It was two in the morning when they landed in New York. Before parting, Marilyn flung her arms round Eve and thanked her for bringing her home.

*   *   *

Between the Strasbergs and the Rostens, Marilyn spent the summer surrounded by puppies, cookouts, boat rides, and bike rides. But sometimes Norman caught her looking wistful, playing on the porch with the beagle one moment and staring through the mesh screen the next, or leaning listlessly against a sand pine, absently swinging her badminton racket, frowning at some invisible demon. At moments like these he’d say whatever he could to make her laugh, and she’d join him inside for a drink with Hedda.

Why this retreat inward, why this anxiety? Why this slow summer shift toward melancholy, this deepening gravitas? After months of uncertainty, her future was finally starting to look more secure. Thanks to The Seven Year Itch, she now had bargaining power. There was a fresh buzz around MMP, and Milton was fielding exciting new offers. After years of degradation, Marilyn just might be winning the upper hand. Wasn’t this everything she had been working for?

Her position at the Studio was no longer precarious. Weekdays in town were filled with parties—drinking screwdrivers out of Dixie cups and sharing chicken wings with Mike Gazzo. When she could, she’d pop by the Martin Beck Theatre to see Eli in Teahouse and romp around with him backstage. They’d go to Jim Downey’s for dinner and drinks, occasionally joined by Arthur Miller. Marilyn—always at ease more with friends than lovers—would be laughing and dancing with Eli while Arthur would watch silently, “swiveling a cigarette from tooth to tooth like a gun.” Sometimes she dragged him to the Strasbergs’ brunches, where he’d lurk on the sidelines, a pipe clenched between his teeth. He hated to see Marilyn sitting at Lee’s feet, Lee stroking her hair murmuring, “Yes, darling,” and “Of course, darling.”

Arthur was stressed. Paparazzi had already started to follow him everywhere—even biking down the cobblestones in Brooklyn Heights or the streets of Sheepshead Bay. A View From the Bridge was in production, but Marilyn left him completely distracted.

The stakes were high. Nearly forty, saddled with a stale marriage and stalled career, Arthur needed a change. Marilyn promised new happiness, maybe even a burst of creativity. But leaving his wife wouldn’t resolve Arthur’s issues, and neither would their subsequent divorce. Throughout his six-year relationship with Marilyn, Arthur would struggle with his work, suffer long dry spells, and would often be simply unable to write.

If Arthur expected Marilyn to be a muse, he was mistaken. She would never fit the Wife of the Great Man role—those beleaguered, understanding artists’ wives, with their loving smiles and dinner reminders and home-cooked stews. She herself was an artist—and as with many other artists, the people closest to her often fell into caretaking roles. She was not the type of woman to inspire a man, cook a three-course meal, and put the children to bed. She didn’t use alarm clocks. She cooked pasta with her hair dryer. It was her show, and it always would be.

Thirteen

Sutton Place

“New York is my home now.”

MARILYN MONROE

In September, Marilyn moved into an eighth-floor walk-up on Sutton Place. Her luxury suite had been draining MMP’s finances, and Marilyn was happy to downsize. She redid her bedroom to look just like the Waldorf: white walls, white chairs, pink taffeta counterpane, with Abraham Lincoln looming over the bed. She stacked books on the nightstand with a framed photo of Albert Einstein perched on top as if he were her overseas boyfriend. She hung paintings on the wall—one by director Jean Negulesco and another simple drawing she’d done herself. Records were strewn round the living room floor: Sinatra, Bing Crosby (Arthur’s), and Marilyn’s own recordings, such as “Love Me or Leave Me,” on 78 rpms with home-typed labels. The window looked out on her “Pepsi-Cola” East River and the floaty 59th Street Bridge.

