Tim’s face darkened. “I ask you a civil question and you get smart.”
Ed flashed his Cheshire grin and continued to shuffle around, mixing drinks at the bar like he owned the place. (Sometimes you’d forget that he didn’t own the place—he had his mail delivered there, and that’s where he entertained guests.) Every now and then he’d put down his camera and scrawl his own version of a Thurber dog on a cocktail napkin. Hours passed—more drinks and more cigarettes, sun sinking lower and the Third Avenue El rattling above. No one gave Marilyn more than a quick look. As she was leaving, a photographer at the bar tapped Ed on the arm. “If you come back later,” he stage-whispered, “bring your little friend.”
Marilyn wanted to stay—this murky subterranean nook offered her a freedom she had never found in California, with its relentless sunshine and solar blankness. Before the year was out, the Third Avenue El would be torn down, along with the pillars the regulars used to steady themselves while hailing cabs in the morning hours. Ed would take a turn for the worse, drinking more and photographing less. And Marilyn would be teetering on the edge of a new life.
They took more street photos near the Gladstone suite, this time in sleek black and her favorite fur collar. This was her classic movie star “disguise”—though the rhinestone-studded cat eyes didn’t fool anyone. They walked down 57th Street, sweet pollen mingling with the scent of wet mink. She paused by the window of Liz Arden’s salon, with its flower display and cool bottles of beauty. The glass door swung open in a gust of setting lotion, behind it a woman—stiff and tall as a mannequin, dressed like Marilyn in all black and tailored wool. In her pillbox hat with starchy veil and sprayed-stiff curls pinned tight to the scalp, she looked like a ghost from a different time. If she recognized Marilyn, she didn’t show it and continued her glide down Fifth Avenue.
Marilyn had little in common with the dark femmes, ice queens, scrubbed virgins, and gamines of her era. She anticipated the exciting, complicated women of the French New Wave who were just beginning to emerge at the time of her death. They were passionate rebels who grinned through wine-stained teeth, reveled in their kinks, and were all the more gorgeous for it. It’s ironic that Marilyn—icon of hard-spackled glamour—was actually a pioneer for the restless flesh-and-blood beauties who surfaced in the sixties.
In one of her most progressive shoots yet, Marilyn posed dishabille in her rooms at the Ambassador. When a seamstress came to fit her for another Norell dress, Ed whipped out his camera, eager to catch the classic Marilyn moment. Each shot is intimate, with a delightfully subversive feel. We see her fastening a garter or striking a cheeky pose in an Ambassador monogrammed bathrobe. We see her relaxed and in control, perched on the arm of an upholstered chair, drinking wine from an old-fashioned coupe. (She rarely used furniture as it was meant to be used.) We see her unmade bed, her chaotic suite—mink flung on the chaise, bras and books strewn over the carpet, vanity cluttered with half-drunk wineglasses, Glorene lashes and square compacts in black lacquer. The white wicker furniture and floral wallpaper look more like a teenage bedroom than a movie star suite. You can breathe the smoke curling up from her cigarette, inhale her skin as she anoints her cleavage with hot drops of Chanel.
Reduced to mascot of the ultra-femme fifties, few people realize how progressive Marilyn really was. None of her contemporaries would have allowed themselves to be photographed bare-faced and hungover, joking with the dressmaker, passing out in full makeup, or simply lolling around their own messy hotel room. Grace Kelly was pure patrician ice. Liz Taylor was warm-blooded but Hollywood flawless. And Audrey Hepburn played the artless ingenue but rarely dropped her gamine polish—at least not for the camera.
On March 24, Eddie Feingersh photographed her getting ready for the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof premiere—lining her eyes with Liz Arden pencils, dusting her nose with peachy finishing powder. She fluffed her hair, sipped wine from a tumbler balanced on the dresser corner. Then the lavish finish: “Before going out, she put on a performance with the stopper from a bottle of Chanel No 5,” wrote Robert Stein, “stroking her skin in sensuous delight.”
