Could he?

Nine

In Bloom

“Life starts from NOW.”

MARILYN MONROE

By now, Marilyn was living in a three-room suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, on Park Avenue. “You entered Marilyn’s apartment directly into the living room,” remembers James Haspiel, Marilyn’s teenage admirer and friend, “on a bulletin board there on the right there were pages from foreign magazines; a portrait of Albert Einstein, and another picture of Einstein walking down a road, seen from behind. There was another page that appeared to me to be a picture of a cluster of hungry orphans all huddled together.” A sketch of Marilyn by actor Zero Mostel was propped on a tiny table.

Then the bedroom: False lashes cut into wedges scattered everywhere. Squat jars of Erno Lazslo’s Phelityl cream sealed with glossy black lids. Nightstands crammed with bottles of Jicky, Fracas, and Chanel; cigarette packs stacked by blue tins of Nivea cream. Heaps of Ferragamos tumbling from the closet. An unmade bed pushed to the wall and strewn with books—The Little Prince, Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Stanislavsky Directs. A telephone faced the headboard to hide her number from the riffraff. And a portrait of Abraham Lincoln pasted overhead like a rock star.

This all came at a price. Milton subsidized everything for Marilyn—even her personal expenses. He mortgaged his home to pay for her sublets, lawyers, hairdressers, beauticians, clothes, makeup, psychiatrists—even medical bills. One thousand a week for her suite at the Towers, $125 a week for psychoanalysis, $500 a week for “beautification,” and $50 a week for perfume. On top of that was a press agent and a private secretary who moonlighted as hairstylist when Caruso couldn’t make house calls. “She liked convenience,” Milton recalled. “She was a bit lazy. She liked to have people come over to do her hair, wax her legs. She’d pay someone to brush her hair, because she might not end up brushing it herself.” (Like that of most other platinum blondes, Marilyn’s hair was high-maintenance. Her natural texture was quite kinky and needed regular straightening permanents, and her roots needed retouching every four or five days. Her baby-fine hair tangled quickly, and she shampooed it each day—highly unusual by mid-century standards. Stylists maintained Marilyn’s shade with a special concoction of silver bleach mixed with twenty-volume peroxide and a violet toner to strip out the yellow.)

The cost was justified for Marilyn and Milton, who wanted to show Fox what she was worth. Besides, Marilyn loved the suite’s airy Frenchness, the high ceilings flooded with sunlight, “bright and fluffy in blue and gold and a bit of white.” She kept her windows thrown open, buckets of white camellias in the bedroom, and Sinatra spinning on the phonograph. She lived in white terrycloth bathrobes, belt tied behind her like a sash. In solitary moments, she’d glide out to the balcony and light a cigarette, gulping in smoke and balmy city air.

“Hotel life is no kind of life for a woman,” Jane Russell warned her. But it suited Marilyn—the starchy white sheets and free flowing mimosas, the unmoored feeling so conducive to creative work. When she wasn’t working or socializing, she’d lie in bed reading, listening to records, or talking on the phone—activities made for hotels. This was the kind of solitude she loved—like her twenty-sixth birthday—alone at the Bel-Air, French doors flung open to a terrace of oleander, honeysuckle, and palms. Steaks, bottles of champagne. Joe phoning from New York. Rooms stuffed with telegrams, flowers, and presents from Fox.

For Marilyn, hotels featured heavily in those magical stretches when life hung in the balance, when she didn’t know if she would make it or not. Back in 1951 she leased an elegant suite at the Beverly Carlton. She spent her days driving to Malibu, her evenings at UCLA studying Titian, Tintoretto, and Raphael. At night she’d toss a chop in the Roto-Broil and leaf through scripts while munching on raw carrots. She’d lie back on her triple-size bed—her first real piece of furniture, the walls painted burgundy red, oyster white, and dove gray, just the way she wanted them.

“Great conflict was going on inside her,” wrote Sidney Skolsky, who accompanied Marilyn on her Pacific Coast joyrides. She’d blast down 101 at 80 miles per hour, past Laurel Canyon, then park somewhere along Malibu beach and drag Sidney on exhausting walks. “I’d listen to her talk,” wrote Sidney. “Mainly she talked career.… She’d say that she’d keep working and that nothing—do you hear?—nothing would stop her from becoming a movie star. Then in the next breath she’d doubt that she could ever make it.”

