Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (29 page)

Paula Strasberg did her coaching in Marilyn’s dressing room or at the actress’s rented home. Like Natasha Lytess before her,
she made herself indispensable. She knew how. She created a need and then filled it. She became Marilyn’s alter ego, patiently listening to all her laments and regrets, assuaging her anger, soothing her ruffled emotions. She talked Marilyn through her insecurities: Could she play the role? Would Arthur Miller stop loving her? She combated Marilyn’s fears and the resentments of producers, directors, and costars. When Marilyn flubbed or forgot a line, Paula shouldered the blame. In short, she held Monroe’s hand. She became
Lee Strasberg’s surrogate, doing what he would have done had he been present instead of his wife. “Operation Marilyn,” as the Strasbergs called it, brought in more money than they made with the Actors Studio and conferred upon Paula a newly discovered status. Her critics called her an opportunist and a starfucker, a designation they similarly bestowed upon Lee Strasberg.

During one of her days off from the
Bus Stop
shoot, Marilyn and Inez Melson, her business manager, drove to Verdugo to visit her mother at the Rockhaven Sanitarium. Milton Greene had allocated $300 per month of MMP funds to pay for Gladys Baker’s health care. Melson took care of the finances. She frequently sent cards to Gladys, often signing Marilyn’s name. When Monroe returned from her visit
with her mother, she felt so thoroughly deflated she called her analyst, Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, and asked her to fly from New York to Los Angeles for a personal consultation. Hohenberg complied and evidently succeeded in helping Marilyn to recover.

Monroe also saw Joe DiMaggio Jr. during this period, inviting him to visit her on the set at the Hollywood studio. She took a taxi to Black-Foxe and brought along enough food to feed half his dorm.

The actress spent most of her spare hours running through her lines. And late at night, unable to sleep, she would talk by phone with Arthur Miller, particularly when cast and crew found themselves on location, first in Phoenix, Arizona, and then at Sun Valley, Idaho.

To avoid the red tape of a New York divorce (and probably to be nearer to Monroe), Arthur Miller temporarily moved to the Pyramid Lake Guest Ranch, forty miles north of Reno, Nevada. Since the cottage he’d leased lacked telephone service, he resorted to a pay telephone booth a quarter mile away, on the edge of the property. When using a long-distance operator to connect them, Miller answered to the name Mr. Leslie, and Marilyn to Mrs. Leslie. Having been tipped off to the true identity of the Leslies, a television camera crew soon showed up at the ranch and started asking questions. The first person they queried was fiction writer Saul Bellow, Miller’s neighbor at the ranch; like Miller, Bellow had come to Nevada to seek a divorce. Bellow and Miller frequently ate dinner together, each vocalizing the strains and tensions of his last marriage. After cornering Bellow, the television crew asked if he’d seen Arthur Miller.

“Can’t say I have,” responded Bellow.

What about Marilyn Monroe—had he run into her?

“I’d certainly know if I
ran
into Miss Monroe, and I can assure you I haven’t.”

It wasn’t until 1959 that Saul Bellow met Monroe. They had dinner together in Chicago, after which Bellow observed that to be close to Marilyn “is like holding on to an electric wire and not being able to let go.”

Arthur Miller couldn’t let go. Besides the phone calls, he wrote to Marilyn every day, sending her long, confessional letters that she kept in a stack by the side of her bed. Disregarding Nevada’s six-week residential requirement, he drove to Los Angeles and checked into an apartment that she’d rented for them at the Chateau Marmont, again using the pseudonym Mr. Leslie. Mrs. Leslie—Marilyn—soon joined him, and the couple spent the night together.

Over the next month, they had two additional clandestine meetings at the same hotel. One evening they ventured to the Mocambo club on Sunset Boulevard to hear Ella Fitzgerald. It had been Marilyn, in 1955, who’d convinced the owner of the legendary Los Angeles nightclub to break the color code by offering Ella a singing engagement. Ella later told an interviewer, “The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. I never had to play a small jazz club again.” In fact, every year for the next five years, Fitzgerald appeared at the Mocambo, and often credited Marilyn for having helped to advance her career. “Marilyn Monroe was an unusual woman, a little ahead of her time. And she didn’t know it.”

In 1956, after attending a Beverly Hills party at which she’d met (and charmed) Achmed Sukarno, president of Indonesia, Marilyn came down with bronchitis and had to be hospitalized, interrupting production on
Bus Stop
for nearly a week. Having learned of her illness, Joe DiMaggio flew from New York to Los Angeles and dropped in on her at Cedars of Lebanon. He’d sent her a large bouquet of roses the day before. But it wasn’t a good visit. Arthur Miller phoned Marilyn from Nevada while DiMaggio was still in the room. Joe, who later related some of the details of his visit to George Solotaire and Paul Baer, excused himself and waited in the hospital’s sitting room for Marilyn to finish her call. When he returned, she told him outright what he’d expected to hear: that she and Arthur Miller were going to be married.

