Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (89 page)

In all these calls and announcements, there is clearly a serious problem. Greenson never mentioned Marilyn’s accident and their visit to Gurdin, an occurrence that could ironically have helped her. Fox rightly expected a reason to be offered for her absence that week, but they received none. Instead of buying time for another week by simply showing Fox that a woman with bruises was hardly fit for the camera, not a word was spoken by Greenson (the only one besides Gurdin who knew about the accident, if such it was). Just as crucial, his letters to Kris and Ostrow (and Murray’s memoir) are noteworthy for their presentation of Marilyn as a gravely ill patient, a schizophrenic and a desperate abuser of dangerous drugs: Would not his account of her nearly tragic, drug-induced accident have supported these allegations? She could have sustained career-threatening if not life-threatening injury, after all.

Why, then, did Greenson not mention this accident, telling Fox straightaway that Marilyn had hurt herself? Why did Greenson not invite a studio doctor to come to Fifth Helena to see for himself that Marilyn was unable to work that day and the next? Why was neither Pat Newcomb nor her boss, Arthur Jacobs, informed of the injury? It was their job to finesse such delicate matters with the press and public should the news somehow be leaked.

Would not Greenson have telephoned Engelberg if he found Marilyn injured, or taken her to Engelberg’s office? To avoid publicity at all cost, would it not have better suited his purposes to have a doctor come to the house? No, these were not options because Marilyn herself—not hours but moments after the blow—had insisted on seeing the man who had cared for her face years earlier. Had the accident occurred as Greenson told Gurdin, why was it not mentioned by Eunice in her memoir; why did Greenson not use it to help keep Fox at bay? And why did Marilyn, who no longer trusted her advisers, not insist on attending the crucial luncheon meeting at Fox the next day, the conference that would determine her fate and that of the picture? Doubtless because she was temporarily disfigured (and very likely sedated).

There can be only one explanation. Greenson wanted to confide in no one and wished to prevent Marilyn being seen or questioned about the injury by Gurdin or anyone else for one reason only: he was the one responsible for it. Exhausted, frustrated, highly strung, confident of his authority to the point of egomania, he was a man known to become enraged when challenged. Furious at Marilyn for having sabotaged his vacation, having disobeyed his orders, causing him professional and personal embarrassment before his family and the studio and then saying that she was (thus the letter to Ostrow) not very ill after all and would be glad to be rid of the picture, Greenson had become violent and struck her. As long before with Joe, she silently endured the moment of abuse, convinced that she had been a naughty child and that punishment was due.

Hairstylist Sidney Guilaroff, not a man to be lightly dismissed, came to visit Marilyn that weekend but was brusquely turned away by Greenson, who came to Fifth Helena for weekend sessions on June 9 and 10: “I went to see her,” Guilaroff recalled, “but Greenson kept me out. He kept a lot of people from her.” For over a week, she was virtually incarcerated at home until her bruises healed and so was
forced to decline several social invitations she might otherwise have attended. Among these was an invitation from Pat and Peter Lawford, who were to be guests of honor at the home of Robert and Ethel Kennedy in Virginia. Her telegram of regret, dated June 13, linked her struggle with Fox to the famous “Freedom Riders” fighting on behalf of civil rights for minorities:

Dear Attorney General and Mrs. Kennedy:

I would have been delighted to have accepted your invitation honoring Pat and Peter Lawford. Unfortunately, I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. After all, all we demanded was our right to twinkle.

Marilyn Monroe

A second visit to Gurdin, on June 14, confirmed that all would soon be well. During that week, there were visits by Greenson and Engelberg, who later submitted bills (Engelberg’s were for injections).

The meetings were held at Fox on Friday, June 8, and to them Greenson thus brought a double burden. He had to convince hostile studio executives that he could deliver Monroe to the set; and he had to prevent knowledge of her injuries—which, if ever known, would ignite a scandal and ruin his career forever, making Marilyn, in the bargain, a more sympathetic figure before the studio and the public.

