Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (90 page)

Meanwhile, Marilyn was far from idle, for there were discussions about other films, too. In addition, the brouhaha with Fox and subsequent news of renewed negotiations led every magazine in America to
ask for a photo story and interview. For those she agreed to accommodate, her good friend Allan Snyder was as usual asked to do her makeup. About the same time, Truman Capote (on familiar terms with the messy business of serious drug addiction) was surprised to find that “she had never looked better . . . and there was a new maturity about her eyes. She wasn’t so giggly anymore.” As Marilyn herself said at this time, “There’s a future, and I can’t wait to get to it.”

By June 23, a week after her second visit to Gurdin, her bruises had vanished, and Marilyn met photographer Bert Stern, on assignment from
Vogue
, for the first of five photo sessions between that day and July 12; she also spent three days (June 29 through July 1) on and around Santa Monica beach with photographer George Barris for a
Cosmopolitan
photoessay. Believing that she was at her best posing rather than acting, and proud of her lithe and youthful figure, she was as ever the most patient and cooperative model, at ease with her lover the still camera, for which she had to remember no dialogue. For these long sessions, Marilyn wore mink for glamour shots, cavorted in bikinis and, draped in diaphanous veils and beneath a white sheet, posed seminude.

“She was very natural, without the affectation of a star complex,” according to Stern. “There was a rare quality that I haven’t seen before or since—as if there were no other person in the world while you were there. Marilyn devoted herself single-mindedly to the task and was ornery or impatient only when she was fed up with the glamour shots, the fashion shots
Vogue
wanted. She did not seem depressed or anxious about anything: she sipped her Dom Perignon and was delighted to be doing what she most enjoyed.”

“How’s this for thirty-six?” she asked Stern, holding a sheer scarf over her naked breasts. George Masters, who was her hairstylist for the Stern sittings, recalled that “she said she never felt better, and she looked utterly fantastic, like something shining and ethereal. This was a lady who talked a lot that week about the future. She had no time for brooding over the past, even the recent past.”

Regarding her age and her prospects, Marilyn was frank and articulate when speaking to a reporter: “I’m thirty-six years old,” she said,

I don’t mind the age. I like the view from here. The future is here for me, and I have to make the most of it—as every woman must. So when you hear all this talk of how tardy I am, of how often it seems that I make people wait, remember—I’m waiting too. I’ve been waiting all my life.

She continued to speak with quiet sincerity, but her tone changed. For a moment it was as if Cherie had sprung from some lost scene of
Bus Stop
and was alive again in Marilyn:

You don’t know what it’s like to have all that I have and not be loved and know happiness. All I ever wanted out of life is to be nice to people and have them be nice to me. It’s a fair exchange. And I’m a woman. I want to be loved by a man, from his heart, as I would love him from mine. I’ve tried, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The reporter naturally followed up with questions about her marriages, but Marilyn was as always the soul of discretion. Joe was “Mr. DiMaggio,” and Arthur “Mr. Miller,” and she would not be led to a discussion of her private life. In the fifteen years he knew her, said Allan Snyder, he never heard an unkind or vindictive word about an ex-husband or a former lover—not even about those professionals who treated her unfairly. “To think of Marilyn Monroe calling a press conference to air her grievances against anyone is laughably out of character. Why, she wouldn’t even say a single bad word to a friend or a reporter!” Nor did she extend a problematic relationship with an individual to include that person’s family: on July 19, showing her gratitude for their concern during Greenson’s absence, Marilyn invited Dan and Joan (without their parents, it should be noted) to Fifth Helena for a casual supper celebrating Joan’s birthday.

Marilyn recognized that something was askew in her relationship with Greenson, for she confided to friends that she felt it was unhealthy for her to depend on someone whose attitude and actions were unpredictable (she provided no details) and with whom she seemed to be making no progress. But in the paradoxical way of many patients in therapy, she continued to consult him daily during July. Greenson had, after all, successfully convinced Marilyn of her need of him. And in this regard, he enlisted Hyman Engelberg as accomplice.

