Page 63 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“Today is forever,” her new husband had promised her less than a month ago.

Forever is apparently fleeting.

But the grudges Marilyn holds when she senses betrayal are not.

Marilyn is further upset by Miller’s decision to return to New York after only a month, to tend to his daughter Jane, who’s been ill.

The following Monday morning, she fails to turn up on set. She sends word she’s feeling poorly. Colitis is cited, but she is nowhere to be seen at Parkside House. She’s apparently left Surrey and gone to London. And then on to somewhere else.

In the south of France, Senator Jack Kennedy has chartered a forty-foot yacht. Its ship-shore communications are down and that suits him fine. He’s licking fresh political wounds.

The 1956 Democratic National Convention wrapped in Chicago on August 17. It was a wild one. Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, the former governor of Illinois, abandoned protocols and left the choice of his vice-presidential running mate to the delegates.

At the end of the vote, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver was ahead, though he failed to secure the nomination over Kennedy.

The delegates voted again. Kennedy surged ahead, but not enough to convince delegates who valued Kefauver’s experience more than Kennedy’s relative youth. Kennedy graciously conceded.

After the convention, Jack Kennedy left for Europe. For days, he’s completely out of contact. On board, it’s just the senator, the skipper, the cook and, according to theWashington Star,“blondes.” No one—especially not Kennedy’s heavily pregnant wife, Jackie—knows if the world’s most famous blonde is among them.

On August 23, Jackie Kennedy has an emergency caesarean. The child, a baby girl, is stillborn. Her name is kept private.

Once Kennedy finally gets word, he races to his wife’s bedside. Some say Kennedy, or his father, offers Jackie $1 million to stay married to him. “But it was just talk,” insists British actor Peter Lawford, who’s married to Jack’s sister Pat Kennedy Lawford.

Marilyn returns to Pinewood Studios to continue filming, and Miller returns to England.

Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh, is present on the closed set. Marilyn has stepped into the role Leigh originated on stage, forcing a rivalry between them.

“Marilyn could play this role with her eyes closed,” Susan Strasberg says, “but Olivier seemed to feel that she should play it like Miss Leigh and he was infuriating her with his exacting and specific direction.”

But Leigh and Marilyn share a tragic common bond.

In early August, forty-two-year-old Leigh had announced a pregnancy to the press, but sadly miscarried soon thereafter. The child would have been her and Olivier’s first.

Marilyn suffers a similar trajectory. In early September, not long after joyfully discovering she’s pregnant, she loses her and Miller’s longed-for baby.

“I’m just Mrs. Miller tonight,” Marilyn says on October 11, 1956, at the London premiere of Arthur Miller’s playA View from the Bridge.

While technically banned from performance in England due to themes of homosexuality,A View from the Bridgeis instead being staged inside The Comedy Theatre to skirt censorship issues and foil the Lord Chamberlain’s “pious attempt … to spare London the shock of this play—a play New Yorkers withstood without pain for some months.”

Despite ongoing tension on the set ofThe Prince and theShowgirl,Olivier and Leigh are seated front and center beside Marilyn and Miller.

Reviews are largely positive. TheEvening Standardpraises the play, though describing it as “so bulging with dramatic muscles that it is constantly on the verge of bursting its seams”—not unlike theDaily Mail’s comments on Marilyn and her scarlet satin mermaid-tail dress at the premiere.

“How could she walk?” asks theDaily Mail,describing the gown as “so tight around the knees that walking was an achievement.”

Of the play itself, however, the paper’s review says it “will shake you to the core, and should end, once and for all, all that talk of ‘Mr. Marilyn Monroe.’”

Throughout her months in England, Marilyn’s dreamed of having tea at Buckingham Palace. Her publicist is unable to secure her an invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II—until the Royal Command Performance on October 29.

The Battle of the River Plate,a film dramatizing Britain’s first major naval engagement in World War II, is playing at the Empire, Leicester Square. Before the showing, a select few are invited to meet the queen.

Though the actors and notables have been briefed on protocol—women are to avoid showing cleavage—Marilyn arrives sheathed in a floor-length gold lamé cape. Shrugging off the elegant draping, she reveals a gown of the same fabric, its front cut daringly low.

As the queen makes her way down the receiving line, Marilyn buzzes with nervousness until it’s finally her turn to takeHer Majesty’s gloved hand and drop into the curtsy she’s practiced for hours.

The two women are the same age, both thirty years old, and are neighbors across Windsor Great Park.

“We love it,” Marilyn tells the queen. “My husband and I go for bicycle rides in the Great Park.”

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