Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Anthony Summers
‘File and forget. We always have good reasons for doing nothing.’ Outside, the world was fast asleep.
JOHN LE CARRÉ’S SMILEY,
IN The Honourable Schoolboy
50
‘IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO me,’ Marilyn had said nine years earlier to Whitey Snyder, ‘promise me you’ll make me up.’ She had been only twenty-seven then, busy making Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and already thinking of death. To ensure he remembered, she gave her makeup man a gold clip inscribed, ‘While I’m Still Warm, Marilyn.’
Snyder kept losing the clip over the years, but he had it in his pocket two days after her death, when he made his way to the mortuary at Westwood Memorial Park. He also took a bottle of gin with him.
It fell to Snyder and his future wife, Marilyn’s longtime wardrobe assistant, Marjorie Plecher, to restore the embalmed ruin that had been Marilyn’s body.
The hair, hanging straight and limp, was covered with a wig she had worn in The Misfits. A chiffon scarf was wound around the neck. Below it, the famous figure was no more. After the surgeon’s assault, the swelling breasts were gone.
‘Oh, my God,’ thought Plecher, ‘Marilyn without a bosom! She’d die.’ She and Snyder tore up a cushion for stuffing, found plastic bags, and made their friend a false bosom. The corpse was then dressed in a simple Pucci dress that had been Marilyn’s recent favorite. ‘She looked beautiful,’ a mourner would say after the funeral, ‘like a beautiful doll.’
With the permission of her half-sister, Bernice Miracle, the funeral arrangements were made by Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn’s former business manager, Inez Melson. They knew she had not liked the idea of being buried, so a wall crypt was chosen. DiMaggio paid for the crypt, which cost $800, and for the bronze casket. The public was told donations should be sent to organizations that helped needy children.
DiMaggio and Melson issued a prepared statement, letting it be known that this was to be a small funeral, ‘so that she can go to her final resting place in the quiet she has always sought.’ Only twenty-four people were invited, including the Greensons, members of the Karger family, Lee and Paula Strasberg, veteran members of Marilyn’s dressing-room team, masseur Ralph Roberts, lawyer Milton Rudin, and Pat Newcomb.
One of those not invited was Frank Sinatra. ‘Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, and Sammy Davis, Jr,’ Mrs Melson recalled, ‘were determined to come. They had the audacity to bring security men and try to say they had permission to go to the chapel.’ Sinatra was not allowed in, but the poodle he had given Marilyn, the dog called Maf, spent a while at Sinatra’s kennel.
Peter and Pat Lawford were not included. Lawford, who had rushed off in a helicopter to collect some of his neighbors, did not like that at all. He fulminated publicly about the fact that his wife, the President’s sister, had flown from the East Coast in vain. ‘It seems to be a concerted effort,’ Lawford said, ‘to keep some of Marilyn’s old friends from attending.’
In the mortuary, Joe DiMaggio was overheard talking to one of the funeral directors. ‘Be sure,’ he said, ‘that none of those damned Kennedys come to the funeral.’
DiMaggio spent the night before the funeral alone beside Marilyn’s remains. He was on his knees for much of the time.
While the ex-husband mourned inside, some devoted followers kept vigil through the night outside the gates. Next day a relatively small crowd, about a thousand strong, gathered to watch the ceremonies.
‘There were hundreds of reporters and photographers,’ Joan Greenson recalled. ‘The noise of the shutters and the motor drives on the cameras drowned out any normal conversation. At first we were not permitted to enter the chapel, the mortician informed us, because the family was with the body. I thought to myself, What family? If she’d had a family to be with, we probably wouldn’t have to be here.’
The chosen guests gathered at last in the chapel, facing a coffin that looked much too large. A eulogy was spoken by Marilyn’s teacher, Lee Strasberg, who had not found the time to visit Marilyn the last time he had visited the West Coast.
Strasberg said of Marilyn, ‘She had a luminous quality, a combination of wistfulness, radiance, yearning, that set her apart and yet made everyone wish to be part of it.’
