Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (86 page)

On Friday, May 11, Marilyn rang the studio and asked Evelyn to bring some items from her dressing room, a task her stand-in was glad to do. Arriving at Fifth Helena and hoping for the chance to visit Marilyn, Evelyn was summarily and curtly dismissed by Eunice: “I’m sorry, Miss Monroe is in conference.” As Evelyn later learned, Marilyn was simply at the other end of the house, or in the bath, and unaware of her friend’s arrival. “But what could I do?” Evelyn asked rhetorically years later. “Mrs. Murray was like a class monitor for Dr. Greenson”—or, one might add, like Mrs. Danvers, the nightmarish housekeeper who terrorized the second Mrs. de Winter after the death of Rebecca.

Saturday, Paula arrived at the house with her sister Bea Glass, who had prepared homemade soups and delicacies Marilyn liked. Joe had come to stay for the weekend, and so there was briefly a circle of affectionate serenity around Marilyn, who was cheerful despite her lingering illness. Pat summarized the feelings of several confidants when she said that of all Marilyn’s entourage, “Paula was among the most loyal and helpful. She took the rap for Marilyn’s lateness, but she gave Marilyn a great deal. And she never tried to own Marilyn, or to cut others out of Marilyn’s life.” Ralph Roberts, who also stopped to visit, saw a warm and supportive atmosphere around Marilyn: “Joe was really the only one in her life then, and that gave us hope, for the rest of us knew there was something terribly wrong in Marilyn’s relationship with Greenson—even Rudy was aware of it.”

Still, Greenson had established a profound dependency—and then he betrayed it. On May 10, he and his wife departed for a five-week trip abroad: he was to deliver a lecture in Israel and they were to proceed to Switzerland for a long overdue visit with her mother, who had suffered a stroke in February. Weinstein implored Greenson not to depart: “Ralph had made himself very central to her functioning,” Weinstein recalled, “and frankly, I was surprised and annoyed. He left when all of this was going on.” But the trip was one Greenson’s wife much anticipated, perhaps as much for the chance to put some distance between her husband and the patient to whom he was inordinately and
inextricably attached: by this time, anyone who knew patient and therapist also knew that she had become virtually his career. Greenson himself admitted to a close friend that “Hildi was afraid to leave me home alone.”

Greenson must have been fearful of leaving his patient, too—fearful for himself, his relationship with her, his control of her. What he did prior to his departure, however, was markedly injudicious.

When I left for a five-week summer vacation, I felt it was indicated to leave her some medication which she might take when she felt depressed and agitated, i.e., rejected and tempted to act out. I prescribed a drug which is a quick-acting anti-depressant in combination with a sedative—Dexamyl. I also hoped she would be benefited by having something from me to depend on. I can condense the situation by saying that, at the time of my vacation, I felt that she would be unable to bear the depressive anxieties of being alone. The administering of the pill was an attempt to give her something of me to swallow, to take in, so that she could overcome the sense of terrible emptiness that would depress and infuriate her.

With this, the countertransference to which he referred—his dependence on Marilyn’s dependence on him—is as clear as the monumentally egocentric eroticism which had by this time taken control of him: Ralph Greenson was by now in the grip of an obsession over which, henceforth, he had no control. Hildi was quite right to be “afraid to leave [him] alone.” As for Dexamyl, it was an acceleration of the drug routine—a combination of Dexedrine and amobarbital—an amphetamine combined with a short-acting barbiturate that was eventually removed from the drug market because of the difficulty of achieving the correctly balanced ratio between the two chemicals.

Before his departure, Greenson recommended that Paula be dismissed from the production of
Something’s Got to Give:
still projecting his own feelings onto others, he told Marilyn that Paula was simply taking advantage of her and her money. Marilyn said nothing, and in fact, although Paula soon departed for a brief trip to New York, Marilyn conveyed no such notice of dismissal to her or the studio.

But she was annoyed with Eunice, and within days of Greenson’s departure she handed her a check and dismissed her. “By this time,”
according to Pat, “Marilyn was on to Mrs. Murray. She resented her and wanted to get her out. Naturally those of us who were close to Marilyn were delighted.” With this single action alone, as Marilyn told her friends, she was making an important step in self-assertion, in establishing her independence from a woman whose meddling interference she resented and whose snooping was offensive. Acting the adult and taking responsibility for her action—this was, she always thought, the goal of her psychotherapy in any case.

