Goodbye Norma Jean

Its sixty years since Marilyn Monroe’s death. Aubrey Malone plots the last extravagant, turbulent years of a Hollywood legend who continues to fascinate

the final yearsMarilyn:

Marilyn Monroe will be sixty years dead this August. What more can be said about her other than the fact that she continues to intrigue us even from the grave?

Her last completed film was The Misfits. The screenplay was written by her husband, Arthur Miller, but by the time it was in the can their marriage was on the rocks. She tortured him with cruelty on the set.

Who was to blame? Both of them and neither. Monroe expected too much from him. She knew she was no angel and confessed as much. ‘A lot of people like to think of me as innocent,’ she said, ‘so that’s the way I behave to them but if they saw the real me they’d hate me.’

Miller checked in to the Chelsea Hotel in New York. She went back to their 57th Street apartment. She rang him one night. ‘Are you coming home?’ she asked. It was as if they were still a couple. She was needy for him but he refused to see her. The past was wiped out, he said, ‘like a colour photo of violence that had been left too long in the sun.’ He couldn’t share her amnesia. Returning to the old life would have been ‘like trying to die backwards.’

He’d stayed with her until she began to threaten his hold on sanity. She was like a drowning woman who was trying to bring him down with her. The intensity with which she’d loved him at the beginning had turned inside out. Miller now started dating Inge Morath, a photographer on The Misfits. Monroe wasn’t pleased at her being in his life. She didn’t appreciate the speed with which the relationship progressed. Had his marriage meant that little that he was able to move on to another woman so quickly? Morath made her feel like ‘a negated sex symbol.’

She started to see Joe DiMaggio again. She’d been married to him once. They were still friends but that was all. Billy Wilder said her marriage to DiMaggio failed when he realised he’d married Marilyn Monroe, that the Miller one failed when he

Marilyn with her co star in The Misfits, Clarke Cable. Photograph courtesy of Steve Cox

Marilyn on the set of The Misfits with director John Huston, left, and her husband at the time playwright Arthur Miller, who wrote the screenplay. Photograph courtesy of Steve Cox In 1954 Marilyn married baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. He wasn’t lively enough for her and her and they fought constantly.

realised he hadn’t. It’s an interesting point. One man wanted the woman, the other the icon.

DiMaggio became an anchor that she tethered herself to. The things that had once bothered her about him, like his stay-athome personality, suddenly became desirable to her. Anything had to be better than Miller’s coldness.

Her depression deepened. When friends phoned her she often didn’t pick up. Her voice was frequently slurred when she did. She talked a lot about suicide. When her publicist Pat Newcomb took her for a ride on the Staten Island ferry one day, she stared at the water as if she was thinking of jumping into it.

Sitting around her apartment in a state of depression, she drank Bloody Marys. She worried about her face and figure and played Frank Sinatra records. There were times she thought she’d like to have married him. Now they were just friends too. Was this her lot, to end up being friends with former lovers? Or former husbands? She was losing weight. She started to think there might be something wrong with her. Deciding to have herself checked out, she went to the Payne-Whitney clinic in February 1961. She signed herself in under the name Faye Miller, a not very subtle pseudonym. Maybe it didn’t matter. She was one of the most recognizable people in the country. She wasn’t prepared for the curiosity of the staff. Maybe she should have expected this after a lifetime of being preyed on by the paparazzi.

She thought she was going to an ordinary hospital but it turned out to be a psychiatric one. It was nicknamed ‘The rich people’s crazy house.’ Her experience there was Kafkaesque. As soon as she was admitted, her handbag and personal effects were taken from her. She then spent 48 hours in a padded cell. The experience traumatised her.

According to a member of staff she took off all her clothes at one stage and stood naked at a window. Another time she threw a chair through a glass door. Her attitude was, ‘If you’re going to treat me like a nut, I’ll act like one.’ The incident caused her to be threatened with a straitjacket. Such prospect brought back a terror of insanity that she’d had all her life. Her grandmother was psychologically unhinged. So was her mother. She believed she had a streak of that in her too.

In the following weeks she became more dependent on medication. At one stage her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, got his daughter to deliver Nembutal to her home. By now he’d become starstruck by her. He wanted a relationship with her that was beyond medicine. She became like a daughter to him.

