Fox had mocked her for daring to change, sizing her up as the “same old Marilyn.” But this Marilyn—tipsily dancing with Truman at the Elmo, barefoot in that black Norell slip, pumps flung under a zebra-striped banquette—was a new Marilyn. Stripped down, she glowed: roots freshly blonded baby-silk at the temple, waves at the nape as if damp from a nap. Stiff curls and stuffed satin had loosened, softened. Nails glossed clear—not Cruella red—and filed to oval points. No jewelry, just bare, creamy skin. She grinned over her shoulder at the in-house photographer. Capote clutched her wrist like a sweaty cherub.

Dancing with Truman, gliding through the Astor Theatre on Marlon Brando’s arm, or frolicking La Dolce Vita–style in Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain, Marilyn was the toast of her adopted town. Every day was a new adventure. Every night was her coming-out ball. And though she had never lived in New York, it felt like she had come home.

Six

Flesh Impact

“Only Marilyn would’ve done it—an important movie star getting on top of a huge elephant. She was like God in drag.”

RAY MYERS

On March 21, actress Sheree North appeared on the cover of Life in a spangly leotard and showgirl pose. Fox had just signed her to a four-year contract, screen-tested her for The Girl in Pink Tights and cast her in How to Be Very, Very Popular, two films Marilyn had rejected. Zanuck had been grooming Sheree to replace Marilyn for months. Now he taunted her with this headline: SHEREE NORTH TAKES OVER FOR MARILYN MONROE. As usual, Elsa Maxwell came to Marilyn’s defense. She dismissed Sheree as one of the “ersatz Monroes,” identifiable by their exaggerated (padded) curves and peroxide hair. To Elsa, these were cheap copies to be batted away like flies: “They may successfully have imitated Marilyn’s walk and other physical characteristics. But there—take my word for it—all resemblance ends. In mind and spirit—which are the very essence of any human being—Marilyn and the ersatz Monroes are as far removed as I am from the Venus de Milo.” Elsa was right: Sheree couldn’t replace Marilyn Monroe. Both films were box office duds.

Marilyn wasn’t threatened by Sheree, but she was shaken enough to get proactive with publicity. This time she’d play by her own rules and show them something raw and authentic. This time she’d be herself.

The next day, she woke late, threw on a coat and darted into a dim little cocktail lounge on 57th Street. She slumped into a chair across from her friend Sam Shaw, Look photographer Ed Feingersh, and Redbook editor Robert Stein. She ordered a scotch mist and sat mutely until it arrived. Wearing no makeup, she looked pale and vulnerable, like a child who had overslept. She fixed her eyes on Robert and asked, “Why do they print things about me that aren’t true?”

Robert shot her a bleary look—he’d already downed five panicky scotches. This was his first time seeing Marilyn up close, and he was struck by the pearly lightness of her skin. He was feeling pretty fragile himself—it’d been three days since he’d flown in from LA, and Marilyn had only just surfaced. He’d been warned she never made small talk, that she never asked rhetorical questions. Robert could tell she was waiting for an answer.

“They don’t mean to hurt you—just use you.”

Marilyn smiled at his honesty. So far she’d been flitting and flirting with the press, occasionally flinging morsels at Leo or Earl. But she wasn’t playing hard to get. She was doing what she always did, waiting for the right moment.

Robert sympathized with Marilyn, with her escape to New York, her longing for art and personal fulfillment: “After two dozen movies, a headline marriage, and a headline divorce, she was in New York to prepare for parts like Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. The papers dug out all the clichés about comedians who want to play Hamlet, underlining their ridicule with photos from The Seven Year Itch. Marilyn on the subway grate, an updraft billowing the white dress over her hips.”

Ed Feingersh—a wiry risk-taker who lived in saloons—was a great match for Marilyn. He spent more time photographing patrols in Korea and Irish Horan’s Hell Drivers than fashion models. He worshipped Cartier-Bresson, Fellini, grainy movable images seen from the inside out. He had no use for static, fluffed-up glamour shots, and neither did Marilyn. Right away the three made a pact over scotches. There’d be no posing, no blowing kisses, no studio setups—just a “straight look” at Marilyn’s new life in Manhattan.