The deed must have encouraged and invigorated her, for that day Marilyn sped off to Fox and, for ten hours, submitted with remarkable patience and good humor to over fifty takes of a scene involving the family cocker spaniel. Expert in rehearsals, the dog (named Tippy by Marilyn, after the one she had lost in childhood to a neighbor’s rage) refused to follow off-camera commands and cues, leaping around and behind her, panting and drooling over Marilyn for hours. Anyone else might have balked at kneeling so long on the ground waiting for an animal, but Marilyn laughed and joked that she knew how The Method could delay players until they find the right mood, and there was no reason a dog should not be similarly indulged. The hours of outtakes from this scene, often frustrating and uncomfortable for her, remain vastly amusing decades later. “He’s getting good!” she calls to Cukor after something like her twentieth take with the dog, and several times the film clips show Marilyn collapsing with laughter over the recalcitrant animal’s antics.

Her energy and good humor continued on Tuesday and Wednesday, May 15 and 16. But with writers scribbling furiously, Weinstein attempting to wrest from Cukor a sense of how this picture could continue without a firm finale and several key roles still uncast, the only scenes to be filmed were retakes of Marilyn with the children at pool-side.

The following morning, she was again on time for work, chatting excitedly about her departure for New York. At the same time, Fox’s telephone lines were jammed with a succession of calls to and from New York, aimed at preventing her journey. First, Weinstein learned from Cukor that if she were absent for Thursday afternoon and Friday’s shootings, the picture would be six days behind schedule, and the director would now have to account for the delays to the new executives. By this time, as Weinstein recalled, they had all forgotten an additional
reason Marilyn would not be at work on the seventeenth: she had a letter of agreement appended to her contracts since 1956, to the effect that she would not be required at the studio during her menstrual period. “She had set that day aside before we began production,” Weinstein recalled years later, “and we had agreed we weren’t going to shoot that day.” This turned out to be a convenience for the film—but how could the producer and director say that her absence actually gave them time to work out the final script problems and complete the casting on this chaotic picture?

This was a matter of concern to Cukor and Weinstein only because of the fierce attention such matters were receiving from the financiers in New York and from Levathes, their legate at the studio. “I had no idea whether it was a good picture or not,” Milton Gould said years later. “I was not a moviemaker. My job was to solve money problems.” His was an honorable task bravely assumed: but not to care “whether it was a good picture or not” was also to act with pronounced myopia. Such an attitude in fact signaled the start of a trend that has long endured: creative decisions subsequently made by attorneys and business graduates, perhaps intelligent and benevolent, but ignorant of the fundamentally crazy and unpredictable nature of movie-making and the impossibility of maintaining religious dedication to production schedules. These new men were concerned only for the so-called bottom line, with no reference to the value of the entertainment product.

The result of this short-sightedness was predictable. Anxious, Weinstein (“whose termination I had already planned,” said Gould) called Milton Ebbins, Lawford’s man in charge of West Coast preparations for the gala: “You’ve got to do something, Milt. You’re Peter’s friend. You’ve got to help me. Marilyn is set to go to New York, and this just can’t happen.”

“What do you mean, it can’t happen?” countered Ebbins.

“Milt, she can’t go. We’re in the middle of a picture. Can’t you do something?”

“Listen, Henry. Number one, I don’t represent Marilyn Monroe. And number two, what’s this sudden problem? This has been planned for weeks. It’s the president’s birthday, for God’s sake!”

“Well, there’s going to be a lot of trouble, Milt. If she goes—I don’t know—she may lose the picture.”

“ ‘Lose the picture’? What does that mean?”

“You know—”

There was a moment of silence, as Ebbins recalled, and then he replied: “Look, Henry, I can’t believe she’s going to lose anything. Marilyn’s not that dumb. And Mickey [Milton Rudin] is not that dumb. Mickey never called me, never said a word!”

As Evelyn Moriarty recalled, there had been no effort to prevent Marilyn’s trip to New York until that week—and now every weapon in the corporate arsenal appeared. “When Peter [Levathes] called to tell me Marilyn was leaving for New York on Thursday,” according to Milton Gould, “I told him to forbid it. He did, but she went anyway. That’s when I told him to fire her.” This final drastic measure took several weeks, however much Gould may have hoped the matter would be adjudicated with all dispatch; at last, however, his bidding would be executed. The reasoning was simple: the studio could save over three million dollars by scrapping a film with only a half-dozen sets and twenty actors—a project doomed from the first day of script conferences and a project in which the director and the star had no confidence. If they could find a persuasive reason—a star’s illness, for example—Fox’s insurance company might be persuaded to reimburse the monies spent. At least the picture might be temporarily shelved, rewritten, perhaps recast and recommenced later.

