Page 54 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

In an interview with NBC, Marilyn reveals only that she’s“fallen in love with Brooklyn,” that she enjoys “almost everything” about the borough. “I just like walking around,” she says. “The people and the streets and the atmosphere, I just like it.”

Author Truman Capote, who at age seventeen had a job atThe New Yorkermagazine and who published his first novel,Other Voices, Other Rooms,at twenty-three in 1948, quickly sweeps his friend Marilyn into his New York social circle. On March 24, the pair is photographed dancing at the El Morocco club. Marilyn, in the black slip dress that’s become her signature New York attire, throws off her high heels so that she doesn’t tower over her diminutive partner.

Capote introduces her to seventy-seven-year-old Constance Collier, famed acting coach to Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, and Audrey Hepburn. Marilyn becomes Collier’s newest pupil, one she affectionately calls “my special problem.”

Their sessions are nothing short of astonishing. “I suppose people would chuckle at the notion, but really, she could be the most exquisite Ophelia,” Collier tells Capote. “What she has—this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence—could never surface on the stage. It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight: only a camera can freeze the poetry of it. But anyone who thinks this girl is simply another Harlow or harlot or whatever is mad.”

Collier recognizes that Marilyn’s gifts are fragile, and so is she.

“Somehow I don’t think she’ll make old bones,” the acting coach confides. “Absurd of me to say, but somehow I feel she’llgo young. I hope, I really pray, that she survives long enough to free the strange, lovely talent that’s wandering through her like a jailed spirit.”

On April 25, it’s Constance Collier who dies unexpectedly of a sudden heart attack.

The funeral service for Collier is held on April 28 at the Universal Funeral Home at Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street, just down the street from the Waldorf Astoria.

Marilyn covers her hair in a black chiffon scarf, her face in large black sunglasses, her legs in black silk stockings, and her famous figure in a loose-fitting black dress. Even to Capote, she’s barely recognizable. The friends steal into the chapel’s back row.

“I hate funerals,” Marilyn tells Capote afterward, as they wait for the crowd to clear. “I’m glad I won’t have to go to my own. Only, I don’t want a funeral—just my ashes cast on waves by one of my kids, if I ever have any. I wouldn’t have come today except that Miss Collier cared about me, about my welfare, and she was just like a granny, a tough old granny, but she taught me a lot. She taught me how to breathe.”

CHAPTER 40

EMERGING FROM AN advance screening ofThe Seven Year Itch,Fox’s Darryl Zanuck has never felt such optimism. He jots a memo and dates it May 19, 1955. “This is great house count and projection room was really in roar most of the time. There was no doubt at all but what this picture is packed with is entertainment. Tommy Ewell does a terrific job. Marilyn Monroe looks better than ever and plays her role most convincingly. Direction wonderful. It should be smash box office. Impatient for New York Opening date.”

But ambitious promotional plans are derailed as film censors and advertising partners begin to weigh in. Some are pushing for the flying-skirt scene to be cut entirely.

Telegrams fly between producer Zanuck and producer Charles Feldman. “They’re replacing a big cutout of Marilyn outside Loew’s Theatre in Times Square. It was showing Marilyn with her skirts blowing above her waist. Not good taste … Some papers refuse to accept the wind blowing adbecause of Kefauver investigation and pressure groups … this is a very delicate situation.”

The Seven Year Itchpremieres on June 1, 1955, Marilyn’s twenty-ninth birthday. She is radiant in a white dress and a white stole—and on the arm of Joe DiMaggio.

Despite their divorce, she has not cut him out of her life entirely.

When he’s in New York, he takes her to his favorite Italian restaurant in the Village, and to celebrity clubhouse Toots Shor’s. He writes her letters, all addressed to Mrs. Joe DiMaggio. “Dear Baby,” he wrote last October as the end of their marriage loomed. “I love you and want to be with you. There is nothing I would like better than to restore your confidence in me.” Marilyn keeps the letter, reading and rereading the postscript scribbled in pencil. “Please forgive me, my perfect girl. I love you.”

“No, we’re not getting back together,” she tells reporters at the premiere, smiling through bright red lips. “We’re just good friends. Very good friends.”

Innuendo delights the press, but not the censors.

Director Billy Wilder telegrams the Catholic Legion of Decency: “I do not have the reputation of ever being connected with pictures of lascivious character. Obviously, the picture deals with a man’s temptations but they are very human and utterly harmless.”

The film is a phenomenal success.

“Miss Monroe brings a special personality and a certain physical something or other to the film,” says theNew York Timesin its review.

Marilyn appears at an even more important premiere on September 29, 1955, when she attends the Broadway opening of Arthur Miller’s newest play,A View from the Bridge,a one-act drama written in verse and based on stories from his Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn—and on his own internal conflicts.

Also at the Coronet Theatre premiere are his parents, Isidore and Augusta Miller. Miller introduces them to Marilyn, though he keeps from them the nature of their relationship—as he’s still married to Mary Slattery, his wife of nearly sixteen years and the mother of his two children, eleven-year-old Jane and eight-year-old Robert.

Miller is a man utterly obsessed but not fully happy, either with his personal life or with the production.

How to get up on the stage and describe to the actors the sensation of being swept away, of inviting the will’s oblivion and dreading it?

Marilyn has become Fox’s most bankable star. Her last five films have grossed a spectacular $50 million. Yet her contractual rate remains $1,500 per week. Milton Greene, her business partner in Marilyn Monroe Productions, is determined to right the imbalance.

How is it possible, Greene argues to the Fox legal team, that director Billy Wilder has been paid $500,000 and producer Charles Feldman $318,000, while the film’s star is paid a fraction of her worth?

The once-mighty studio system proves no match for Marilyn’s unimpeachable demands.

She’s offered a new, seven-year contract. During that time, she’ll owe Fox four A-level pictures and be paid a salary of $400,000 for each. From director to story to cinematographer, she’ll have total creative control—and freedom to make her own films through Marilyn Monroe Productions. The contractual bonuses are mammoth.

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