A nondenominational pastor made a brief address, drawing on a verse from the Book of Psalms: ‘How fearfully and wonderfully she was made by the Creator!’
The music of ‘Over the Rainbow’ was piped into the chapel — Marilyn had been a fan of Judy Garland. Then it was almost over.
Attendants solemnly slid a mass of flowers toward the foot of the coffin, and lifted the lid. As they did so, Joan Greenson recalls, ‘a shock of yellow hair popped out. I couldn’t bear to look.’
Of those who did look, DiMaggio was last. Marilyn was lying, cushioned by what the press called ‘champagne-colored’ velvet, a posy of DiMaggio’s roses in her dead hands.
DiMaggio, who had wept throughout the ceremony, said, ‘I love you’ again and again, then bent for a final cold kiss.
Held back by more police than were needed, the crowd watched as Marilyn was borne to the Mausoleum of Memories. The hearse moved slimly, incongruously flanked by security guards from Pinkerton’s, in powder-blue uniforms and white gloves.
The pastor said, ‘Ashes to ashes,’ and the coffin was wheeled to a hole in the wall covered by a brown curtain. With difficulty, sweating in the heat, four men in black shoved the coffin into a waist-high vault.
The few wreaths from the famous included those from Sinatra, Jack Benny, and Spyros Skouras. There were flowers marked simply ‘Arthur,’ and more from Miller’s children.
An anonymous wreath bore the full text of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet that goes:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
… I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Three times a week, for twenty years, Joe DiMaggio had a pair of red roses delivered to Marilyn’s crypt. In 1982, without explanation, the order was canceled.
Marilyn’s friend Robert Slatzer filled the gap. He sent white roses, under a covenant that would ensure delivery until long after his own death.
‘Do you know where the poor darling is buried?’ said director George Cukor. ‘You go into this cemetery past an automobile dealer and past a bank building, and there she lies, right between Wilshire Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard, with the traffic moving past.’
At Westwood Memorial Park, a number of other celebrities became Marilyn’s neighbors in death. The ashes of Peter Lawford lie fifty feet from Marilyn’s crypt. Sometimes, when the old flowers in Marilyn’s urn seemed too fresh to throw out, the delivery man would move them to Natalie Wood’s grave, just a few paces away.
One tier above Marilyn, in the same wall, lies the body of an obscure teenager called Darbi Winters. She was murdered in 1962, just after Marilyn’s death. She had only recently told her mother that, one day in the distant future, she wanted to be buried near Marilyn Monroe.
The owners of the vacant vault next to Marilyn’s at one point put the space up for sale for $25,000. The cemetery authorities would not reveal whether it was in fact purchased.
The Monroe faithful, and the idle curious, still arrive in a steady trickle to peer at the crypt. The facing stone was replaced once, after it had been chipped by souvenir hunters and marked indelibly with the lipstick of female kisses.
The husbands, and some of the lovers, found their lives altered forever by their association with Marilyn.
Three years after Marilyn’s death, in 1965, Joe DiMaggio stood in a ceremonial lineup for baseball hero Mickey Mantle at New York’s Yankee Stadium. Robert Kennedy came along the line, smiling and shaking hands. Rather than shake Kennedy’s hand, DiMaggio quickly backed away.
‘Marilyn hangs like a bat,’ said the singer Sammy Davis, ‘in the heads of the men that knew her.’
Gowned in green, the g
Three weeks after Marilyn’s death, her mother Gladys wrote a sad but unusually lucid little letter from the Rock Haven Sanitarium, where she was still confined. In a note to her guardian, Inez Melson, she said of ‘dear Norma Jeane’:
She is at peace and at rest now and May Our God bless her and help her always … I wish you to know that I gave her (Norma) Christian Science treatments for approximately a year. Wanted her to be happy and joyous. God Bless you all. …
On a dark night a few months later, Marilyn’s mother escaped from the Sanitarium. Clutching a Bible and a Christian Science manual, she climbed down a rope of knotted sheets and wandered off across suburban Los Angeles.