Greenson performed brilliantly. He, Rudin, Feldman and Frank Ferguson (an assistant secretary of Fox) met in the executive offices, where Greenson began by stating that his patient had endured two unfortunate incidents: a virus she contracted in New York and (his ego ever uninjured) his absence from her life. He added that Pat Newcomb was “dispensable” as publicist and Paula Strasberg as coach (doubtless because, like Ralph Roberts, they were friends of Marilyn and disliked him). In addition, he reminded them that he had pulled Marilyn through a crisis once before, during
The Misfits
, and he could do so again.

The discussion continued along these lines, and when Feldman attempted to raise the stakes, asking if Marilyn would accept a new director
or cameraman, Greenson was unfazed. He said, according to Feldman’s detailed notes, that he would “be able to get his patient to go along with any reasonable request and
although he did not want us to deem his relationship as a Svengali one, he in fact could persuade her to anything reasonable that he wanted
.”
¹

Continuing this expression of egomania, Greenson astonished everyone by saying that he was ready to assume responsibility for all creative areas of the picture: to select the new director and cameraman, to decide which scenes Marilyn would or would not perform and which takes would finally be printed. “I pointed out to Dr. Greenson,” noted Feldman, “that although I was sure he knew his business, I agreed with Mickey [Rudin] that he [Greenson] was not necessarily expert in our motion picture business.”

The meeting, which began at half past twelve, continued through luncheon. A few minutes before four, when Rudin returned to his office, there was already a message awaiting him from Fox: the studio considered Marilyn Monroe in breach of contract and was prepared to proceed with all available legal remedies. In fact, they had so proceeded on Thursday afternoon, and thus the Friday meeting was an empty formality. Moments before the Los Angeles County Court closed that June 7, a suit was filed against Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc., and its employee Marilyn Monroe, in the amount of $500,000. Sheilah Graham, who got the news from Henry Weinstein on Thursday, published it in her column in the
Citizen-News
that night; otherwise it was unreported in the press until Friday and Saturday, June 8 and 9.

When the news broke widely over that weekend, Marilyn was, as Allan Snyder, Marjorie Plecher and others remembered, unutterably depressed, for she could not believe that Fox would go so far as to fire her. She had, after all, made twenty of her twenty-nine films there and longed to believe that at last she was valued and had friends.

The dismissal, said Peter Levathes in an official statement, “was made necessary because of Miss Monroe’s repeated wilful breaches of her contract. No justification was given for her failure to report for photography on many occasions. The studio has suffered losses through
these absences.” This was a simple case of muscular exertion by Levathes, acting at last on orders from Gould, Loeb and the rest of the board. Then, Levathes seemed to admit that Twentieth Century–Fox was itself a place fit only for madmen: “We’ve let the inmates run the asylum,” he added, which meant that actors were lunatics and executives little more than keepers of a madhouse—not an allusion likely to win staff support.

Weinstein, years later, offered his own explanation, and it was at least partly correct. The real reason Marilyn was fired, he said, was that “
Cleopatra
was way behind schedule and costing millions, and here we had this small picture behind schedule. It looked as if Skouras and his appointed head Levathes were losing control of their talent. And so she was a pawn—an interesting pawn, a sad pawn, it’s tragic, it’s funny—but a pawn. And that’s the real Hollywood story.” And, he might have added, it is often enough the story of Hollywood.

“They just didn’t understand,” said David Brown, a veteran of problems more difficult even than this,

and they decided to play hardball like businessmen: “We’ll sue you. . . . We’ll hold you to every last clause. . . . You’ll never work in this town again,” and so forth and so on. These executives were storm troopers delivering messages. It was all so unnecessary.

It was also very soon regretted by the men at Fox, who scrambled to correct a potentially disastrous oversight.

That the company had much earlier begun negotiations for Marilyn’s replacement on the picture was obvious on Saturday, when newspapers showed a photo of George Cukor, smiling too broadly with Lee Remick, who was signed on Saturday to replace Marilyn; in fact, Remick landed the role only after Kim Novak and Shirley MacLaine turned it down. And with this single announcement about Remick’s employment, the men at Fox revealed their delirious incompetence, for Dean Martin’s contract gave him the right to approve his leading lady. Loyal to Marilyn, Martin at once telephoned his agent Herman Citron and announced he would not proceed with
Something’s Got to Give
—news that touched and cheered Marilyn to the point of tears.