With its fancy florists, sleek boutiques, and elegant brownstones full of Morgans and Rothschilds, Sutton Place was known as the Silk Stocking District and quickly became Marilyn’s world. She filled her prescriptions at Whelan’s Drug Store, ate coffee-cognac ice cream at Maxfield’s, and shopped at corner grocers stocked with caviar, white truffles, and quail eggs. You might spot her strolling across 50th Street with a trench slung round her shoulders, munching popcorn given to her by one of the Monroe Six, or leaning out her window in a baby-blue bathrobe, gazing toward the East River in the early morning light.

No longer living out of hotels, Marilyn was beginning to feel like a real New Yorker. She spent hours admiring Picassos at the Modern, or lingering over vanilla sundaes with friends from acting class. Marilyn’s constant crackles of fear were outweighed by a sense of joy, and for the first time in her life, belonging. Contented and secure in her private life, public opinion mattered less and less. “I learned early on to bring her the gossip-free New York Times if I brought her a newspaper,” wrote Jimmy Haspiel. “When in the past I had offered Marilyn a newspaper and said, ‘You are in Earl Wilson’s column today,’ her hand went right up between us, her palm facing me, her fingers pointed skywards, and she said, ‘I’m not interested, Jimmy.’ What Marilyn was doing was getting on with her life.”

Those little digs that hurt her so much in the past had ceased to bother her. When Judy Holliday parodied her on the radio, Marilyn was secure enough to let it roll off. “I hear you did an impression of me,” she teased when she caught Judy weeks later strolling down Fifth Avenue. Charmed, Judy asked her to tea the next day at her penthouse in the Dakota.

Judy spent the next morning tearing through her closet, yanking out dresses, ripping them off, and hurling them across the room in agony. “I look faaaaat,” she wailed, twisting and grimacing in the mirror. Marilyn arrived one hour late, in an old sleeveless blouse, ballet flats, and a wrinkled cotton skirt stained by splotches of black grease. Her roots showed, her bare legs were mottled by mosquito bites and scabs. Somehow, she’d forgotten to shave her armpits. But the skin on her face glowed, and her heat-fatigued sigh sounded like marshmallows. She was heartbreakingly, ravishingly beautiful.

Judy gasped. Two weeks after her radio caricature, the “real thing” stood before her in all her scruffy beauty. Judy felt suddenly dowdy, despite her WASP waist dress and salon-coiffed hair. “I thought I was a real woman,” she admitted later, “until Marilyn Monroe came over to my house for tea.”

*   *   *

By fall 1955, Sam Shaw, Norman Rosten, and Eli Wallach had emerged as her closest confidants—or, as Marilyn called them, Sam Spade, Claude-Claude, and Teacake. (Somehow her pet names always fit. Marlon Brando was Carlo. Paula was Black Bart. Lee was the Great White Father. Teenage Susie was miffed that she never got one.) But unlike Marilyn’s masculine, silent husbands, her “brothers” were warm, communicative men who packed picnic baskets and read poetry. They understood her—especially her empathy, which extended to inanimate objects. (Sam Shaw: “If you were browsing through an antique shop and didn’t like a lamp, she’d say she liked it and buy the poor lamp because no one else wanted it.”) They humored her odd behavior, such as ordering plates of asparagus and bacon from the fanciest restaurants in town or calling at three in the morning to complain about her cat.

“You never know when she’d phone in the middle of the night without identifying herself,” wrote Norman Rosten, “her voice low, breathless, impossible to disguise.” “Hello, it’s me,” she’d chirp into the phone. “What’s everybody doing?” Or “I thought we could stir up some mischief.”

“You had to be on her time,” Norman added. “She never got the time thing straightened out: it was a built in psychic time. Marilyn time. Possibly Einstein time.”

Eli Wallach shared Marilyn’s nutty sense of humor. When Shelley Winters told him about Marilyn’s crush on Albert Einstein, Eli bought a picture and signed it “To my dear Marilyn, Love Albert.” She giggled, had it framed in silver, and placed it on her beloved baby grand.

