Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (85 page)

Marilyn engaged a limousine and driver from the Carey Cadillac Company that spring, and records provide a chart to the course of her life.
According to the detailed invoices charged to her and signed by her daily driver, Rudy Kautzky, her schedule up to the first day of shooting was unvarying, Mondays through Saturdays, from April 2. She began with a facial at Madame Renna’s on Sunset Boulevard, usually around noon; this was followed by a session with Greenson in his Beverly Hills office and a reading of script lines with Paula, who was in residence at the Bel-Air Sands Hotel on Sunset. Marilyn then visited either Engelberg, Seigel or specialists who treated other ailments that plagued her; these doctors administered injections, sometimes wrote concurrent prescriptions and routinely gave Marilyn what she requested. She was then driven for food shopping at the Brentwood Mart on San Vicente Boulevard or at Jurgensen’s in Beverly Hills, and in late afternoon she was driven back for a second session with Greenson at his home: by now he was sometimes bringing her in for twice-daily counseling.

The routine was broken only for costume and makeup tests at Fox on April 10 and wardrobe fittings at home on April 16. “She was so happy to be back at work,” according to Henry Weinstein. “The tests were marvelous. I never saw anyone so pleased and delighted as Marilyn during those tests. According to film editor David Bretherton, Allan Snyder (still her preferred makeup artist and close friend) and Marjorie Plecher (costumer for the film and subsequently Mrs. Snyder), Marilyn was more beautiful than ever when she arrived for the tests: they all noticed a clarity of expression, a luminous radiance and eagerness to work hard.

Weinstein’s recollection that all during mid-April she lay at home in a “barbiturate coma” and his panicky rush to the studio on April 11 to urge that the picture be canceled can only be due to his unfamiliarity with a Nembutal hangover. In fact, as the limousine records indicate, she left with her driver at nine-fifteen that morning for a usual day of appointments: Weinstein, youthfully eager but injudicious, had arrived at six.

Thenceforth, except for the final outcome of a hopelessly derailed and canceled picture, the making of
Something’s Got to Give
paralleled the production of any other Monroe picture. Terrified of appearing before the camera, as Weinstein and the entire company recalled, Marilyn delayed, malingered and overrehearsed; frightened of not sleeping sufficiently, she frequently took too many pills—no one bothered
to monitor her intake—and so she was groggy and confused for several early morning hours; but determined to acquit herself well, she was brilliant when she finally arrived. Word-perfect, willing to work and rework a scene to the director’s pleasure, generous with her co-stars and fiercely dedicated to pleasing her audience, she was, as David Brown said, the consummate professional. As everyone became convinced—Snyder, Newcomb, Strasberg, Roberts, even Levathes—the source of the trouble was the conjunction of Greenson and Murray, a team they were powerless to counter. To her further alarm, Pat Newcomb discovered in mid-April that Eunice had moved into the guest room of Marilyn’s home.

“Marilyn couldn’t walk across a room without advice and counsel and people with vested interest,” Levathes said years later.

Her so-called advisors created the difficulties and caused her a terrible identity crisis. I thought Marilyn was a nice woman—not a shallow person who made no distinctions, but someone who thought about her life, who knew the differences between sham and reality. She had depth; it wasn’t all fluff. She was enormously complex during her suffering and her absences from the production, but at her best there was no one like her.

Cukor agreed: the advice she was getting was utter rubbish.

On Sunday, April 22, after a session with Greenson, Marilyn rode down to Hermosa Beach, south of Los Angeles. There the veteran hair colorist Pearl Porterfield (who had cared for, among others, the wavy white coiffure of Mae West) prepared Marilyn for her first day on the set of
Something’s Got to Give
. Eunice was so impressed with the look when Marilyn arrived home that henceforth she had her thin brown hair washed and styled by Pearl Porterfield, too.

Marilyn’s first scene was scheduled for Monday morning, April 23, but when she awoke she had a blinding headache, no voice, and impaired respiration: she was seen by her dentist (the only physician she could reach at five in the morning), who diagnosed acute sinusitis. For the rest of that week, she was ordered to rest at home, visits to Greenson being the sole exception. But such occurrences are hardly rare in movie-making, and there were contingency plans. Her point-of-view shots (what her character sees) were photographed that day, and, from
Tuesday through Friday, scenes with Cyd Charisse and Dean Martin were filmed.