“A line flashed through my head,” remembered Robert Stein. “The Marilyn Monroe You’ve Never Seen.” Why not shoot in the gritty heart of workaday Manhattan—the underground platform at Grand Central Terminal? The Starlet in the Subway—Marilyn was delighted.

Just before they left, a tanned, good-humored DiMaggio breezed in, his face lit by a “schoolboy smile.” “Sam, how are you,” he said, clapping him on the shoulder, telling him how relieved he was that Marilyn had left “that movie crowd.” He nodded and grinned at Robert and Ed, told Sam to take Marilyn antiquing again, then strode out of the dark little lounge into the bright noise of 57th Street.

*   *   *

She arrived the next morning on the Grand Central platform, with her agent Dick Shepherd tagging along. Marilyn was nervous. This was her first subway experience—she took taxis everywhere—and besides, the gridlocked throng would have been unbearable. But in an oversize camel coat and tousled hair, she looked like your average city girl—buying coffee and Vogue at a kiosk or waiting on the platform for the IRT, clutching her copy of the Post. “Nobody recognized her. Eddie’s camera kept clicking while she stood strap-hanging on the uptown local. No heads turned.”

Marilyn certainly wasn’t dressed like a fashion plate, but that was the whole point. In fact, it was her lack of interest in fashion that gave her such a wonderful sense of style—a style she solidified in New York City. She wore black pullovers and toreador pants to dive bars with Frank Sinatra, flung minks over slips for midnight walks in Central Park. She paired cocktail frocks with plain trenches from Jax, mixed couture with sportswear, and wore sober wool suits with gloves of black fishnet. In a time when women matched their polish to their purses, Marilyn usually had a strap slipping off her shoulder, slept-in hair, or a bare leg in winter. She rarely wore hats—her head was too huge for silly veiled flowerpots. She wore a terrycloth bathrobe with the same aplomb as white ermine. And she threw on Army-Navy jeans for runs to the 42nd St. Smoke Shop.

A woman at her most beautiful is a woman living authentically. Like Jackie Kennedy—more gorgeous at fifty than twenty in her Henleys, jeans, and windswept hair—Marilyn seemed to age backward. At twenty-eight, she was living by herself, for herself—even her shabby little room at the Gladstone brimmed with the delicious vertigo of possibility. The heady high of feeling yourself change in a way you can’t quite see yet.

Now living alone, Marilyn began to break away from Amy’s sartorial influence. She lounged around in plaid pants and scuffed-up loafers, paired bedhead with plunging gowns by Oleg Cassini. 1955 was the year she went rogue with her hair, mussing it up even after Caruso’s pricey cuts. As with James Dean, the crazier her hair, the better she looked. “Marilyn was the first star of any magnitude to appear in public unconcerned with the state of her tresses,” wrote Caruso himself. “As if to say all this beauty just thrown together.” The screen queen in quiet rebellion. This was Marilyn’s new brand of sex appeal—more arresting and alluring than the pop-shockers and hippies that came decades later.

In New York, Marilyn became her own stylist—expertly projecting her unique image. Her casual glamour looks just as chic today—more relevant than Audrey Hepburn’s shirtwaists and Grace Kelly’s pearls. Her style remained unchanged from 1955 to her death, in 1962—a time when fashions and fads moved at warp speed. Yet she never looked dated. She still doesn’t—a shot of her in pigtails, jeans, and cowboy boots on the set of The Misfits could have been taken yesterday. In a ratty white robe on Venice Beach or strapped in Cecil Chapman satin, she was always unmistakably Marilyn. Beaming in her loose camel coat, she glowed like a fresh deli daffodil. She loved her scruffy disguise.

Of course, no matter what she wore, Marilyn was noticed—even on the subway in New York City. A man on the platform spotted her and turned around, obviously attempting to place her face. Did he know her? Perhaps last week’s cute blonde from the Copa? Playing along, Marilyn tried to look serious, then broke into a broad smile. Slack-jawed the man gasped aloud: “It’s her.”

