Also at the party, showering Marilyn with praise, were the moguls of Hollywood: Sam Goldwyn, Jack Warner, and Marilyn’s old adversary, Darryl Zanuck. ‘This party,’ wrote Skolsky a few days later, ‘was a big deal to Marilyn because it signified in its peculiar Hollywoodian manner that the elite of the town had finally accepted her.’
The elite of the town were about to get a nasty shock. While they were accepting her, at the age of twenty-eight, as a full-fledged star, Marilyn had already decided to reject them. She had in fact resolved to turn her back on Hollywood altogether — husband, lovers, moguls, and all. Just before Christmas 1954 Marilyn put on her black wig and dark glasses, and drove to the Los Angeles airport carrying a ticket in the name of Zelda Zonk.
Cinderella, alias Zonk, was about to disappear.
Part Three
BROKEN MARRIAGE – BROKEN MIND
‘How can I capsulize Marilyn? The more you know about people the more complex they are to you. If she were simple, it would have been easy to help her.’
ARTHUR MILLER
17
IN THE FROZEN DARK before dawn, as Marilyn’s plane flew east, a diminutive young woman steered a station wagon along the wooded roads near Weston, Connecticut. Amy Greene was on her way to LaGuardia Airport to pick up Marilyn and her traveling companion. Amy’s thirty-three-year-old husband, Milton, was Marilyn’s accomplice in her flight from Hollywood. For the next two years he was to be her close friend and champion, and her business partner.
Greene’s wooing of Hollywood’s most valued asset had not happened overnight. His meeting with Marilyn, eighteen months earlier, is recorded in Monroe lore rather like Stanley’s with Livingstone. One look at the baby-faced Greene prompted her to say, ‘Why, you’re just a boy!’ He replied, ‘You’re just a girl,’ and they immediately took a liking to one another. Greene, photographer of distinction, had been in Los Angeles to take pictures for Look magazine, and his approach had won over not only Marilyn, but even Joe DiMaggio. He photographed her in bulky clothes and modest poses, depictions that departed from the sexpot cliché but kept all the Monroe allure.
The plan that would outrage Hollywood took its initial vague shape at their first dinner together. Over the wine Greene enthused about his personal dream of independent filmmaking. Marilyn said she would like to be in one of his future movies. She was unhappy at Fox for two reasons.
On the one hand, Marilyn felt that the studio was taking advantage of her. In spite of her huge success she was still tied to a contract that paid her a maximum of $1,500 a week. On that basis, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, five successful films ago, had brought her only $18,000. That did not amount to much, by Hollywood standards, after she had paid taxes, agents’ fees, acting coach Natasha Lytess, and beauticians. By contrast, Marilyn’s co-star Jane Russell, not bound by a long-term contract, had been paid $100,000.
Milton Greene agreed with Marilyn that this was unfair. He assured her she could earn much more, were she to break away from Fox.
Marilyn also complained about her studio’s insistence on casting her in stultifying roles. That troubled her at least as much as the poor pay. For a long time now she had been telling reporters that she was ‘really eager to do something else, roles such as Julie in Bury the Dead, Gretchen in Faust, and Teresa in Cradle Song.’ She wanted to work opposite ‘serious’ actors like Marlon Brando and Richard Burton. She wanted to act — and nobody at Fox was listening.
Greene could not help listening. ‘I thought I’d seen them all,’ he said. ‘Being in the business I’d seen so many models and actresses. But I’d never seen anyone with that tone of voice, that kindness, that real softness. If she saw a dead dog in the road, she’d cry. She was so supersensitive you had to watch your tone of voice all the time. Later I was to find out that she was schizoid — that she could be absolutely brilliant or absolutely kind, then the total opposite.’ In the early days, though, Marilyn seemed to Greene to be a prize without blemish.
The conspiracy began at once. Greene asked to see Marilyn’s contract, got legal advice, and was soon telling her that her contract was void, that she could and should leave Twentieth Century-Fox. Marilyn was infected by the heresy of the notion. When Greene left for New York she drove him to the airport, and surprised him with the fervor of her kiss.
In the months to come there were more meetings. They talked at a cocktail party attended by the Bogarts, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland, and huddled together during an evening of charades at Gene Kelly’s home, a regular haven for visitors from the east.
