The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

No Relief

As if things were not bad enough for Marilyn Monroe as the year 1960 blessedly wound down, news of a death in the cast of The Misfits plunged her back into the deep depression that had recently caused her to be hospitalized. She had always admired Clark Gable, all the way back to when she found a photo of Edward Mortenson and thought he looked like Gable. She regretted that she’d caused the distinguished actor so much grief by her behavior on the set of The Misfits and hoped he would forgive her and try to remember her fondly. She never had a chance to tell him how she felt about him, though. “I don’t know how he would have reacted if he had known how important he had been to me all these years,” she later said.

On November 5, Clark Gable suffered a massive heart attack. He would die on the sixteenth at the age of just fifty-nine. Before his death, Gable had seen The Misfits and had judged it one of his best movies. Still, rumor had it that he had been so annoyed at Marilyn’s behavior on the set, it ultimately caused him the stress that precipitated his attack. Perhaps it was a theory that would have held more credence had he fallen ill during the production instead of after it. Moreover, Gable had a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit that couldn’t have done much for his well-being. At any rate, the story circulated around the world that it was Marilyn Monroe who was responsible for his death. “I kept him waiting—kept him waiting for hours and hours on that picture,” Marilyn told Sidney Skolsky. Then, as if parroting something that had obviously sprung from one of her five days a week with Dr. Ralph Greenson, she added, “Was I punishing my father? Getting even for all of the years he kept me waiting?”

Marilyn would later tell her half sister, Berniece, that people would shout at her from passing cars as she walked down the street in Manhattan, “How does it feel to be a murderer?”

“It upset her so very much,” said Diane Stevens from the John Springer office. “This was the last thing she needed. I called her when I heard the news about Clark because I knew how she’d probably react. She picked up the phone—she was back in New York by this time—and sounded like a shell of her old self.”

“I’m not doing so well,” Marilyn told Diane, according to her memory of the conversation. “I feel so responsible. I know it’s my fault he’s dead.”

“But it’s not,” Diane told her. “You have to stop thinking that, Marilyn. It will just make you worse.”

“I don’t see how things can get any worse,” she responded, her voice sounding heavily medicated. “My marriage is over. I have no one. Now this. I don’t think I can go on.” With those chilling words, Marilyn hung up the phone.

“Frantically, I tried to call her again, but she never picked up,” said Stevens. “I was scared. I called my boss, John [Springer], and told him about the conversation. He said, ‘My God, what now?’ as if he had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. He then called May Reis and asked her to check on Marilyn. She told him, ‘Oh, no, I recently quit. I no longer work for her. I just couldn’t take it.’ I swear, not a thing seemed to make sense in Marilyn’s world. There was always a surprise right around the corner. He said, ‘I don’t care if you work for her or not, get your ass over there and find out if she’s still alive.’ Finally, he called me back about an hour later and said May had told him Marilyn was sleeping and that all was well. John and I knew better. ‘All is not well,’ he told me. ‘I’m becoming very afraid as to how this whole thing is going to end.’ I shared his fear.”

It would seem, though, that all Marilyn needed was a break from the pressure of her life in order to turn things around. “She seemed a lot better once she got to New York,” says one relative. “I know she called Gladys as soon as she got to New York.”

After Marilyn received another very strange Christmas card from her mother—she had one every year—this one signed, “Loving good wishes (whether or not they are warranted), Gladys Pearl Eley, your mother,” she felt compelled to reach out to her.

“Gladys had been calling the office for weeks trying to reach Marilyn,” recalled Diane Stevens. “I so dreaded hearing her voice. She always said, ‘This is Mrs. Eley calling for Miss Mari-lyn Monroe—she pronounced it like Mary-lynn.’ John’s position was always the same: If she calls, be polite but firm that Marilyn would call her back when she was ready to do so—and then tell her to call Inez Melson, who was really responsible for dealing with Gladys. However, the last time I spoke to Gladys—when she heard that Marilyn was in the hospital and was trying to track her down—she became very irate and accused me of not passing her message on to her daughter. In fact, I hadn’t passed those messages on because I felt that Marilyn was already under so much strain. When I finally told her that Gladys had been calling, she sighed and said, ‘Oh, gosh. I have been meaning to call her, really I have. But I just haven’t had the strength to cope with her right now. I haven’t called Berniece back, either, and I feel terrible about it.’ Then she said, ‘Have you told anyone at Fox about this?’ I hadn’t. She said, ‘It’s so funny because they are trying to keep it a secret from the press about Mother, and we’re trying to keep it a secret from Fox. Where my mother is concerned, I would say there are enough secrets to go around, wouldn’t you?’ I had to agree. I know there was always concern at the studio that someone would track Gladys down again and she would say or do something that would cause a scandal. It was one of the reasons we tried not to antagonize her. We didn’t want one of her voices telling her to do something that would be totally destructive to Marilyn’s career or reputation.”

