The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Is Committed

I opened my living room window as wide as I could and I leaned out. I knew that I had to make up my mind inside the room. If I climbed out onto the ledge, someone below would be certain to recognize me and there’d be a big spectacle. I squeezed my eyes shut at the open window, clenched my fists. I remembered reading somewhere that people who fall from heights lose consciousness before they hit the ground. Then when I looked down, I saw a woman walking along the sidewalk near the building awning. She was wearing a brown dress and… I knew her.”

Those were Marilyn Monroe’s words to her friend Ralph Roberts, when she described to him her decision to commit suicide in February 1961. It was a startling admission. Marilyn told Roberts that she had been so depressed about any part she might have played in the death of Clark Gable that she had considered leaping from her thirteenth-floor apartment window. Luckily, she changed her mind at the last moment.

After her divorce from Arthur Miller, Marilyn began once again to sink into the deepest of depressions, some of which were so bottomless it seemed to those who knew and loved her that there was simply no reaching her. Clearly she wasn’t eating much, and by the beginning of 1961 she looked gaunt and sickly. She wasn’t even washing her hair, once so vibrant and luxurious but now dull and lifeless. It was as if she no longer cared about anything. With the exception of her daily visits to her psychiatrist Dr. Kris’s office, she secluded herself in her New York apartment, refusing most guests and expressing no interest in socializing. Socializing had become an ordeal for her especially as she got older. Monroe historian Charles Casillo explains it best this way: “There was no place for lines in her face with that kind of persona. Let’s face it, we all want to look nice when we go to a party, but imagine every person you meet inspecting every inch of you, judging you on your appearance only? Does she have freckles? Is she tired? Is she thin? Is she really that beautiful? Marilyn had to face that kind of scrutiny every day, with every person who faced her. She knew what her major attraction was. She even admitted that at times she was invited to a party ‘to dress up the dinner table.’ Would the invitations keep coming if the dessert wasn’t so appetizing?” ^*

Those who managed to reach her by telephone couldn’t help but note the abject despondence in her voice. She had taken such a sharp turn for the worse, there was genuine concern about leaving her alone, yet she refused to allow anyone to stay with her. Though Dr. Kris had been trying to find a proper pharmaceutical strategy for managing not only Marilyn’s depression but also her increasing anxiety, nothing seemed to work. She had been taking so many drugs for such a long time, it had become difficult to find one that would have a true impact on her condition.

During a session, Marilyn relayed to Dr. Kris the same chilling story she told Ralph Roberts about her near suicidal leap. Obviously, it piqued the doctor’s concern. After all, sitting before Dr. Kris was an important patient she had been trusting to follow her orders when it came to proper drug dosage and frequency. Kris was well aware that if Marilyn had genuine interest in killing herself, she could easily do so with the pills already in her possession. She wouldn’t have to leap out of a window to get the job done. There was no question about it—the doctor needed to take action.

Dr. Kris suggested to Marilyn that she check into a private ward at New York Hospital for some rest and relaxation under medical supervision. Reluctantly, Marilyn agreed. Therefore, on Sunday, February 5, Dr. Kris drove her to Cornell University–New York Hospital. Marilyn checked in using the pseudonym of “Faye Miller,” in order to keep her presence there unknown. However, when it came time to take her to her room, she was mysteriously escorted to another clinic on the expansive premises.

From the moment Marilyn entered this strange new wing, it was obvious to her that there was something very different about it. She had been to hospitals over the years, and none of them were quite like this one. For one thing, the orderlies escorting her seemed distant and forceful. Her journey deeper into the ward involved passage through numerous steel doors, most of which required a key from both sides. Suddenly, it all became clear, and fear swept through her at the realization: Those doors were meant to keep people in, not keep people out.

Marilyn realized that Dr. Kris’s description of what awaited her had been misleading: “a place to relax and rest,” she had said in a soothing voice. Yet this place, these people, this environment—all of it felt uncomfortably familiar to Marilyn. In fact, this was exactly like the sanitariums where her mother had spent so many years of her life. Indeed, she was in the Payne Whitney Clinic, the psychiatric division of the hospital.

If Dr. Kris had had any notion that Marilyn would relax in this place, she had been sorely mistaken. In fact, for starters, Marilyn threw an emotional tantrum, screaming to be let go, crying that she was frightened and insisting that it was all a big mistake—which, of course, only served to make her appear even more disturbed. “What are you doing to me?” she hollered out as she was dragged down a long hallway. “Where are we going?” She shrieked in horror as she was forcibly thrown into a sparse padded room with barred windows and, in the corner, another smaller room with a sign on it that said simply “Toilet.” A steel door closed with a terrible sound, and was locked. She would later recall the cell as being “for very disturbed [her emphasis] depressed patients, except I felt I was in some kind of prison for a crime I hadn’t committed… the violence and markings still remained on the walls from former patients.”