He quickly hired a press agent, two handlers, and a secretary—all of whom cost much more than they could afford. MMP was still waiting for funding, and Fox was threatening lawsuits, scaring away potential investors. Their only hope was Henry Rosenfeld—millionaire dressmaker and “Dior of the Bronx.” Henry and Marilyn had an ongoing flirtation; he’d send her love letters and cash presents. Milton begged Marilyn to dash to Rosenfeld’s Boston home and work her magic. But the thought of sashaying around, luring him for money made her queasy. It was a relapse back to those Hollywood days she had fought so hard to escape.
Her faith in Milton momentarily slipping, Marilyn turned to Joe, who was still her confidant and would be for the next six months. Joe was always there, and she still trusted him, with his wary protectiveness, sound financial advice, and his “steel magnate” suits of gray flannel. He insisted on escorting Marilyn to Boston. Joe liked Milton but didn’t trust him with business. Who knew what this Rosenfeld guy would try to pull over them both?
Joe drove Marilyn to Boston himself, stopping on the way to meet his brother Dominic for dinner. Soon the small Wellesley restaurant was mobbed with reporters. One reporter fought his way to their backroom table. “Is this a reconciliation,” he asked, shoving a microphone in Joe’s face. Joe turned to Marilyn: “Is it, honey?” Marilyn shot him down coolly. “No, let’s just call it a visit.” So Joe blocked out his hurt and focused on his current task—carrying minks, trunks, and red leather Gucci bags, shielding her from flashing cameras and nosy reporters.
The next morning Marilyn met with Rosenfeld, clad in his classic red tie and worn suit of navy blue. As charmed as he was by Marilyn, he refused to sponsor MMP. (He would, however, give Marilyn checks, love letters, the odd diamond bracelet, and free reign over his factory shop in the Bronx, which she merrily raided with friends, hauling back armfuls of dresses and suits.) Joe drove Marilyn back to New York under clouds of doubt. She’d uprooted her whole life and taken enormous risks, only to degrade herself Hollywood style—flaunting her curves and batting her eyes for wealthy men.
Despite this setback, Marilyn remained positive, energetic, and determined. Never once did she doubt her decision to team up with Milton Greene, and she was in no mood to come crawling back to Fox and Co. Two days after returning from her failed Boston trip, Marilyn rejected another flimsy script with a bold pink telegram addressed to Darryl Zanuck: “AM EXCEEDINGLY SORRY BUT I DO NOT LIKE IT. SINCERELY, MARILYN MONROE.”
Besides, money was the last thing on her mind. She’d moved East to learn, explore, and dive deep into New York’s world of art and theater. For Marilyn, theater was the ultimate challenge. Actors she admired, such as Marlon Brando and Eli Wallach, slipped gracefully between screen and stage, toughening up and expanding in the process. Last September while wrapping up The Seven Year Itch, she’d managed to catch a performance of The Teahouse of the August Moon. Backstage she met Wallach, whom she immediately christened Teacake.
“After that night’s performance,” wrote Wallach, “a press agent had ushered her into my dressing room—I remember that she looked nothing like the movie star I’d seen on screen—she wore a simple dress and had short blond hair. She was pale, shy, and wore no lipstick. The first thing she said to me was ‘How do you do a whole play?’ Though she was by now perhaps the world’s most famous movie star, she had never appeared in a play, and she seemed both awed and curious about it. I had the impression that she might not have ever seen a stage production. After we’d talked for a while, she asked if she could come see the show again and watch from backstage. I told her I was afraid that the management wouldn’t allow it, so she said she’d watch from the balcony, which she did many times after our meeting.”
Emboldened, Marilyn dropped in on more plays, at times wandering backstage by herself. There she met and impressed another Method actor, Ben Gazzara: “The time she came backstage, she wore no makeup, her hair was windblown, she was girlish and very pretty, and she was ecstatic about what she’d seen.” Marilyn found herself relaxing around these actors, smoking out the window of their dressing rooms, the chilly city air mixing with the carnation-y scent of stage makeup. She could see herself thriving in a group like this—where women had roles as expansive as men did and joined them at Sardi’s over tumblers of Chianti.
