Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (81 page)

Carolyn Joerndt Blackmer devoted her entire life to Swedenborgianism, Urbana, her husband and the little nursery school she opened on campus in 1929, which expressed her love of children and her desire for good early education. By that time, Eunice and John were beginning their own family and eventually had three daughters, named Jacquelyn, Patricia and Marilyn. Although Eunice’s lack of education prevented her from becoming a teacher, she imitated further her adored sister, even to the point of calling herself a “child nurse” or even, more boldly, a “nurse”—a designation she continued to assume during her later life in Los Angeles, where she listed herself in telephone directories as an educated, trained professional (indeed, a “shadow” of Carolyn). Lacking any training or credentials other than the normal school of motherhood, Eunice throughout her life admired her sister Carolyn and her brother-in-law Franklin Blackmer to the point of idolatry; indeed, after the death of Carolyn she married Franklin, who died within the year. Eunice Joerndt Murray Blackmer’s life, it appears, might have served as the true-life basis of a minor nineteenth-century Gothic romance.

Eunice and John Murray’s marriage was frankly troubled almost from the outset. He traveled round the country and into Mexico, organizing trade unions and leaving his wife to raise their daughters. They lived at various addresses in Los Angeles and during World War II (in which John was too old to serve) they resided on busy Twenty-sixth Street in Santa Monica. At the same time, they began to build a five-bedroom Monterey hacienda on nearby Franklin Street—a house they had planned for years, according to Eunice’s later memoir. The home was completed in 1946, but by that time John Murray was virtually an absentee father, and Eunice had no money for the mortgage. This was a grave disappointment for her, and she sold the home to Ralph Greenson after inhabiting it only four months; to maintain a connection to the
house, she befriended the buyers and even asked if she might work for the doctor.

Almost at once, he hired her, putting her in the homes of his most important clients as monitor, companion and nursemaid, a position for which she had no training or special capability; she did, however (as Greenson required), obediently report to him every detail of his clients’ private lives. “It was strictly a financial relationship,” said Eunice’s son-in-law Philip Laclair, who married her daughter Marilyn.

She did it for the money. Her husband [John Murray] left her badly, she had no formal training as a nurse—not even a high school education—but she was a kind woman and became a valuable asset to Greenson. She always followed his orders very closely.

In 1950, after more than a decade of long separations, the Murrays were at last divorced—a moment that perhaps made Eunice feel more than ever a failure, for in terminating a marriage she failed to live out one of Swedenborgianism’s essential tenets; she had also failed in her emulation of Carolyn. (John Murray subsequently remarried, moved to New Mexico, and died in 1958.) From 1950, Eunice was a lonely woman looking for purpose and comfort, and this she found in her work for Ralph Greenson. Eager to serve a man of authority who was both father figure and carer of souls, Eunice was sent by him to work (as she said) “in any kind of therapy that seemed indicated,” either with clients “seriously ill with depression or schizophrenia, [or with] others, like Marilyn Monroe, [who] were simply recovering from stressful experiences and needed supportive aid.”

With her famous client Marilyn Monroe, who also bore the name of her youngest daughter, it would have been natural for Eunice to sense a younger version of herself—a shy, confused soul abandoned by her parents, denied education and victimized by unhappy marriages. Here Eunice (by 1961 a grandmother) had an opportunity to revise her own earlier life, to correct what had gone wrong—with the help of the common denominator she shared with Marilyn: Ralph Greenson. From the first day of their meeting at Doheny Drive in 1961, she regarded Marilyn as a recalcitrant child—so Greenson also described her—and as Marilyn’s friends soon recognized, Eunice treated her with a certain benign condescension, indicating in her sweet, quiet
manner where they should shop and how they should arrange their schedule around Marilyn’s daily sessions with Greenson. And Marilyn, accustomed to accepting her doctor’s decisions, offered no resistance—for the present. But very soon, as everyone recognized, Marilyn resented Eunice’s prying and her obvious function as the doctor’s “plant.”