Arm in arm with Dick Shepherd, she took the street exit, walking past signs for matzo balls, twenty-five-cent hamburgers and ten-cent ice cream cones. Hot subway air gushed up behind her. Marilyn unbuttoned her coat, the scent of her perfume mixing with newsprint, street hot dogs, petrol, and tire rubber. Spring had arrived, with Manhattan’s haphazard beauty in bloom. These may have been the happiest weeks of her life.

*   *   *

For eight days, Ed and Robert trailed Marilyn through New York, documenting the details of her new city life. They rented a suite at the Ambassador Hotel—her rooms at the Gladstone were too shabby. The suite was bright and springlike, with white wicker furniture, floor-to-ceiling windows, and loose undone curtains in gauzy white.

If Milton Greene was the first to show Marilyn’s playful vulnerability, Ed Feingersh was the one who captured her very real need to be alone. That first morning Ed shot her reading, sprawled out on a wicker chaise with copies of Motion Picture Daily and Lee Strasberg’s An Actor Prepares. Marilyn had often been photographed reading, but this was the first time it didn’t seem like a joke—as if you’d actually caught her in the act of some private thought you were desperate to know. In striped capris and a black sleeveless blouse, Marilyn embodied an undone, low-key sexiness. She twirled her hair absently, absorbed in her book, then kicked off her shoes, feet flexed like a dancer’s. Even barefoot she always seemed to be wearing invisible stilettos or flesh-toned heels.

By late afternoon, they were wrapping up. The sun lowered, casting pointy black shadows in the white airy room. Marilyn didn’t want to be alone—she was liking this creative, collaborative feeling. She asked Robert and Ed what they did at the end of the day, so they took her to Costello’s, a dank little dive bar on Third Avenue.

Just the kind of place Marilyn loved: full of history, exclusive but decidedly untrendy. Wood panels murky with age and cigarette smoke. James Thurber’s comics scrawled on the wall. (Marilyn loved James Thurber; she’d bought Thurber Country a couple of years earlier.) Dogs being chased by rabbits. Scrawny men cowering under towering wives (“I’m leaving you, Myra, you might as well get used to the idea”). Writers from the nearby New Yorker were always stopping by for steak sandwiches and cheap gin. Yanko, the bartender, was often too hungover to tie his shoelaces. (“If I bend over to tie them, it feels like the sides of my head’s going to pop out on me.”) Propped beside the register was a blackthorn walking stick that Ernest Hemingway had cracked over John O’Hara’s head. The bar’s owner, Tim Costello, kept watch and drank tea in the back.

Marilyn slid into a chair across from the bar. She looked luminous against the dark paneled wood, her raw blonde hair fluffed up in a beachy pompadour. She gazed up at the loopy drawings of henpecked men and pensive little dogs, smoke curling from the dwindling cigarette clasped in her hand. She’d never seen anything like this before—the blackthorn stick and the literary past, the rough-hewn saloon mood that wrapped you in a cozy, permanent dusk.

Robert Stein found the afternoon especially memorable: “Tim, usually wary of strangers, was clearly intrigued by the blaze of blond hair at our table, and in a rare gesture, came over to take the orders himself.”

“A screwdriver, please,” Marilyn said.

Tim was expressionless.

“Vodka and orange juice,” she added.

Tim kept looking at her. “We don’t serve breakfast here,” he said.

“Okay,” Marilyn said agreeably. “Vodka on the rocks.”

Tim gave the order to his brother Joe at the bar and went back to reading his paper. Later, as Ed Feingersh was heading to the men’s room, Tim stopped him.

“Who is she?”

Ed smiled. “Marilyn Monroe.”

Tim’s face darkened. “I ask you a civil question and you get smart.”

Ed flashed his Cheshire grin and continued to shuffle around, mixing drinks at the bar like he owned the place. (Sometimes you’d forget that he didn’t own the place—he had his mail delivered there, and that’s where he entertained guests.) Every now and then he’d put down his camera and scrawl his own version of a Thurber dog on a cocktail napkin. Hours passed—more drinks and more cigarettes, sun sinking lower and the Third Avenue El rattling above. No one gave Marilyn more than a quick look. As she was leaving, a photographer at the bar tapped Ed on the arm. “If you come back later,” he stage-whispered, “bring your little friend.”