Their friendship ran deeper than simple jokes. Eli recognized Marilyn’s intelligence and admired her courage. “This is no dumb blonde,” he told Coronet magazine. “She’s got guts. Marilyn is not any one thing; she’s multidimensional.” They both worried over being typecast—Marilyn as the ditsy blonde, Eli as the Italian hothead. In class he stuck up for her like a big brother. “She’s smart,” he said to Maureen Stapleton during Marilyn’s timid first days at Malin Studios. “I know she’s smart,” Maureen had assured him.

In fact, Eli was so impressed by Marilyn’s professionalism that he asked her to help him rewrite a contract. “I remember her putting on her little Ben Franklin spectacles to read the contract. ‘All right,’ she told me. ‘Take out clauses three and four. And make sure they clarify your billing.’”

He loved that about Marilyn, how she shot lightness and play into serious moments. They were clowning around together—Wallach in a Sigmund Freud costume—when Marilyn suddenly looked up and whispered, “Eli, you’re going to be working all your life.”

In class they’d sit in each other’s laps or jump up during a break and dance the Lindy. Sometimes he took her dancing on Swing Street. “One time Marilyn and I were cavorting on the dance floor,” Eli remembered. “I looked up to the balcony, where I noticed Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, and Joe DiMaggio. I gulped and said that I didn’t feel like dancing anymore. She looked up at them and smiled. ‘The hell with them—let’s keep going!’”

Soon enough their names appeared in gossip columns all over the country. “Please, Annie,” Eli explained to his wife, Anne Jackson. “Think of Marilyn like my sister. I’m the beard for Arthur.”

The beard worked a little too well, arousing suspicion even among some colleagues. “I followed her up Broadway,” wrote Studio actor Stefan Gierasch, “while she was walking with Eli Wallach. She had grease on her face and was dressed down, but everyone still recognized her. Everyone always wondered if she was secretly dating Eli, but they never knew for sure.”

“Fortunately, I wasn’t famous,” wrote Norman Rosten, who also escorted Marilyn to concerts and premieres. “I was a safe, nonrecognizable, non-gossip companion. It sounds glamorous; it also was hard work. There we were one night, seated in Carnegie Hall, she in her devastating dress, I in my assembly-line suit, waiting for the great pianist Emil Gilels to enter on stage and be seated at the piano. ‘Relax,’ she whispered with that little laugh of hers. ‘They don’t know who you are.’ I don’t know if word of her presence got backstage, but Gilels played like a man inspired. At intermission, a Carnegie official approached and informed us that Mrs. Gilels was seated in a box across from our part of the dress circle and asked to meet her. Marilyn took my hand (she was worried I’d back out) and with half the hall watching, we crossed over to the box where Mrs. Gilels was chatting with a short, intense man. It was Gilels himself. Marilyn introduced me as ‘my poet friend’ and I tried my best to look poetic. He said to her ‘You must visit Russia one day. Everyone would like to see you.’ She answered, ‘I would love to, and someday I will. Right now I’m reading Dostoevsky.’ Then she turned to Mrs. Gilels, who didn’t seem to know more than a dozen words of English. ‘He’s a great man, your husband, you must be so proud of him.’ Mrs. G. smiled sweetly. It was a high moment in international relations.”

The next day’s gossip column: MARILYN MONROE COOING POETRY WITH NORMAN ROSTEN. Norman groaned. Hedda laughed: “It’s certainly better than ‘wooing.’”

Far from a devious femme fatale, Marilyn befriended entire families. She was a regular guest at the Wallachs’ home—eating bagels and gefilte fish, chatting with Anne over coffee in the kitchen, or babysitting their son Peter. She shared a birthday with Sam Shaw’s preteen daughter, Edie, and surprised her one year with tickets to the circus. “Marilyn was so excited,” Sam recalled years later. “She wore a skirt, a loose blouse, no make-up, a wig wrapped in a babushka like a scarf around her head. Edie I remember with lace trimmed bobby-socks, her hair tied in a bun and white dainty gloves. Both girls, a big sister and a kid sister.”

