Page 55 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

The breakthrough deal is the first of its type. As a Hollywood businesswoman, she is truly a pioneer.

Zanuck concedes defeat.

Straw Head has won.

On December 20, 1955, Marilyn purchases a black Ford Thunderbird with a V8 engine and a convertible top. She registers the car to Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc.

Eleven days later, on New Year’s Eve, she signs her new contract with 20th Century-Fox. It’s one year to the day since she finalized the plans for the company that bears her name.

In January 1956, the Los AngelesMirror Newsreports: “Marilyn Monroe, victorious in her year-long sit-down strike against 20th Century-Fox, will return to the studio next month with a reported $8,000,000.00 deal. Veterans of the movie scene said it was one of the greatest single triumphs ever won by an actress.”

Over the past year, Marilyn’s realized many, so many, of the resolutions she made upon arriving in New York. But old demons won’t be outrun. In his diary, Truman Capote records his sense of impending tragedy. “Saw Marilyn M. and ArthurMiller the other night, both looking suffused with a sexual glow. They plan to get married, but I can’t help feeling this little episode is called ‘Death of a Playwright.’”

Marilyn calls Miller “Arturo” and he calls her “Sugar Feeny” after his cat. The lightness is a reprieve from their shared burdens of fame. In Marilyn, Miller sees “a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”

Capote makes the stark assessment that “1955 was a year of growth and discovery for Marilyn. It was also the time when she started swallowing too many pills and drinking too much champagne.” He also knows a secret in the workings of Marilyn Monroe Productions. Its president and vice president are being over-prescribed by Milton Greene’s doctor brother. “Tons of pills,” Milton’s wife Amy Greene admits. “Anything we wanted, uppers, downers, it was all available.”

Sleeping pills at 3 a.m., then Dexamyl to puncture the soporific bubble on the way to a 9 a.m. meeting. And maybe stronger drugs too.

Marilyn is a frequent presence in the apartment at 135 Central Park West where Actors Studio Artistic Director Lee Strasberg lives with his second wife, Paula, also an instructor at the Studio, and their teenage children, Susan and Johnny. The place is filled with Strasberg’s extravagant collections of classical music recordings, theater books—and celebrity guests.

Though Marilyn trusts Paula, it’s seventeen-year-old Susan Strasberg in whom she often confides. “I always felt I was a nobody,” Marilyn tells her. “And the only way for me to be somebody was to—well, be somebody else, which is probably why I wanted to act.”

Marilyn had been in the audience at the Cort Theatre a fewmonths earlier, on October 5, 1955, when the teenager made her Broadway debut in the title role ofThe Diary of Anne Frank. That theNew York Timespraised Susan as having “the soul of an actress” astonished her father. “I just don’t know how she picked it all up. She’s never had any formal training.”

Marilyn and Susan Strasberg are friends as close as sisters, often sharing a room and vying for Lee Strasberg’s attention.

“My dad treated Marilyn Monroe more like his daughter than me,” says Susan. “He constantly validated her. With her Pop was vulnerable, paternal, permissive. With me he was impersonal, critical, forbidding.”

Like many of the men in her life, Marilyn calls Lee Strasberg “Daddy.”

The first film in Marilyn’s new contract with Fox will beBus Stop.

Marilyn is set to play the role of Cherie, a Phoenix café singer kidnapped by the rodeo cowboy who loves her more than he should.

Last year, she met with columnist Hedda Hopper at the Waldorf Towers on Park Avenue, where Marilyn sublet Suite 2728 from British American comedienne and Broadway star Leonora Corbett for an eye-watering $1,000 per week.

“I heard Darryl Zanuck boughtBus Stopfor you,” Hopper said at the time.

Bus Stop,William Inge’s new play—afterCome Back, Little Shebaand the Pulitzer Prize–winningPicnic—is a hit at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway.

“I hope it’s true,” Marilyn replied, “but I’ve heard nothingabout it from the company. All I’m asking for is good stories from good directors because I have to learn.”

Bus Stopfits the bill, as does Marilyn’s choice of director, Joshua Logan, who directedPicnicon Broadway and adapted it into a 1955 Oscar-winning film. Logan also credits his studies in Moscow with Konstantin Stanislavski for his Pulitzer Prize–winning achievement as co-author, co-producer, and co-director of the 1949 stage musicalSouth Pacific.

It’s the challenge she wants.

“I never had a chance to learn anything in Hollywood. They worked me too fast. They rushed me from one picture into another,” she says. “It’s no challenge to do the same thing over and over. I want to keep growing as a person and as an actress, and in Hollywood they never ask me my opinion. They just tell me what time to show up for work. In leaving Hollywood and coming to New York, I feel I can be more myself. After all, if I can’t be myself, what’s the good of being anything at all?”

On February 7, 1956, Marilyn welcomes visitors at her new apartment on 2 Sutton Place. Sir Laurence Olivier, the Oscar-winning actor widely regarded as the best in the world, enters with both his agent and popular and prolific British playwright Terence Rattigan.

Marilyn has decided that her next project afterBus Stopwill beThe Prince and the Showgirl.The movie is a film adaptation of Rattigan’s playThe Sleeping Prince: An Occasional Fairy Tale,which opened in London in 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Olivier will reprise his starring role as a princeregent who attempts to seduce an American showgirl—played on stage by his wife, Vivien Leigh, who won an Oscar in 1940 as Scarlett O’Hara inGone with the Wind.

It’s the first acquisition for Marilyn Monroe Productions. “Last week there was persuasive evidence that Marilyn Monroe is a shrewd businesswoman,”Timemagazine reports, “apparent when Marilyn Monroe Productions bought a property to serve as a starring vehicle for its president, M. Monroe.” Milton Greene and Olivier will both be producers, and Warner Bros. will distribute.

The now forty-eight-year-old Olivier, who will also direct the picture, is looking to revive his somewhat stodgy reputation by starring in the film adaptation alongside the sexy Hollywood starlet. Marilyn is hoping that the association with the highly respected legend of stage and screen will confer more respectability upon her.

“Monroe and Olivier,” saysBus Stopdirector Joshua Logan, “that’s the best combination since black and white.”

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