After one of these drives, she bought a full-length mirror. She stuck it on the door of her coffin-size closet, which tumbled with sweaters, slips, and hangers nabbed from Fox’s wardrobe departments. At the top of the mirror she scrawled NUNC in red lipstick. It’s Latin for “now.”

*   *   *

As much as she loved her suite at the Waldorf, Marilyn spent more time roaming the streets, basking in the glamour of her first Manhattan spring. You’d see her strolling down Broadway in a white tennis sweater, sleeves pushed up, camel coat in hand, stopping at Childs’ for burgers and black coffee. Or leaving Jim Downey’s with Eli Wallach, her hair pushed back by a white kerchief, skin makeup-free and coated with lanolin. She spent days with Sam Shaw combing through Third Avenue junk shops, or hitting a Central Park hot dog stand before plopping onto a bench for a long afternoon of people-watching. She was eager to explore everything about New York—so eager that she barely remembered to put on clothes. Once she threw on her mink right over her underwear, grabbed a pair of pumps and raced out the door to meet Sam for a walk down Fifth Avenue. Drunk from the city’s haphazard beauty, she hardly noticed how hot she was in her coat, or its dark fur pressed against her bare skin.

Celebrity photographer and Brooklyn Heights native, Sam was Marilyn’s ideal tour guide, and she quickly fell in love with his neighborhood haunts. “She’d walk the brick paved side streets of the Heights,” he wrote, “examining the restored carriage houses along Love Lane, visiting the musty book stacks of the Long Island Historical Society, pondering the outstretched arm of the statue of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher in the churchyard of the ruins of Plymouth Church.”

One morning, they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge—Marilyn in her camel coat, Sam with a Nikon slung round his neck. They were strolling the Promenade when it started to rain. Sam darted into a phone booth to ring a friend who lived nearby, asking if he could drop in with “a friend” to escape the sudden storm.

Norman Rosten—a poet and close friend of Arthur Miller’s—had been given no warning of Marilyn’s arrival. He first glimpsed her in the stairwell, sodden in her camel coat, no makeup, her wet hair piecey with silver glints from the rain. “I watched from above as she turned into the second floor,” Rosten wrote. “She looked like a pretty high school kid on an errand.” When they reached the door, Sam mumbled a name. Norman misheard it as “Marion.” He still had no idea who she was.

Marilyn glanced up—“Pleased to meet you”—then curled into the nearest chair with a baby-deer smile. When Norman noticed her wet shoes she slipped them off, leaving her chilly feet bare and exposed. His wife, Hedda, put coffee on and found a pair of slippers. They chatted about the rain, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Marilyn barely spoke—just in breathless little cloudbursts.

She leaped up to scan the bookshelf. Marilyn, like all compulsive readers, always made an immediate dash to the bookshelf, a fast path to easy friendship. “Hey, I’ve read this too,” she’d exclaim, eager to connect, eager to find out: Does this person’s inner landscape match mine? She grabbed a skinny book from a nearby table: Songs for Patricia by Norman Rosten. When Norman said he wrote it for his daughter, her eyes widened. She opened the book and read quietly until Hedda returned with coffee and cake.

HEDDA: “Do you live around here?”

MARILYN: “No, I’m not from New York. I’m studying at the Actors Studio.”

HEDDA: “That’s wonderful. Then you must have been in theater. What plays have you been in?”

MARILYN: “No, I’ve never been on the stage. But I have done some movies.”

HEDDA: “Oh? What was your movie name?”

MARILYN: “Marilyn Monroe.”

That night, the Rostens planned to hit a party three blocks down. When they invited Marilyn to tag along, she lit up in delight. She knew she’d go unnoticed in that soggy camel coat. Norman introduced her: “I’d like you to meet a friend, Marilyn Monroe.” Everyone laughed, drank, thinking it was a good joke. “Sure,” said the host, “happy to meet any of your friends, even Greta Garbo.”

