Page 85 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

She sings the lines through, and then exhorts the audience, “Everybody! Happy Birthday!”

The band once again strikes up the song as Marilyn bounces to the beat, waving her arms in time to the music and encouraging the audience to join in the serenade as two men in chef’s toques carry a litter bearing an enormous multitiered birthday cake.

Watching from the wings is Isidore Miller, Marilyn’s former father-in-law. He and Marilyn have remained close since the divorce. Bringing the Austrian-born Miller as her proud escort to this All-American gala, Marilyn thinks, will be “one of the biggest things of his life.”

She’s right.

After the show, President Kennedy takes the microphone to thank all the performers. “We’re grateful to Miss Monroe, who left a picture to come all the way east,” he says, “and I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”

The president, the attorney general, and Marilyn all sign the guestbook at the Upper East Side townhouse where Arthur Krim, chairman of United Artists, is hosting a private after-party for leading Democrats and celebrities who performed at the gala.

Marilyn arrives on the arm of Isidore Miller.

Her one-of-a-kind rhinestone dress continues to attract attention. “She was wearing skin and beads,” says Adlai Stevenson. “I didn’t see the beads!”

As White House photographer Cecil Stoughton snaps candids, he captures the two Kennedy brothers listening intently as Marilyn speaks.

“There was something at once magical and desperate about her,” historian and Kennedy campaign aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observes from across the room. “Robert Kennedy, with his curiosity, his sympathy, his absolute directness of response to distress, in some way got through the glittering mist as few did.”

The next day, Jackie Kennedy is furious—not with the president, but with his brother. “My understanding of it is that Bobby was the one who orchestrated the whole goddamn thing,” Jackie tells her sister-in-law over the telephone. “The attorney general is the troublemaker here, Ethel. Not the president. So it’s Bobby I’m angry at, not Jack.”

CHAPTER 60

“IT WAS MARILYN who was the hit of the evening,”Timemagazine reports on the gala.

That’s scant consolation for how little she means to the studio. “Fox should start paying as much attention to me as they are paying to Elizabeth Taylor,” Marilyn tells Lawrence Schiller, a photographer she befriended in 1960 on the set ofLet’s Make Love.

Taylor’s salary for the Fox period dramaCleopatra,currently shooting in Rome, is $1 million. Marilyn is making one tenth of that—$100,000—forSomething’s Got to Give.

Marilyn’s personal publicist, Pat Newcomb, has an idea how to close the gap.

The whirlwind cross-country trip has exhausted Marilyn, but she makes her 6:15 a.m. call time on Monday, May 21. A studio doctor examines her and pronounces her vulnerable to a relapse of sinusitis.

But he does clear her to shoot a solo sequence.Something’sGot to Givescreenwriter Nunnally Johnson calls it the “midnight skinny dip.”

When director George Cukor calls “Action,” on Tuesday, May 22, Marilyn, costumed in a flesh-colored bikini that’s meant to make her appear nude, cavorts in the pool. The ruckus is intended to wake her on-screen ex-husband, Dean Martin. But Martin’s out sick himself, and not on set.

The cameras shoot close-ups, long shots, wide shots. In the rushes, though, it’s revealed that the bathing suit straps are visible across the shoulders.

“That’s easily solved,” Marilyn calls from the pool. “I’ll just take it all off.”

The “spontaneous” declaration is part of Newcomb’s plan. Yesterday, the publicist had telephoned Schiller, who’s booked to be on the lot shooting a story forParis Match.

“I would plan to be on the set all day tomorrow if I were you, Larry, and bring plenty of film,” Newcomb told him. “Marilyn has the swimming scene tomorrow and, knowing Marilyn, she might slip out of her suit!”

Marilyn adds her own instructions. “Larry, if I do come out of the pool with nothing on, I want your guarantee that when your pictures appear on the covers of magazines Elizabeth Taylor is not anywhere in the same issue.”

Newcomb tips off two other photographers: William Reed Woodfield of Globe Photos and Fox photographer Jimmy Mitchell.

Schiller selects a long lens and focuses his camera on Marilyn as she moves through a series of poses. One leg over the edge of the pool. Laughing and splashing in the water. Lyingon the pool deck under artfully draped towels. It’s as Marilyn glides through the water that the photographer suddenly realizes “she didn’t have the top of her swimming suit on.”

He keeps shooting. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen rolls of film. And when he finishes working in black-and-white, he does four rolls of color.

Westfield, too, gets a shot of Marilyn shedding her suit poolside.

Marilyn Monroe is taking her clothes off on Stage 14!Security is posted at the doors to keep out Fox employees eager for a look.

Marilyn doesn’t mind the commotion. She’s taken uppers for mood and painkillers for her thumping earache, and she can’t feel a thing. Least of all how cold the water is.

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