The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

“Maybe”

After Marilyn Monroe returned from Cal-Neva on July 29, 1962, she spent so much of the next few days alone behind the walls of her modest home in Brentwood, it made monitoring her state of mind a near impossibility. Only Eunice Murray and her doctors—Greenson and Engelberg—seemed to know what was really going on with her, and they weren’t exactly forthcoming to her friends. “After Cal-Neva, Pat was worried to death for her,” shared a friend of Mrs. Kennedy Lawford’s. In the days after their return from Nevada, Pat tried to call Marilyn, with no success. Finally, she asked Peter to run an errand for her. Pat had salvaged the blouse Marilyn soiled in Reno and now saw its return as an opportunity for Peter to check in on her troubled friend. Therefore, Peter dropped by Marilyn’s, and as Pat later reported, he found her in “better than good spirits.” Pat was relieved. That evening, Pat telephoned Marilyn, who finally answered. Now she seemed distant and depressed, and this was mere hours after Peter’s pleasant visit with her.

During their conversation, Pat questioned Marilyn about what she had done that day. Marilyn said that she had seen her doctor (not specifying which one), and, she claimed, the only other person she had come into contact with the entire day was Eunice Murray. Pat, knowing that her husband had spent the better part of an hour at Marilyn’s, found her withholding of this information to be very odd. Peter had said he spent long enough time at her home to enjoy a cocktail with her at the pool, and he even described her as having been in a “silly mood.” However, Marilyn now painted a picture of her day without Peter as a part of it. Pat challenged Marilyn, explaining that she knew that Peter had been there to return the blouse, and she was baffled by Marilyn’s reluctance to voluntarily discuss Peter’s visit.

Though Marilyn apologized for not telling Pat about Peter’s time there, Pat was more interested in why she decided to withhold the information. Marilyn, when pressed, explained that she didn’t want Pat to feel jealousy over Peter’s visit. That explanation angered Pat and she let Marilyn know it. Marilyn, who was not used to Pat’s clipped manner, began to cry and reassure her friend that nothing was going on between her and Peter. “I didn’t think for a moment anything was,” Pat told Marilyn, “and I still don’t—because he’s not attracted to you, Marilyn.” Pat then went on to say that Peter didn’t see Marilyn as a sexual being, but more as a wounded child. “She told Marilyn that she thought it was sick that Marilyn viewed every man as wanting her and every woman as being jealous of her,” this same intimate of Pat explained many years later. “Pat said that she thought Marilyn behaved like that because she had no important men in her life—no father, no brothers.”

From this trustworthy source’s account, it would seem that Marilyn took a browbeating from Pat that night. The call ended abruptly, at Pat’s initiation. Unfortunately, this confrontation between good friends would never be fully resolved. However, it may have been that conversation that led Marilyn to reach out during this period to a man from her past she still called “Daddy.”

“The phone rang one day when my mother was at the grocery store,” recalled Nancy Jeffrey in an interview for this book. “Daddy [Wayne Bolender] answered. It was Marilyn. He wanted to know how she was doing, he had heard that she was having a hard time. She said that she was fine. She would never have shared with him any of her sorrow, though. My parents would watch things on TV and get very upset. I think they felt that maybe she should not have gone into show business, that maybe her life would have been better. Anyway, somewhere in the conversation, I know that she asked my father, ‘Daddy, are you disappointed in the way my life has turned out?’ And all he said was, ‘Norma Jeane, I promised you on your wedding day that I would always love you—and I will keep that promise until the day I die. I still love you, Norma Jeane.’ That’s what he told me he told her, just like that.”

Marilyn then revealed to Wayne Bolender the primary reason for her call. She asked if he had any paperwork from her time at his home so long ago that might help convince Stanley Gifford Sr. and his son, Stanley Gifford Jr., that she actually was related to them. He explained that, unfortunately, there was no such documentation. It’s been said that he also attempted to discourage her from contacting the Giffords again. He believed it would only lead to more disappointment for her. However, Marilyn wrapped up the call apparently undeterred. She would contact the Giffords again, she insisted. The next time she did so, they would listen. The next time she did so, they would believe her claim to be “one of them” was the truth.

While Stanley Gifford Jr. believes to this day that he is not related to Marilyn Monroe, there is no telling what five minutes in her presence could have done to sway him and his father. Even if they hadn’t believed they were blood relatives, they could have been convinced to take Marilyn under their wings. There was at least a possibility that they may have seen in her what so many others already had—a woman who simply wanted what so many other people already have: a place to belong. Marilyn ended the phone call with her “Daddy” on an optimistic note. “Maybe that’s what I need,” she concluded. “Maybe if I find my brother, that will change everything.”

As had happened so many times before, Marilyn Monroe’s hopes for happiness in her future hinged on one word: Maybe.