She arrived at the Morosco Theatre in a cloud of white ermine, glowing like a bronze doll in her sheath. She’d paired couture and fur with rockabilly hair, her hands ringless under her opera gloves, nails clear, lustrous, and rubbed with lanolin. Her bare swathe of neck was more arresting than the sea of chokers and chandelier earrings glittering around her. She might have been the only woman there without a single piece of jewelry.
Milton Greene was there to shepherd her through the crowd. They spent most of the night together, whispering and giggling during intermission. She engaged her fans with touchable ease, slipping off her mule and using its sole as a surface for autographing Playbills. Tennessee Williams fluttered around, inviting everyone to the after-party on the St. Regis rooftop.
His mother, Miss Edwina, held court on the roof, in her garden-party frock and bonnet swathed in flowers. Gore Vidal and Truman Capote milled around clutching highballs, teacups, and cucumber sandwiches. Writer Elaine Dundy described the moment Marilyn arrived.
At that moment a buzz and a rustle ripped through the crowd. Everybody stopped what they were doing, freeze-framed with their drinks, hors d’oeuvres or cigarettes halfway to their mouths. They were all looking in one direction. A path had been cleared, and walking through it was Marilyn Monroe. She was wearing what anyone else would have called an underslip, a simple, unadorned black silk slip with thin shoulder straps and clearly nothing under it. Her skin was a luminous alabaster with pearly blue and rose tints such as I have never seen outside paintings by the Old Masters. She was more astonishingly beautiful in the flesh than on celluloid and we all stared silently in our reverence.
Eventually the party started up again. By then I had worked my way around to her part of the room and was rewarded with the following tableau vivant: blonde Marilyn was seated in an armchair. On one of its arms perched Carson McCullers, her brown hair chopped short and uneven as if she’d taken an ax to it, her body fierce in tomboy tension and twisted like a pretzel. Sitting in a chair on the other side of Marilyn-In-Her-Slip was Edwina-Williams-In-Her-Hat. They were conversing with each other, all three with heads inclined. The Three Fates, I decided; Beauty, Brains and Motherhood. Whose destiny were they spinning out at that very moment?
Eddie was waiting at the Gladstone when Marilyn staggered back, collapsing by the fire in a threadbare chair. He took one last shot of her drifting to sleep in white fox fur. She slept upright in the lobby that night while bats beat their lullaby in the rafters above.
As their week together drew to a close, Marilyn grew quieter, more reflective. She took off her peach Pucci dress and wrapped herself in a white terry bathrobe. Without a word she stepped onto the balcony, lit a cigarette, and stared out at the Manhattan skyline. “Eddie’s shutter just kept clicking, and rolls of 35 mm film filled up,” wrote Robert Stein. “He never asked her to pose. She hardly knew he was there.”
This was a Marilyn the world hadn’t seen yet—alone, withdrawn but dazzlingly happy.
Eddie’s photos of Marilyn are infused with some quiet magic, which Robert Stein attributes to the resemblance between photographer and subject. “In their days together,” wrote Stein, “despite their disparity in looks, I could see Eddie and Marilyn were much alike. Like Marilyn, Eddie was given to self-parody to mask the pain of being defenseless against daily living and, like her, desperate to make full use of the gifts such an open nature provides. Just as Marilyn dreaded looking less than perfect in front of the cameras and was always late, so Eddie obsessed over what he did behind the camera and would let no one else develop or print his pictures.… They both were somehow more directly connected to life than the rest of us, and more vulnerable. Each held on to an ideal of Art as if it were life itself, and, as it turned out for both of them, it was. Marilyn’s movies and Eddie’s pictures made those who saw them feel more alive but at the same time fear for their safety, sensing the price that would have to be paid for their luminous openness.”
But it was Marilyn’s luminous openness that made her such a hit in New York. For the first time, she felt accepted, welcomed. Unlike glassy, judgmental Hollywood, New York embraced her quirks and creativity, and she couldn’t imagine going back. “If I close my eyes and picture LA,” she said at this time, “all I see is one big varicose vein.”