“Three Gemini children fated to meet and play,” wrote Norman Rosten of Marilyn, Edie Shaw, and his daughter, Patricia, whose birthday was right before theirs. “Edie and Patricia barely teenage, and Marilyn in her mid-twenties and ageless.” Marilyn was always giving Patty little gifts and trinkets, including an adorable dog named Cindy. Marilyn had found the dog roaming the streets, half starved, barely able to walk. With the help of a vet, she nursed Cindy back to health and presented her as a birthday gift to Patty. “The playful spirit of the child lurked in her eyes, her walk, her psyche, particularly her laugh,” wrote Norman Rosten. “That inner child stayed with her to the end.”

Marilyn doted on her own pets with childlike intensity. That fall she adopted a russet striped cat who mysteriously got pregnant under her care. Marilyn obsessed over prenatal cat care, fed it caviar, and lined a box with a blanket. She called Norman and Hedda with daily updates: “Cat looked fine, cat seemed to be breathing hard, cat didn’t eat much, cat looked listless, cat looked crazy.” Norman threatened to get an unlisted number if the kittens didn’t arrive soon. Marilyn coached her pet through labor alone and rang Norman at midnight: “They’re coming, the kittens! Hurry, take a cab!”

Marilyn always treated animals with empathy and care, just as she treated people. Years later she adopted a basset hound named Hugo and fretted over his moods. When Marilyn convinced herself that Hugo was depressed, it was Norman who helped feed the dog teaspoons of whiskey. “In those years people, friends were closer,” mused Norman. “There was more meaning to friendship.”

Throughout her life, Marilyn would refer to Norman Rosten as her “closest friend.” They discussed dreams, poetry, and art. “I had mentioned the Rodin section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” wrote Norman, “knowing it would delight her and for months she promised to see it. One day the phone rang: ‘I’m ready, Claude, if you are!’ It was the perfect Monroe sentence—directionless, timeless.”

The Rodin wing was empty that afternoon, and there was something hushed and holy in the rooms. She wandered around the airy vault, the cool marble matching her own skimmed-milk pallor. She paused by Pygmalion but it was The Hand of God that stopped her cold: a vision of obsessive love coaxed out of stone. She tiptoed round it, slipping off her sunglasses, eyes as solemn and rapt as a child’s. “This was a different dream, of love and happiness and culmination—a dream denied her,” Norman wrote. “She stood before this vision transfixed, finger at her lips.”

Ever the paradox, Marilyn was equally captivated by Francisco Goya. Back in May she’d rushed to the Met for its monthlong exhibit of his etchings and drawings—this time with Sam Shaw. She roamed, unrecognized, pausing to gape at his witches and ghouls, then suddenly turned to Sam: “I know this man well. We have the same dreams. I’ve had these dreams since I was a child.”

Eager to learn more, Marilyn immediately bought Goya’s biography. But she was bitterly disappointed—the book had none of the psychological insight she’d hoped for. Norman and Sam understood her frustration. They knew how personally she responded to art, instantly considering Goya a kindred spirit. They marveled at her complexity. Rodin’s eros and Goya’s demons coexisting in one angelic being.

“It isn’t simple with Marilyn,” mused Sam years after Marilyn’s death. “Nothing ever is.”

*   *   *

“She chose us because we were family men,” said Sam Shaw, referring to Norman, Eli, and himself. “She felt safe with us—there was no threat or sexual tension.” But Marilyn simply couldn’t turn off the flirt, telling Norman she loved him, sitting in Eli Wallach’s lap, making Sam girlish scrapbooks with crayon-drawn hearts (“I’d rather be dancing with you, Sam,” she scrawled on one page). She pushed boundaries—she couldn’t help herself. One weekend Marilyn ran into Eli at Idlewild Airport before a weekend flight to LA. He was waiting for a plane to San Francisco. She asked if he was flying alone and said, “If you had asked me I would have gone with you.”