Marilyn giggled, drank, and chatted—all the while passing for another milk-fed ingenue hoping to make it big. Even without her Monroe name, people were just as drawn to her. Norman watched in awe: “Was it her voice, the half-shy, half-curious way she looked at people, her sudden warmth, that quick, infectious laugh? It was like she’d stepped into the reality of her true self,” he observed, in this Brooklyn Heights brownstone thousands of miles away.

When Marilyn returned to her suite, she sat down to write her new friend a note. She thanked him for the visit, for the party, and most of all for the book. (Norman sent her home with Songs for Patricia.) She mentioned that she used to write poetry, usually when she was depressed—she had once showed it to a friend who had cried upon reading it. “But it was an old friend,” she concluded, “one I’d known for a long time.” Scrawled in light pencil, Waldorf-Astoria letterhead, April 1955.

That spring, Marilyn took up poetry again—often inspired by the city itself—the Brooklyn Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge, and Central Park. She took walks alone, or hailed a cab and asked the driver to take her over the bridge and drop her off near the Esplanade. Marilyn loved walking. In this way she was made for New York. Back in Hollywood she startled everyone by hiking around Beverly Hills in jeans and a sweatshirt. (No one ever walked in Beverly Hills—not even to the newsstand—the police would stop you.) In New York she could be like Baudelaire—a flâneur roaming the streets for rough patches of beauty. Everything inspired her: flower vendors; the East River, “like Pepsi Cola”; even taxi drivers. “Impatient taxi drivers,” began one poem, “driving hot dusty New York streets/ So they can save for a vacation driving hot dusty/ Highways.…” Another, called “The Towers,” opened with this line: “So many lights in the darkness.…”

*   *   *

As Marilyn’s support system grew, so did her confidence. She threw open her doors to the press, often inviting them into her own suite. Holding court from her luxurious perch, she bantered with journalists, flirting back, entertaining them with mimosas and gossip.

“I arrived at her apartment at the Waldorf Towers at the appointed time, 9:30 a.m.,” wrote Maurice Zolotow, who interviewed Marilyn in the spring of 1955. “Frank Goodman, her New York publicity man, was there. We waited. She was ‘getting ready,’ Goodman told me. We waited. At ten past ten she emerged.

“Marilyn, judging by the flush on her skin—and I was able to see a good deal of her skin—had recently bathed. The aroma of Chanel No 5 pervaded the small living room. She wore a white terry cloth robe with nothing underneath. No stockings and no slippers. Her legs were slim and finely tapered, and sometimes, when she flowed into a change of position in the armchair in which she was curled, I glimpsed a vista of white thighs. Her thighs were also beautifully tapered. I was struck by the fact that her toenails were painted platinum-white, to harmonize with the shade of her hair. Her hair was unkempt. I assumed she had not had time to brush and comb it. Later I found out she doesn’t like kempt hair. She wore no cosmetics on her lips cheeks or eyelashes. I wasn’t sure about her eyebrows. She might have had eyebrow pencil on her eyebrows. She appeared sweet and guileless, though the mole on her left cheek imparted an eighteenth-century Madame du Barry touch, a dramatic contrast to her angelic features.”

He noticed the books stacked on the end table—James Joyce, Emerson, the letters of George Sand—the English bicycle propped by the kitchen window. The tiny gray kitten batting a rolled-up sock. “Milton Greene and I have a lot in common,” she said when asked about MMP. “We have parallel aims and ideas. I think he’s very capable and talented and a lot of other people will see it too. It is ridiculous to think that he is using me or I am using him.” When prodded about her financial arrangements, Marilyn bristled. “That’s my business,” she snapped, “how I’m living and supporting myself.”

What struck Zolotow most was her total self-possession, how she spoke with none of her usual shyness. “It wasn’t about money,” Marilyn said of her break with Fox. “It was about my rights as an actress and as a human being. I know they didn’t want to hurt me. They sincerely thought they were choosing the best for the Studio and for me. I feel it is up to me to show them that I am capable of interpreting roles with more depth, more feeling than they have ever seen me do. But I must have approval of the script and a good director,” she insisted. “I want good stories—not just to be thrown into any old thing. I think I am a serious actress, and I want to prove it.”