* * *
After months of lying low, Milton was anxious to stir up publicity for Marilyn. The fans should see for themselves that their star had not dimmed, that she wasn’t in exile cowering under the thumb of the mighty Darryl Zanuck. They needed a stunt, a spectacle, with all the razzle-dazzle Marilyn deserved. This could be tricky—her contract with Fox forbade paid appearances except for charity events. Mike Todd would soon be hosting a Ringling Bros. gala to raise funds for the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation. With a celebrity guest list, Madison Square Garden location and Milton Berle as ringmaster, this could be the perfect high-profile debut. As a longtime supporter of charities, Marilyn leaped at the chance to appear in the circus—riding an elephant, preferably a small, female one, with a rhinestone saddle and pink bow on its tail.
The fitting at Brooks Costume Company was a disaster. She’d been given a charcoal bodice to match the elephant’s skin, but Marilyn hated charcoal and demanded a black one. Besides, it was too tight—the seams dug into her flesh and hurt. Tailors and seamstresses bustled around her. Costume fitter Mary Smith was there, so was Dick Shepherd, Milton Greene, Eddie Feingersh and Robert Stein. Reporter H.D. Quigg slipped in, eager to brag about seeing Marilyn naked. Half-dressed, humiliated, and surrounded by gawkers, Marilyn began to cry.
“At the costume fitting she arrived as the Star,” wrote Stein, who was alarmed by Marilyn’s sudden outburst, “until the Other abruptly emerged and burst into tears of frustration.” What Stein misidentified as some schizoid fit was really a normal reaction to being poked, prodded, sewn up, and stripped in a roomful of gaping men. She might as well be back in the Fox wardrobe room with the bitchy wardrobe assistants, tape measures, straight pins, and scratchy fabrics. It all felt like one giant step backward—she’d tottered around in five-inch heels, tripped on her train, and had fallen smack on her million-dollar ass. She hadn’t put her career on the line to be cut up into cheesecake again.
On March 31, she prepared to ride her elephant through Madison Square Garden. Backstage, Milton donned his dinner jacket and pinned her into the black velvet bodice. Stagehands frantically painted the elephant pink while someone hoisted Marilyn onto its back and pushed her into the crowd of 8,000 raucous fans.
“The place went absolutely ape,” Amy Greene told Photoplay. “I have never experienced anything like the hysteria and the din that came out of those mouths all the way up the stands. I’m telling you, I had goosebumps. Everyone cheered her, and when I looked up toward the balcony, it was the strangest sight. All I could see were the open mouths, right up to the rafters.”
Everything worked beautifully. The elephant was tender and tame, pausing to bow at the cheering audience. (Milton: “Afterwards she talked about how sweet and nice the elephant was. She called it a ‘sweet baby.’”) Marilyn smiled and waved in spangled glory, all the while bleeding from a straight pin that had punctured her thigh.
With its fishnet tights and heaps of cleavage, Marilyn’s costume was far more revealing than the halter necks and thin robes that had enraged Joe last year. Yet Joe seemed unruffled. In fact, when the elephant stopped in front of his box, Joe beamed “as if to let everyone know that Marilyn is still the one girl in his life.” Bedecked in her feathered can-can outfit, Marilyn waved from her perch. She was, quite literally, on top of the world.
The tide was beginning to turn—Marilyn had been wooing the press spectacularly. Journalists reported “peace offerings” from Zanuck, including dramatic roles in Anastasia and The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing. “If true,” predicted one reporter, “it seems that Marilyn’s revolt has begun to reap dividends.”
Milton and Amy basked in the glow of Marilyn’s wild triumph. It was as if they were all rebel teenagers, thumbing their noses at Hollywood. “It was like a cannon had been shot in Old Madison Square Garden,” remembers Amy Greene. “It was a moment in all our lives that we were David and Goliath—and we were loving every minute of it.”