“Joe responded by telling Marilyn he’d read as much in the press but had wanted to hear it from her,” said Paul Baer. Paul accompanied George Solotaire to Los Angeles to meet up with DiMaggio. The three
men then drove to Las Vegas, where Edward Bennett Williams awaited them.

“Joe wasn’t a happy warrior,” said Baer. “Of course, there wasn’t anything he could do to alter the situation. He said to us, ‘Let’s go find Arthur Miller and take care of him.’ He wasn’t serious. He had contempt for the intelligentsia, but it didn’t compare to his hatred of Hollywood bigwigs. He had nothing against Arthur Miller. He figured Miller was in the picture primarily because he—Joe—had screwed up. If he hadn’t screwed up, he’d still have been married to Marilyn Monroe. That’s not to say he wasn’t upset. That first day or so, he drank himself sick. He drank in his Vegas hotel room because he didn’t want to tarnish his public image. I had the feeling, though, that he’d already mourned the end of his marriage. A day or two later, he came downstairs and joined us in the casino. He didn’t gamble much—he never did—but he chatted it up with the gangsters, the high rollers, the hookers, and the bookmakers, swapping stories about baseball and the underworld. And then he started jawing away with some showgirls. And as luck would have it, he wound up in bed with one of them.”

Kurt Lamprecht, a German-born writer living in New York, contacted Marilyn Monroe through Arthur Jacobs, her new PR agent, requesting an interview for the German press. Back in her Sutton Place apartment in early June, having completed work on
Bus Stop
, Marilyn agreed to the interview.

“She was enormously popular all over Europe, arguably the best known and most popular American actress,” said Lamprecht. “I found her to be an utter delight. Full of vitality and wonder, she also had an unquenchable desire to learn, to pick up knowledge and process it. She asked all sorts of questions about what my life had been like in Germany before I came to the States. Somehow we began talking about poetry. She showed me a letter she’d received from T. S. Eliot. ‘We’re pen pals,’ she giggled. She had an intense interest in politics and regularly wrote to the national affairs editor at the
New York Times.
We discussed the Actors Studio. She said she had grave doubts concerning her
acting skills but felt the Strasbergs were helping her. In her eyes, Lee Strasberg could do no wrong. She called him ‘the Great White Father.’ She revealed that before performing a scene for the Actors Studio with Maureen Stapleton from Eugene O’Neill’s
Anna Christie,
she became so nervous she peed in her panties. ‘And I don’t usually wear panties,’ she added.”

Lamprecht, an acquaintance of Arthur Miller’s, felt that Marilyn wanted to marry the playwright in order to validate her intellect. Not that there wasn’t also a sexual component to their relationship. Several days after his first interview with Monroe, Lamprecht accompanied the couple to lunch at Sardi’s. “They both looked suffused with a glow,” he remarked, “that could only come from a highly charged sexual relationship. To me it seemed obvious that sexuality represented an important factor for both. But evidently not everyone realized they were involved. Joan Copeland, Arthur’s younger sister, joined us for coffee and dessert that day, and it was clear she didn’t have the faintest idea they were anything other than good buddies. Joan, like Marilyn, took courses at the Actors Studio. But she seemed unaware that Marilyn would soon become her sister-in-law. I’d spoken to Truman Capote concerning Arthur and Marilyn, and he suggested that Miller was all but addicted to her—he was not merely besotted with her, he was smitten. Like Joe DiMaggio, Miller was in love, seriously, completely, with the full force of a man trapped in quicksand. Capote said to me, ‘If you ever write a book about the two of them, you ought to call it
Death of a Playwright.
’ ”

After lunch, Lamprecht returned to Marilyn’s apartment to complete the interview he’d begun with her a few days before. “She suddenly became very serious and at the same time sarcastic,” said Lamprecht. “She began talking about Arthur Miller’s problems with the government, how they’d unconstitutionally canceled his passport because maybe he’d once read a book by Karl Marx. She talked about his pending June 21 appointment to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which she referred to as ‘an agency dedicated to
the destruction of morality, creativity, and intelligence as we know it in this country.’ She was on her soapbox. She said that in August 1955 she, herself, wrote to the Soviet embassy, requesting an application for a visa to visit the USSR. It had nothing to do with politics. She’d hoped to see Russia because she wanted to look into the possibility of producing (and appearing in) a film version of
The Brothers Karamazov
. After she contacted the Russian embassy, all hell broke loose. The
Daily Worker,
an American Communist Party newspaper, ran an article reporting on her request to visit Russia. The FBI began tracking her every move, as if she were selling state secrets to the KGB. She surmised that by now her FBI file bulged with reports documenting all her ‘subversive’ activities, including her romantic involvement with, as she called him, ‘Comrade Miller.’ Marilyn insisted it was all part of the same whole-cloth plot: Congress wanted to implicate anyone and everyone they considered even remotely controversial. An amusing side note to all this is that whenever Marilyn got angry at Arthur, she called him ‘that Communist.’ ”