Had Fox not rushed to production (as Milton Rudin, for one, wisely counseled against),
Something’s Got to Give
would either have been turned into a good film (first on paper, where all good films are made, and at which stage David Brown urged care and caution); or it would never have got beyond a prose treatment, saving money, jobs and the health of many. Of these machinations Marilyn knew nothing as she sped to New York.

“The whole thing was ridiculous,” Henry Weinstein said years later, reassessing the way the event was mismanaged.

At Fox, the men up front were trying to prove they were bosses. Had I been more experienced, I would have gone with her to New York with some press people from Fox. We could have made an advertising event out of it, going around with our own camera crew and signs reading
Something’s Got to Give—Marilyn Monroe!
—instead of worrying about the schedule. But these men were concerned only about power, which of course is a Hollywood fixation. And to be concerned about power when you have Marilyn Monroe is stupidity.

At half past eleven on the morning of May 17, as previously agreed, Marilyn’s scenes were concluded—just as Peter Lawford and Milton Ebbins, who were to escort Marilyn and Pat to New York, arrived at Fox by helicopter to whisk them away to Los Angeles International Airport. “Of course a car would have done just as well,” as Ebbins later said, “but Peter loved to fly around in that helicopter. I told him I was surprised he didn’t use it to go shopping at Sears.”

An hour later, Fox’s attorneys filed a breach-of-contract notice (dated the previous day, May 16), mailed to both MCA and to Milton Rudin, charging Marilyn with failure to work and a stern warning of dire consequences to follow. Had the studio’s legal department collected every saber from the prop rooms, the sound of rattling could not have been louder; to follow, one might have expected the muted clanking of chains.

Marilyn arrived that evening at her New York apartment, where early next morning Fox’s New York office delivered a copy of the breach-of-contract letter to her door: now she knew clearly that she was in danger of being fired. Her reaction (as Pat Newcomb and Ralph Roberts recalled) was undisguised, justifiable outrage: how could Greenson have blithely left her for Europe? Surely his connection to the production, to Weinstein and to Rudin put him in a unique position to know this action would be taken against her. How could her “team,” as the men at Fox called Weinstein, Greenson and Rudin, not protect her at such a time? Why, indeed, ought she to be receiving this letter at all? Why did she have advocates if they could not be trusted to defend her against such ridiculous charges? Only her friends and her insistence on acquitting herself in the present task enabled her to prepare with a residual equanimity.

On Friday evening, the composer and producer Richard Adler, who was staging the birthday salute for the president, came to Marilyn’s apartment to rehearse with her at the white piano. Over and over, for perhaps three hours, she sang “Happy Birthday to you . . .” Adler, recalled Ralph Roberts, “became more and more perturbed, because he was afraid she was going to sound too sexy. He even called Peter
Lawford to ask Marilyn to tone down her manner. But of course she just smiled and went right on preparing it the way she thought it would be best.”

Madison Square Garden, on Saturday evening, May 19, was packed with more than fifteen thousand people who paid from one hundred to one thousand dollars for a ticket to a vast birthday party that served to pay off the Democratic National Committee’s deficit from the 1960 presidential campaign.
¹⁰
Jack Benny, the elegant and witty master of ceremonies, introduced the performers—among them Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Durante, Peggy Lee, Henry Fonda, Maria Callas, Harry Belafonte, Mike Nichols and Elaine May—but there had to be a musical interlude when Marilyn’s turn came, for she was as usual late. At last she arrived at the Garden, and was ready to go onstage after a last minute touch-up by Mickey Song, who styled the Kennedy brothers’ hair. “We kept working around her lateness,” remembered William Asher, the producer of the event, “and the comedian Bill Dana suggested that Peter introduce her as ‘the late Marilyn Monroe.’ ” Which is exactly what Peter did. In one of the most awkward and jarring moments in the history of events recorded by television, Marilyn—barely able to walk in her skintight body stocking—inched her way to the podium and Lawford announced, “Mr. President: the late Marilyn Monroe.”