She was found in a Baptist church, and a clergyman talked to her before she was returned to confinement. ‘People ought to know,’ the mother said of her famous offspring, ‘that I never did want her to become an actress in the first place. Her career never did her any good.’
A month before she died, sitting with the head of the studio at Twentieth Century-Fox, Peter Levathes, Marilyn offered a sad commentary on herself.
‘I’m a failure as a woman,’ she said. ‘My men expect so much of me, because of the image they’ve made of me and that I’ve made of myself, as a sex symbol. Men expect so much, and I can’t live up to it. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman’s. I can’t live up to it.’
Within days of that conversation Marilyn asked Life reporter Richard Meryman, ‘Do you know the book Everyman?’ Meryman replied that he did.
‘Well,’ Marilyn told him, ‘I want to stay just in the fantasy of Everyman.’
Dean Martin’s former wife Jeanne offered this view on Marilyn and other idols of our time. ‘I call them the Poster People,’ Martin said. ‘They’re the most durably famous, yet in many cases they have nothing to them. You find them only through the roles they played in their films. I am not an uncompassionate person, but look at the way they were. The Montgomery Clifts, and the Marilyn Monroes, Elizabeth Taylor and David Bowie. In life they attract each other. They meet socially, they rush straight at each other, but they have nothing that means anything to mortals. History jettisons them forward into time, and I find their portraits on my son’s bedroom wall, pale and beautiful, but lost to reality.’
Marilyn Monroe, however, was more than a Poster Person — although she had once been just that on the wall of John Kennedy’s hospital room. Certainly Marilyn was a mass of paradoxes, a sex symbol who found no happiness in love, an actress who was terrified each time she stepped onto a sound stage. She was an ardent pursuer of learning who never learned to live with herself, who toppled in the end into something very close to madness.
Marilyn’s legacy, for all that, is made of more solid stuff than fantasy. ‘Everyman,’ to whom she offered her last public aspiration, remains bewitched by a woman of astonishing achievement. Marilyn, a fugitive from a deprived childhood, battled her way to world prominence with more than sex. She did it with sheer hard work, and an innate brilliance that shines out of even the most inane movies with which Hollywood chose to launch her. For a dozen years her presence on and off the screen made millions laugh and cry, and they have not yet shown any sign of forgetting.
In the fickle century that invented ‘stardom,’ only Charlie Chaplin was memorialized and chronicled more than Marilyn Monroe, a fact that would probably amaze and amuse her. Fittingly, Marilyn’s brittle, too-long laughter follows us down the decades of an era that some call the Age of Anxiety. In that odd telegram to Robert Kennedy, weeks before she died, she described herself as one of the few remaining earth-bound stars. ‘All we demanded,’ Marilyn said in the telegram, ‘was our right to twinkle.’ She more than earned that right, and Everyman has made her a goddess.
Part Seven
POSTSCRIPT
‘Nobody has ever testified under oath as to these allegations. I believe that all the continuing questions should be confirmed, explained, or proven to be not true …’
MIKE ANTONOVICH,
Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, October 1985
‘As public prosecutors we cannot support a grand jury investigation concerning matters of historical interest by artificially cloaking them in the guise of a criminal enquiry.’
IRA REINER,
Los Angeles District Attorney, November 1985
1985 — Open and Shut
‘She committed suicide by barbiturates; that is the reality, and there is nothing very special about it except for the fact that she was Marilyn Monroe.’ So spoke Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates, announcing public release of police documents on Marilyn’s death. It was September 23, 1985. ‘Permit me to express a faint hope,’ said California Attorney General John Van de Kamp, ‘that Marilyn Monroe be permitted to rest in peace.’
The release of documents was no spontaneous gesture. Gates had earlier refused to release the papers. Now, in the knowledge that the author had obtained them anyway from a confidential source, he caved in to pressure from ABC Television’s 20/20 program.