It’s not hard to imagine why stage acting appealed to her. The mid-fifties were still Broadway’s golden age, when theater was closer to high art than was film. More important, stage actors enjoyed a real creative freedom—a freedom that eluded her during all her years in Hollywood. “Movie actors are held stiffly to position,” explained director Josh Logan, who worked in theater as well as film. “Much, much more than in plays, you’re prescribed by the limitations of the camera—if you move sideways, you’ll get out of the frame, or your arm will be cut off. You have to be constantly thinking, ‘Am I on my mark; am I in my frame?’” Marilyn watched these plays with growing interest. Cut loose from the rigor of budgets and call times, she knew that she could reach unimagined heights as an actress. Who knew how much she could accomplish, how much she could do?
Meanwhile, Milton was working hard. Keeping track of Marilyn was a full-time job—constant appointments, dress fittings, and platinum touch-ups. There were always bills to be paid, prescriptions to be filled, letters to be answered. Evenings were spent gliding around on her arm at movie premieres and late-night parties. On top of all that, Milton was still maintaining his photography business—sole provider for himself, his family, Marilyn, and MMP.
“We always had a plan of attack,” Amy pointed out. “I’d mention a play and say, ‘When do you want to see it,’ and she’d say, ‘Well, let’s do it next Wednesday or Thursday.’ I had a very scheduled regime for her. I would make her go to the theater at least once a week; I would take her to movies at least once a week; I would take her to the right parties at least once a week.”
Throughout her life, Marilyn would attract people who believed in her—busy people with packed lives of their own who still supported her past the point of exhaustion—but no one as much as Milton Greene. Milton usually slept three hours a night if he was lucky. He could stay up all night working or at the Copa, but he always woke at the crack of dawn. If he and Amy had crashed at the studio, he’d wake her up and send her to the Kanters’ with a coat thrown over her pajamas. Jay—who was also responsible for Marilyn—would already be shaving in the bathroom, and Amy would crawl into bed with Judy for a few more hours of sleep.
“At that point when we went to parties and theater and stayed over, we slept in the studio,” said Amy. “He had this wonderful big studio—but she couldn’t sleep there because there was only one bed. I said to Milton, ‘We have to get her a pied-à-terre in New York. She’s a young woman with two old married people and she needs a life.’” Lured by its hot meals, helpful staff, and proximity to Milton’s studio (and Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door Spa), Marilyn settled on the Gladstone Hotel.
On the morning of January 19, Joe DiMaggio was spotted hauling stacks of Louis Vuitton trunks down East 52nd Street through the Gladstone’s revolving glass doors. Gloria Swanson had lived there in the twenties, but now there were bats, creaky hallways, and small, stuffy apartments—hardly the epitome of chic. Marilyn’s suite was dark and poky, crammed with shabby Victorian furniture. But she had her own parlor and kitchenette stocked with gin, bourbon, and sherry. Carl Sandburg’s bio of Abraham Lincoln was displayed proudly on the coffee table. (Marilyn would often treat a book as a centerpiece, more weighty and worthy than a Tiffany vase.)
Photographers camped outside the revolving doors, snapping her pulling on a pair of gloves or chatting on the pay phone in the gloomy little lobby. They caught her in glimpses—slinking out in her winter mink, Garbo hat hiding half her face as if she weren’t quite ready to be seen. For now, Marilyn wanted to protect her fuzzy, fledging life—so downy and vulnerable and wonderfully different from the pageantry of Sunset Boulevard. She loved huddling round the fire sipping sherry with Milton or ducking past the cameras for a late-night walk in Central Park.
Marilyn was much more generous with her teenage fans, who skipped school to wait hours outside the Gladstone, shivering with their Kodak Brownie cameras. To give them a little thrill, she’d whirl through the door, twirling runway style and blowing a kiss.
Sometimes Joe could be seen striding through the Gladstone lobby. They may have been separated, but DiMaggio was still the man Marilyn trusted the most. Marilyn continued to join Joe on day trips to Boston, dinners out with Dominic, and drinks at the Sherry-Netherland hotel. It was not uncommon to see Joe pulling up by the Gladstone in his blue Cadillac, with Marilyn flying out the lobby door, paparazzi ready to pounce. “What’s next, Marilyn?” “Are you back on with Joe, Marilyn?” It was all on such shaky ground—Marilyn had no answers, not even for herself. Neither did Joe. He could only hope, as he sped off like a fugitive chased by the flashing pack.
