The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

more alone than ever before. She also felt a tremendous sense of guilt about the drugs she had been taking during the pregnancy and was afraid that she was responsible for the baby’s death. “Could I have killed it?” she asked one friend. “I felt she was slipping away,” her half sister, Berniece, would say of this time. Indeed, on December 24, Marilyn received a letter from her mother, Gladys, whom she had not seen in some time. “Have I pushed you away, dear daughter?” she wrote, probably knowing the answer. “I would love a visit from you.” Then, in a heartrending understatement, she concluded, “The holidays are so sad. So very sad.” Later in the letter, she added, “I have tried to reach you so often but it is very difficult. Please do me the favor of a telephone call or a return letter. May God bless you.” She signed it, “Mrs. Gladys Eley.”

As it happened, Marilyn wouldn’t work in 1959. She was too sad and never really able to recover emotionally from the miscarriage. In April, she received a note from Berniece, addressed to “Mrs. Marilyn Miller.” She wanted to visit. “Please phone or write me as to when you will be home, and the best time to come. Give my regards to Arthur.” Marilyn didn’t respond. Now was not a good time for a visit.

In June, she had to undergo a series of operations to determine if it were possible for her to have children. It was decided that, no, it could never happen for her. Melissa Steinberg, the daughter of Dr. Oscar Steinberg, who performed one of the surgeries, recalled, “I’m afraid it didn’t work out at all. He had to tell her, which was terrible for him, that she could not have children. The way I heard it, he walked into her room to give her the bad news and she looked at him and said, ‘I already know. I already know.’ He then said he would name his firstborn daughter after her, which he did. She was very, very sad. I know he was worried about her. She took it very badly.”

She didn’t give up hope, though. Later that year, she would go to see singer Diahann Carroll at the Mocambo in Los Angeles and, recalled the singer, “I was pregnant with my daughter, Suzanne. Marilyn, so sad and so beautiful, came backstage to say hello. ‘May I touch your tummy?’ she asked me. I was delighted, of course. I took her hand and put it on my stomach and said, ‘You pat right here, sweetheart, and say a prayer and a wish, and I’ll hope with all my heart that your dream comes true.’ She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, ‘Oh, I do, too. I do, too.’ ”

There seemed to be no end to her melancholy at this time in her life as one terrible moment seemed inevitably to give way to another. Though she signed on to begin filming a new movie in 1960, a musical comedy called Let’s Make Love, Marilyn was feeling anything but lighthearted. Her marriage would most certainly not last another year, and she knew it. She refused Berniece’s telephone calls that holiday season— the first time that had ever happened. Throughout all of the vicissitudes of her life, she had never felt so low. Indeed, as Marilyn told one close friend, “As hard as I tried, the amount of time and energy I spent on this thing… I think now that it must be a sign. God must not want me to have children. Of course. Why should he allow me to have children? I can barely handle my own life.”

One evening after Marilyn got home from the hospital, she and that friend went through Marilyn’s closet, looking for something she might be able to wear to dinner. “I don’t like to wear fancy clothes,” she told her friend. “They take away from me, from who I am. I don’t want people to be distracted when I walk into the room. So let’s find something very simple.” As she was talking and thumbing through a row of blouses, she came across a maternity top. She stopped for a moment. Then she took it off the hanger and handed it to her friend. “Please get rid of this for me,” she said. Then, a few moments later, she came across another. “Oh, no.” Finally, with tears streaming down her face, she decided to just take the time to get rid of all of the maternity clothes in the closet. “This isn’t even what I set out to do,” she said, very upset. “I just wanted to wear something pretty for dinner.” After cleaning out the closet, she and her friend put all of the maternity outfits in a large box. The next day, Marilyn had her secretary send them all to her half sister. “Maybe Mona [Berniece’s daughter] will have better luck than me,” she concluded sadly.

PART SEVEN

Slow Death

Giving Voice to the Voices

The second week of January 1960 found Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Miller in Los Angeles, ensconced in bungalow number 21 of the plush Beverly Hills Hotel, next door to the French actor Yves Montand and his wife, actress Simone Signoret. Montand had been cast to star opposite Marilyn in Let’s Make Love, replacing Gregory Peck, who had decided—wisely, as it would turn out—that making this film was a very bad idea. It was a new year and Marilyn seemed determined not only to make the movie an enjoyable experience, but also to somehow save her marriage in the process. Diane Stevens, an assistant to John Springer, who worked for Marilyn as a publicist at this time (through the Arthur Jacobs agency), recalled, “I remember thinking, no, she is not in shape to do a movie. Unlike Elizabeth Taylor—whom John also worked for and with whom I had a great deal of contact—Marilyn was not able to bounce back after personal tragedy. Rather, she seemed to lose herself in the personal chaos. It was as if she had no coping skills or, at the very least, it was as if she had exhausted her supply. I thought she should have been in a hospital by this time, not on a soundstage.”

In fact, Marilyn was primed to make this film a big success. How could it fail with the legendary “woman’s” director George Cukor at the helm, a script by the Oscar-honored writer Norman Krasna, songs by the triple- Oscar-winning tunesmiths Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, and with Gregory Peck as her leading man? But Peck left the project early on because he felt the script was terrible. Other big male stars who turned down the role were Cary Grant, Charlton Heston, Rock Hudson, Yul Brynner, and James Stewart. French actor/singer Yves Montand had no such misgivings, though. He had recently made a big success in a French-language film version of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. Married to Simone Signoret, an Academy Award Best Actress winner in 1960, he signed on to join Marilyn as her leading man in Let’s Make Love.

A strange thing occurred during the early part of rehearsals for the film, something that greatly impacted Marilyn’s marriage to Arthur. A Writers Guild strike had broken out, causing a problem for the film, the script of which was already such a mess Marilyn barely wanted to appear in it. There was some hope from her that the strike might cause the cancellation of the film as no union writer would be available to work on it. The film’s producer, Jerry Wald, asked Arthur Miller if he would mind doing some rewrites on the script. Miller agreed. In effect, he not only consented to rewriting the movie—an endeavor that, to most observers, seemed far below his station as a Pulitzer Prize winner—but also to break ranks with the guild. Marilyn was surprised. “She had always thought of Arthur as someone who championed the rights of the underdog,” said Rupert Allan, who was in Los Angeles visiting the Millers at the time. “For him to snub his nose at the strike first confused her and then made her lose respect for him. She had thought of him as a principled person, an Abraham Lincoln. And he suddenly turned on her. He became much hated, too, on the set. He would lord his wisdom and knowledge over everyone involved in the movie, to the point where people didn’t want to be around him. Suddenly Marilyn was ashamed of him. My, how the tables had turned.”

Actually, there was somewhat more to Marilyn being upset with Arthur than met the eye. She wasn’t upset with him just because he had betrayed his own ideals, though that was part of it. She also suspected from the start that he had taken the writing job just to put her in her proverbial “place.” After all, she signed on to do the movie at least partly because no one in the household was making any money. Arthur Miller may have been at least a little embarrassed by this situation. Then, suddenly an opportunity presented itself to him to not only bring in a paycheck but perhaps also to be the person responsible for the words his wife had no choice but to recite on camera. It may have seemed as if he were getting back at her. According to people who knew him best, that was his intention. Or, as one person put it, “It was an in-your-face ‘screw you’ to her.” It’s no wonder she was beginning to resent him as much as he seemed to resent her.