The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

A Sign from God?

On December 16, 1958, Marilyn suffered a miscarriage. She would say that she felt more alone than ever before. She also felt a tremendous sense of guilt about the drugs she had been taking during the pregnancy and was afraid that she was responsible for the baby’s death. “Could I have killed it?” she asked one friend. “I felt she was slipping away,” her half sister, Berniece, would say of this time. Indeed, on December 24, Marilyn received a letter from her mother, Gladys, whom she had not seen in some time. “Have I pushed you away, dear daughter?” she wrote, probably knowing the answer. “I would love a visit from you.” Then, in a heartrending understatement, she concluded, “The holidays are so sad. So very sad.” Later in the letter, she added, “I have tried to reach you so often but it is very difficult. Please do me the favor of a telephone call or a return letter. May God bless you.” She signed it, “Mrs. Gladys Eley.”

As it happened, Marilyn wouldn’t work in 1959. She was too sad and never really able to recover emotionally from the miscarriage. In April, she received a note from Berniece, addressed to “Mrs. Marilyn Miller.” She wanted to visit. “Please phone or write me as to when you will be home, and the best time to come. Give my regards to Arthur.” Marilyn didn’t respond. Now was not a good time for a visit.

In June, she had to undergo a series of operations to determine if it were possible for her to have children. It was decided that, no, it could never happen for her. Melissa Steinberg, the daughter of Dr. Oscar Steinberg, who performed one of the surgeries, recalled, “I’m afraid it didn’t work out at all. He had to tell her, which was terrible for him, that she could not have children. The way I heard it, he walked into her room to give her the bad news and she looked at him and said, ‘I already know. I already know.’ He then said he would name his firstborn daughter after her, which he did. She was very, very sad. I know he was worried about her. She took it very badly.”

She didn’t give up hope, though. Later that year, she would go to see singer Diahann Carroll at the Mocambo in Los Angeles and, recalled the singer, “I was pregnant with my daughter, Suzanne. Marilyn, so sad and so beautiful, came backstage to say hello. ‘May I touch your tummy?’ she asked me. I was delighted, of course. I took her hand and put it on my stomach and said, ‘You pat right here, sweetheart, and say a prayer and a wish, and I’ll hope with all my heart that your dream comes true.’ She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, ‘Oh, I do, too. I do, too.’ ”

There seemed to be no end to her melancholy at this time in her life as one terrible moment seemed inevitably to give way to another. Though she signed on to begin filming a new movie in 1960, a musical comedy called Let’s Make Love, Marilyn was feeling anything but lighthearted. Her marriage would most certainly not last another year, and she knew it. She refused Berniece’s telephone calls that holiday season—the first time that had ever happened. Throughout all of the vicissitudes of her life, she had never felt so low. Indeed, as Marilyn told one close friend, “As hard as I tried, the amount of time and energy I spent on this thing… I think now that it must be a sign. God must not want me to have children. Of course. Why should he allow me to have children? I can barely handle my own life.”

One evening after Marilyn got home from the hospital, she and that friend went through Marilyn’s closet, looking for something she might be able to wear to dinner. “I don’t like to wear fancy clothes,” she told her friend. “They take away from me, from who I am. I don’t want people to be distracted when I walk into the room. So let’s find something very simple.” As she was talking and thumbing through a row of blouses, she came across a maternity top. She stopped for a moment. Then she took it off the hanger and handed it to her friend. “Please get rid of this for me,” she said. Then, a few moments later, she came across another. “Oh, no.” Finally, with tears streaming down her face, she decided to just take the time to get rid of all of the maternity clothes in the closet. “This isn’t even what I set out to do,” she said, very upset. “I just wanted to wear something pretty for dinner.” After cleaning out the closet, she and her friend put all of the maternity outfits in a large box. The next day, Marilyn had her secretary send them all to her half sister. “Maybe Mona [Berniece’s daughter] will have better luck than me,” she concluded sadly.