Reading the article today, one senses that Marilyn was such a nice, decent person, it makes her travails all the more tragic. She certainly wasn’t one of those celebrities who resented her success or her popularity. About her public, she told
Of course, Marilyn being Marilyn, she also couldn’t resist the dramatic “exaggeration,” like this one: “Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night—up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it.” That likely never happened. But it’s a nice image, anyway.
However, regarding her feelings for Fox, she was very clear: “I think that when you are famous, every weakness is exaggerated. This industry should behave like a mother whose child has just run out in front of a car. But instead of clasping the child to them, they start punishing the child. Like don’t you dare get a cold—how dare you get a cold! The executives can get colds and stay home forever, but how dare you, the actor, get a cold? You know, no one feels worse than the one who’s sick. I wish they had to act a comedy with a temperature and a virus infection. I am not an actress who appears at a studio just for the purpose of discipline. This doesn’t have anything to do with art. I myself would like to become more disciplined within my work. But I’m there to give a performance and not be disciplined by a studio! After all, I’m not in military school. This is supposed to be an art form not just a manufacturing establishment. The sensitivity that helps me to act also makes me react. An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?”
She would also do her first layout for
As for the movie? The studio decided to replace Marilyn in
In 1995, Dean Martin recalled, “I met Marilyn in 1953, before she met Frank, before she met Peter, before she knew any of us. I met her before she was all screwed up, so I knew what she was like then and what she had become, and I felt badly for the kid. At the same time, I was a little tired of all the bullshit. There was only so much you could take. In fact, no one had an easy life. We were all screwed up in our own ways. We all had problems. We were all doing drugs, let’s face it. I was no saint, either. But I showed up for work. You had to show up for work. That was the priority. You had to be glad you had a job and you had to show up for work. I’m not saying she wasn’t sick all of those days. Who knows? I wasn’t following her around like the FBI, I was just sitting on my ass waiting for her to show up at the studio. So, when I had my chance to get out, I did. However, the few scenes we did, I enjoyed, but getting to them… oh my God, I mean, the takes, one after the other, it would drive any man crazy. But… look… I liked her. She was a good kid. But when you looked into her eyes, there was nothing there. No warmth. No life. It was all illusion. She looked great on film, yeah. But in person… she was a ghost.”
Her time with Dr. Greenson—controversial as it was, even back then—had begun with a certain amount of frustration. While in New York, and under the care of numerous physicians there, Marilyn had come to believe that a certain pharmaceutical had been helpful in stabilizing her: Thorazine. It had begun to represent hope to her that she might be able to regain control of her often chaotic thought processes. Yet when Dr. Greenson heard Marilyn’s request for Thorazine, for some reason, he refused. Greenson had quickly become the one doctor Marilyn would trust and speak with openly, and he served that purpose well. Yet he knew all too well that Marilyn would at times have her own agenda when it came to her chemical treatment. It may have simply been that she was asking for more than he would have recommended, or that he didn’t want her to take it at all—but it was clear to her that she would need to find this wonder drug elsewhere, especially when her Los Angeles physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, also refused to prescribe it to her. Therefore, Marilyn continued her doctor-shopping ways with medics she had seen previously, most of whom had been starstruck by her and had given her whatever prescription drugs she requested.
“She was waiting in the lobby,” recalls one of the doctors to whom she had paid a visit during the summer of 1962. “I guess she had her head down in a magazine as the last client of the day left, and then she just walked right into the office. She was a knockout—lots of teased-out blonde hair… red lipstick. I remember she was wearing a cream-colored coat that looked like satin to me. She had on a white dress and I specifically remember that she was wearing white stilettos. I mean, she was dressed to kill in all-white. Very impressive… very movie star.”
Though Marilyn would address this doctor by the name of his previous employer—making it clear that she had so many doctors she didn’t even remember what they looked like!—it would quickly become apparent that he was a total stranger to her. Indeed, the man who had previously treated Marilyn had died and the one who now stood before her was his protege and successor, the much younger Dr. Schwartz. *
“I knew her immediately, of course,” says the doctor, “and I even knew that she had seen [the deceased doctor] for a time. I had only been an intern for a short time before he died. There was no one to continue his practice, so his wife asked me to stay on and at least help some patients through the transition.
“She wanted Thorazine,” explains Dr. Schwartz. “I was wary of taking her on as a patient. Most doctors were afraid of treating a famous patient who had been suspected of attempting suicide. No one wants to be mentioned in a patient’s obituary as their last doctor.”
Though Marilyn persisted in trying to convince the young doctor that her experience with Thorazine had been a positive one, he was still reluctant. “When you’re fresh out of med school you’re under real scrutiny,” he explains, “overprescribing could get you into all kinds of trouble. Not with the authorities so much, but it can leave a doctor with a bunch of drug-dependent patients. Some doctors would like that, because it kept people coming back—but I didn’t [like it].”
Marilyn spent some time detailing her need for confidentiality —which made it easier for this young doctor to