The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn’s Drugs of Choice

By late August of 1961, Marilyn Monroe was back in Los Angeles permanently and living in her apartment on Doheny and Cynthia in West Hollywood. There was also word that she would be making a new film for Fox called Something’s Got to Give. She wasn’t thrilled with the script, felt it needed a lot of work, and wasn’t even sure it could ever result in a decent movie. Still, she was contractually obligated to do one more film for Fox, and this would have to be it.

In September, Marilyn joined Frank Sinatra in entertaining guests on his yacht for a four-day cruise to Catalina Island. “They were definitely a couple,” said one of the partygoers. “She was acting as if she was the hostess, not a guest. She seemed in good spirits, but definitely not quite right. I had heard that there’d been some trouble getting her there. Everyone knew she was not well, that she was under the care of doctors.”

At this time, Marilyn’s primary physician working with Dr. Greenson was Dr. Hyman Engelberg. However, Marilyn had become so adept at the art of “doctor shopping” that the two doctors were unable to keep track of the medications in her system. When she would demand confidentiality from another doctor, she would always get it because of her celebrity. She would then stock up on as much medication as she could from him before that doctor would refuse her any more. Then she would simply “shop” for a different doctor. Greenson and Engelberg did attempt to control Marilyn’s doctor-shopping habit, though perhaps not in the best possible way. “The idea was that she was never to be said no to when she wanted a prescription,” said Hildy Greenson, Dr. Ralph Greenson’s wife, “because the only thing that would happen was she would procure medication elsewhere and not inform her primary physicians about it. So whenever she asked for a drug she would usually get it.” That “idea” apparently did not work. The list of drugs she was taking by the end of 1961 was staggering.

After Greenson’s and Wexler’s diagnosis of Marilyn Monroe as suffering from BPS, she began taking the barbiturate Thorazine. At the time, Thorazine was a new drug, developed in the 1950s to treat the disease. When she would take it, however, she would gain weight, and therefore she didn’t like it. As soon as she was off the medication, she would lose weight quickly. However, she would also lose her grip. Historically, whenever she looked her best—as in her last film, Something’s Got to Give—it was because she was not on Thorazine. Certainly the problems she would later have on the set of that movie suggested that she was off her meds.

Marilyn was also taking the narcotic analgesic Demerol as well as the barbiturates phenobarbital HMC and Amytal, along with large quantities of Nembutal. Of course, she had been taking Nembutal to sleep for many years, and truly it had become an addiction. Dr. Engelberg insists that the most he and Dr. Greenson gave her was twenty-four Nembutal at a time. However, Marilyn went through the drug like candy, so she must have been getting it elsewhere.

Marilyn was also taking Seconal, and no one knew where she got that drug from either. Moreover, she was taking chloral hydrate to sleep, and Dr. Engelberg emphatically states that he never prescribed it to her, nor did Dr. Greenson. In fact, Engelberg would say that he was amazed at the number of drugs found in her system when she died—including the aforementioned chloral hydrate, which he now presumes she bought when she was in Mexico just before her death. There were fifteen bottles of pills on Marilyn’s night table when she died.

Though Engelberg consulted Greenson on all of the sleep medications he prescribed to Marilyn, he didn’t on other drugs. If she got an infection, for instance, and needed an antibiotic, Engelberg would not pass it by Greenson for approval. Also, Marilyn very often received injections of vitamins to boost her resistance to colds and sinus infections—a recurring problem for her. Often she would receive such injections a few times a week. By the end of 1961, though, Marilyn had developed the alarming habit of giving herself injections. Many people witnessed that she had syringes with her and bottles that had been premixed—by whom, no one knows. A source who was very close to the actress recalls that the concoction was of phenobarbital, Nembutal, and Seconal. “Marilyn referred to it as ‘a vitamin shot,’ ” said the source. “I think I know who gave her this combination of drugs, but I’d rather not say because I am not one hundred percent certain. I can tell you that after she would give herself this injection, she would be gone—no longer able to function.”

Indeed, Jeanne Martin recalled that prior to their leaving Frank’s home for the cruise that August 1961, Frank asked her to help get Marilyn dressed. She was too disoriented from all of the medication she was taking to do so herself. “I had to pick out each item of clothing and practically dress her,” Jeanne recalled. “I kept asking her, ‘Marilyn, are you all right? Because you don’t look good to me.’ She would just sort of look at me with her eyes half-closed and say, ‘Oh, I am just fine. I couldn’t be better.’ I was worried. I remember thinking, who is giving her all of these drugs? What kind of doctor would keep her in this kind of state? She was really, shall we say, glazed.”

During the weekend, Marilyn drank plenty of champagne every night, as always. The more she drank, the more disoriented and even boisterous she became. “It was such a sad sight,” Jeanne Martin recalled. “I didn’t take my eyes off her for a second because I was afraid she would slip and fall. You can’t know how difficult this was unless you knew Marilyn and what a lovely woman she was, how nice she was to everyone. You wanted her to be all right, but on this day during this party, it struck me that she was not all right. Not at all.”