According to invoices later submitted, Engelberg visited Marilyn at home every day but six during July: except for the fourth, the sixth
through the ninth and the sixteenth, she received injections—liver and vitamin shots, she said. But these transformed her mood and energy with alarming rapidity. “She asked to postpone our talk,” recalled Richard Meryman, who arrived late one afternoon for the second of a series of interviews for
Life
. “She was tired out, she said,” after meetings at Fox. But then they were interrupted by the arrival of Engelberg: Marilyn bounded out to the kitchen, received a shot and returned to Meryman—suddenly eager to talk on and on, which she did until midnight and after. That evening (unlike the other meetings) her speech was rapid and disjointed—hardly the effect of “liver and vitamin shots.”

These were Engelberg’s so-called youth shots. When Pat Newcomb learned of them, she told Marilyn to remember she was only thirty-six, “but she implied that whatever she was receiving was going to keep her young. Of course it was hard to argue with her, because she looked so great—better than I’d ever seen her in films.” But this was cause for alarm, for Engelberg tracked down Marilyn wherever she was to provide the injections: Pat never forgot the day he found the two women at a Brentwood restaurant, where “he took her back to some private place to give her the shot.” In his way, Engelberg was clearly as proprietary with Marilyn as Greenson; his first wife recalled him almost dancing with schoolboyish glee, showing off to his friends and announcing as he shook a set of keys, “I have access to Marilyn Monroe’s apartment,” and then, “I have the keys to Marilyn’s house! When therapy or the usual dose of Nembutal failed to put Marilyn to sleep, Greenson routinely telephoned Engelberg, who in 1961 dashed down from his house on St. Ives Drive to Doheny, and in 1962 made the longer trip to Fifth Helena. Greenson was quite open about the arrangement: as he said, he had an internist provide the injections “so that I had nothing to do with the actual handling of medication.”

The issue of her doctors and her work may have been among the items on her agenda when Marilyn placed a total of eight telephone calls that summer to the office of her new friend, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. According to Pat Newcomb and Edwin Guthman, their conversations were simply social, friendly calls, brief and uncomplicated, for they were not encouraged by the busy Mr. Kennedy. But he had assured her during their last meeting in June that he was indeed interested in her career and concerned for her health during and after the
trials of
Something’s Got to Give
. In light of their several conversations about matters political and social at two previous dinners, Kennedy may not have anticipated that Marilyn, from afar, would depend on his compassion and encouragement in her private life, too. According to Edwin Guthman, however, there was never time in Kennedy’s office for him to devote to lengthy social calls, and Marilyn was gently but firmly discouraged from prolonging their conversations.

In support of this, the telephone records document very brief calls. On Monday, June 25, Marilyn called Kennedy’s office to confirm his presence at the Lawfords’ on Wednesday evening and to invite him and the Lawfords to visit her home for a drink before dinner; she spoke only with his secretary, Angie Novello, for one minute. On Monday, July 2, she placed two calls, again to Novello and for the same length of time. The remainder of the calls were placed during the last two weeks of July, only one of them lasting more than one minute: on the thirtieth, Marilyn called Kennedy to say that she was sorry to have missed his Los Angeles speech the previous weekend; she had gone to Lake Tahoe.
²
These calls and four meetings comprise the entire relationship between the two.

During July, Marilyn relied on three sources of encouragement: friends like Ralph Roberts and Allan Snyder (and, by phone, Norman Rosten in Brooklyn); the admiration and encouragement of a few journalists and photographers; and the return to her life of Joe DiMaggio.

“We often stopped in at her house in the evening for a drink in June and July,” according to Allan Snyder and Marjorie Pelcher. “She was in very good spirits, showing us her newest addition to the house—some tiles, a carpet and a new chair.”

Since his return from Europe, Joe and Marilyn had frequently exchanged telephone calls, and he visited her once in June (on the twentieth) and twice in July (on the eighth and twenty-first); as all her friends knew, Joe’s presence and concern were her great strength, and
ever since he rescued her from Payne Whitney they had maintained constant contact. Now, they shared simple suppers on the floor of her living room, since the shipment of Mexican furniture was delayed; they rented bicycles at the Hans Ohrt Bicycle Shop in Brentwood and freewheeled along San Vicente Boulevard toward the ocean; and they shopped together.

