“Marilyn,” cried Truman when she emerged an hour later. “Where have you been?”
“Looking at her,” she replied, smile slick with Max Factor Ruby Red.
* * *
Back on Central Park West, closeness thickened into claustrophobia. The Strasbergs were cracking under the pressure of their own rigorous intimacy, lashing out with each of their own dysfunctional reflexes. Johnny swore under his breath, stormed off to his room, and blasted the radio. Paula threatened suicide or—even worse—to write a tell-all book revealing the family’s twisted secrets. Lee bottled up his tension, slamming doors and exploding in rage-induced nosebleeds. Paula was worried he’d have a heart attack. Like Lee, Susie turned her anger inward. When things were unbearable, she’d lock herself in her closet and rip up nightgowns with her teeth. Even Sweetie Pie, the most neurotic cat in America, was agoraphobic—cowering in the coat closet for hours, hoping someone would take pity and throw him a lamb chop.
Paula eavesdropped. She started with Lee, considering it as a necessary evil since he never told her anything. Then she started spying on everyone: Susie, Johnny, probably even Marilyn, but in her case just to get the juicy scoop on Arthur.
With Susie’s Broadway premiere closing in, Paula eavesdropped even more. Desperate for her daughter to succeed where she’d failed, Paula mourned the loss of her acting career, which she’d sacrificed for family. She blamed the children for the loss of her dream—and her figure. Taped to the fridge next to her EVERY EMOTION IS VALID sign was the Mayo Clinic diet: egg whites, steak, and grapefruit. Marilyn had simple tastes and actually enjoyed diet food, but it was a hardship for Paula, who lived for heavy Jewish casseroles and densely buttered breads.
“I don’t have time to think myself into despair,” Paula would lament, though sadly this wasn’t the case. She lived for drama, seizing any event as an excuse for hysterics. Susie’s ballet lessons, Johnny’s threats to go to medical school, getting blacklisted, chronic foot pain, Lee’s book- and record-buying sprees. She’d take to her bed for days, wailing on the phone draped in black, propped up in bed like a “little Buddha.” “She was a frustrated actress,” Amy Greene wrote years later. “She was a frustrated mother. She was a frustrated everything. This was one unhappy lady.”
Milton admitted, “Marilyn thought Paula was marvelous, but I called her a witch.… To me, she looked just like a witch’s tail.”
Certainly Paula provided less stability than Amy’s brisk, no-nonsense approach. But Marilyn relied on the Strasbergs, and they were happy to support her. “She was welcomed into our home even at five in the morning,” wrote Susie. “There was a bed for her and arms to hold her.”
* * *
Like many other actors of her era, Marilyn had a little pill habit by 1955. Just like Shelley Winters, she filled her prescriptions at Schwab’s, casually grabbing a malted on her way out. By the early fifties barbiturate use was fairly standard, at least in the film industry. “We were all on those things,” wrote her friend John Eula. “Blackbirds, up-birds, bluebirds, over-the-rainbow birds. Everybody carried them around in your briefcase like you do aspirin.” Bowls of them were laid out at parties—pink Seconals and mint green Nembutals offered like jelly beans. But Marilyn wasn’t a party girl—her sedative habit had little in common with the swanky pillheads of Doheny Drive, dipping their manicured hands in crystal dishes of barbiturates and benzodiazepines. Marilyn took her drugs alone, at night.
Part of the problem was the rigor of Hollywood set production. Marilyn’s energy levels were too sensitive and erratic for strict studio schedules. “She doesn’t eat on time, and she often sits up half the night reading or studying her scripts,” Billy Wilder complained. “Then she hates to get up in the morning.” Dawn call times require the discipline to force yourself to bed unspeakably early—no easy task for an obsessive perfectionist and chronic insomniac. Sometimes she put off sleep for hours, kicking around scripts, desperately calling friends to see who was awake, lining her eyes in swipes of lavish black, then rubbing it all off with Kleenex and cold cream. Then came the worry loop. Everyone else had been sleeping for hours; she’d look like death and miss her lines. By 4 a.m. she was facing another white night or knocking herself out with a Seconal—and either way she’d wake up bleary-eyed and groggy. Pills made her “womby and tomby,” easing her way into peaceful sleep.
In New York, Marilyn had seemed to ease up on the pills, at least for a little while. Milton took diet pills and the occasional tranquilizer, but no more than anyone else in the business. The Greenes seemed to be a healthy, sobering influence on Marilyn, who wanted to keep it together, keep it chic. “When she lived with us,” remembers Amy, “she was not zonked out at all.” James Haspiel claimed that out of all the times he saw Marilyn that year, she was never drunk or even tipsy. But Milton saw a different side. “I think something in Marilyn was building up. She was drinking more and more,” recalled Milton, who tried to keep her in check during public appearances. “I’d say to her, ‘Learn to be smart. You have to be in front of a camera, you have to look a certain way. I’m behind the camera. So you let me drink, and I’ll drink enough for the both of us.’ She liked that; she got a kick out of that.”
