Page 41 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

She takes Marilyn under her wing and advises her not to let the studios push her around. “I’m a little rebel too. And I know that when you stand up to them, the bastards back off.” Marilyn in turn tells Bacall about how conflicted she feels between what she wants for her career versus for her home life.

“She came into my dressing room one day and said that what she really wanted was to be in San Francisco with Joe DiMaggio in some spaghetti joint,” Bacall says. Marilyn asks a lot of questions about her co-stars’ marriages and children. “She seemed envious of that aspect of my life—wistful—hoping to have it herself one day.”

Romanian-born Jean Negulesco, known for his deft touch with the genre, is directing Marilyn for the first time. “When I started work with Marilyn, I realized she was one of the most atomic personalities ever to come out of Hollywood,” he tells theLos Angeles Times. “But I was surprised to find how hard she worked and how much she wanted to give a good performance.”

Natasha Lytess takes her usual place on set, but during the shoot, she gives an interview deeply critical of Marilyn. “She is not a natural actress. She has to learn to have a free voice and free body to act. Luckily Marilyn has a wonderful instinct for the right timing. I think she will eventually be a good actress.”

Lytess suggests retake after retake, annoying the other actors and infuriating Negulesco. If he once again hears “Well, that was all right, dear, but maybe we should do it again one more time,”heis leaving the film.

The director’s dislike for the drama coach nearly matches Joe DiMaggio’s. “Maybe I could get through to Marilyn if I didn’t have this broad to deal with,” DiMaggio tells a friend. “She’s going to ruin her, I’m telling you.”

Lytess likes DiMaggio even less. DiMaggio is “the punishment of God in your life,” she tells Marilyn.

Yet when Lytess is dismissed from the picture, Marilyn protests by complaining of bronchitis and is a no-show on set. What begins as a lone act of defiance quickly becomes a pattern.

When Marilyn doesn’t get her way, the studio doesn’t get her performance. If she does show up, she arrives late and deliberately forgets or botches her lines, until she gets whatshewants. She is beginning to realize that the studio needs her more than she needs the studio.

CHAPTER 30

GRACE MCKEE LIES in bed, dying of uterine cancer.

She’s arrived at Unit 3 in the Doheny Apartments seeking Marilyn’s help and a place to stay. McKee is a Christian Scientist who believes that prayer is a more effective healer than any medicine. She refuses to consider a hysterectomy that might save her life, but the pain has become so severe that she’s willing to accept relief.

Painkillers, sleeping pills, uppers, downers, the apartment is awash with them. Some are prescribed to McKee by doctors. Others are procured from Schwab’s by Sid Skolsky, whom Joe DiMaggio calls Marilyn’s “pill-pal not pen-pal.” Skolsky’s column has made the place a top Hollywood destination, so he’s allowed anything he wants.

What everyone wants in 1950s Hollywood is pills. Just as talkies replaced the silent era, marijuana and heroin have been pushed aside by the latest offerings from the pharmaceutical industry. Benzedrine, or “bennies,” keep a person slim and alert. The perfect high of Dexedrine and Dexamyl iscounteracted by sleep-inducing barbiturates, Seconal and Nembutal, or “yellow jackets.”

Marilyn’s bathroom cabinet is full of them. When, two or three times a week, she arrives at the studio to dress for an event, she slaps a plastic bag full of pills onto her dressing room table—uppers, downers, vitamins—no one is quite sure what cocktail of drugs the mixture contains.

McKee, who’s struggled with alcoholism, is astonished by how many pills Marilyn takes and how often.

“Don’t worry,” Marilyn replies. “I have been taking them every day for years.”

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell are standing in white rhinestone-encrusted dresses and high heels on the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard. It’s June 26, 1953, and the co-stars ofGentlemen Prefer Blondesare promoting the 20th Century-Fox musical comedy ahead of its August release.

An enthusiastic crowd has gathered to watch as the pair—Hollywood’s “First Blonde” and “First Brunette,” according to newsreels—place their hands and feet in wet cement.

Continuing the tradition that Grauman’s began in the 1920s, the actresses make their hand- and footprints, then sign their names—Marilyn dotting theiin hers with a rhinestone—and scrawlGentlemen Prefer Blondesacross their adjoining squares.

Marilyn recalls going to Grauman’s as a child.I used to go to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and try to fit my foot in the prints in the cement there. And I’d say ‘Oh, oh, my foot’s too big. I guessthat’s out.’ … When I finally put my foot down into that wet cement, I sure knew what it really meant to me, anything’s possible, almost.

“It’s for all time, isn’t it?” Marilyn observes.

“Yes,” Russell replies. “It’s for all time, or as long as the cement lasts.”

Then the fun begins. Marilyn cheekily suggests that Jane, for whom Howard Hughes once designed a special bra, immortalize her bust in the cement, while she imprints her buttocks, famous for her wiggle walk inNiagara,on the slab.

It’s only a joke. They don’t go through with it. Marilyn’s on enough of an emotional high.This could be her life’s proudest moment.

But when she scans the crowd, looking for familiar faces, there are none. Joe has refused to attend. Jane Russell disappears with her husband and children, leaving Marilyn entirely alone.

Even the studio has abandoned her. They didn’t even book her a car. If not for the kindness of her hairdresser, Gladys Whitten, Marilyn would have no way home.

CHAPTER 31

MARILYN PACKS HER BAGS for Alberta, Canada, where she’ll spend August and September shooting a Western calledRiver of No Return.

Though the Canadian Rockies are as pretty as a picture postcard, it’s hardly her destination of choice. And she couldn’t be less interested in the action-adventure genre, even if Fox has upped the budget to include CinemaScope and Technicolor. Marilyn is cast as Kay, a dance-hall singer who joins Matt, a widowed farmer played by Robert Mitchum, in a desperate, waterborne chase after Kay’s villainous fiancé steals Matt’s rifle and his only horse.

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