The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Quiet Before the Storm

After returning to the United States following production of The Prince and the Showgirl, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller took a lease on a spacious thirteenth-floor apartment in New York on 57th Street. They’d recently purchased a large farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, but it was being refurbished. Meanwhile, they would live in the city and spend the next few months trying to get their marriage back on track. In her spare time, during the first part of 1957 Marilyn fancied herself a housewife, preparing meals for her husband—breakfast every morning had become a specialty of hers—as well as grocery shopping and running errands that made her feel, as she put it in an interview at the time, “as if I have a real purpose in this world. I don’t mind it at all. In fact, lately, I think I prefer this kind of more simple life.” (One wonders what Joe DiMaggio might have thought if he’d read that comment from his ex-wife.) Often the couple would retire to a summer cottage they rented on Long Island where Marilyn would go horseback riding or spend her time painting with watercolors. It was actually a very pleasant year, 1957, perhaps the quietest she’d ever had in her life. Her career wasn’t that far from her mind, though. She was still studying with the ever-present Strasbergs, but she did have a new psychiatrist, Marianne Kris, recommended to her by Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund and also the founder of child psychoanalysis.

Marilyn saw Dr. Kris as many as five days a week, which at this time most people believed was too much. “Every single day she would sit in that office and lament her childhood or her marriage,” said one person who was close to Marilyn at the time. “Afterward, she would be upset for hours. Then, just as she was regaining her equilibrium, she would be back on that damn couch. Some thought she was on a quest to learn more about herself, to set right the past. I didn’t. It was, I thought, a form of self-abuse. She simply would not allow there to be any peace in her life. If there was a lull in the drama, she would create something new upon which to fixate, and most of those creations at this time came from her sessions with Marianne Kris. That, along with Strasberg’s constant nagging of her to draw upon her childhood for her acting… well, it’s no wonder she was not an emotionally well woman. As Berniece used to put it, ‘Why can’t she just leave well enough alone?’ ”

Why? Because Marilyn Monroe wanted nothing more than to, once and for all, come to terms with the sadness of her childhood. She knew she had significant emotional problems stemming from her youth, from not being wanted, not feeling loved—and she felt it necessary to explore those areas and see what she could learn from them, or at the very least find a better way to confront her demons. The constant stream of letters from Gladys—at least one a week—probably didn’t help matters. It was as if Marilyn always had one foot firmly planted in the distant past, the other in the uncertain present. The problem was that there were never any new revelations. There was never a sense of closure. Rather, the same questions were asked time after time, with the same answers being given and no progress ever made. Perhaps it was, as many people believed, a case of too much therapy. Perhaps she needed to live the present rather than constantly analyze the past.

Also at this time, Marilyn and Milton Greene—partners in Marilyn Monroe Productions—ended their relationship. The two had been having problems for many months with Greene attempting to control, at least in Marilyn’s view (shared by many observers), too much of her business affairs. Money was always an issue with Greene—he never seemed to have enough and always seemed to be looking to MMP to bail him out. Also, there were any number of creative issues between them over The Prince and the Showgirl. When he suggested that he be recognized as executive producer of the film, Marilyn balked. That she took issue with it suggested she was really finished with Milton Greene by this time, because he, by rights and by contract, had every right to be recognized as an executive producer. In the end, Greene blamed Arthur Miller for any problems, not Marilyn. The two men didn’t like or trust each other. Greene felt that since Miller had Marilyn’s pillow-talk ear, there was nothing he could do to redeem himself from whatever Miller had accused him of at any given time. Moreover, Greene couldn’t stop himself from criticizing Miller in Marilyn’s presence, which made her uncomfortable and left her feeling that she had to take sides. Once she decided that she had to choose her husband, there was nothing Greene could have done to rectify the situation. After some wrangling, Marilyn made a decision to eject him from the company on April 11. She issued a very unkind statement saying that he had mismanaged MMP and had even entered into secret agreements about which she knew nothing. When Greene acted as if he didn’t know what had happened to cause such a schism, Marilyn issued another statement that sounded suspiciously not like her—but a lot like Arthur Miller: “As president of the corporation and its only source of income, I was never informed that he had elected himself to the position of executive producer of The Prince and the Showgirl. My company was not formed to provide false credits for its officers and I will not become a party to this. My company was not formed merely to parcel 49.6% of all my earnings to Mr. Greene, but to make better pictures, improve my work and secure my income.” After much legal wrangling, Marilyn settled with Greene for $100,000, which was just the return of his original investment in MMP. She never spoke to Milton about what had happened, simply refusing his telephone calls much as she had with Natasha Lytess. These decisions were not like Marilyn. It was as if she were doing anything she could do to impress Arthur Miller, who had made his loathing of both Lytess and Greene quite clear.

