Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (67 page)

With Joe at Yankee Stadium on opening day (1961). (The Bettmann Archive)

Receiving the Golden Globe Award for
Some Like It Hot
from Rock Hudson (1961). (From the collection of Mickey Song)

Entering Madison Square Garden for the gala birthday celebration of President John F. Kennedy (1962). (From the collection of Chris Basinger)

Eunice Murray. (1962) (UPI/Bettmann)

In her dressing room rehearsing for
Something’s Got to Give
, with drama coach Paula Strasberg (1962). (Photo by James Mitchell, Twentieth Century–Fox Studios)

With Wally Cox and Dean Martin during production of
Something’s Got to Give
(1962). (Photo by James Mitchell, Twentieth Century–Fox Studios; from the collection of Evelyn Moriarty)

The last day Marilyn Monroe worked on a film: her thirty-sixth birthday (June 1, 1962), with Henry Weinstein and Eunice Murray.

During the filming of the nude scene in the unfinished
Something’s Got to Give
(1962). (Photo by James Mitchell, Twentieth Century–Fox Studios; from the collection of Evelyn Moriarty)

On the set of
Something’s Got to Give
, May 1962.

*    *    *

The first months of 1958 were a time of melancholic strain in the Miller marriage. After several false starts on
The Misfits
, Arthur was pitched into a nervous gloom, and his wife was not adapting to suburban idleness. “Arthur was writing, writing, writing, but it wasn’t worth a damn,” according to Olie Rauh. “Meantime, she was trying to keep a low profile: he was the important one, she felt, he should write.” Inevitably, Marilyn and Arthur exchanged angry words—sometimes in company, as the Strasbergs recalled. Marilyn knew about and tried to ameliorate the wary suspicions and discomfort preventing good relations between Lee and Arthur, but her negotiations were futile.

More than once, as Susan recalled, Marilyn became tense and hostile when the Millers and Strasbergs visited, and the result was an explosion of anger (often for no apparent reason) directed at her husband, who would leave the room quietly instead of retaliating. Scolded for her bad manners and humiliation of Arthur, Marilyn was struck with remorse: “If I shouldn’t have talked to him like that, why didn’t he slap me? He should have slapped me!” That had been her punishment in earlier days, and she expected it now. Even with friends like the Rostens, there was merely “a façade of marital harmony,” as Norman recalled, and Arthur’s reaction was frequently to find refuge in sleep—“hiding,” as Rosten added, for he was “more unraveled than ever.”

Marilyn could not inspire Arthur to better or swifter writing, nor could she give him a child, which was her desire more than his, as he admitted in his memoirs. However she may have thought about it, she seemed to herself an ineffective muse and a failed partner. Her extended professional furlough also evoked a scratchy contentiousness, and this led to a period of even more excessive drinking during the first few months of 1958. At least once that March this nearly led to calamity, for at Roxbury she tripped and fell halfway down a flight of stairs, sustaining only a bruised ankle and a cut on her right palm from a broken whiskey glass.

On another occasion, Rosten recalled her sitting alone at a party in her Manhattan apartment, sipping a drink and apparently “floating off in her own daydream, out of contact.” When he approached her, she said, “I’m going to have sleep trouble again tonight,” and she thought the drinks would narcotize her. Similarly, friends like her dress designer John Moore recalled her greeting him for a fitting at the apartment
one Sunday morning with a sly grin: “The maid’s not here,” she whispered as if scheming, “so we can put more vodka in the Bloody Marys!”

Liquor often made Marilyn ill, and she had little tolerance beyond one or two modest drinks; she preferred champagne, which did not upset her stomach. But with alcohol, her appetite increased, and with no apparent reason to look her best for Hollywood, she quickly gained even more weight—as much as eighteen pounds above her normal one hundred fifteen. By April, the few photos she approved for publication showed her in the latest style, a comfortable black chemise or “sack dress” that afforded neat camouflage. Such an outfit the international press deplored: “She shouldn’t wear it, she looks awful,” reprimanded the Associated Press. John Moore agreed, attempting diplomatically to communicate the joint opinion by showing her a clipping from a German newspaper: in a chemise, it said flatly, Marilyn Monroe looked like someone in a barrel. Her reaction was an amused avoidance of the issue by a delicious non sequitur: “But I’ve never even
been
to West Berlin!”

It may also have seemed as if she had never been to Hollywood, which was changing fast and, with its short memory, almost forgetting her. By April 1958, almost two years had passed since she had made a film in America, and during the interval, studio executives were not breathlessly awaiting her return. On the contrary, they created replicas, copycat blondes in wild profusion whom they often outfitted with Marilyn Monroe’s earlier wardrobe.
²

But Marilyn’s agents made certain she was aware of the threat as well as the changes; indeed, by May she was ready to listen to offers to return to Hollywood—not only because she longed to do more than talk to Marianne Kris and listen to Lee Strasberg, but also because the Millers were short of money. She also wanted to apply in her work what she hoped she had learned since 1956. Fearing there might be no purpose in her life, she felt that therapy and acting classes suggested all sorts of avenues, but that everything was theoretical. Now Marilyn longed to “be up and at it, doing something for a change,” as she told Sam Shaw and Susan Strasberg. She had lost a child, had to abandon plans for a new home, was mired in an arid matrimonial patch and when she gazed in the mirror saw someone still lovely at thirty-two, but slightly bloated, pale and weary. She listened to the men at MCA—Lew Wasserman, Jay Kanter and another colleague, George Chasin.