“That was one of the few times I thought she was cruel,” claimed a mutual friend, who thought Marilyn was toying with Eli for sport. “She would never have gone to San Francisco with him.”

But it’s just as likely that Marilyn was compelled by her desire for closeness and warmth, her hatred of boredom, and the fact that she’d always been attracted to Eli. After all, he’d been on that list of “desirable men” she’d made years ago with Shelley Winters. Marilyn’s interactions with men were always light and whimsical, infused with her sense of fun and play. Studio classmate Jack Garfein remembered one afternoon in particular:

“She called me and said that Strasberg said that I was very good at choosing women’s clothes, and would I go shopping with her? And I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So I met her, and we started to walk and talk, and I sensed that she liked me. At one point she said to me, ‘Take my hand, Jack.’ I said, ‘Marilyn, if I take your hand tomorrow we’re on the front pages of all the newspapers.’ She said, ‘Jack, don’t be silly—you think people are occupied with me, with my life? Come on, they have their own lives they’re living.… You want me to get their attention? Watch—I’ll walk up on these steps here at Carnegie Hall; I’ll stand a certain way and people will stop and say, “Oh, hi, Marilyn Monroe!”’ I said, ‘Well, Marilyn, you’re very modest and you’re very nice, but I’m sorry, I don’t think that that’s what will happen if I take your hand.’ She said ‘Ok, let’s go into a coffee shop. We’ll sit at the counter; we’ll order coffee—Jack, if nobody recognizes me at the coffee shop, will you stop being stupid and take my hand?’ So we walked into the coffee shop, we sit right there, and the guy gives us coffee. Nobody recognized her—even the guy opposite her serving the coffee. So then we went and I took her hand, we went shopping, and of course, she had a great sense of humor. I said to her, ‘Marilyn, it’s just a year I’ve been married; I’m not looking for trouble, you know,’ and she laughed. So we went into the store, and every time she was trying on a dress she would say to me ‘Jack, I need to be zipped up’ or ‘Jack, I need to be buttoned’ but laughing, knowing what it did to me. In no way was it directly seductive—it was enjoying life, like, ‘Have some fun, Jack; see what joy or pleasure you could have.’ I was trembling much of the time, but the irony of that is that she walked me home after that.… And I had a sense that if I wanted to invite her upstairs she probably would have come. I don’t know what would have happened—you never know—that’s the wonderful thing about women, women who are honest, who aren’t racked by guilt: ‘Oh, I misled this man; oh, how terrible, I made him feel that he could have me’ instead of knowing there’s fun in life, it’s fun to have that feeling and that sense. So I sensed that she would have but I stopped and said, ‘OK, Marilyn, I live here, I’ve got to go upstairs.’ She laughed, because she knew that there was a conflict, and she was enjoying it. So she said, ‘Get me a taxi,’ and I said okay and got her a taxi, and she kissed me very lightly and she left.… She loved that mystery between a man and a woman.”

Perhaps the constant flirtation was Marilyn’s way of protecting herself, of scattering her heart in pieces instead of trusting it to one person alone. “One evening at our house with friends,” remembered Norman Rosten, “someone suggested an impromptu poetry reading. The idea was to pass around a copy of Whitman and Yeats, each to open a page at random and read. At Marilyn’s turn, she opened the Yeats and the poem could only have been presented to her, again, by fate. It was ‘Never Give All the Heart.’ She read the title, paused, and began the poem. She read it slowly, discovering it, letting the lines strike her, surprised, hanging on, winning by absolute simplicity and truth.”

For everything that’s lovely is/ But a brief, dreamy, kind delight/ O never give the heart outright …

“When she finished,” Norman noted, “there was a hush. She stared into space.”

*   *   *