Among the first to recognize that Eunice was inappropriate for Marilyn was Pat Newcomb, who had almost daily contact with her client, helping to schedule appointments for photographers and reporters as well as facilitating the ongoing discussions with Fox. “At first,” said Pat,

Marilyn sought her advice because she was supposed to be this wonderful housekeeper Greenson had found for her. But from day one, I did not trust Eunice Murray, who seemed to be always snooping around. I tried to stay out of her way because I just didn’t like her. She was sort of a spook, always hovering, always on the fringes of things.

Alan Snyder was also dismayed, frankly describing Eunice as “a very strange lady. She was put into Marilyn’s life by Greenson, and she was always whispering—whispering and listening. She was this constant presence, reporting everything back to Greenson, and Marilyn quickly realized this,” for Eunice could often be overheard telephoning to Greenson the details he desired.

As Christmas approached, Marilyn telephoned Ralph Roberts in New York, telling him she was having a miserable time in therapy but that she still felt her best option was to stay with Greenson. “She said that she dreaded doing the movie that was being planned for her, that she missed her Manhattan friends, and she asked me to return to Los Angeles with her after the trip she planned to New York early in 1962.” But despite her unhappiness Marilyn was, she told Ralph, looking forward to Christmas: Joe was coming to spend the holidays with her.

DiMaggio arrived in Los Angeles on December 23, decorated Marilyn’s apartment with a tree and stocked her refrigerator with champagne and caviar. On their behalf, Marilyn had accepted an invitation to the Greensons for Christmas dinner; Joe, always shy with
strangers, reluctantly agreed to attend. New Year’s Eve, however, the former Mr. and Mrs. DiMaggio spent quietly together at Doheny Drive.

That season, Marilyn told Ralph and Pat (and presumably Joe) that Mrs. Murray was on the lookout for a house in Brentwood, a western section of Los Angeles near Santa Monica and Franklin Street. This was the location Greenson and Mrs. Murray thought best for Marilyn. Come to think of it, Marilyn added, it was odd: somehow she could never bring herself to address her housekeeper as anything but “Mrs. Murray,” who always addressed her familiarly as “Marilyn.”

1
. By the time Marilyn’s Estate was finally appraised in 1963, it was valued at $92,781 (orabout $375,000 in 1993 dollars). Lee Strasberg’s second wife, whom he married after the death of Paula in 1966, was his sole beneficiary when he died in 1982; thus Anna Mizrahi Strasberg, a woman Marilyn never knew, became heir to the bulk of Marilyn Monroe’s Estate—which meant primarily income from film royalties and from the licensing of her image on coffee mugs, T-shirts, pens, etc. In 1992, this generated something in excess of one million dollars a year. By this time, Marianne Kris was long dead, and her heirs were the Anna Freud Children’s Clinic in London.

2
. To confuse tourists and fans, Marilyn installed on the doorbell at Doheny Drive the name Marjorie Stengel. Formerly Montgomery Clift’s secretary, Stengel had worked briefly for Marilyn in New York after the departure of May Reis.

3
. This was fortuitous for Brown and for film history: David Brown went on to produce or co-produce an impressive array of films:
The Sting, Jaws, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy, The Player
and
A Few Good Men
, to name only a few.

4
. The 1940 script, by Sam and Bella Spewack, was itself inspired by the Tennyson poem “Enoch Arden,” about a seaman believed dead who returns after a long absence to find his wife remarried. Recognizing her happiness, he does not reveal his identity and subsequently dies of grief. The Spewacks and their successors slyly named the couple of their movie scenario Ellen and
Nick
(combined to allude to Enoch)
Arden
.

Chapter Twenty

J
ANUARY
–M
AY
1962

I
N LATE JANUARY
1962, Eunice Murray found a home for Marilyn Monroe. Ralph Greenson accompanied his patient on her first visit to approve the choice, and she purchased it from the owners, William and Doris Pagen, for $77,500. Marilyn had prudently deferred her income from
Some Like It Hot
and
The Misfits
, and that January she received checks totaling $225,000; most of this paid past taxes, and then Marilyn put down $42,500 and signed for a 6¼ percent, fifteen-year mortgage, with monthly payments of $320. She would take title and possession of her new home two months later.