Marilyn wanted to stay—this murky subterranean nook offered her a freedom she had never found in California, with its relentless sunshine and solar blankness. Before the year was out, the Third Avenue El would be torn down, along with the pillars the regulars used to steady themselves while hailing cabs in the morning hours. Ed would take a turn for the worse, drinking more and photographing less. And Marilyn would be teetering on the edge of a new life.

They took more street photos near the Gladstone suite, this time in sleek black and her favorite fur collar. This was her classic movie star “disguise”—though the rhinestone-studded cat eyes didn’t fool anyone. They walked down 57th Street, sweet pollen mingling with the scent of wet mink. She paused by the window of Liz Arden’s salon, with its flower display and cool bottles of beauty. The glass door swung open in a gust of setting lotion, behind it a woman—stiff and tall as a mannequin, dressed like Marilyn in all black and tailored wool. In her pillbox hat with starchy veil and sprayed-stiff curls pinned tight to the scalp, she looked like a ghost from a different time. If she recognized Marilyn, she didn’t show it and continued her glide down Fifth Avenue.

Marilyn had little in common with the dark femmes, ice queens, scrubbed virgins, and gamines of her era. She anticipated the exciting, complicated women of the French New Wave who were just beginning to emerge at the time of her death. They were passionate rebels who grinned through wine-stained teeth, reveled in their kinks, and were all the more gorgeous for it. It’s ironic that Marilyn—icon of hard-spackled glamour—was actually a pioneer for the restless flesh-and-blood beauties who surfaced in the sixties.

In one of her most progressive shoots yet, Marilyn posed dishabille in her rooms at the Ambassador. When a seamstress came to fit her for another Norell dress, Ed whipped out his camera, eager to catch the classic Marilyn moment. Each shot is intimate, with a delightfully subversive feel. We see her fastening a garter or striking a cheeky pose in an Ambassador monogrammed bathrobe. We see her relaxed and in control, perched on the arm of an upholstered chair, drinking wine from an old-fashioned coupe. (She rarely used furniture as it was meant to be used.) We see her unmade bed, her chaotic suite—mink flung on the chaise, bras and books strewn over the carpet, vanity cluttered with half-drunk wineglasses, Glorene lashes and square compacts in black lacquer. The white wicker furniture and floral wallpaper look more like a teenage bedroom than a movie star suite. You can breathe the smoke curling up from her cigarette, inhale her skin as she anoints her cleavage with hot drops of Chanel.

Reduced to mascot of the ultra-femme fifties, few people realize how progressive Marilyn really was. None of her contemporaries would have allowed themselves to be photographed bare-faced and hungover, joking with the dressmaker, passing out in full makeup, or simply lolling around their own messy hotel room. Grace Kelly was pure patrician ice. Liz Taylor was warm-blooded but Hollywood flawless. And Audrey Hepburn played the artless ingenue but rarely dropped her gamine polish—at least not for the camera.

On March 24, Eddie Feingersh photographed her getting ready for the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof premiere—lining her eyes with Liz Arden pencils, dusting her nose with peachy finishing powder. She fluffed her hair, sipped wine from a tumbler balanced on the dresser corner. Then the lavish finish: “Before going out, she put on a performance with the stopper from a bottle of Chanel No 5,” wrote Robert Stein, “stroking her skin in sensuous delight.”

She arrived at the Morosco Theatre in a cloud of white ermine, glowing like a bronze doll in her sheath. She’d paired couture and fur with rockabilly hair, her hands ringless under her opera gloves, nails clear, lustrous, and rubbed with lanolin. Her bare swathe of neck was more arresting than the sea of chokers and chandelier earrings glittering around her. She might have been the only woman there without a single piece of jewelry.

Milton Greene was there to shepherd her through the crowd. They spent most of the night together, whispering and giggling during intermission. She engaged her fans with touchable ease, slipping off her mule and using its sole as a surface for autographing Playbills. Tennessee Williams fluttered around, inviting everyone to the after-party on the St. Regis rooftop.