A few days later, Marilyn called Eve at four in the morning. In six hours she’d be flying to Illinois for an event honoring Abraham Lincoln—would Eve like to come? Eve, half asleep but intrigued, said yes. Who could say no to Marilyn?
The itinerary was grueling: plane to Chicago, two-hour layover, plane to Champaign, car cavalcade to Bement, all in fifteen hours. Why put herself through this for such a small-town affair? Marilyn saw it quite differently. Her compassion for everyday Americans was as sincere as her love of Lincoln himself. Didn’t the people of Bement have a right to art and culture? Civilization wasn’t the province of Manhattan’s upper class. For Marilyn, this was a nobler cause than glittery publicity tours, and well worth the effort.
They arrived at LaGuardia just before dawn. Eve was exhausted, but Marilyn giggled and joked with Jimmy Haspiel and the MM6, who’d subwayed to the airport to see her off. In her blue eyelet frock and white Ferragamos, hair freshly feathered by Pete Leonardi, she frolicked for the benefit of the paparazzi, skipping around and chatting. Aside from her gigantic makeup box, she carried no luggage—just an oversize children’s book, Lincoln: A Picture Story of His Life. (A spoof on her own ditzy image—bringing a kids’ book instead of the double volume Sandburg she was actually reading.) Just before they took off, Pete gave Jimmy a lock snipped from Marilyn’s platinum head.
On the first flight, Marilyn wrote her Lincoln speech while Pete back-combed her hair. Then she unlocked the seat’s folding table, pulled out her beauty box, and pushed back the window’s red curtains to make use of the natural light. Elbows propped on the table, she peered into her magnifying mirror, lining her lower lids to create the illusion of shadow, her cheap costume clip-on pearls glinting in the sun. She combed her lashes and stroked them with mascara, all the while rehearsing her speech in whispers with Eve. “‘Our Late Beloved President,’” Eve marveled later. “It sounded as though Eisenhower, not Lincoln, had just died.”
“She rode it all with aplomb,” wrote Eve, “but when we got to Bement she was frazzled.” Local press, radio, and television had been alerted, and the paparazzi slavered at each stop. Eve stood guard at the airport toilets. Marilyn had been taking diuretic tablets for kidney issues, but in her excitement she’d left the pills in New York. Now her ankles and feet were swollen from the flights. By the time she reached Bryant Cottage, the historic home where Lincoln had debated Stephen Douglas, Marilyn was exhausted. She asked for a basin of water for soaking, kicked off her mules, and collapsed.
Peter passed out—slumped on the floor, sunglasses on, head resting on the edge of Marilyn’s bed. Someone procured the water basin and Marilyn rallied, soaking her feet and snacking on white grapes (natural diuretics). Sufficiently refreshed, she stripped off her dress so Eve could iron it, touched up her makeup, and brushed up on her speech. Her hair was matted beyond repair, but she let Peter nap, pulled on a pair of wrist-length black gloves, and, as Eve put it later, “went forth valiantly to ‘bring art to the masses.’”
Despite Eve’s cynicism, Marilyn enjoyed herself. She gave her speech, judged a beard-growing contest, and browsed wheat shafts, river maps, and taxidermy bears. She flirted with sailors, shook hands with the mayor, bantered with the local press, and winked at some farmers. Shortly after nightfall, it was time to leave.
By now, the prairie winds had picked up. Their tiny plane in Champaign couldn’t fly above the storm, and they’d have to spend the night in Bement. Marilyn looked frantic. She was exhausted: swollen ankles, no luggage, no tubs of Laszlo creams, no razors, not even a single bottle of Chanel No 5. “She looked so crushed that I stepped in,” recalled Eve. “Surely planes were flying out of Chicago, and we were only eighty miles away.” Couldn’t a car take them to the airport? But it was past nine—were there even any flights still bound for New York?
Marilyn shivered in her summer lace dress. Eve slipped off her cardigan, draping it round her bare shoulders. Pete took charge of logistics, called Chicago, and found a New York–bound plane that agreed to hold seats. The governor lent them his official car and crew, and off they went, flanked by motorcycles, speeding down the highway to Chicago.
By the time they reached the airport, the plane was waiting on the tarmac. It was past eleven, the lights were off, and the passengers were asleep. Marilyn stumbled aboard, a bedraggled cat in rumpled eyelet, her skin puffy and parched from planes and lack of sleep. “Nobody recognized her,” Eve remembered years later. “Her hair was tangled; she was just a tired, ordinary girl.”
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.”