Something switched that fall, unleashing ugly rogue thoughts she’d worked so hard to pack down. In the orphanage days she’d dreamed of colors, fairy-tale shades of crimson and gold, purple-swathed kings, glinting knights, and pearly baby princesses. But by late 1955, Marilyn’s nightmares resembled scenes from Bruegel and Bosch.
In journals she wrote down her nightmares and terrors, and the city’s landscape that darkened around her. Her beloved East River grew eerily silent, save for “distant drums,” “piercing screams,” and “the thunderous rumbling of things unknown.” She wrote of “sharp souls” taunting her nights, “ominous whispers” keeping her from sleep. Her dreams were fraught with moans “beyond sadness,” “the cry of things too young to be known,” and “the sobs of life itself.” Despite her successes, she felt “sub-human,” “surreal,” and paralyzed by Imposter Syndrome. “I have a feeling things are not really happening,” she wrote, “but I’m playing a part for which I feel guilty.”
She dreamt of lying in a hospital cube, preparing to be cut open by “the Finest Surgeon Lee Strasberg.” In the dream Dr. Hohenberg pumped her with anesthesia while Arthur fretted alone in the waiting room. Hedda called the hospital hourly, while Norman stopped by repeatedly “but mostly to comfort Art.” Most vivid in her dream was Milton Greene, affably detached in a sumptuous penthouse suite, calling to check in from his elegant desk, “very worried” yet somehow relaxed, playing records, taking business calls, and snapping photos of “great paintings.”
But when Lee cut her open he found no organs, just “finely cut sawdust—like a Raggedy Ann doll.” “Strasberg is deeply disappointed,” she wrote, “academically amazed that he had made such a mistake. He thought there was going to be so much more than he had ever dreamed possible in almost anyone, but instead there was absolutely nothing, devoid of every human living feeling.” It was the ultimate nightmare—Strasberg’s hopes for Marilyn are shattered; Dr. Hohenberg gives up her quest for a “permanent psychiatric cure.” Even Arthur is let down—not just for Marilyn’s sake but “for his play and for himself indirectly.” Overwhelmed by insecurity, Marilyn was beginning to see herself as a grotesque experiment.
Sometimes she’d forget how many pills she’d taken and panic, terrified she’d slip into death while she slept. Back at the Greenes’, Amy had counted them for her, but Arthur knew little of the sedatives and barbiturates, or the heavy painkillers she took for endometriosis. Besides, he fell asleep hours before Marilyn, leaving her alone with her worries and meds.
On nights like these, she’d take a cab to the Strasbergs’, hoping for relief or at least someone to sit with her through the night. Three, four, five in the morning in a Juel Park nightgown, ringing the doorbell with a wild look in her eye. One of those nights, Johnny woke to the sound of her scratching the walls in a stupor, crawling the floors in her crumpled thin slip. Blue bruises bloomed from her forearms—she’d bitten herself in her dreams. “Johnny, I can’t sleep,” she slurred, stumbling toward the couch where he’d been dozing. She leaned on him for support, bare arm pressed against his shoulder, her hot skin smelling like Orris butter cut with the bitter scent of phenobarbital.
“I think it’s probably too late to wake them up, don’t you?” she whispered. (It was never too late to wake up Lee and Paula where Marilyn was concerned.) “Do you mind if we just sit here for a while?”
Johnny tensed up. Should he wake the parents? Would they be angrier if he woke them up or more angry if he didn’t? They sat in silence, air thick with adrenaline and drugs. “The situation that millions of men fantasized about terrified me.… At that moment she was so doped up that I wasn’t sure she knew where she was.” When Marilyn finally staggered back to bed, Johnny exhaled, sinking into queasy relief.
Marilyn and Johnny shared a special bond: their shyness, their outsider status and rebellion, the T-Bird she’d given him on his fifteenth birthday. Sadly, Johnny remembered her the way so many men remember Marilyn Monroe: “beautiful, drugged, and helpless.”
* * *
On October 5, 1955, The Diary of Anne Frank premiered on Broadway. Paula assigned Delos Smith and Marty Fried with the task of taking Marilyn to Cort Theatre. This was Susie’s big day, no mishaps allowed. “I’ll kill her if she’s late,” Paula hissed, for once entertaining the possibility of being annoyed with Marilyn. “Delos, it’s up to you.”
