* * *
With Milton and Amy by her side, Marilyn revamped her public image. After dinner they’d sit round the fire with tumblers of scotch, planning their first press conference. What would she wear? Whom should they invite? And then there was the business side, with all its technicalities. “Almost every evening there were meetings with attorneys,” wrote Amy. “Marilyn had a good understanding of the business, but I wouldn’t know. I’d just get out of the room.”
Milton did the real dirty work—fielding calls from lawyers and agents, keeping furious Fox moguls at bay. Marilyn often stayed behind whenever he drove into town, answering the phone from the bath when he’d call to consult on publicity offers or delinquent traffic tickets. There were telephones scattered all over the house—Milton liked to roam as he talked, dragging fifteen-yard cords behind him. Marilyn loved doing business from the tub. Charlie Feldman called daily, making halfhearted threats. Journalists, columnists, and trade tattlers demanded to know—where was Marilyn, what was she doing? Where was their gorgeous fugitive, and when were they getting her back?
For now, she preferred to stay in the snowy country. Cut loose from the confines of Fox and Hollywood, Marilyn’s mind was free to roam, and roam it did. She plunged into the Greenes’ extensive library, starting with a list from Michael Chekhov then quickly moving on to her own preferences. She read voraciously—especially biographies—Josephine Bonaparte, Lady Emma Hamilton, Marie Antoinette, and Eleonora Duse—bold women who invented themselves, seized control of their image; women whose personalities defined the age they lived in and glittered out from the past.
“She was fascinated,” said Amy, “by women who had made it.” Sometimes Amy found her sitting on the stairs, gazing at a portrait of Lady Hamilton, a coal miner’s daughter who launched herself into the highest echelon of eighteenth-century society. Then she discovered Josephine and scooped up every book she could find about her, chattering at dinner about the empress and her friends. She regaled them with stories about Juliette Récamier, a brainy beauty who commissioned a nude statue of herself. When Juliette’s breasts began to age she smashed the girlish marble ones—controlling her image just like Marilyn.
“She was like a child about stories,” Amy recalled. “She said nobody had told her stories in her childhood, so when anybody told her a story, she was hooked.” One day Marilyn was preparing for a drive, wrapping a long white scarf around her neck. Amy noticed and made a joke about the dancer Isadora Duncan, strangled to death by her own silky scarf. “Who’s Isadora Duncan?” Marilyn asked, already enthralled. “It was,” Amy would note with a laugh years later, “Isadora Duncan Week in Connecticut.”
Like Marilyn’s first role model Eleonora Duse, whose framed picture she kept by her bedside, she had little formal education and read compulsively to make up for it. “Books were her Harvard,” claimed Amy, who sensed the depth behind Marilyn’s girlish enthusiasm. The Greenes marveled at her peculiar tastes and realized that their pinup girl was really an Old Soul. She zeroed in on their records of Bach, Mozart, and Shostakovich, and pored over their books on Renaissance art. “The feelings she had about old, old paintings,” mused Milton, “Michelangelo, Rubens, Van Dyck—that period. Not Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, or Picasso. It was the old ones she liked. I have a print downstairs she gave me of a head that looks like it came from the Michelangelo period. She bought it at an auction. There are certain old things that she heard about and liked, and she went after them personally.” For years she’d been honing her curatorial instincts, and this was the moment she’d been waiting for: the gift of quiet and time.
In New York, Marilyn became a compulsive writer, a habit she retained for the duration of her life. She loved classic composition books and always had several going at once, their black-and-white marbled covers scattered throughout the Greenes’ house. Many ended up near the bathtub.
From the snowy cocoon of the Greenes’ country home, Marilyn cultivated her image—and herself. At night the Greenes heard her pacing upstairs, switching on the radio, opening books and then slamming them shut. She stayed up late, her mind active and churning until she drifted to sleep in the wintry-pink Connecticut morning.
December rolled into January, and Hollywood still had no idea where Marilyn was hiding. Twenty-nine days after her midnight flight, she was ready to emerge. It had taken Fox a month to realize their star was actually gone.
Three
Blonde on (Subdued) Blonde
“I’m for the individual as opposed to the corporation. The way it is, the individual is the underdog, and with all the things a corporation has going for them an individual comes out banged on the head. The artist is nothing. It’s really tragic.”