Joe and Marilyn seemed much like the happy couple of ten years ago—but they were more serene, both of them respectful of their differences, he less alarmed by her public persona, yet somehow touched by her essential sweetness and simplicity, and perhaps impressed with her courage and core of strength. He agreed with her concern about the ongoing therapy with Greenson, and promised to support whatever decision she made.

A decade had made a difference. Joe sat quietly, nodding appreciatively as she purchased an entire new wardrobe in Beverly Hills, at Saks Fifth Avenue and Jax: cashmere sweaters; blouses; two evening dresses; unfussy, spike-heeled shoes; a half-dozen pairs of pants in various pastel colors. The morning of July 21, he brought her home from Cedars of Lebanon after yet another procedure to alleviate her chronic endometriosis.
³
As subsequent events revealed, his presence then must have marked a major step forward in the reunion of Joe with Marilyn, for the following week he informed Monette that he was resigning his position and would no longer be working for the company after the end of July.

As for the interviews, it is no surprise that Marilyn was most articulate, secure and frank in Engelberg’s absence. On the fourth, fifth, seventh and ninth of July, for example, she gave what was her last interview, for
Life
magazine, a series of conversations conducted by Richard Meryman at Fifth Helena. Only during the second meeting, after Engelberg’s visit and treatment, were her remarks unusable; the final draft was drawn from the other three, during which Marilyn was at her best:

• Regarding some unflattering remarks in the gossip columns: “I really resent the way the press has been saying I’m depressed and in a slump, as if I’m finished. Nothing’s going to sink me, although it might be kind of a relief to be finished with movie-making. That kind of work is like a hundred-yard dash and then you’re at the finish line, and you sigh and say you’ve made it. But you never have. There’s another scene and another film, and you have to start all over again.”

• Leading Meryman on a tour of her home, she pointed out her plans for a small guest suite, “a place for any friends of mine who are in some kind of trouble. Maybe they’ll want to live here where they won’t be bothered till things are okay for them.”

• On fame: “What goes with it can be a burden. Real beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived. Glamour can be manufactured. Fame is certainly only a cause for temporary and partial happiness—not for a daily diet, it’s not what fulfills you. It warms you a bit, but the warming is only temporary. When you’re famous every weakness is exaggerated. Fame will go by and—so long, fame, I’ve had you! I’ve always known it was fickle. It was something I
experienced
, but it’s not where I live.”

• Replying to Meryman’s question as to how she “cranked herself up” to do a scene: “I don’t crank anything—I’m not a Model T. Excuse me, but I think that’s kind of disrespectful to refer to it that way. I’m trying to work at an art form, not in a manufacturing establishment.”

• On her chronic tardiness: “Successful, happy and on time—those are all the glib American clichés. I don’t want to be late, but I usually am, much to my regret. Often, I’m late because I’m preparing a scene, maybe preparing too much sometimes. But I’ve always felt that even in the slightest scene the people ought to get their money’s worth. And this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best. When they go to see me and look up at the screen, they don’t know I was late. And by that time, the studio has forgotten all about it and is making money. Oh, well.”

• On her recent troubles at Fox: “Executives can get colds and stay home and phone in—but the actor? How dare you get a cold or a virus! I wish
they
had to act a comedy with a temperature and a virus infection! I’m there to give a performance, not to be disciplined by a studio. This isn’t supposed to be a military school, after all.”

• On being a sex symbol: “A sex symbol becomes a thing, and I just hate to be a thing. You’re always running into people’s unconscious. It’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies, but you also like to be accepted for your own sake. I don’t look on myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have, including one corporation in particular which shall be nameless. If I’m sounding ‘picked on,’ I think I have been.”

• On her interest in social and humanitarian causes: “What the world needs now is a greater feeling of kinship. We are all brothers, after all—and that includes movie stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs—everyone. That’s what I’m working on, working to understand.”