman of Fox’s executive committee, and requested that the studio release Marilyn for several days so she could participate in the festivities. Unaware that Monroe had already departed, Gould said it would be impossible—the film was way behind schedule. Recalling the conversation, Gould noted that RFK called him
“a no-good Jew bastard” and hung up on him.

Marilyn had asked fashion designer Jean Louis to create her dress for the occasion. At a cost of $7,000, the couturier had fashioned a skintight, flesh-colored mesh gown studded with rhinestones. Wearing nothing underneath, Marilyn described the garment as “all skin and beads.” “The skin was visible,” commented Peter Lawford, “but the beads were not.” Marilyn personally paid the bill for the gown but was later reimbursed by Bobby Kennedy, who evidently wrote it off as a “Justice Department expense.”

Another payment assumed by RFK went to Mickey Song, a Beverly Hills hair stylist who attended to JFK and RFK whenever one or both visited the West Coast. Song had been flown to New York to cut President Kennedy’s hair prior to the Madison Square Garden birthday party. “I saw Marilyn Monroe sitting alone in her Garden dressing room and noticed that while her hair had been preset, it had to be brushed out,” said Song. “I asked Bobby Kennedy, whose hair I also cut earlier that day, if Marilyn needed me to attend to her hair. He led me to her and introduced us, though I’d met her previously on several occasions at Hollywood parties. She seemed nervous as I worked on her hair. A few minutes later Bobby returned and said he needed to talk with Marilyn, so I left the room. The next thing I knew, he came barging out of her dressing room and slammed the door behind him. ‘I think she needs you again,’ he said. And under his breath, he muttered, ‘What a bitch!’ I went back in. Her hair was totally disheveled. She didn’t
say anything as I combed it back into place, but it seemed apparent to me that he’d tried to put the make on her and she fought him off. For my bouffant job on Marilyn, Bobby eventually sent me a check for fifty dollars.”

Mickey Song further remembered that Marilyn was drinking heavily, alternating between champagne and vodka, as she waited for her cue. Among the celebrities in the packed house that night were Jack Benny, Henry Fonda, and Ella Fitzgerald. Peter Lawford introduced her. Her gown glittering, she moved slowly in the direction of the spotlight, stopped, looked straight at the president and began to sing her seductive, unmistakably sexual rendition of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Ethel Kennedy had joined Bobby in the audience, but Jackie passed the evening at her retreat near Middleburg, Virginia, evidently uninterested in hearing her husband serenaded by the woman who secretly planned to evict her from the White House.

After completing the number, Marilyn launched into a specially written version of “Thanks for the Memory,” and then led the audience in a happy birthday chorus. A large cake was wheeled out, and the president soon appeared onstage to cut it. “I can now retire from politics,” he joked to the crowd, “having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”

With the show over, the party adjourned only long enough for a few of the more notable participants to relocate to a private affair hosted by Arthur Krim, head of United Artists. Still wearing her nearly diaphanous gown, Marilyn was as much a hit in Krim’s town house as she’d been at the Garden. Although the actress had rejected Bobby Kennedy’s advances earlier that evening, he hadn’t given up. UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson would recall in his autobiography that in order to converse with Marilyn that evening, he’d been “forced to break through the strong defense established by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around her like a moth around the flame.”

Marilyn’s escort for the evening was Arthur Miller’s father, whom she introduced to both the president and the attorney general. At
midnight, she placed Isidore Miller in a taxicab and returned to the party. Later that night, she joined JFK for a private birthday celebration in one of the bedrooms of the family’s penthouse suite at the Carlyle. As usual, a Secret Service agent was posted outside the front door of the suite to guard against the possibility of somebody walking in on the couple. An FBI report not released until 2010 revealed a new wrinkle concerning Monroe’s dealings with the Kennedys. Apparently in an alcoholic haze, she’d spent an hour in bed with JFK, and then entered a second bedroom and passed the remainder of the night with Robert F. Kennedy, whose aggressive nature and perseverance had obviously paid off. The following day, RFK bragged to Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, that he’d finally “bagged Miss Monroe.” It was Salinger who disclosed this information to an FBI agent.

Back in Los Angeles, Marilyn went to dinner with Ralph Roberts. “She gave me a detailed account of the birthday bash, but couldn’t seem to recall what happened after she and the president reached the Carlyle,” said Roberts. “However, I must admit I didn’t realize until this particular point in time just how much John F. Kennedy had meant to her. She’d built the affair into a full-blown romantic fantasy. For months she’d been calling the president at the White House, writing him letters, even sending him snippets of her love poetry. But what truly amazed me was her admission that she’d once telephoned Jackie Kennedy. She actually told the First Lady she wanted to marry the president, and apparently Jackie humored her by saying she had no objection and, in fact, had grown weary of her fishbowl existence in the executive mansion. I could well imagine their conversation, both women expressing their thoughts in that whispery, Little Bo Peep voice they shared. Still, I had some serious misgivings about Marilyn. She seemed to have constructed a whole new reality for herself, a magic kingdom in which she—and she alone—reigned supreme.”

On May 25, back on the set, Marilyn did a nude swimming pool scene. “It’s the only time she seemed to come alive,” said George Cukor. On June 1 she celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday by taking Dean Martin’s
teenaged son to a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game and then went to dinner with Frank Sinatra at Trader Vic’s. The next morning she came down with a head cold, and again production on the film had to be suspended—but not before the cast threw a small birthday party for Marilyn at the Fox Studio. On June 8, having seen and heard enough, Peter Levathes issued the following public statement: “Marilyn Monroe has been removed from the cast of
Something’s Got to Give
. This action was necessary because of Miss Monroe’s repeated willful breaches of contract. No justification was given by Miss Monroe for her failure to report for photography on many occasions. The studio has suffered losses through these absences.”

Levathes attempted to salvage
Something’s Got to Give
by replacing Monroe with actress Lee Remick, but Dean Martin—the male lead—refused to work with anyone other than Marilyn. Levathes offered Martin’s role to Robert Mitchum, but Mitchum—a friend to both Monroe and Dean Martin—wasn’t interested. With few options available, the studio now sued Monroe for $750,000 in a futile attempt to recover a fraction of its losses. The lawsuit never reached court.

“They ought to sue Elizabeth Taylor, not me,” Marilyn told Ralph Roberts. “
Cleopatra
has cost them far more than my stupid little film. But it’s easier to blame me for everything. I’m a pushover. Elizabeth Taylor’s the Queen of the Nile.”

In despair over her ouster from the film, Marilyn turned to Joe DiMaggio for consolation. In spite of his past rages, his hatred of Hollywood and the movie industry, Joe had never turned away from Marilyn. Nor had he ever given up hope of getting back with her on a full-time basis. In anticipation of spending more time with her, he had just resigned his position at Monette. He arrived at Marilyn’s Brentwood home and asked her to marry him. He wasn’t a billionaire, but he had more than enough money to support them both. He would supplement what he already had by endorsing products and appearing in television commercials. They could still have children—if need be, they could always adopt. In time they could revive Marilyn Monroe
Productions, and she could star in a film every year or two, but the films would be of a serious nature, and she would make far more than she currently earned as a “studio slave”—he would see to that.