The roller coaster continued its crazy route. Early Monday morning,
a meeting room at Fox was crowded with Levathes, Cukor, Feldman, Martin, Citron and casting director Owen McLean. The purpose was to convince Martin not to force the studio to close down the picture; and Levathes begged him not to reject Lee Remick. But Martin replied that Levathes was not quite accurate: he was not rejecting Remick, he simply would not do the picture without Marilyn, for whose participation he had signed to do this silly movie in the first place. “Mr. Martin,” reported the transcript of the meeting,

said that he felt the chemistry between himself and Miss Monroe was right and that was why he took the picture and for no other reason, and that Miss Monroe meant a lot more at the box office than Miss Remick and that the point of the end of the story seemed to be that he would leave Miss Charisse for Miss Monroe—and that therefore this was not a role for Miss Remick, and that he wanted to do the picture only with Miss Monroe.

That was that. The studio was caught short by Dean Martin’s loyalty, his insistence on his contractual rights and his canny sense of the best casting.

At this point, the vigilant Milton Rudin stepped in. He called Feldman on Monday afternoon to ask why he had not been informed that a lawsuit had been filed, since he assumed conversations were continuing in good faith. He then rightly asked why Fox was giving out derogatory statements to the press about Marilyn, since he fully expected her to return to work very soon. Contrariwise, Rudin added, he had advised Arthur Jacobs and his staff to issue no defensive publicity at all on Marilyn’s behalf, nor to provide any reply to the many calls everyone was now receiving. The conversation concluded when Rudin asked Feldman who was to replace Martin if they went forward with Remick. Feldman replied that he did not know, whereupon “Mr. Rudin said maybe we ought to get President Kennedy.”

Bumbling along with their strong-arm tactics, Fox instructed their law firm (Musick, Peeler and Garrett) to continue to turn a skirmish into outright war. That same Monday, an amended lawsuit was filed, raising the ante against Marilyn from $500,000 to $750,000. This they had to do very hurriedly, before anyone learned that their suit from the previous week contained an error that could have led to an instant
dismissal of the case: the first brief claimed that “since April 16, the defendant failed, refused and neglected to render services” on
Something’s Got to Give
. Marilyn had not begun work on the picture until April 30, after which she willingly and satisfactorily rendered very much service indeed. This clause, omitted from the June 7 suit, was supplemented by an inclusion of the May 16 warning.

Nothing, Fox seemed to reason, would succeed like overkill, and so on June 19 they continued in their litigious actions, suing Dean Martin (whose company, Claude Productions, was producing the picture) for $3,339,000—the entire cost of the shelved production as they then computed it. This, like the suits against Marilyn, was eventually abandoned by Fox when an entire new platoon of executives strode through the studio gates. The shakeup began before the end of June, when the (forced) retirement of Spryos Skouras was announced.

Meantime, Peter Levathes quickly realized that in abandoning
Something’s Got to Give
and losing Monroe and Martin, the company was also losing the fantastic publicity from the photos of the swimming scene and the peekaboo nude shots—glorious color images that by this time had appeared worldwide. Where and when, it was being asked, would this film be released? And as for the matter of cost, Lee Remick came at no bargain price: her salary was $80,000, and more than fifteen days of footage would have to be scrapped. It would in the long run be easier to find the budget for, essentially, a new picture.

Thus (hooray for Hollywood), discussions for an eventual resumption of
Something’s Got to Give
were resumed just a week after Marilyn’s dismissal, as negotiations began for a complete script revision by Hal Kanter. At the same time, there were telephone calls and meetings to determine how Marilyn Monroe and Dean Martin could be brought back in October, after Martin had completed another scheduled picture. “When [Levathes] made his announcement that he was going to fire Marilyn,” said Nunnally Johnson, “I phoned him to suggest that if anyone was to be fired it should be the director. It was Marilyn who brought people into the theaters, not this director.” All this was being discussed throughout June and July, despite the objections of Milton Gould, who left the board of Fox on the departure of Skouras.