MARILYN MONROE
On the evening of January 7, Marilyn’s attorney, Frank Delaney, flung open his doors on East 64th Street to flocks of photographers. Tonight, Marilyn would unveil herself to the public and announce the formation of Marilyn Monroe Productions. As usual, she was late. Reporters and cameramen blocked the sidewalk. Inside the press had been humming since five, sipping cocktails with Marlene Dietrich and Tony Curtis, checking their watches and craning their necks for a glimpse of the “new Monroe.”
It was 7 p.m. before Marilyn blew in like some skittish snowflake. She wore a tight white sheath with loose spaghetti straps, white satin slingbacks, white stockings (Milton had to run out to a nurse-uniform store), a fluffy white ermine, and diamond chandelier earrings on loan from Van Cleef & Arpels.
Flanked by Delaney and Greene, Marilyn sat down for the press. “I have formed my own corporation so I can play the kinds of roles I want,” she declared. “I’m tired of sex roles. People have scope, you know.… And I have a dream of sometime playing in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.”
Then came personal questions and their obligatory responses: “We are very good friends, Joe and I. We always will be.…” Some pert journalist shouted about Marilyn’s being under contract with Fox, but Delaney shot back that she was “a free agent.”
By midnight a crowd still milled around the door, with Milton trying to round up Amy and Marilyn. “Sinatra was playing at the Copa,” remembers Amy Greene. “I had a crush on him, and I really wanted to go. But I knew there was no way anyone could get in. As we were getting in the limo to go home, Marilyn said, ‘Do you really want to go to the Copa?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘Follow me.’”
Marilyn—who felt like a nuisance most of the time—loved when she could actually be helpful. She led them through a clattery kitchen (the Copacabana’s VIP entrance) into a smoky room where Sinatra was playing to a full house. Sinatra, annoyed at being interrupted mid-song, stopped the orchestra—only to look up and see his friend Marilyn swathed in white mink like some polar angel. “It was like a scene out of a movie,” Amy recalls. “A table and three chairs materialized down front, right under Sinatra’s nose. We sat down and Marilyn said, ‘Is there any other problem you’d like me to take care of?’”
After the show, Sinatra invited the group to his dressing room. “It seemed to me most of the audience decided to go along,” remembered Amy, who panicked at the thought of being crushed by a stampede. “The passageway wasn’t built for mass movement. At the steps there was a terrible jam.” Marilyn happily took charge, pushing her friend toward a bouncer and instructing her to wrap her arms around his thick neck. The bouncer carried Amy to safety as she swung from his neck like a pendant. “It was the most amazing thing. In all that pushing and shoving Marilyn kept on smiling and talking to people. She wasn’t scared a bit. When we’re in a crowd, it was me she worried about.” Meanwhile, Milton fought back the stragglers and handled Marilyn.
After a late-night dinner with Sinatra at the 21 Club, they piled into the limo for a nightcap at Marlene Dietrich’s on Park Avenue. It was well past three by the time Marilyn stumbled in, lightly drunk, Guerlain lipstick in Rouge Diabolique smudged on her ermine collar. Dietrich found the red smudge “maddeningly erotic” and fell asleep dreaming of this tipsy, kittenish creature—whose fluffy white fur and platinum whiskers reminded her of Jean Harlow.
The sun was rising by the time they staggered back to 480 Lex. Still wired, Marilyn asked Amy for a Seconal. (She’d given her stash to Amy and told her to act as warden.) She’d earned her right to a sound sleep—they all had.
Neither Marilyn nor Milton realized how badly it had gone. The Jean Harlow ensemble had been a miscalculation—blinding the reporters with platinum curves. To make matters worse, Marilyn had reverted to glib frippery when bombarded by the press. But who wouldn’t when asked questions of such hostile inanity?
PRESS: “Marilyn, we heard there’s something new about you? What is it?”
MARILYN: “Well, my hair is new. I used to be platinum, but I dyed it. Now I’m a subdued platinum.”
PRESS: “Do you want to play the Brothers Karamazov?”
MARILYN: “I don’t want to play the brothers. I want to play Grushenka. She’s a girl.”