* * *
Now that Marilyn had finally emerged, she needed a private driver, leg waxes at Elizabeth Arden, bleaching at Enrico Caruso’s, and chaperones to bring her to meetings or shows. At this point, most of her wardrobe was still stashed in Connecticut, and Milton would frantically drive back and forth from Weston, slips, minks, opera gloves, and handbags strewn in the backseat.
Marilyn still clung to Milton in those wintry early months, slipping a gloved hand through the crook of his arm as he guided her through the Astor or the Elmo. She had a few old friends in New York that winter, mostly the Rat Pack, who were friends of Milton’s, too. There was Milton Berle, a lover turned friend from her chorus-girl days. Back then she was just another blonde cutlet, but Berle sensed that “there was nothing cheap about her. She wasn’t one of those starlets around town that you put one meal into then throw in the sack.… She had respect for herself. Marilyn was a lady.”
Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin were also in town doing their weekly show at the Copa. “Both Jerry and Dean are always yelling and falling all over the place when they see me,” Marilyn said with a giggle, “and I love them for it. Other people have criticized me for the way I dress and the way I walk, but Dean and Jerry never do.” So was Sammy Davis Jr., another affectionate prankster who treated her with that brotherly mix of teasing protectiveness. Back in LA there’d been a rumor she and Sammy had slept together, a rumor they both found hilarious. To the Rat Pack guys she was just Marilyn—no starlet and certainly no piece of studio meat.
Supportive as they were, these friendships paled in comparison to Marilyn’s devotion to Milton Greene. Their creative collaboration showed no signs of slowing down. That winter they spent nearly every day together bustling around his Lexington studio, rooting through magazine stacks and clothing racks, hatching up plans for quirky new photo shoots. Tables heaped with screenshots, ashtrays, old copies of Look, and black Bakelite telephones that never stopped ringing. Sinatra would be playing on the phonograph; Sammy Davis Jr. would stop by for a drink. You might catch them pasting tissue-thin flowers to a white paper background, or with their heads bent together at the worktable, discussing their plans to collaborate on a book. He’d crouch on the floor, straightening the seams of her stockings, fiddling with his Nikon, and humming along to a bebop record, while she’d vamp around in rosary beads or played with a litter of Pekingese puppies. With every click of the camera, Marilyn’s confidence swelled. “There was a kind of magic between them, something that you could tell was clicking,” wrote Jay Kanter. “It was fun to watch.”
Those months, it was always Marilyn and Milton and Milton and Marilyn. Winter snapshots reveal a catalog of intimacy—nestled together at the Astor or sprawled out on the floor of 480 Lex pouring nightcaps after a movie premiere. They finished each other’s sentences, drank from the same glass like twins. Norman Mailer described their relationship as haunted by “some wistful longing of the past,” and if Marilyn ever fell in love at first sight, it was surely with Milton. Whether clipping rhinestone barrettes to celebrity dogs or collapsing in giggles over proposals from Prince Rainier, their bond went far deeper than shiny urban frolics. “The two of them knew a secret,” observed Amy. “When they planned and schemed they would be on the sofa and I would be in a chair next to them and they went right off into their own world that only the two of them understood.”
That winter, she and Amy planned a surprise party for Milton’s thirty-third birthday. Marilyn and Jay Kanter called a three o’clock meeting at the Gladstone, while Amy filled the studio with drinks, guests, and decorations. (“Keep him out till six thirty,” Amy instructed.) “We had a hard time with Milton,” Jay remembered later. “We transacted all the business in a couple hours, but we had to keep him another hour. So Marilyn would say, ‘Oh, that reminds me of something else I’ve been wanting to take up.’ We’d dispose of that in a few minutes and Milton would say, ‘I’ve got to be going.’ Then I’d say, ‘Oh, here’s something else to worry about.”
They kept Milton busy until six forty-five, then walked him to the studio, where everyone burst out “Surprise!” Marilyn beamed, watching Milton’s face light up with joy. “Marilyn was wondrously happy,” said Amy, “for she felt she had put it over—and she had. It’s the first time she ever had a surprise party for anyone.”