Contracts were drawn up without problems and with the assistance of her new attorney, Milton Rudin (Greenson’s brother-in-law). Rudin expedited the purchase of the house and subsequently managed the transfer of Marilyn’s representation from MCA to his own firm. With Greenson, Murray, Weinstein and Rudin in place, both the private and professional aspects of Marilyn Monroe’s life seemed safely assured. Only for a moment did she hesitate before signing the escrow papers: “I felt badly because I was buying a house all alone,” she said later. But encouraged by Greenson, buy it she did, although as Marilyn’s friend and stand-in Evelyn Moriarty recalled, “she was talked into this house—by Mrs. Murray and by Dr. Greenson, as she told us several times while we were filming
Something’s Got to Give.”

The house was remarkably like a modest version of the Murray-Greenson
home. Near Santa Monica and the ocean, between Sunset and San Vicente boulevards, there is a run of short, dead-end streets off Carmelina Avenue known as the “numbered Helenas.” At 12305 Fifth Helena Drive was a Spanish hacienda behind a high white wall. Secluded and private, the small (twenty-three-hundred-square-foot), single-story house with attached garage and a tiny guest house needed considerable refurbishing, but it had a red-tiled roof, thick white stucco walls, casement windows, a beamed cathedral ceiling in the living room and arched doorways throughout. The property also featured lush plantings and a swimming pool—all nestled in a quiet cul-de-sac convenient to shopping, to Fox and a mere mile from the Greenson residence on Franklin Street, just around the golf course of the Brentwood Country Club.

A visitor at the front door looked down to see a tile with the Latin motto
CURSUM PERFICIO
, a translation from the original Greek of a New Testament verse.
¹
The threshold gave, without foyer, onto a small living room; to the left were a kitchen, dining area and small solarium; to the right were three small bedrooms, one facing the front lawn, with a small private bath, and two smaller bedrooms connected by a second bath. As was the custom in many homes built during the Great Depression, there was little closet space—two small cupboards for three bedrooms, plus a linen closet—and none of these had operating locks, as Eunice pointed out. This was bad news to Marilyn’s new secretary, a woman in her late fifties named Cherie Redmond. From January 1962, Cherie worked at Doheny Drive; from March, she was at Fifth Helena; and when production on the new film began, she was in daily attendance at Fox.

Cherie wished to secure Marilyn’s financial papers, checks and related private materials in a closet or in one of the small bedrooms—“but there isn’t one door in the place that locks,” as she wrote to her New York counterpart, Hedda Rosten (who was taking care of mail and minor secretarial duties at Fifty-seventh Street). As the next owners after Marilyn discovered, none of the inoperative interior locks were repaired while she was in residence. (Cherie finally had one installed for her small file cabinet, on March 15.)
²

Just as Marilyn was planning the partial renovation of the new house and the purchase of new, Mexican-style furnishings, she heard the first rumblings of Hollywood talk about an important new man in her life: nothing in the press, of course (that would have been unthinkable in 1962), simply party chatter. In time, the talk became a loud shout, then an avalanche.

A passionate love affair between Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy has been assumed for so long that it has achieved as solid a place in public awareness as almost any other event in the man’s presidency.

But if the phrase “love affair” describes a protracted intimacy sustained by some degree of frequency, then such a connection between these two is impossible to establish with any of the rudimentary tools of historico-critical studies. In the absence of such evidence, no serious biographer can identify Monroe and Kennedy as partners in a love affair. All that can be known for certain is that on four occasions between October 1961 and August 1962, the president and the actress met, and that during
one
of those meetings they telephoned one of Marilyn’s friends from a bedroom; soon after, Marilyn confided this one sexual encounter to her closest confidants, making clear that it was the extent of their involvement.

In October 1961, after a photography session for a magazine story, Marilyn asked Allan Snyder to deliver her to a party at Patricia and Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house. The occasion was a dinner party honoring Pat’s brother, President Kennedy, and among the other guests were several blond movie stars—Kim Novak, Janet Leigh and
Angie Dickinson, for all of whom the president had a keen appreciation. All contrary allegations notwithstanding, this was the first meeting between Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy; hearsay about any earlier introduction simply cannot be substantiated. Before this, the schedules of Monroe and Kennedy since his January 1961 inauguration reveal wide geographic distances between them. That October night, Marilyn was driven back to her apartment by one of the Lawfords’ staff.