As scheduled, on June 21, ten days after Arthur Miller secured his divorce from Mary Slattery, he traveled to Washington, DC, to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Having been implicated by his relationship to Elia Kazan, who infamously named names for the HUAC, Miller was adamant that he was innocent and that he would provide no names for its witchhunt.

Marilyn Monroe remained in her New York apartment and watched the proceedings on television. Before the hearing began, ABC-TV aired a brief interview conducted several days earlier with Monroe, in which she vigorously defended Miller, proclaiming him “the only man I ever loved.” During the hearing, Miller, who purportedly attended a half dozen meetings of the Communist Party in the late 1940s, stated he was not and never had been a party member, and to the best of his knowledge had never attended a Communist Party meeting. He requested that his passport be returned to him. He wanted to go to England because for one thing,
A View from the Bridge
was opening in
London in October, and for another, because “I want to be with the woman who will be my wife.” He went on to say that he and Marilyn Monroe planned to be married, and she, too, had to be in England to begin work on a new movie.

Edward Bennett Williams told sportswriter
Maury Allen that the hearing broadcast, including the opening interview with Monroe, had “hit Joe DiMaggio like a brick wall. I figured he would cancel a dinner date we’d made for later that evening. He didn’t. He went straight ahead with it and never said a word about Marilyn all night. Joe has a way of blocking unpleasant things out of his mind like that. If he doesn’t want to discuss something that would hurt him, he just forgets about it.”

Once the HUAC hearing was over and had gone reasonably well, Miller and Monroe held an impromptu press conference at Marilyn’s apartment, the purpose of which was to formally announce their forthcoming nuptials. “Because of Miller’s HUAC hearing, half the country already knew of their plan, so I suppose the announcement was directed at the other half,” said Kurt Lamprecht, who attended the event. “One of the more notable incidents that afternoon took place when Marilyn hugged Miller. She embraced him with such force that he told her to stop, ‘or I’ll fall over.’ I didn’t know him personally, but I had difficulty imagining Joe DiMaggio making such a comment.”

Just as notable were the remarks Marilyn offered concerning the institution of marriage, a portion of which seemed directed specifically at DiMaggio as well as at the foster families the actress had experienced during her formative years:
“I guess I was soured on marriage because all I knew were men who swore at their wives and others who never played with their kids. The husbands I remember from my childhood got drunk regularly, and the wives were always drab women who never had a chance to dress or make up or be taken anywhere to have fun. I grew up thinking, ‘If this is marriage, who needs it?’ ”

Regarding her feelings for Arthur Miller, she said: “For the first time I have the feeling I’m going to be with somebody who’ll shelter me. It’s
as if I’ve come in out of the cold. There’s a feeling of being together—a warmth and tenderness. I don’t mean a display of affection or anything like that. I mean just being together.”

On June 29, the day of their planned civil marriage ceremony, Arthur and Marilyn were being driven along a winding country road by Morton Miller, Arthur’s cousin, when it became evident that they were being closely followed by another car. Morton sped up, as did the other vehicle. They were in Roxbury, Connecticut, where the playwright owned a small house he would soon sell, reinvesting the money in another Roxbury property, a 1783 two-story colonial farmhouse on 325 acres. Just as Morton rounded a bend, the driver of the second car lost control and careened off the road, crashing into a row of trees. Morton stepped on the brake. Marilyn jumped out and started running in the direction of the wrecked car. The driver looked dazed and badly injured. His passenger had been thrown through the windshield and lay unconscious by the side of the road in an ever-widening pool of blood. The driver eventually recovered. The less fortunate passenger died later that day. Her name was Mara Scherbatoff. She was a forty-eight-year-old New York bureau chief for the French magazine
Paris Match.
By chance, she’d attended the Sutton Place press conference and since then had been following Monroe and Miller for additional news on their imminent marriage. Marilyn took the tragic accident to heart. When asked by the Associated Press for a comment, she remarked: “It’s more than sad that Miss Scherbatoff should have perished in pursuit of a news story as trivial as my third marriage. It once again demonstrates the very arbitrary and futile nature of existence.”