The loves of our lives aren’t always our lovers, and Marilyn’s great romance never ended in marriage. Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller loved Marilyn, but Milton understood her. For Marilyn, who said she felt like “a fish out of water,” being understood was everything. Milton was the closest she came to those elusive words “soul mate”—a concept she believed in until the day she died.
* * *
By this point, Marilyn had been dodging the press for months. But journalist George Carpozi Jr. coaxed her into an interview by suggesting a walk in Central Park—he’d read that she loved long walks in the woods. He arrived at the Gladstone with photographer George Miller in the late afternoon of January 27. Miller bullied Marilyn as if he were some major director—ordering her to touch her toes, get on her back and cycle in the air, drop to the floor and do ten push-ups. Emboldened by bourbon, he asked her to switch out her tennis sweater for a camisole.
MILLER: “Now, Marilyn, can you drop the strap please?”
MARILYN (uneasy whisper): “I don’t think the strap will come down.…”
MILLER: “Aw, come on, Marilyn, you can make it fall. Give it another shake.”
It was as if she were back at Fox—forced to shimmy like a stripper till the strap inched down her shoulder.
Sensing that Marilyn needed to be rescued, Carpozi stepped in: Why don’t they take that walk in Central Park? He’d parked his Buick outside. Marilyn changed into a black slip (“Do I need a coat?”) and threw a bowler hat over her messy hair. She grabbed her mink and Carpozi’s hand.
Central Park was pitch black. Wind snarled through the leafless trees, whipping Marilyn’s bare, stilettoed legs. She smiled broadly, heedless of the frigid air. This was her new home, New York in its glittering darkness. Freed from the strain of his sleazy photographer, Carpozi tried once more to open Marilyn up. This time she didn’t dodge him with batted lashes or jokes. She took his arm and began, “I was born Norma Jean Mortensen in Los Angeles County General…”
* * *
Carpozi was shocked by Marilyn’s optimism. How could she seem so happy? She’d left Hollywood for a chilly, ramshackle suite swarming with rats, paparazzi, and greasy teens. Bad press, lawsuit threats, and Darryl Zanuck still breathing down her neck. With MMP teetering and no investors in sight, her situation was tenuous—even her clothes were still in LA. She had no money, no relationship, no future—at least not one she could see. But she had her freedom, she had Milton, and for now that was all that mattered.
One late January morning, Marilyn emerged from the Gladstone arm in arm with Milton and George Nardiello. A dark-eyed fourteen-year-old named Peter Mangone shivered by the door, fiddling with a Revere movie camera he’d borrowed from his brother. Marilyn turned on her heel to blow Peter a kiss, and Milton gamely allowed the boy to follow. Perhaps Peter reminded him of his younger self—a shy kid from the Bronx, skipping school to stake out his favorite star.
For the next few hours, Peter followed the trio as they sauntered down Fifth Avenue, making stops at Elizabeth Arden and I. Miller & Sons. Sometimes she’d pause to adjust her fur collar or to whisper and giggle into Milton’s ear. Sometimes she’d gaze skyward and yawn, lashes lowered like a cat’s. The late-morning light cast a lo-fi haze. She looked like a blonde peach.
Marilyn looked particularly beautiful in those first months of 1955, her tousled locks skimming her chocolate collar, her skin iridescent against the city’s gray matte. She cut a stark hourglass figure in fitted black cashmere—and for once her figure looked elegant, not exaggerated. Cars screeched to a halt on the curb. Somewhere on 54th Street a Checker cab crashed into the back of a delivery truck, its dazed driver grinning out the window: “Marilyn!!!”
She squeezed Milton’s arm tighter, smiling in the frosty air. They marched at a merry clip—Lexington Avenue still glittered with ice, but a giddy thaw hung in the air. Winter was halfway over, and all it took was one balmy gust to unleash spring’s woozy levity. They might end up bankrupt and disgraced, but spring was coming, and it looked bubbly and blonde and dizzy with promise. Like a bottle of champagne straight from the freezer—the one you were saving for Sunday but open on Tuesday. Because you no longer feel worried and woolen—just clear, smooth, and synthetic as a Lucite bauble. Because of the creamy camellias in the Liz Arden window. Because you’re going to share the bottle with your best friend—the one who makes you curious as a teenager, and you want that high to last all night, all week. You want it to last forever.