Greene and his wife, Amy, were on hand when Marilyn came to New York to shoot the skirt scene for The Seven Year Itch. Amy watched as an ashen-faced DiMaggio stalked away, and she was at the St Regis Hotel the next day to sympathize over the bruises. When Marilyn returned to Los Angeles, Milton stayed in touch by telephone, talking her through the fine details of her contractual commitments. In the coming weeks, miserable and confused during the collapse of her marriage, Marilyn simply did not know what to do about the contract. She was wooed, in the end, as much by the promise of tranquility as by the hope for a better professional future: Milton and Amy Greene were offering to take the famous foster child into their home.
So it was, in the dying days of 1954, that Marilyn came in secret to the Greene home in Connecticut. An old farmhouse, dating from the early eighteenth century, it stood on twenty-five acres of woodland, with its own trout stream and a little lake. The living room was a cavernous place, the full two-story height of the old stable, warmed by an enormous log fire. Marilyn was given the studio, a home within a home, with its own balcony overlooking the water. For her, this house in the woods was wonderland.
Marilyn had rarely seen snow before or watched the seasons change. In the coming months, when spring came, she would greet it with the naive astonishment of a child. Here nobody bothered her. She could bundle up in Greene’s warm clothes and go walking in the woods. She could wander off to lunch on sandwiches and homemade chocolate éclairs at The Little Corner, a nearby restaurant run by Greene’s brother.
Amy recalled, ‘She liked to drive. We’d take the convertible and go sailing along the highway with the top down. We both liked to feel the wind on our faces and the warmth of the heater on our legs.’
At home, Marilyn quickly became ‘Auntie’ to the Greene’s year-old son, Josh. She helped feed and bathe him, and surprised the Greenes by staying home to baby-sit him, so that they could go out on New Year’s Eve. Marilyn would tell an interviewer that year that the Greenes were ‘the only real family I have ever known.’
That, of course, was untrue. Marilyn had said the same of the DiMaggio family in San Francisco and, years before, of Fred Karger’s family. She made a habit of grafting herself onto other people. As Amy Greene noticed with prescience, though, Marilyn also had a way of ‘shedding’ people when they were no longer useful.
‘Never forget,’ said Amy Greene, ‘that Marilyn wanted above all to become a great movie star. She would do anything, give up anyone, to move on up.’
It was now that Hal Schaefer, back in Los Angeles, was unceremoniously dumped with one phone call. Marilyn’s friend, Sidney Skolsky, who had loyally resisted the temptation to publish what he knew about the DiMaggio marriage, was put on ice until further required — several years hence. The curious intimacy with her dramatic coach, Natasha Lytess, now came to an end.
Lytess, realizing that her pupil was drawing away, pressured Marilyn for financial help. She later wrote: ‘I had been her private director for long years, working with her day and night. Yet when she was asked to do something for me, she had the feeling that she was being used.’ There were others, Marilyn aside, who felt Lytess did expect too much. At all events, she was soon to be discarded as redundant.
In her newfound world Marilyn needed new friends. The Greenes were soul mates who could show her Eastern sophistication and culture. Amy Greene, a former fashion model with looks that reflected her Latin ancestry, was lovely in her
own right. She told Marilyn, six years her senior, that looking good in ordinary life did not demand the overtight skirts and sweaters that had made Marilyn’s name on the screen.
‘It dawned on me what pitiful clothes she had,’ Amy recalled. ‘She had to rummage through my drawers every time we wanted to go out. We brought Norman Norell to dinner, one of the top dress designers of the day, and had him design an elegant wardrobe for her.’ Marilyn welcomed the change. She and Amy went off on shopping sprees in Manhattan — at Milton Greene’s expense.
Marilyn rarely had a close woman friend of her own age. In this sudden intimacy with Amy Greene she revealed a good deal of herself. Some of it was trivia. Amy learned, not least when Marilyn scandalized dressing-room attendants at Bonwit Teller on Fifth Avenue, the truth of the legend about Marilyn’s reluctance to wear panties. She was, however, fanatical about wearing a brassiere. ‘Somebody, somewhere, had told her that if she always wore a bra her boobs wouldn’t sag,’ Amy Greene said, ‘and she insisted on it. She slept with a bra on. She told me she’d finish making love with someone and then, zoom, on with the bra.’ At Bonwit Teller she wore the brassiere and a sanitary belt.