*   *   *

Zolotow lingered, and Marilyn got up to concoct a milk punch spiked with chocolate syrup and shots of Marsala (a remnant of the DiMaggio days). Maurice mentioned Ulysses and Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, and Marilyn marveled that a man “would go into a woman’s mind” like that. She showed him her latest junk-shop find, a reproduction bust of Nefertiti (“Do I look like her?”). They commiserated about anxiety and therapists, discussed psychoanalysis as a sort of religion.

“I believe more in Freud than in mysticism,” she said with a laugh. “I do not think I will ever take the road of religion, and yet I still believe in many things that cannot be explained by science. I am still learning. I am still seeking. I believe human nature is a dynamic thing, and a person should never stop growing and changing. I am not afraid of change and growth. I believe in freedom and independence.”

“I want to learn,” she added after a pause. “I want to learn so badly. I read and study as much as I can, because I want to grow as a person.”

Before Maurice left, Marilyn read him some of her cityscape poems. She told him that she’d “fallen in love” with Brooklyn, that she wanted to buy a little brownstone there and travel West only to make pictures. “New York is my home now,” she said. “I love it here. I’ll never live in Hollywood anymore.”

When Zolotow asked if New York had changed her, she answered quickly and firmly: “Oh, yes. I have found freedom and independence, and I don’t intend to let them slip away.”

*   *   *

Marilyn was blossoming. Her hopes soared like the blurry spiked spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Lee had her constantly thinking, observing, and expanding. She studied the animals at the Central Park Zoo, their movements and gestures. The slow lope of the bison, the sun bear’s hot claw—black matte as if it had been manicured. The thick, wet lashes of a giraffe; the sad little capuchin monkeys with their furrowed blonde brows. She liked the sea lions—they’d bark and splash and gaze up like puppies, beadlets of water glistening on their crested, canine heads. But it was a lioness named June who Marilyn grew attached to and seemed to tame within an hour. Every so often June would creep to the edge of her cage, swishing her tawny tail, and Marilyn would stick her hand through the iron bars and pet the dark tuft of fur at its tip.

A chill crept up, the sun dropped and glowed pink against the blackening gate. The zookeeper clanged a bell and called, “Closing in ten minutes.” Marilyn lingered, clinging to the lion’s cold cage. Something about June’s weary glamour touched Marilyn. She hated to leave her. “She’ll be all alone in the dark,” she cried on the phone to Susie that night. “She’ll be lonely.”

Marilyn has often been compared to daffodils, hummingbirds, kittens, wrought-iron butterflies. But it was the writer Karen Blixen who saw Marilyn as one of the baby lion cubs she’d cuddled so many times in Kenya, exotic, adorable, and, she wrote, utterly terrifying: “I would not keep her.”

Compelled to delve deep in her own traumatic past, Marilyn spent nights in her bathrobe smoking in bed, gouging her memory for clues. She scribbled stories—of switches, churches, and aprons—her frantic slant filling sheet after sheet of starchy white paper, pausing to flip through Freud’s letters or Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Self-discovery and acting were two quests that defined Marilyn’s life, and under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg, they became intertwined forever.

She first approached her therapist with wary self-consciousness. “I’m afraid to ever say anything,” Marilyn wrote, “for fear she will think I am trying to flatter her.” But she quickly began to trust Dr. Hohenberg and even examined her reasons for not having trusted in the past. With her customary bravery, Marilyn addressed the sexual abuse she’d suffered as a child, and the foster mother who hadn’t believed her. “I will not be punished,” she wrote, “or be whipped/ or be threatened/ or not be loved/ or sent to the hill to burn with bad people/ or ashamed/ exposed and known and seen/ or ashamed of my sensitive feelings/ SO WHAT/ they are reality. My body is my body, every part of it.”

“It’s much better to know reality,” she wrote, urging herself to face things clearly, “and to have as few illusions as possible. I can and will help myself and work on things analytically no matter how painful.” Her flaws, she discovered, were her greatest gifts. “My sensitivity is so strong—much deeper and stronger than that of Susie’s.… Do not be afraid of my sensitivity.… I can and will channel it.” She learned to embrace her quirkiest qualities, even the “crazy thoughts.” Through therapy and work with Lee she explored her neuroses, owning them with confidence and authority. Gradually, she began to see herself for who she really was—an intelligent, ambitious, complicated woman on the verge of something great.