The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

“How Dare You Betray Me!”

Early Friday afternoon, February 10, Ralph Roberts, Marilyn’s good friend and masseur, picked her up from a back entrance of Payne Whitney and then secreted her away, with Dr. Kris in the backseat. In the car on the way back to Marilyn’s apartment, she let Dr. Kris have it. “How dare you betray me!” she shouted at her. “I trusted you. How could you do that to me? And you didn’t even visit me? What is wrong with you?” Roberts recalled, “Marilyn was screaming at the doctor as only she could. She was like a hurricane unleashed. I don’t think Dr. Kris had ever seen her like that, and she was frightened and very shaken by the violence of Marilyn’s response.

“We dropped Marilyn off, and I wound up driving the doctor home. There was a lot of traffic, so we inched down the West Side Highway overlooking the river, and Dr. Kris was trembling and kept repeating over and over, ‘I did a terrible thing, a terrible, terrible thing. Oh God, I didn’t mean to, but I did.’ ”

Some people question Roberts’s recollection of Marilyn’s release. As a close friend of Marilyn’s, he may have had a vested interest in portraying the psychiatrist as remorseful. He may have known that Marilyn would have wanted this short bit of her history minimized. If Dr. Kris admitted to doing something terrible, then perhaps Roberts could believe Marilyn had been of sound mind the entire time and shouldn’t have been hospitalized at all. In any case, this is how Roberts recollected it, and therefore many people have chosen to view the Payne Whitney chapter in Marilyn’s life as just a tremendous mix-up, or a misdiagnosis from an incompetent doctor.

“Once Joe got Marilyn situated in her apartment, he realized that perhaps Marilyn’s shrink may have had the right idea—just the wrong way of going about it,” said Stacy Edwards. “Marilyn wasn’t well. She was crying and disoriented. Without her pills for those few days, her entire system was out of whack. He also could not believe how thin she’d gotten. After calming her down, he convinced her to allow him to take her to another hospital, Columbia University– Presbyterian. She said she would go but he had to promise her that he would not leave town and would come to visit her every day she was in there. He agreed to that.”

At about five ’o clock that afternoon, Marilyn was admitted to the Neurological Institute of the Columbia University–Presbyterian Hospital, where she would remain for more than three weeks, until March 5. The first thing she did, once settled into her new hospital room, was to contact her attorney, Aaron Frosch. She demanded that he draft a document that would prevent any one person from ever having the power to commit her again without first consulting Joe DiMaggio.

When she was finally released from the second hospital, Marilyn was descended upon by such an excited mob of reporters and photographers that the scene became riotous. What was perhaps the most revealing element of such chaos, though, was how much she seemed to relish it. Except for a few occasions in the past, such as when she announced her divorce from Joe, Marilyn generally lit up whenever the media was present. She loved the public’s rapt attention, even if her private life was falling apart. Moreover, she knew what her job as a movie star entailed, which was to look and act like Marilyn Monroe, even when she didn’t much feel like her. No matter the present travail, she usually managed to play the part. In fact, by this time—1961—it had become second nature to her.

When she got home, though, Marilyn was in for a shock. First of all, she got a telephone call from Doc Goddard, Grace’s husband. She hadn’t heard from the man in many years. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she had talked to him. After exchanging a few pleasantries, he said that he was tired of reading in the press that it had been Grace’s idea that Marilyn marry James Dougherty. He was going to write a book, he said, tell the truth—which, he said, was that Marilyn had been the aggressor in that relationship, and in fact had asked Grace’s help in convincing Dougherty to marry her. He was tired, he said, of being blamed for that first marriage since it was due to his job transfer that the Goddards had to leave Norma Jeane behind. Marilyn truly didn’t know what his angle was, but she didn’t like it. She told him that if he wrote a book about her, she would sue him. She also told him that Grace would be very disappointed to hear that he was planning such a venture. The conversation ended in an unpleasant way with Marilyn hanging up on him.