Page 48 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

It’s a beautiful summer evening, the perfect occasion for Charles Feldman to put on one of the dinner parties he so enjoys hosting. Though Feldman and his MGM-starlet-wife Jean Howard divorced in 1947, they continue to host gatherings at their Coldwater Canyon house.

Tonight’s guests are three newlywed couples. Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio live nearby at 508 North Palm Drive. British actor Peter Lawford and Patricia Kennedy Lawford, who married in April, have invited their houseguests, Pat’s brother Jack Kennedy, a first-term US senator from Massachusetts, and his chic wife of less than a year, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

Jackie Kennedy dazzles in a cocktail dress with a triple strand of pearls around her neck. But they’re nothing compared to the Mikimoto pearls with a diamond clasp that Marilyn was gifted by Japanese emperor Hirohito. When Marilyn arrives late, as usual, the commotion interrupts the conversation over hors d’oeuvres, screwdrivers, and champagne.

With her white dress and halo of white-blond hair, she glows like a comet hurtling across the cosmos. Jack Kennedy can’t take his eyes off her.

“Senator,” she coos, giving him her hand, which he holds for a little too long.

“Miss Monroe,” he replies. “I believe we’ve met before.”

“Mrs. DiMaggio,” corrects Joe, standing protectively close to his wife.

Over an elegant multicourse dinner, Kennedy stares at Marilyn with an intensity that it’s impossible for DiMaggio and Feldman to ignore, much less the new Mrs. Kennedy. The senator asks Marilyn about her film career and compliments the patriotism she showed in entertaining American troops in Korea.

“What a very brave woman you are, performing in front of so many men,” he declares, refilling her champagne flute.

DiMaggio has had enough. “Let’s go,” he hisses in Marilyn’s ear. “We’re leaving.”

“That would be rude. Anyway, I don’t want to.” She juts her chin out at him.

“I don’t care what you want,” he says.

He snatches her stole and they’re out the door without saying good-bye to the others.

Marilyn later calls her old friend Bob Slatzer in Ohio and tells him about the dinner party with Jack Kennedy.

“I may be flattering myself,” she says, “but he couldn’t take his eyes off me.”

Could it be that she felt something more?

CHAPTER 36

ON STAGE 9 at the Fox lot, the summer 1954 production ofThere’s No Business Like Show Businessis running late and over budget.

Marilyn plays Vicky Parker, a hatcheck girl whose aspirations for a career on the stage ignite when she meets Tim Donahue and convinces him to break away from his family vaudeville act, the Five Donahues, so that the couple can perform a show on their own.

Fox is spending big on this first romantic comedy to be filmed in both CinemaScope and DeLuxe color, with a screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, costumes by William Travilla, and Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor, and Mitzi Gaynor among the accomplished cast.

But Marilyn may have contracted influenza, or possibly even pneumonia, while performing outdoors in Korea, and is now fighting bronchitis. She arrives to set late, so sluggish from the effects of sleeping pills that she can barely remember her lines.

Travilla, who’s worked with Marilyn on numerous pictures,declares his designs “an act of love” for her. Yet even Travilla’s dazzling array of jewels and furs, exquisitely tailored day dresses and spangled showgirl garb, can’t disguise Marilyn’s mounting anxiety. After every take, she looks to the wings, where only the black-clad Natasha Lytess seems capable of coaxing a performance from the ailing star.

Walter Lang, an accomplished director of musical motion pictures, sets up a sequence that requires three pages of the script to be filmed in a single take. Hair and makeup and wardrobe have been preparing since 4 a.m. Hundreds of extras are on standby, a jazz band poised to play.

Marilyn has one line, which she fluffs. Repeatedly.

To break the mounting tension, Lang announces they’ll wrap the scene without her.

Shaking with tears of humiliation, Marilyn takes refuge in her dressing room.

Travilla rushes after her, discovering Marilyn sitting in front of the mirror, crying at her own reflection.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “It happens to the best of us.”

“Oh, Billy!” she howls, tears flowing down her pale cheeks. “I’m losing a piece of my mind each day. My brains are leaving me. I think I’m going crazy, and I don’t want to be seen this way. If I go crazy, please take me away and hide me. I don’t want to be locked up like my mother.”

“You’re talking yourself into the idea of being mad. Don’t be crazy!” he laughs.

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