Gloria Romanoff, also a guest for the weekend, recalled, “She was very unwell that weekend. Sleeping pills were her downfall, I’m afraid. The poor girl simply couldn’t even take a nap without them, she was so addicted. She didn’t even need water or anything to wash them down. She could just take a handful of pills and swallow them, dry. Then, of course, all of the alcohol just made things worse.”

As the afternoon wore on, Frank became frustrated and embarrassed by Marilyn’s behavior. One of his former associates recalled, “To tell you the truth, Frank couldn’t wait to get her off that boat. She was embarrassing him. He told me, ‘I swear to Christ, I am ready to throw her right off this goddamn boat.’ Instead, he called one of his assistants at the end of the trip, when they were ashore, and had her taken back to his place. He told me later that when he got home, she was sound asleep on the couch. He picked her up, he said, and moved her to the bedroom. He undressed her and put her under the covers where she slept soundly through the night. He was worried about her.”

When that same associate asked Frank Sinatra if he was going to stop seeing Marilyn Monroe, he said, “By now I would have cut any other dame loose. But this one—I just can’t do it.” ^*

What’s most interesting—and telling—about this time is that despite the unhappiness she felt, the photos Marilyn took during this period for publicity purposes, especially those by Douglas Kirkland, are perhaps the best of her career. Kirkland, who shot her in November 1961, described her as “amazingly pleasant and playful, like a sister, and not at all intimidating as I had imagined her to be. She sat beside me, laughed easily and made small talk, putting me at ease. I was young and did not know how to ask her to pose for the sexy images I hoped to get, but she simplified it all by suggesting, ‘I should get into bed with nothing on but white silk.’ We discussed the details and Marilyn said she wanted Frank Sinatra music and chilled Dom Perignon.” She never looked lovelier than she does in Kirkland’s photographs. (It should be stated, though, that based on how Kirkland later described the session, with Marilyn saying, “I think I should be alone with this boy,” and then asking everyone else to leave—and then even inviting him into bed with her—it doesn’t sound like a very platonic situation. However, he insists that nothing happened between them—except for the amazing photos that resulted from the session.)

How Marilyn was able to turn on Marilyn Monroe when she needed to for professional purposes at the same time that she was so terribly troubled remained a true mystery to her friends and associates. It was as if she only found her true bliss in front of the camera as the perfect vision of herself. Everything else—her real life, the one she led in private—paled in comparison. The truth, of course, is that one quick way for her to feel like Marilyn Monroe was to stop taking her Thorazine, as she had during this period. In her mind, as long as she was slim and sexy… she was Marilyn Monroe. In just a few months, when asked by reporter Alan Levy if she was happy, her response would be, “Let’s put it this way. I’m slim. And I can always get very gay. It depends on the occasion or the company.”

The Douglas Kirkland sessions provide an excellent opportunity to contrast experiences with Marilyn. Her publicist Michael Selsman tells the story of what happened when he and his wife, the actress Carol Lynley, were to meet Kirkland at Monroe’s Doheney apartment to go over the proofs of the session. “Carol was nine months pregnant, due any moment,” he says. “I couldn’t and didn’t want to leave her at home by herself, so I took her along to Monroe’s apartment,” he recalls. “I knocked on her door, as Carol stood shivering beside me. MM opened the door and looked at Carol, whom she knew, since they had adjacent dressing rooms at the studio, and said, ‘You come in,’ motioning to me, ‘but she can wait in your car.’ This was unexpected and I was momentarily stunned. Carol and I exchanged glances, and I assured her I’d be out in fifteen minutes.”

At some point, the two were joined by Douglas Kirkland. Selsman continues, “Every other actor I worked with would use a red grease pencil to put an X through the negatives they didn’t like, but not Marilyn on that day. She took a scissors and cut out every one she did not like, then cut those into tiny splinters and threw them in the wastebasket. This laborious process took three hours, during which I repeatedly got up to leave, but Marilyn kept ordering me to sit down. It was my first evidentiary of Marilyn Monroe’s capacity for cruelty. Doug told her that the negatives and proofs were his property—that he could be trusted to keep them locked up if that was her wish. That didn’t deter her. Poor Doug. She just mopped up the floor with him. He would say, ‘But I like this one.’ She would say, ‘No! I don’t. I don’t want to be seen like that. That’s dead.’ ”

Douglas Kirkland’s memory of that night is totally different. “Yes, she cut the proofs and negatives into little pieces—and that was disturbing,” he says. “It was shocking, actually, the way she went through them, cutting them up. However, she was extremely clear about what she thought was best for her and the ones she killed, for the most part, were not good. She was thorough and professional. She wanted photos that the Everyman could enjoy. Or, as she put it to me when she saw one shot she really loved, ‘I like this one because [Marilyn] looks like the kind of girl a truck driver would like to be in there [the bed] with. That’s who this girl appeals to—the regular guy.’

“I absolutely agree, though, that she was a darker personality than the one I had shot the day before,” says Kirkland. “The day before, she had been sexy, vibrant, and exciting, but twenty-four hours later, she was drawn, tired, and disturbed. She answered the door with a scarf on her head and dark glasses on. I don’t know what could have happened in such a short period of time to change her personality but it was totally, totally different. However, was I horrified? Did I think she was awful? Oh my gosh, no. Absolutely not. No, no, no. She was Marilyn Monroe, after all.” ^*