One of the friendlier skeptics was Billy Wilder, who loved her warmth but considered her more a calendar girl with perfect comedic timing. “I say they’re trying to elevate her to a level she can’t aspire to,” he said. “Mae West knew where she stood—but somebody talked Monroe into thinking that she’s much better, and that she has so much to give to so many people. A human being has to know his limitations. She should know her speed limit, and not attempt 180 when she can only do 60. It’s like herring à la mode,” he added. “You put the chocolate ice cream on the herring and the herring ain’t gonna taste good, and you’ll spoil the ice cream too.”
Even Elsa Maxwell sensed that Marilyn was holding back: “She reminds me, so often, of the girl who stays on and on in the powder room, fluffing her dress, combing her hair and repairing her makeup—to postpone the moment she must join the party and sink or swim.” Elsa was also thrown off by Marilyn’s outfit, and puzzled over her choice of tight white satin. “‘Why,’ I wondered irritably, ‘don’t the Milton Greenes, who are her good friends—with Milton being a fine fashion photographer—help with the clothes?’ Then I forgot she was dressed all wrong, because—curiously enough—she wasn’t vulgar in this costume. She was more like a little girl, in spite of her twenty-eight years, who was trying to appear sophisticated and grown-up. She reminds me of a fawn, without really looking like one. She radiates health and vitality. And I find something wistful in her eyes and remember her years as an orphan when she was boarded out with different families and many times treated as a little slave.”
“You’re a fool to be photographed with Monroe,” one Fox mogul warned Elsa after that disastrous first press conference. “You keep writing about her in your newspaper column too! You don’t seem to get the idea that she’s on the way out. A year off the screen and she’ll be washed up! We can find a dozen like her!”
Elsa laughed in his face. “You’ll never find a dozen like her! You may find a dozen beautiful hunks of photoplasm topped off with blonde hair. But they won’t be Marilyn Monroes. Wait and see—you’ll be glad to have Marilyn back on her own terms.”
* * *
When the Sunday papers arrived, Marilyn was humiliated. “Miss Monroe has a firm contract with us,” Fox stated, “and we have her exclusive services until August 8, 1958.” Headlines such as DIFFERENT? PRETTY MUCH THE SAME … were typical. “Marilyn Monroe is a stupid girl and is being fed some stupid advice,” sneered the Hollywood Reporter. Even worse, if she dares to take on “long hair, art theaterish” roles such as Grushenka, “some of her attractiveness will have been lost.”
As usual, Milton and Marilyn had overestimated the intelligence of their audience. She was always a little too smart for the press, who were too busy mocking her to ever really hear her. They had no idea who Grushenka was—if they’d actually read The Brothers Karamazov, if the book had any meaning to them other than a reference point for something brainy and Russian, they’d have known that Marilyn was perfect for the role. Instead of being taken seriously, she was dismissed—again—as a sugary joke. (Years later, she’d blame the press for ruining her chances to play Grushenka—a role she’d always been drawn to.)
From the moment of her late arrival, the press had been poised to punish her—ready to record her next blonde blunder. Still ditsy, still late, she was the “same old Marilyn,” a bimbo with delusions of grandeur. How dare this bratty bleached-out starlet leave Hollywood—and couldn’t Fox crush her as fast as they had raised her? The press didn’t get it yet. Blinded by their own jabber and squawk, they missed the magic. Like a butterfly sealed in its silk-tapered swaddle, Marilyn was still priming herself, cocooned in her tight white satin. New York was waiting.
* * *
After the press conference came more shaky starts. She was offered the lead in Guys and Dolls, but issues with Fox made it impossible to accept. She was out of work, out of money, and entirely dependent on Milton’s cash handouts. Doubt and insecurity gnawed at her. Maybe the Hollywood Reporter was right—maybe she was a silly starlet.
Meanwhile, Milton had begun to realize just how much he’d taken on—phones ringing off the hook, piles of telegrams, offers from columnists and magazines he’d never even heard of. The floodgates had opened, and the press was bombarding him with questions: What were their plans? Had Fox really fired Marilyn? Milton was a photographer, not a publicist, and now he was at the center of a media hurricane.
