Marilyn spent most of Wednesday begging anyone who would listen to her for a piece of paper and a pen so that she could write a note to someone, and so that her plea for release could be heard. It must have struck her that she was now in a situation eerily similar to one in which her mother, Gladys, often found herself. How many rambling manifestos had Gladys written over the years explaining why she shouldn’t have been institutionalized, pleading with the disinterested to intervene on her behalf and obtain release? Finally, a young nurse agreed to allow Marilyn to make contact with someone by mail. But who? Marilyn would later recall thinking that Berniece would be too stunned to know what to do, and besides, she was out of state. She also didn’t feel close enough to any of her ex-husbands to ask for help, and besides, it would have been too humiliating. Certainly, Natasha Lytess would have come to her aid, but that bond was long broken, and besides, she was in California, too. Who? Finally, she decided to appeal to her friends Lee and Paula Strasberg. She sat down and wrote this letter to them:
The note was delivered that same day. Lee Strasberg, when he received it, immediately called Dr. Kris. He was told that Marilyn had been suicidal and that this was the reason for her hospitalization. That was all he needed to hear to make the decision that his star student was exactly where she needed to be. Neither of the two Strasbergs would interfere with her doctor’s orders.
On Thursday morning, once Marilyn at least acted as if she was calm, she was allowed to make one phone call. At a loss as to whom to call, she knew she would have to contact someone who would move heaven and earth to get her out of that place. Who was the most obstinate man she knew? Who would not take no for an answer? The answer was clear to her: Joe DiMaggio. Their marriage hadn’t ended well, that was true. However, based on the kind of man he was and the way he reacted when faced with defiance, she knew she would be able to count on him. So she placed the call to him in Florida.
His friend Stacy Edwards recalled, “I believe Joe was in Florida because he used to coach the Yankees down there during training. He told me, he’s sitting in his motel room having a cold beer and watching TV when the phone rings. It’s Marilyn, sobbing that she’s in a nut house in New York and she needs him to get her out of there. He thought it was a joke. He said she was making no sense, at all, and he thought, surely, it was a prank, or she was high on pills and delusional. But then, after he calmed her down, she told him the whole story. She needed him. How she ever tracked him down in a fleabag motel in Fort Lauderdale, I’ll never know, but she needed him. That was all he needed to hear. He jumped on the next plane.”
Joe DiMaggio showed up at Payne Whitney that very night and demanded that Marilyn Monroe be released in his custody the next morning. He said that he didn’t care who had to authorize the matter, he just expected it to be done. He was told that only Dr. Kris would be able to obtain her patient’s release. “I don’t care who does it,” Joe said brusquely, “but if someone doesn’t get her released from this place, I swear to Christ, I’ll take this hospital apart brick by brick.” He was then put on the phone with Dr. Kris, who had locked away her patient four days earlier and hadn’t come by to say hello or ask how it was going. The doctor said that if Marilyn was unhappy at the facility, perhaps she would feel more comfortable in another hospital. Joe would later say that he couldn’t believe his ears, or as he told Stacy Edwards, “I got to thinking the doctor was the one who shoulda been locked up. She was acting like Marilyn had her choice of resorts. To get what I wanted from her, I said, yeah, fine, we’ll do that. But let’s just get her out of here, first. Please.” The release was hastily arranged for the following day.
“We dropped Marilyn off, and I wound up driving the doctor home. There was a lot of traffic, so we inched down the West Side Highway overlooking the river, and Dr. Kris was trembling and kept repeating over and over, ‘I did a terrible thing, a terrible, terrible thing. Oh God, I didn’t mean to, but I did.’ ”
Some people question Roberts’s recollection of Marilyn’s release. As a close friend of Marilyn’s, he may have had a vested interest in portraying the psychiatrist as remorseful. He may have known that Marilyn would have wanted this short bit of her history minimized. If Dr. Kris admitted to doing something terrible, then perhaps Roberts could believe Marilyn had been of sound mind the entire time and shouldn’t have been hospitalized at all. In any case, this is how Roberts recollected it, and therefore many people have chosen to view the Payne Whitney chapter in Marilyn’s life as just a tremendous mix-up, or a misdiagnosis from an incompetent doctor.
“Once Joe got Marilyn situated in her apartment, he realized that perhaps Marilyn’s shrink may have had the right idea—just the wrong way of going about it,” said Stacy Edwards. “Marilyn wasn’t well. She was crying and disoriented. Without her pills for those few days, her entire system was out of whack. He also could not believe how thin she’d gotten. After calming her down, he convinced her to allow him to take her to another hospital, Columbia University– Presbyterian. She said she would go but he had to promise her that he would not leave town and would come to visit her every day she was in there. He agreed to that.”
At about five ’o clock that afternoon, Marilyn was admitted to the Neurological Institute of the Columbia University–Presbyterian Hospital, where she would remain for more than three weeks, until March 5. The first thing she did, once settled into her new hospital room, was to contact her attorney, Aaron Frosch. She demanded that he draft a document that would prevent any one person from ever having the power to commit her again without first consulting Joe DiMaggio.
When she was finally released from the second hospital, Marilyn was descended upon by such an excited mob of reporters and photographers that the scene became riotous. What was perhaps the most revealing element of such chaos, though, was how much she seemed to relish it. Except for a few occasions in the past, such as when she announced her divorce from Joe, Marilyn generally lit up whenever the media was present. She loved the public’s rapt attention, even if her private life was falling apart. Moreover, she knew what her job as a movie star entailed, which was to look and act like Marilyn Monroe, even when she didn’t much feel like her. No matter the present travail, she usually managed to play the part. In fact, by this time—1961—it had become second nature to her.
When she got home, though, Marilyn was in for a shock. First of all, she got a telephone call from Doc Goddard, Grace’s husband. She hadn’t heard from the man in many years. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last
