The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Suicide over Johnny?

Johnny Hyde’s funeral was extremely difficult; his estranged wife refused to allow Marilyn Monroe to attend it. “They thought I was awful,” Marilyn later recalled. It’s been said that Marilyn and Natasha Lytess disguised themselves as family servants and managed to get into the service anyway, which was held at Johnny’s North Palm Drive house. Elia Kazan’s yarn was that Marilyn broke into the house the night before the service and kept vigil till morning beside Johnny’s coffin. Later there were published accounts that the next day at the funeral, she hurled herself onto the coffin and had to be pulled off it, kicking and screaming in agonizing grief. That story was started by Marilyn, in her own book: “I threw myself on the coffin and sobbed. I wished I was dead with him.” No one remembers anything like this happening at the funeral. Rather, Marilyn was apparently subdued and contemplative throughout the burial service at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

Afterward, Marilyn stayed at Johnny’s grave site for many hours, alone with her thoughts and memories. She stayed so long, in fact, that the sun was setting and an attendant suggested that she take her leave. According to veteran Hollywood agent Norman Winters, that anecdote is actually true.

She hadn’t been in love with Johnny; she was clear about it. It was just a simple matter of chemistry. She hadn’t wanted to lead him on, but didn’t know how to keep him in her life—indeed, in her career—without having sex with him, which, she later admitted, “was, I guess, the same as leading him on.” However, they had shared so many intimate moments, she felt certain that no one knew him quite as well as she did. “No one knows the true depth of what we shared,” she would later tell one of her closest friends. “When it’s just the two of you in bed in each other’s arms and it’s pitch black in the room and you put your head on his chest and hear his heart beat, that’s when you really know a man. When his heart beats for you, that’s when you really know him.”

“If I had never met him, he would be alive with his family,” a distraught Marilyn told Natasha, according to Natasha’s memory. “And now I’m alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Natasha told her, hugging her tightly. “I’m with you, Marilyn. I’m with you.”

“I had to keep telling her ‘you’re not alone,’ ” Natasha would later recall, “because I truly believed she was about to end her life.”

“I hadn’t seen her in some time,” said her neighbor Jerry Eidelman, “and I ran into her in—of all places—the grocery store. It had to have been just a day or so after the funeral. She was buying cleaning supplies. I remember that she had on yellow slacks and a white-and-yellow angora sweater, her hair in a ponytail and horn-rimmed glasses. ‘Are you cleaning the house?’ I asked her. She forced sort of a thin smile and said, ‘No, I don’t clean, Jerry. We have someone else do the cleaning. But for her to shop for the supplies would cost more money, so I’m doing it.’ Then she said, ‘I need to stay busy. Did you hear about Johnny Hyde?’ I told her I did. She said, ‘It’s so awful. I don’t know how to cope with it. And then this thing with my mother, too, is driving me crazy.’ I asked what she was talking about, and she said that her mother had gone off and married some creep and that she was worried sick about her. She said she was thinking of going on a trip to try to find the woman and rescue her from her husband. I said, ‘But Marilyn, you can’t do that. Or at least not alone. Take me with you. We’ll find her together.’ She said, ‘I don’t think I can expose you or anyone else to my mother. You don’t know what she has put me and my sister through. She’s very ill.’ Then, in what I now view as one of those great Marilyn Monroe moments, she put her hand up to her forehead dramatically, swooned a little, and whispered, ‘I’m so sorry, I simply must go now.’ She then rushed out, leaving her cart of cleaning supplies behind.

“I paid for the stuff and took it to her home. I knocked on the door and she answered. She looked awful. She’d been crying and was very pale. ‘Here are your cleaning supplies,’ I told her. ‘You forgot them.’ She looked at me blankly and asked, ‘What cleaning supplies?’ I said, ‘Thirty minutes ago, Marilyn—at the grocery store, remember?’ She was very disoriented. ‘Oh, that’s right, the cleaning supplies,’ she said. She then took the bag from me, and without saying thank you or anything else, just turned and closed the door behind her. It was very strange and, also, very disconcerting.”

A couple of days after Johnny’s funeral, Natasha returned home from work at the studio and found Marilyn in her bedroom. She was out cold, her cheeks puffed out and her coloring pale. Horrified, Natasha rushed to her side and forced open her mouth. It was full of dissolving pills. Natasha managed to shake Marilyn awake. By way of explanation, Marilyn told her she had taken some sleeping pills—which she had bought over the counter at Schwab’s—and then fell asleep before she could wash them down. It seemed such an unlikely scenario, Natasha didn’t really believe it. “She felt worthless,” Natasha later remembered. “She thought she was responsible for Hyde’s heart attack. If he had not loved her and cared so much about her [she thought] he would still be alive.”

No, Marilyn insisted, she had not tried to kill herself over Johnny Hyde. She would never do such a thing. She later told photographer and friend Milton Greene, “I felt guilty and I had a lot of feelings to sort through—but, oh baby, I sure didn’t want to die. The fact is,” she concluded, sadly, “he had made certain that I had nothing to die for.”

Natasha wasn’t convinced. She wrote a letter to her student Helena Albert at this time in which she said she felt that Marilyn “was intent on doing herself in” and that she feared there was nothing she or anyone else could do about it. “I think that when a person wants to kill herself, she will at some point do it despite the best intentions of her friends to prevent it from happening,” she wrote. She also wrote that she was determined to be loyal to Marilyn and do whatever she could to “keep her stabilized and,” she added, somewhat wryly, “if there is any time for it, perhaps we will be able to work on her acting, as well.”

Two weeks later, on Christmas Day, Marilyn Monroe presented Natasha Lytess with an antique ivory cameo brooch framed in gold. On it, she had inscribed, “I just want you to know that I owe you much more than my life.”