Much about Marilyn was irritating, certainly for the meticulously tidy Amy Greene. She observed that Marilyn lived in a chaos of clothes cascading from suitcase and closet, of cosmetics and toiletries scattered across her room. She was oblivious to the tedious responsibilities of her own life, such as a pending trial in Los Angeles for driving without a license. Her friends would sort it out.
The Greenes watched bemused as Marilyn plunged into their library. She started reading about Napoleon, discovered Josephine, and scooped up every book she could find about her. Supper conversation in the Greene household was dominated for a while by Marilyn enthusing about Josephine and her entourage.
‘She was fascinated,’ said Amy Greene, ‘by women who had made it.’ Marilyn especially enjoyed learning how Josephine’s friend, Juliette Récamier, who was renowned for her figure, treated a specially commissioned nude statue of herself. As she aged, and her breasts started to droop, she had the marble breasts smashed.
Marilyn would sit on the stairs with Amy contemplating a cameo portrait of Emma, Lady Hamilton, Lord Nelson’s mistress. She could hardly bring herself to believe that this imposing woman had begun life as a servant girl, and she made a personal celebration of the way Emma improved herself. ‘She was like a child about stories,’ Amy Greene recalled. ‘She said nobody had told her stories in her childhood, so when anybody told her a story, she was hooked.’
Milton Greene had a motorcycle with a sidecar, and took Marilyn riding in it. One day, as they prepared to set off, Amy noticed Marilyn was wearing a long white scarf. She made a crack about Isadora Duncan, the eccentric American dance pioneer who died of strangulation when her scarf caught in the wheel spokes of a friend’s sportscar. ‘Who’s Isadora Duncan?’ Marilyn asked, and was enthralled by the explanation. ‘It was,’ Amy Greene recalls, ‘Isadora Duncan Week in Connecticut.’
To record her new experiences Marilyn bought a small leather-covered diary, one with a clasp and tiny key. She would carry it around the house, making notes on conversations or magazine articles that caught her interest. At night the Greenes would hear the radio playing in Marilyn’s room till all hours, as she fed her unquenchable appetite for reading. They became aware of the torment that would now never leave Marilyn — insomnia. Sleep, when it did come, was ushered in by barbiturates; the pills, Seconal in those days, were never far from Marilyn’s bedside.
It was now that Marilyn told Amy of the misery in her past as a female, of the child she claimed to have had in her teenage years, the endless string of abortions. Marilyn still suffered excruciating period pain. Amy would find her screaming in agony that no pills could quell, and took her to see a gynecologist friend.
Marilyn’s longtime Los Angeles physician, Dr Lee Siegel, identified her ailment in an interview for this book as endometriosis, a condition in which womb-lining tissue forms in places other than the womb, such as the ovaries or Fallopian tubes. Extreme pain during menstruation, and pain in the reproductive organs, is a usual symptom. Women who have endometriosis and want to have children are urged not to wait too long before becoming pregnant, for the disease is progressive and worsens with time.
Marilyn was now nearly twenty-nine. With her history of myriad abortions, some of the early ones perhaps performed inefficiently, she had courted additional disaster. As Amy Greene put it, ‘Her whole womb was weeping.’ Marilyn now feared gynecologists, and insisted that Amy Greene stay in the room during the doctor’s examination. The abortions had indeed caused damage, making it unlikely that Marilyn would ever bear children.
The doctor suggested that, with so much pain so often, Marilyn should consider a hysterectomy. She rejected the idea out of hand. ‘Marilyn was emphatic,’ said Amy Greene. ‘She said, “I can’t do that. I want to have a child. I’m going to have a son.” She always talked of having a son.’
In the coming months Marilyn would hear from the actress Jane Russell, her friend from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, asking her to help WAIF, an organization that found homes for unwanted children. This marked the beginning of Marilyn’s active interest in children’s causes, one she would maintain till she died. Soon the world’s press would be chronicling her own frantic efforts to bear children.