Coincidentally, just before Christmas, Marilyn finalized her new will—which would be signed in January 1961. In it, she provided a $100,000 trust fund for Gladys—up from the previous will’s $25,000 allocation (and so much for those who have claimed over the years that Marilyn had no interest in her mother). However, she only bequeathed $10,000 to Berniece, whom she was a lot closer to than Gladys. Interestingly, she also wished to bequeath her psychiatrist, Marianne Kris, with a full 25 percent of her estate and—more surprisingly—Lee Strasberg with the other 75 percent. ^*

“Finally, she called Gladys when she got back to New York,” says Diane Stevens. “From my understanding, it was a fairly good conversation. Gladys seemed a little better to Marilyn and, in fact, Marilyn said she enjoyed talking to her. She had avoided visiting her when she was last in Los Angeles and said that she would definitely see her when she returned. ‘She’s a very strange link to a past I have worked so very hard to forget,’ she told me. ‘But, still, she is my mother, isn’t she?’

“I think that her miscarriages made her feel somehow more warmly toward Gladys. She also told me, ‘You know, my mother’s children were kidnapped from her by her ex-husband. I think I can now understand how terrible that must have been for her. I actually don’t know how she could have survived such a thing. I wonder,’ she said, ‘if that’s what made her lose her mind. I think I would lose mine if that ever happened to me.’ The interesting thing to me about Marilyn, though, was that just when you thought all was lost with her, she would rally. By Christmas, she looked and sounded better to me.”

During this period, Marilyn renewed her friendship with a publicist named Pat Newcomb, a woman who had worked with her on Bus Stop and whom Marilyn rehired at the end of 1960. Rupert Allan, a good friend of Princess Grace Kelly, had decided to spend more time with the princess in Monaco. Newcomb would take his place as Marilyn’s personal publicist. “At the core of her, she was really much stronger than all of us,” Pat Newcomb recalls of Marilyn, “and that was something we tended to forget, because she seemed so vulnerable, and one always felt it necessary to watch out for her.”

Marilyn actually spent Christmas with Pat, gifting her with a mink coat for the holiday. She also decided to rekindle her relationship with Joe DiMaggio after he sent her poinsettias for Christmas. When she asked him why he had sent them, he said that he did so because he knew she would call him to thank him. “Besides,” he said, “who in the hell else do you have in the world?” When Marilyn allowed him to visit her on Christmas evening, some in her circle were concerned about it. After all, it had not ended well with DiMaggio. Most people felt that he was the last thing she needed at this desperate time in her life. (In just a short time, DiMaggio would turn out to be a savior in her life.)

Marilyn’s divorce from Arthur Miller would be the first order of business to be taken care of in January 1961. Along with her publicist, Pat Newcomb, and attorney, Aaron Frosch, Marilyn would fly to Mexico on January 20—picking the day of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s inauguration specifically because it was sure to have the attention of all media—where the divorce would be quickly granted. There would be no alimony for either party and the house they owned in Roxbury would go to Miller since he used the money from the sale of his previous home to buy it.

With another marriage over, and especially after the affair with Montand, Marilyn’s image was now, maybe more than ever, that of a hussy, a homewrecker. The perception was that she had used Arthur Miller to write movies for her—Let’s Make Love, for example—then dumped him. Considering that it was because of Miller’s alleged ties with Communists that Marilyn would be forever tailed by the FBI, maybe it was appropriate that even the Russian media got into the act. “When you speak of the American way of life,” commented the Russian magazine Nedyela, “everybody thinks of chewing gum, Coca-Cola and Marilyn Monroe. She found in Arthur Miller what she lacked. She exploited him without pity. He wrote scripts for her films and made her a real actress. Marilyn paid him back. She left him. Another broken life on her climb to the stars.”

When a reporter read that commentary to Marilyn, she couldn’t contain her anger. “Listen!” she exclaimed. “I know Arthur Miller better than the Russians and I’ve learned from Arthur Miller more than the Russians. I’ve learned from Arthur Miller that he does not believe in a Communist State. That’s what I’ve learned from Arthur Miller. The Russians can talk all they want about my climb to the stars, his broken life and what I’ve done to somebody. But I know the man. They’re talking about an idea. They can have their ideas. I had the man.”

Earlier, Marilyn had told Joe DiMaggio, when he visited her, that she was looking forward to returning to Los Angeles so she could continue her treatment by Dr. Ralph Greenson. At the end of the month of January, as if to bid a final and respectful farewell to Arthur Miller and her life with him, she would happily attend the New York premiere of The Misfits with Montgomery Clift.