Finally, on Monday, April 30, Marilyn appeared on the set promptly at nine for her first scenes in the picture. With her hair brilliantly white, her skin unblemished, her eyes clear and alert, she wore the required costume for her entrance: a red and white floral-print sheath, a white coat and white shoes. For seven hours—and over forty times, according to a careful count of the outtakes—she repeated the closeups in which, as Ellen Arden, she returns to her home for the first time in five years. Standing at poolside, she gazes in silent wonder at her little boy and girl, splashing playfully, at first oblivious of her presence and then, when they chat with her, of her identity. The scene is a miracle, and not only because Marilyn in fact still had a severe sinus infection and a fever of one hundred and one degrees: she was forcing herself to work.

Finding her way through all the emotional complications of the character’s scene, she is alternately happy to see her children, frightened of their reaction, concerned for their welfare, proud of their growth and charm. In fully thirty of the forty takes Cukor directed, there is preserved forever Marilyn Monroe at the peak not only of her beauty but of the depth of her inner resources. With the daily help of Paula Strasberg, Marilyn had reached into her own lost childhood, and perhaps into the sorrow of her own failed pregnancies, and there she had found the mysterious complex of feelings that enabled her to give a simple scene its wistful, fully human regret. As in nothing she had done since
Bus Stop
and
The Prince and the Showgirl
, there is in this incomplete film the relic of an astonishing performance. Her smile is unforced, her brows arch and her eyes just begin to glaze with tears, as if a wash of memories has evoked both penance and longing.

The Marilyn Monroe of this film is wholly unlike that of
All About Eve
or
Niagara
, of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
or
The Seven Year Itch
. She is mature, serene, fragile—but graceful and resplendent, too. None of the emotions were manufactured: they were, to the contrary, deeply felt, imagined,
lived
in some way. The laughter with the children moments later is neither cute nor manic, but joyous, wise, confident that somehow all will be well. No one who sees them (or the few moments preserved in the 1990 commercial documentary that bears the film’s title) can for a moment see this as anything but the efforts of a responsible
and sensitive actress evoking recognizable human feeling and continuing to grow as an artist, just as she wished.

Marilyn worked until four o’clock that afternoon, when she returned home and collapsed into bed. Next day, Engelberg pronounced her ill with a sinus infection and unable to work—a judgment confirmed when Fox sent Seigel, who rang the executive offices to say he would not ask even the film’s cocker spaniel to perform in such a condition. Marilyn was ordered to bed for the remainder of the week, and the studio was so informed. There was an ancillary issue at stake, too: with the hugging scenes Marilyn was required to do with them, her closeness was considered risky for the health of the two children.

“She was genuinely ill,” according to Marjorie Plecher, “as anyone could see. But the studio didn’t want to believe her.” Allan Snyder agreed: Marilyn, never strong physically, had been susceptible to colds and respiratory infections over the fifteen years he had known her, and that week she spiked a high fever with her sinus infection: “But no one wanted to hear about that.” Pat Newcomb also knew this to be true.

On each day of the production call sheets from May 1 through 4, Marilyn’s absence was announced as if it were a last-minute development each morning. Evelyn Moriarty said she was always informed a day or two in advance of Marilyn’s continuing leave: “Marilyn did
not
simply not show up!” Alternate shooting could be hastily scheduled in her absence.

Despite illness, Marilyn worked with Paula for hours at home. But then Fox pulled another tactical error, sending a messenger at ten or eleven each night with revised script pages printed, according to tradition, on a different color paper from the previous or original pages of dialogue; these new lines had been composed by this writer or that one, by Cukor, by anyone willing to risk what now seemed impossible. With all this confusion, “Marilyn was shattered,” according to Nunnally Johnson, who kept in touch with her and the production. She saw her comeback film as a terrible failure, and she was right. “And then more and more [revisions] arrived, until in the end there were only four pages left from the original script.” When Cukor and Weinstein learned the distress this was causing Marilyn, they tried to mislead her by having the changes inserted into a freshly bound script with all pages on the same color paper as the original. “She was much too smart [not to say experienced] to be misled by that trick,” concluded Johnson.