The released file contained rather less than was available to readers of Goddess. (In a hilarious exercise in bureaucratic futility, officials blanked out — in the police version — telephone numbers that were openly reproduced in the first edition of this book.) Gates hoped the release of the file would ‘put to rest speculation that Monroe was murdered’ — a speculation not indulged in Goddess. It was a vain hope.
In the months to come, Marilyn’s fate was rarely out of the headlines. For this author and his publisher, it meant a windfall of publicity that no money could buy. Goddess became a bestseller. It was also the trigger for two episodes — a shameful public circus involving the Los Angeles County grand jury, and a scandal over the cancellation of a television program. Ironically, and sadly symptomatic of our times, the cancellation of the television report caused more furore than the aborted jury process. The cancellation occurred in a wave of innuendo suggesting intervention by the Kennedy family.
The Censoring of 20/20
In 1985, at a restaurant in Manhattan, a producer for ABC Television’s 20/20 program, Ene Riisna, met with a representative of Macmillan, my American publisher. Riisna and another senior producer, Stanhope Gould, read an early proof copy of this book, and swiftly decided that the Monroe-Kennedy angle would translate into ‘a first-class television news story’.
Both producers are distinguished — Gould has won four Emmy awards for his investigative work. In the seventies, his program on Watergate was the television production that did most to make Watergate a national issue.
Gould and Riisna did not see their story in the documentation of Marilyn’s affairs with the Kennedy brothers. That would hardly astonish the American people.
In Gould’s words, ‘It was the documentation coupled with the mob angle that made it a major story — the fact that the President and Attorney General of the United States had put themselves in a position to have the nation’s most powerful criminals eavesdrop on their affairs with the nation’s most famous actress and were exposed to blackmail. That’s one hell of a story …’
Gould and Riisna knew they would have that story if their own crosschecks and research produced positive answers to three questions. Did the affairs really happen? Did the mob obtain compromising bedroom tape-recordings? Did Robert Kennedy become even more seriously compromised, by visiting Marilyn in Los Angeles just hours before she died?
Executive Producer Av Westin wanted a major scoop to open the program’s fall season. He told his producers, ‘Go to it!’
From June to September, with teams working across the United States and in Europe, 20/20’s resources were put to work. The reporter was Sylvia Chase, a twenty-year veteran whom Westin described as ‘an absolute bear on facts. If Sylvia says it’s true, it means that she’s
Four months, and a quarter of a million dollars later, the 20/20 journalists were triumphant. They had corroborated the information in this book — and, in the wiretapping area, taken it further. Their program was edited to run at about half an hour, twice as long as an average item.
In mid-September, huddled in a cutting room on New York’s Columbus Avenue, the producers viewed their work with Producer Westin. He was impressed, but ill at ease. Westin wanted major cuts, including references to other episodes in which John Kennedy left himself open to blackmail — the affair with Judith Campbell, the Hollywood starlet also involved with Mafia boss Sam Giancana, and Kennedy’s wartime relations with Inga Arvad, a Dane suspected of spying for the Germans.
The producers did not object to the cuts, yet Westin still seemed troubled. A program this ‘sensitive’, he said, would have to be seen by ‘the Fourth Floor’, the executive of ABC News. Meanwhile, the Monroe program was postponed for a week.
The first executive viewing was by Robert Siegenthaler, Vice-President for News Practices. Siegenthaler, himself a former producer, merely suggested minor commentary changes. As the tail-end of a hurricane swept through the streets outside, 20/20’s producers felt only relief. Their storm, however, was about to break.
Later, over a pizza lunch, the Monroe program was viewed behind closed doors by the then President of ABC News, Roone Arledge, his Senior Assistant David Burke, and Vice President Richard Wald. The producers, and reporter Sylvia Chase, were unceremoniously left to cool their heels outside.
Within hours 20/20 boss Westin told them, ‘They don’t want it to go out at all. What would be the minimum you could go with and get it on air?’
Over the next four days, working into the night, the team cut the story to thirteen minutes. During office hours, while researchers sought new sources for what was already multiply sourced, Westin and his producers engaged in a grotesque diplomatic dance with their own executives.