Seven
Ingenue
“Marilyn was a field of wild flowers, a gamboling puppy in the backyard, a pink sunset in June. She was glorious, and we had to look.”
MARLON BRANDO
Marilyn’s pink elephant entrance had the effect she’d been hoping for. “It was international coverage,” explained Amy. “Newspapers, magazines—nothing that was printable at that point didn’t carry a huge picture of her. So now Zanuck is freaking out. The stockholders are saying, ‘Darryl, this lady is looking good, why isn’t she making pictures?’”
She soon caught the attention of Edward R. Murrow, an award-winning journalist who’d taken down McCarthy. He wanted Marilyn for his TV series, Person to Person, and arranged to meet with her and Milton at the Ambassador Hotel. Ed talked shop with Milton, lit Marilyn’s cigarettes, joked about the fast one she’d pulled on Zanuck and crew. Marilyn beamed in her marten fur. Ed’s show, with its massive audience, was a chance to launch her dream into the world.
But when Murrow and his crew descended on the Greenes’ home for filming, something shifted. Marilyn watched the technicians rush around the living room, fiddling with their cables and cameras. Milton looked on anxiously—he recognized the look of panic flickering across her face. He hoped they’d finish up the preparations in time for a quick rehearsal to ease Marilyn’s nerves. “I took her for a ride on my motorcycle to distract her,” he said. “We talked, and she was nervous. That comes off on the show—a certain kind of nervousness that she’s trying to shake off.”
Even her outfit—a straight wool skirt and white short-sleeved sweater—seemed stiff and awkward. It didn’t suit Marilyn at all—nor was it remotely typical of her easy style. She’d had use for those sorts of plainer outfits in Connecticut, but in the city she’d been living in black slips and bathrobes. She gave subsequent interviews on her own louche terms—in a suite at the Waldorf wearing nothing but a robe. Needless to say, those interviews were far more successful.
At the time it seemed novel to film her en famille, but the whole setup cast her as a dependent little girl. In spite of her closeness with the Greenes, she was still their guest. It would have been bold and unnatural for her to march around the house like she owned the place. In Weston, Amy reigned as a confident queen—it was her domain, not Marilyn’s. Amy jumped in whenever Marilyn faltered—and that day Marilyn faltered a lot. She sat mutely on the couch, looking to the Greenes for cues and approval, stroking the dog’s fur when she saw Amy petting it. Everything seemed to go wrong—even Ed Murrow’s opening question—“How’s Marilyn as a houseguest; does she clean up after herself…?”—was infantilizing. How could she answer a question like that? Marilyn sighed, raising a sweet but exasperated eyebrow.
In Murrow’s defense, it was a valid question. Marilyn was about as domesticated as a baby cheetah—and just as rare in a Connecticut country home. But it wasn’t a cheetah Marilyn resembled that day—more like a plasticky, petrified doll, eyes darting under a thick fringe of panicky lashes. Gone was the usual witty minx who could catch a reporter’s banter and throw it right back at them. In fact, Marilyn seemed less like herself and more like those delightful ditzes Lorelei Lee and The Girl from The Seven Year Itch. At a time when everyone was waiting with bated breath for the “New Marilyn” to emerge, this was the worst possible outcome.
What happened? Milton, too, seemed mysteriously off. During rehearsals with Ed he’d been bright and talkative, but withdrawn and tentative today during filming. Marilyn and Milton could be moody and changeable, just as likely to dash out of a party as to rush to it. Amy called it “Russian gloom,” and it surfaced in them both, especially Milton, who could be strangely—though charmingly—absent. They had similar insecurities—the shyness, the childhood stutters—and they dealt with them in different ways. Milton would detach into blasé coolness, while Marilyn would lapse into fuzzed-out vagaries. Like many creative types, they were too dreamy to be sharp. Why chain yourself to the moment when you could be slipping in and out of Technicolor?