During Christmas 1954, Marilyn and the Greens delighted in the sheer naughtiness of Marilyn’s escape from Hollywood. Amy answered the phone with lofty innocence to the stream of famous callers. Frank Sinatra, still holding Joe DiMaggio’s hand back in Los Angeles, was fobbed off with a tall story. So was Billy Wilder, Marilyn’s director on Itch. Bob Hope, who wanted Marilyn for his Christmas show in Korea, called in person. With the others sitting around giggling, Amy Greene struggled to sound serious as she inquired, ‘Tell me, Mr Hope, is Miss Monroe lost?’ Afterward, she and Marilyn rolled about on the floor, hooting with laughter.
Marilyn did not remain wholly hidden for long. In early January 1955, Milton Greene called a press cocktail party in New York, limited to a select audience of eighty. Dripping ermine, Marilyn announced that she had formed her own corporation, Marilyn Monroe Productions, with herself as president, holding 51 percent of the shares; and Milton Greene, as vice president, holding 49 percent. She said she did not intend to renew her contract with Twentieth Century-Fox. It was all very startling for her Fox bosses, who were under the impression that her existing agreement had yet to expire.
Marilyn was, she said ‘a new woman.’ She told the press she was making the break ‘so I can play the better kind of roles I want to play. I didn’t like a lot of my pictures. I’m tired of sex roles. I’m going to broaden my scope. People have scope, you know … they really do.’ Asked what sort of roles she now wished to play, Marilyn mentioned ‘one of the parts in The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky.’ Asked by a tittering reporter how those names were spelled, Marilyn replied, ‘Honey, I couldn’t spell any of the names I told you.’
Milton Greene tried to explain his grand plan, which was to form a group of actors and directors who would conceive their own films freed from the production-line tyranny of the big studios. The press took little notice. For them the focus remained Marilyn, and Greene would soon discover that running Marilyn Monroe Productions was a full-time occupation — and a crushing financial burden.
Marilyn had told Greene she was underpaid — and that her only present asset was fame. She was broke, and — because her contract with Fox was still enforced — she could not legally take other paid work. Using his earnings as a photographer, Greene paid all her expenses during 1955.
For a year Greene was to gamble all on his conviction that, whatever the legal niceties, Hollywood could not afford to pass up the box-office bonanza that came with the name Monroe. Twentieth Century-Fox would have to come to terms, however much it objected to Marilyn going independent. Greene would be proved right, but meanwhile he mortgaged himself to
the hilt to keep Marilyn in luxurious, and visible, limbo.
Greene believed Marilyn must maintain a star’s standard of living, not slip into dowdy obscurity. Marilyn did not demur, and was soon installed in grand style at the Waldorf Astoria Towers. Her working base was now a vastly expensive three-room luxury apartment, her first home in Manhattan. Greene paid for everything — clothes, beautician expenses of five hundred dollars a week (in 1955 prices), and the cost of keeping Marilyn’s mother under care. He also bought Marilyn a black Thunderbird sportscar; Marilyn had become a fast driver who fancied herself an expert behind the wheel.
Under the stipulations of the Fox contract, Marilyn could make unpaid public appearances. Greene saw to it that the public saw a nice mix of the new Marilyn and the old. First, he made sure that the rogue glamour girl did not disappear. In March 1955, scantily costumed, Marilyn rode a pink elephant into Madison Square Garden, as her contribution to an extravaganza in aid of the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation. She and the elephant made their entrance to the commands of a ringmaster in the person of comedian Milton Berle, who would later claim he and Marilyn had once been lovers.* Twenty-five thousand people roared approval at her entrance, and Marilyn stole the show.
At breakfast time on Good Friday, 1955, the Greene home in Connecticut was invaded by television crews. Milton Greene had arranged for an appearance on Person to Person, a live interview program conducted by Edward R. Murrow. The show was a supposedly ‘informal’ visit with Mr and Mrs Milton Greene and their celebrated houseguest. Marilyn, who had been dousing a worse menstrual period than usual with painkillers and sleeping pills, wished she had never agreed to take part. She was not used to television, was petrified at the idea of talking directly to fifty million viewers. Her voice quavering, the seasoned star seemed amateurish compared to her coolly articulate hostess, Amy Greene.
Murrow hastily started asking the Greenes about their guest. Did she cook? Did she help clean the house and make her own bed? The Greenes lied obligingly. Marilyn herself offered a few worthy thoughts about the importance of working with the right film director, then fell back on a trusty old theme. She had really enjoyed riding the pink elephant, she said, ‘because I hadn’t been to a circus as a kid.’