That same week, when she complained to Weinstein and Levathes, Marilyn reminded them that she had permission to attend President Kennedy’s birthday gala in New York later in May. Evelyn Moriarty recalled that this absence was posted weeks in advance: indeed, the call sheet circulated on May 10 for May 17 noted that production would shut down that morning at eleven-thirty “because of Miss Monroe’s permission to go to N.Y.” It would have been unimaginable for the studio to deny the presence of Hollywood’s most famous star at a command performance. In addition, performers with other commitments were readily released for this special event, each sent to provide a portion of the evening’s entertainment. Marilyn’s upcoming appearance was already known and promulgated in New York, as Hedda mentioned to Cherie in a letter posted the first week of May.

For the occasion, Marilyn was submitting to hours of fittings with Jean Louis, who had created the notorious gown worn by Marlene Dietrich in 1953 for her nightclub premiere—a skintight array of sequins, brilliants, rhinestones and chiffon that covered and flattered while giving the illusion of nudity. In Dietrich’s case, a foundation garment was also required; Marilyn, however, would wear merely a sheer body stocking embroidered with sequins, so that she would seem to glitter in the spotlight. Literally sewn into it the evening of the party, she would wear, as
Life
magazine stressed later, “nothing, absolutely nothing, underneath,” and would appear enveloped only by reflected, diffused light—a veritable star indeed. Eunice made plain her disapproval of such a daring outfit: “It might have been more graceful if it were looser,” she said—to which Marilyn gaily replied, “Be brave, Mrs. Murray—be brave!”

Although both Marilyn’s and the studio’s physicians ordered her to remain home from Tuesday through Friday (May 1 through 4), Cherie—now working on Marilyn’s behalf at Fox—was required to telephone Eunice daily to ascertain the patient’s health. Her log for May 1 contains a curious annotation: “At 4:00, I called [Eunice], who said she would ask Marilyn how she felt and bring me back a message. But she didn’t come back on the line. I didn’t call her back and left at 6:30.” There are several such omissions on Eunice’s part during April and May: she seems to have been afflicted with either a gradually failing memory or an astonishing lack of courtesy. In any
case, Eunice seemed to be taking on the characteristics of one or another of Marilyn’s doctors.

All that first week of May, Cukor shot around her, filming scenes with Dean Martin and Phil Silvers, Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse, a courtroom sequence on another sound stage, and Marilyn’s point-of-view shots. Again, Greenson insisted on seeing Marilyn twice daily, and on these outings her limousine logs include daily stops to the Vicente Pharmacy, the Horton & Converse drugstore or one or another Westwood chemist. Her analyst was still providing abundant medications—not for her sinus condition (that would have been the responsibility of Engelberg or Rubin, whom she also visited), but for her anxiety and depression over
Something’s Got to Give
. But the barbiturates and tranquilizers prescribed had exactly the opposite effect Greenson supposedly sought. Instead of encouraging Marilyn to work, the pills made her more and more dysfunctional: taken with the antibiotics, they became even more powerful sedatives and hypnotics, gradually rendering her confused, foggy and somnolent. Her condition could have been mistaken, by any passerby, as that of a confirmed alcoholic. To young Joan Greenson fell again the task of transporting Marilyn, often in a drug haze and with speech impaired, to and from her home when Rudy was off duty.

In such a condition, Marilyn’s behavior toward friends would occasionally be demanding or socially inappropriate. She sometimes treated Pat like a personal servant rather than a professional assistant, ordering a second telephone line installed at Pat’s home in order to have constant access to her publicist, for any request or complaint, any hour day or night. Yet when Pat’s car went down with a terminal complaint, Marilyn presented her with a new one, waving away the cost.

At seven o’clock on the morning of Monday, May 7, Marilyn dutifully arrived for work, but a half-hour later, alternately perspiring and shaking with chills, she was sent home. Fearing this, Cukor and his unit manager had arranged an alternate schedule, and the company proceeded south to Balboa Island for other scenes. But by the time they arrived, the weather had turned inclement and remained so the next day. Everyone was back on the set Thursday, when
Something’s Got to Give
completed fourteen days of shooting (only one with Marilyn) and was four and a half days behind schedule—by no means a morbid situation,
and one typical of many productions. With the usual Hollywood ingenuities (to cover, for example, accidents, illness, weather, revised scripts or new sets), plans could be rearranged: in fact the May 10 call sheet proposes only one additional day of shooting to compensate for losses thus far incurred.