Greenson had her for consultations every other day. Some of them lasted up to five hours. Many were held in his home. She ate with his family and sometimes stayed overnight. She’d always had a wish to belong to a ‘real’ family because of her orphaned past. He tapped into that need.

She started seeing Frank Sinatra again in the summer. She became like a mascot of Sinatra’s Rat Pack, an honorary member he could drink and have fun with without thinking of any lasting commitment. He enjoyed her company but he didn’t consider her marriage material.

Marilyn didn’t make any films in 1961. She had a lot of medical problems that year. In May she underwent a gynecological operation in Los Angeles. Doctors discovered her fallopian tubes were blocked following poor surgery following an abortion in the past. There were said to have been fourteen of these in all.

She left New York for Hollywood in August. In October she started an affair with Robert Kennedy after meeting him at Peter Lawford’s beach house. She attended a dinner there the following month at which John F. Kennedy was present. She slept with him too.

She was drawn to the Kennedys like a moth to a flame but there was never going to be anything lasting for her with either of them. Even if they weren’t married, the combination of actress and politician didn’t look good on paper. Her affiliation with

Early modelling days wearing a potato sack Typical studio glamour pose

Sinatra made such a combination toxic in Robert’s case. As Attorney General he was getting tough on crime. Sinatra’s Mob connections made him anathema to him. Marilyn said she felt like a piece of meat being tossed between the two brothers.

1962 began badly for her. On the first day of the year, she learned of the death of her lawyer friend Jerry Giesler. He’d handled her divorce from DiMaggio. She then heard that Inge Morath was pregnant, that Miller planned to marry her. The news had a devastating effect on her. She sank into a gloom. It was an insult to her to see him moving on with his life as if she’d never existed.

Her depression was compounded by the fact that Frank Sinatra announced his engagement to Juliet Prowse in the second week of January. She hadn’t seen this coming.

News on the career front was bad too. Her fan mail dipped from 8000 letters a day to just 50 a week. Newspapers reported that her fame might be on the skids. A film poll listing the top stars of the day didn’t even have her among the top 25. Greenson saw her going downhill. He suggested she buy a house. His thinking was that it might act as a substitute to her for not having a husband, or child.

She didn’t think she was beautiful anymore. If her looks went, she thought, what was left? She said to her cook, ‘Nobody’s ever gonna marry me now. I can’t have kids. I’ve been divorced three times. Who would want me?’

The house was situated on Helena Drive, a cul-de-sac off Sunset Boulevard. The fact that it was on a dead end seemed symbolic. A motto above the door said Cursum Perficio. Translated into English that meant, ‘I’ve finished my race.’ Never was a residence more aptly named. She described it as a ‘fortress where I can feel safe from the world.’

She bought it for $77,500, paying half in cash and taking out a mortgage for the remainder. She should have been well off financially at this stage because of her earnings from Some Like It Hot and The Misfits but high earnings can sometimes be as much of a curse as a blessing - at least as far as the IRS is concerned. She was now in the 90 per cent tax bracket.

A woman called Eunice Murray moved in with her. She was a housekeeper provided by Greenson. To Marilyn she took on the role of friend, at least at first. In time Murray became more a plant of Greenson’s than a confidante. Marilyn’s conversations were reported back to him for dissection.

She signed for another film, Something’s Got to Give, a title that proved to be prophetic. She was absent more often than not and was eventually fired from the film. That tipped her over the edge. It had never happened to her before despite all her tantrums.

Who could pull her out of this fix? Nobody, it seemed. Maybe she was beyond help. ‘Reality is coming too close,’ she said. Pills became her best friends now. On the last night of her life, the most famous actress in the world had nobody to talk to. She phoned a number of people but none of them took her calls. She overdosed on Nembutal on August 4, 1962. There had been many suicide attempts before where her stomach was pumped. This time her luck ran out. She died naked with the phone in her hand. Miller wasn’t sure if she meant to kill herself or not. He didn’t go to her funeral. What would have been the point? ‘She won’t be there.’

