Page 87 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Suddenly, she turns to him, asking, “What? What is it you want to tell me?”

Pearson is too tongue-tied to answer.

Someone else is looking out for Marilyn tonight—her favorite limo driver, Rudy Kautzsky. She climbs into a rented Cadillac, returning to the Fox lot to return her costume. Then it’s on to dinner at La Scala, the Beverly Hills restaurant where,Varietycolumnist Army Archerd notes, Marilyn often “dines alone, late.”

Shortly after midnight on Saturday, June 2, it’s finally time to go home.

Within hours, she’s gripped by a fever and a chill she caught at the baseball game. The symptoms of her acute sinusitis come rushing back. But her mind is whirring with the feelings that wash over her every year around her birthday, feelings of sadness and regret over being alone.

Marilyn’s telephone rings. She can tell it’s long distance by the clicking sounds when she picks up the phone. She’s brimming with hope when the operator connects her with Hyannis Port.

“Jack?”

“It’s me, Peter. Peter Lawford.”

Lawford has once again been pressed into doing Jack’s dirty work. “You can handle it, Peter,” his brother-in-law had told him.

Lawford does the president’s bidding. Clearly and firmly, he tells Marilyn that she will never again hear from Jack Kennedy. The president wasnevergoing to divorce his wife to marry her. Marilyn was never going to be First Lady.

To drive the point home, Lawford gets crude. “You’re just another one of Jack’s fucks.”

Lawford ends the call, then makes another one to Marilyn’s publicist.

“Get to Brentwood as soon as you can,” Lawford tells Pat Newcomb, knowing the damage his call has inflicted. “Marilyn needs you.”

Pat Newcomb hurries over to comfort her friend, who is deeply distraught. Penicillin cured the ear infection Marilyn suffered after filming the swimming scene, but there’s no cure for the twin afflictions of humiliation and heartbreak the Kennedys have so cruelly administered. But she can always sedate herself.

On Sunday morning, a shaft of light pierces Marilyn’s new blackout blinds. No matter how many times she tugs at the curtains, the room is simply not dark enough to sleep.

By the afternoon, Marilyn is begging for relief. She asks Mrs. Murray to call Dr. Greenson, who’s been away in Germany for four weeks.

“Bring him back!” she cries, collapsing to her knees.

Mrs. Murray calls Dr. Greenson’s children, Joan and Danny. Danny is now a medical student.

The three of them enter Marilyn’s dark room and find her wrapped in a bedsheet. Her masked face looks to Danny like “the Lone Ranger,” but when he looks beneath it, he sees that her face is white with anxiety and damp with sweat, classic signs of a Dexamyl overdose. After consulting with their father by telephone, they summon a local doctor, who clears Marilyn’s nightstand of all drugs.

“I can’t sleep. I’m ugly. Nobody loves me. People are only nice to me when they want something I can give them.”

Listening to her expressions of hopelessness and rejection, Danny grows increasingly concerned.This woman is desperate.

“My life isn’t worth living,” she insists.

CHAPTER 62

MONDAY, JUNE 4. Marilyn is once again absent from Stage 14. The studio’s insurance doctor is dispatched. Her temperature is 100 degrees, yet her lawyer, Mickey Rudin, encourages her to go back to work. Marilyn lashes out, angrily accusing him of being “with them,” taking Fox’s side against her.

Co-star Dean Martin has also had enough. When, on June 5, Marilyn is once again a no-show, he declares, “That’s it!”

Production is suspended and it becomes a legal matter.

Rudin places an urgent call to Dr. Greenson, who flies back to Los Angeles on Wednesday and goes straight to Marilyn’s bedside. Mrs. Murray and Pat Newcomb have no idea how to help her. Maybe the doctor can.

Thursday, June 7. Marilyn makes an emergency visit to Michael Gurdin, a UCLA plastic surgeon, seeking treatment for “an accidental fall.” She’d seen him previously in 1958, under her then married name, Miller.

With her hair covered in a scarf and dark glasses over her face, “Joan Newman” arrives at Dr. Gurdin’s office accompanied by Dr. Greenson.

When Gurdin examines her face, he observes black-and-blue marks around her nose and a bruised left cheekbone.

---