They arrived at Sutton Place prepared to find Marilyn lolling in the bath. To their shock, she was ready to go, dressed simply in black. In fact, they arrived so early at the theater that the staff were still taking dustcovers off the seats. Paula had put them up in the balcony—she wasn’t taking any chances. She knew a typical Monroe entrance would hijack the audience and derail the entire production. But Marilyn kept herself subdued, unsequinned. “When she wanted to,” remembers Delos, “she could get attention from anyone. She’d just do that walk and they’d become like pigs in heat and she’d shine. I thought she must use fluorescent makeup, the way she’d shine.… But she muted her light that night.” In fact, Marilyn was so determined not to eclipse Susie that she didn’t even break for intermission, staying hidden in the balcony with Marty and Delos. She wept profusely throughout the play and flung her arms around Susie after curtain call.
There was the typical postshow dressing-room whirl: flashing cameras and clothing racks crammed with belts, petticoats, ostrich boas, and woolen waistcoats. “Marilyn was very quiet,” wrote Susie, “taking pictures with me for the Life photographer but staying in the background as much as she could.” Photos show the two hugging like sisters—both in black—Marilyn in one of her scoop-necked slips and Susie in a crew-necked frock of velvet. Marilyn’s smile was big-sister proud, Susie’s lit up in giddy release.
Marilyn kept a low profile at the Sardi’s after-party. She didn’t even sit at the Strasbergs’ table. Susie plopped down by her father, propped up her elbows and plowed through ham sandwiches, pizza, ice cream, and fruit salad. Suddenly Marilyn rushed up, placing her hands on Susie’s slim shoulders. “Wasn’t Susie wonderful?” she gushed to a stony Lee. “You must be so excited.”
“No,” Lee replied. “Relieved.”
Fifteen
Cherie
“Personally, if I can realize certain things in my work, I come the closest to being happy.”
MARILYN MONROE
Ever since her escape from LA, Marilyn had been assembling a support network, surrounding herself with people who believed in her talent, her intelligence, and her depth. To the Rostens, the Strasbergs, the Greenes, her friends at the Studio—she was more than the sum of her candy-curvy blondeness. Marilyn had won over New York, yet Hollywood lagged behind, unconvinced.
All of this was about to change. After the success of The Seven Year Itch, Fox could no longer deny Marilyn’s value—they wanted her back, but at what price? For Marilyn, that meant creative control, director approval, and most important, respect.
Then agent Audrey Wood called with an offer: “I have a project in mind for your partner,” she whispered, refusing to speak Marilyn’s name in case the phones were bugged. A film adaptation of William Inge’s Bus Stop. The story intrigued them: an innocent cowboy, a broken-down chanteuse on the run from her past. With her Hollywood dreams and childhood wounds, Cherie was the perfect role for the “new” Marilyn—even better than sexy, campy Baby Doll. For the first time she could play a real woman—not the cutout bimbos and adorable airheads from Gentlemen and Itch. Cherie’s appeal was dusty honey and grit, and only Marilyn could get it right. This time, Fox was offering $8 million. She’d spent 1955 completely unemployed, so there wasn’t much to think about. Milton was ready to accept right away.
Bus Stop was currently on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre, with Kim Stanley as the lead. Eager to dive into her new role, Marilyn called up the Greenes and bought three tickets. She loved how Kim attacked the role with such brutal intensity and watched, transfixed, as she transformed herself onstage. But very quickly, panic took over. “She thought she couldn’t do it because Kim Stanley was doing such a good job,” remembered Amy. “I mean, the insecurity absolutely loomed.”
Milton dragged her back to the Music Box three more times. “They went back three times to see it,” said Amy. “And each time Marilyn was more confident, and saw things she could do that Kim wasn’t doing. At one point, Milton turned to Marilyn and said, ‘You’re Cherie.’” This time, she believed him.
Gradually, Marilyn realized she had it in her. The Method would allow her to become her own Cherie—less brassy and more vulnerable than Kim’s. She practiced Cherie’s Ozark twang and found that she had an ear for dialect. She connected to the character, run-down but full of dumb, desperate hope. It could have easily been Marilyn singing in that tawdry nightclub, batting her eyes at bombed-out cowboys who had fallen asleep in their whiskeys and beers. Marilyn’s commitment manifested itself in whimsical ways, too. On an afternoon coffee break at Whelan’s with Jimmy, she cried out when the waitress moved to refill his cup. “No, no. Please give him milk, he’s a growing boy!” she said. “It would be a full quarter of a century before I would realize that that was a line from Bus Stop,” Jimmy mused years later.
Milton, thrilled to be back in his creative element, did a Cherie-inspired photo shoot later referred to as The Black Sitting. They kept it informal: Milton set the tone with jazz records and several bottles of red wine. It was cold out, so he’d brought Marilyn special fishnets with warm fabric hidden in the toes—he knew how numb her feet got in the studio. For the backdrop, he swathed the place in fabrics until it resembled a “black velvet womb.” “They must have cornered the black velvet market on Seventh Avenue,” Amy joked. “And they had strobe lights—remember strobe lights? There’s something about black velvet that’s very sensuous and very rich. Look at me, I’m a street kid, but here I am in black velvet—wow!”
