Page 52 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Nothing is resolved. Still, the Fox wardrobe department outfits her in a strapless, backless gown of red ruched chiffonto wear to Romanoff’s on November 6, where Charles Feldman and Billy Wilder are throwing theSeven Year Itchwrap party.

Marilyn’s car runs out of gas on her way to Rodeo Drive, so when she arrives late, she’s surprised to find eighty of Hollywood’s most famous names among the attendees of the formal dinner in her honor.

She’s even more astonished when Clark Gable appears before her and asks her to dance. Meeting the “King of Hollywood” is like a dream. The eyes, the debonair mustache. Just like the photograph of her father.

The Seven Year Itchset photographer Sam Shaw captures the moment as they float around the room.

Marilyn dances with her co-star, Tom Ewell, her agent and producer, Charles Feldman, and even studio head Darryl Zanuck—and has a second dance with Gable.

Humphrey Bogart tops up her champagne flute.

“I feel like Cinderella,” Marilyn says.

With the great and the good here to applaud her, she has at last been accepted into the highest echelons of Hollywood.

The spell breaks at 1 a.m., when Feldman sees her home.

A few days later, Gable sends Marilyn an enormous floral arrangement, stem after stem of red roses.

CHAPTER 39

FOR CHRISTMAS 1954, Marilyn gives herself a new identity. “Zelda Zonk” wears a black wig and dark glasses. And she has a one-way ticket to New York City.

It’s not until the plane is airborne that she removes her Ray-Ban Wayfarers and shakes her blond curls free from the wig that’s kept them under wraps.

She’s successfully evaded the press all the way to the airport—unlike last month, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where she had been in-patient for a week after undergoing surgery for endometriosis. Though a nurse had tried to help her sneak out a back exit, hundreds of reporters and photographers were there to snap photos of her looking pale and ill, and covering herself in a long mink coat.

On board the last flight out of Los Angeles, she’s sleepless with nervousness and excitement. From her window seat, she stares out at the dark sky, trying not to bite her nails any shorter than they already are. At age nineteen, she’d set hersights on a career in Hollywood. Nine years later, she’s fleeing its corrupt dream factory.

There is no one to keep her here any longer. Her marriage to Joe DiMaggio is over. The studio system is suffocating her. Aunt Ana is dead. So is Grace McKee. Her mother’s weekly letters contain a string of impossible demands. That Gladys be released from the sanitarium. That Marilyn return to God and to the Christian Science faith.

The last time she reinvented herself, Norma Jeane became Marilyn Monroe.

This sad bitter child who grew up too fast is hardly ever out of my heart,she thinks.With success all around me, I can still feel her frightened eyes looking out of mine. She keeps saying, “I never lived. I was never loved.”

MARILYN HAS LEFT HOLLYWOOD, newspaper headlines venture, then ask, “Where’s Marilyn?” Darryl Zanuck can’t answer that question. Neither can Charles Feldman or Sid Skolsky.

Marilyn tells almost no one of the secret project she’s hatched with fashion photographer Milton Greene, drawing up the papers with a New York lawyer. She’s creating her own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc. She’ll be president, and Greene will be vice president.

She met Greene a little over a year ago, when he was assigned to photograph her for a September 1953Lookmagazine cover story. Marilyn had greeted the youthful-looking thirty-one-year-old, “Why you’re just a boy!”

“And you’re just a girl!” Greene answered right back.

Their fast friendship led to an intimate creative partnership. Two months ago, in October 1954, Marilyn posed in Greene’sNew York photography studio for the “Ballerina Sitting” series, barefoot in a white tulle and satin gown.

Now Greene and his wife, Amy, pick Marilyn up from New York’s Idlewild Airport and drive her into an unfamiliar landscape. She presses her face against the windowpane, staring at the snow-covered fields and the bare, frosted trees of Fairfield County, Connecticut, where the Greenes live in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in rural Weston.

She spends the holidays in their rambling bohemian farmhouse, helping trim the Christmas tree and meeting the Greenes’ artistic friends. Among their sharp crowd are dancer Gene Kelly, star of films likeSingin’ in the Rainand most recentlyBrigadoon; composer Leonard Bernstein and his actress wife, Felicia; and novelist and screenwriter Truman Capote, whom Marilyn previously met on the set ofThe Asphalt Jungle. She listens to them gossip about unfamiliar ideas and people, then steals away to the Greenes’ library to educate herself.

Amy Greene—a former model for Saks Fifth Avenue—helps Marilyn create a New York look, enlisting her friend the designer Anne Klein.

“Come get what you want,” Klein says of her new capsule collection of black dresses in slip and sheath cuts.

Marilyn still insists on bleaching her own hair, but she begins wearing clothes with more forgiving lines and much less makeup, forgoing her signature red lipstick. Before stepping out, she dons one of Klein’s simple black slip dresses and a tight black cap that covers her curls.

Back in Los Angeles, the lawyers are still arguing. It’s likeThe Girl in Pink Tightsall over again. Marilyn is in breach ofher contract. She can’t just walk out and abandon her obligations. There’s a script and a film to be made.

The plans for Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc., are finalized on December 31, 1954. With characteristic misspellings, she writes out her resolutions for 1955:

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