In June 1957, The Prince and the Showgirl opened at Radio City Music Hall. Marilyn, of course, attended with Arthur. The reviews were favorable and it seemed as if there might be a new appreciation of her ability as an actress, which somehow made all of the angst in England worthwhile, or at least most of it. What’s perhaps most interesting about this film is the active role Marilyn took in its production and how far she had come as a thoughtful and, indeed, imaginative artist with a keen eye toward filmmaking. When she was unhappy with Fox’s final cut of the film, she expressed her dissatisfaction to Jack Warner, MCA, and Laurence Olivier’s production company. What she had to say and how she expressed it says so much about who she was at the time: “I am afraid that as it stands it will not be as successful as the version all of us agreed was so fine. Especially in the first third of the picture the pacing has been slowed and one comic point after another has been flattened out by substituting inferior takes with flatter performances lacking the energy and brightness that you saw in New York. Some of the jump cutting kills the points, as in the fainting scene. The coronation is as long as before if not longer, and the story gets lost in it. American audiences are not as moved by stained glass windows as the British are, and we threaten them with boredom. I am amazed that so much of the picture has no music at all when the idea was to make a romantic picture. We have enough film to make a great movie, if only it will be as in the earlier version. I hope you will make every effort to preserve our picture.” Does that sound like the critique of an empty-headed movie star? In the end, no changes were made to the picture. It came out as Fox and MCA saw fit, but not for lack of trying on Marilyn’s part.

In July, Marilyn would learn that she was pregnant. She wanted nothing more than to have a baby, but now she wasn’t sure how she felt about this child’s father. However, she had to admit that the last six months with Arthur had been very relaxing. She wasn’t sure that she had his respect, but she knew he cared about her. Still, it was difficult for her to get past what she’d read in his journal. “My little girl is always going to be told how pretty she is,” Marilyn said when she learned of the pregnancy. She was sure it would be a girl. “When I was small, all of the dozens and dozens of people I lived with—none of them ever used the word ‘pretty’ to me. I want my little girl to smile all the time. All little girls should be told how pretty they are and I’m going to tell mine, over and over again.”

Unfortunately, on August 1, Marilyn would be diagnosed as suffering from an ectopic pregnancy. She was about five or six weeks along at that point. She was extremely saddened by the loss of the baby. “My heart is broken,” she told her half sister, Berniece, in a telephone call from the hospital. She could, she said, “try again,” and she intended to—“but not now.”

The first six months of the year had been peaceful, but that changed after Marilyn lost the baby. Some in the family say that a letter she received from Gladys set in motion a chain of events that could have proven deadly. Apparently, Gladys sent a heartless note to her daughter in which she in effect said that, in her view, Marilyn wasn’t ready to be a mother. She told her that along with motherhood came certain responsibilities, “and you, dear child, are not a responsible person.” One relative recalled, “Marilyn was, I think, as upset about that letter as she was about losing the baby. She began to drink a lot more after that, and with the pills it all got to be too much. She started to say that she was hearing voices in her head. This was very scary and very reminiscent of her mother and grandmother. ‘I could never be like them,’ she said, ‘because at least I know the voices are not real.’ She was acting very strangely. Arthur told me that he was at a restaurant one night and the maître d’ came over to tell him that he had a phone call. It was Marilyn. She was out of it and asked him to come home to save her. Luckily, he rushed home. She had taken an overdose. I don’t know if it was on purpose, or not. No one ever knew. Afterward, no one ever discussed it, which is why there’s a lot of mystery around it. It simply was never discussed.”