Her reputation continued to rise after her death. Like James Dean seven years before, she became almost beatified for many. She was seen as a fawn in the jungle of film-making, a candle in the wind of bureaucracy. When the dust settled, some perspective was achieved. She was beautiful but flawed, adorable but of limited talent, heavenly on screen but impossible to live with. Was it fame or pills that killed her? One, of course, led to the other.

Images from Something’s Got To Give where she swam naked in a swimming pool were sold to Hugh Hefner for $25,000. Global sales brought the overall price to $150,000. The man who photographed her for Playboy in 1949 got $200. Monroe made just $50 for that centerfold.

Many authors tried to divine the enigma of Marilyn in successive decades. Never one to miss an opportunity to do her down, Billy Wilder quipped, ‘There have been more books on Marilyn Monroe than on World War II – and there’s a great similarity between them.’

Norman Mailer was more profound. ‘Marilyn was every man’s love affair with America,’ he wrote, ‘She was blonde and beautiful and she had a sweet little rinkydink of a voice and all the cleanliness of the American backyards. The sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin.’

People love conspiracy theories and there were many of these in the years following. She was said to have been murdered by the Mafia, the CIA, the Kennedys, even Greenson. Paper doesn’t refuse ink. Some of these theories are still being pedaled today in various iterations to sell magazines.

DiMaggio sent six red roses to her crypt three times a week until he died. She once said the camera was her only true lover. If that was true, he ran it a close second.

executive chairs.’ Everyone had a theory on why she died but Henry Hathaway’s was the simplest and truest. He contended, ‘You don’t have to hold an inquest to find out who killed Marilyn. It was those bastards in the big

Aubrey Malone's book The Misfits - The Film that Ended a Marriage will be published later this year by Bear Manor Media.

Marilyn – the backstory

Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jean Mortenson in Los Angeles in 1926. She was the daughter of a film cutter, Gladys Monroe Mortenson, and a father she never knew. She spent most of her youth in foster homes after her mother developed psychological problems and wasn’t able to look after her.

Her desire to be an actress came from her childhood suffering. ‘I didn’t like the world around me,’ she sighed, ‘because it was kind of grim.’

She married a neighbour, James Dougherty, when she was just 20. It was mainly a marriage of convenience, an attempt to gain some independence away from her institutional roots. She divorced him four years later. By now she’d become a successful model. She appeared on an incredible number of magazine covers, often without much clothes on her. ‘Marilyn made it to the top, ‘a commentator wrote, ‘because her dresses didn’t.’ When she dyed her mousey brown hair a platinum blonde (to match her idol Jean Harlow) the transition from Norma Jean to Marilyn was complete. She appeared in a number of minor roles with Twentieth Century Fox before coming to prominence in a small but important part in the 1950 Bette Davis vehicle All About Eve.

It was followed by Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, all of them made in 1953, her breakthrough year. In 1954 she married baseball legend Joe DiMaggio but – like Dougherty - he wasn’t lively enough for her. They fought constantly. He was upset about the fact that she seemed to throw herself at men. When she posed above an air vent during the filming of Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch and her dress billowed above her thighs, it was the last straw for him.

She was next smitten by the playwright Arthur Miller. They married in 1956. He said he would do his best to get her away from the ‘bubblehead’ roles she was mainly associated with but he still encouraged her to appear in another one of them, the film that became her best known of all, Some Like It Hot. Tony Curtis impregnated her on the set despite saying that kissing her was like kissing Hitler. The baby, like so many others she carried inside her over the years, was aborted.

By 1959 the marriage to Miller had also crumbled. Their tensions were played out in full view of the cast and crew of The Misfits in 1961. He wrote the screenplay to give her, at last, an ‘adult’ role, but she felt he exploited their relationship to write it. Her last year was spent in a miasma of pills and booze as she tried to come to terms with the fading of the sex symbol tag she once reviled. By 1962 she became again the lost soul of her childhood years, fighting loneliness and depression in the Hollywood jungle. When she died in the August of that year she was broken both in body and mind.

She appeared in a number of minor roles with Twentieth Century Fox before coming to prominence in a small but important part in the 1950 Bette Davis vehicle All About Eve. Here she is seen with the film’s co-star George Sanders The iconic photograph of Marilyn posing above an air vent during the filming of Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch.