Page 72 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Simone Signoret is also nominated for a Golden Globe, for Best Actress in a Drama forRoom at the Top, but she doesn’t win—yet less than a month later, she beats out Doris Day,Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor to win the Oscar statuette for Best Actress.

After a brief acceptance speech, she’s off to France to film another picture. Meanwhile, Miller travels to Galway, Ireland, for script meetings with John Huston, who directed Marilyn inThe Asphalt Jungleand is soon to direct her next film,The Misfits.

MARILYN’S HUSBAND IN GALWAY, the newspapers announce.

With their spouses away, Marilyn and her leading man grow closer.

“Tell me,” Signoret asks hypothetically, “do you know who could resist if they took Marilyn Monroe into their arms?”

Not Yves Montand.

After missing a day of filming on Sound Stage 11, Marilyn asks Montand back to her room to rehearse. She’s been ill, she says, lying in bed with a bottle of cold champagne and a small bucket of caviar, dressed in a transparent night dress. She asks him to give her a kiss goodnight.

Montand moves as if in a reverie.I bent down to put a goodnight kiss on her cheek. And her head turned and my lips went wild. It was a wonderful, tender kiss. A kiss of fire. A hurricane, I could not stop. I was half-stunned, stammering, I straightened up, already flooded with guilt, wondering what was happening to me. I didn’t wonder for long.

Soon it’s Montand—not Paula Strasberg on the Fox payroll for $2,000 a week—to whom Marilyn turns for affirmation at the end of each take. Another night, she knocks on his bedroom door, naked but for a mink coat.

Soon the bellboys at the Beverly Hills Hotel, along with Foxhair, makeup, and wardrobe, start to talk. Back from Ireland, Arthur Miller is said to have caught them in bed together.

“An actress whose name came up at this year’s Oscars is having marital problems,” one gossip columnist reports. Others advise Marilyn to stop sleeping with other people’s husbands.

“If Marilyn is in love with my husband, it proves she has good taste,” Signoret declares. “For I am in love with him too.”

Dr. Greenson’s office is nearly equidistant between the Fox lot and the Beverly Hills Hotel, but psychoanalysis can’t fill the void that Marilyn feels. “Marilyn had this terrible neediness,” Norman Rosten observes. “When she felt insecure, she went with other men simply for something to hold on to, however short-lived.”

When the shoot wraps in June, the set lights go dark. Film stops spooling through the cameras. Without the attentions of the director, choreographer, and crew, there is nothing. Silence.

Marilyn and Montand meet once more, this time in New York. The night Montand is to fly back to France, she hires a Cadillac, reserves a hotel room, then drives out to Idlewild Airport with a bottle of champagne chilling in the back seat. His one-hour stopover extends to five, as they sit in the back of the hired car. She begs him to stay in New York. They can leave their spouses and marry each other.

Montand’s answer is no, but he’s moved by the depths of her feeling.

“I was touched,” he says. “Touched because it was beautiful, and it was impossible. Not for a moment did I think of breaking with my wife.”

In France,Paris Matchreports: “The Montands have survived Hurricane Marilyn.”

But the eye of the storm is often the most dangerous place to be.

In July, filming begins onThe Misfits. It’s said that Arthur Miller is struggling to finish the script. He doesn’t know how the story ends.

CHAPTER 49

FRANK SINATRA IS HOSTING a private screening of his soon-to-be-released movieOcean’s Elevenwhen some unexpected guests show up at his Los Angeles home.

Among them is Peter Lawford, one of the film’s co-stars and a newly minted member of the Sinatra-led “Rat Pack” of entertainers known for their spirited carousing. Lawford—known as “Peter Brother-In-Lawford” ever since he married Pat Kennedy in 1954—has brought along the famous Kennedy clan.

The Kennedys are in town for the Democratic National Convention, running from July 11 to 15. Forty-three-year-old Senator Jack Kennedy, a fourteen-year veteran of the US Congress, already has 600 of the 761 delegates needed to secure the party’s presidential nomination. Younger brothers Bobby and Ted Kennedy are both working as campaign managers doing their utmost to help Jack over the top.

A little star power might help swing some undecided votes, and Frank Sinatra delivers. On July 10, Sinatra and his “Jack Pack” of entertainers draw two thousand cheering, check-wavingdonors to the black-tie, $100-a-plate Democratic Committee Dinner at the Beverly Hilton.

To open the convention, the “Committee for the Arts”—Nat King Cole, Tony Curtis, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, Shirley MacLaine, Vincent Price, Edward G. Robinson, and Frank Sinatra—file onto the stage at Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, known informally as the Coliseum, and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” to a starstruck crowd of politicians.

What the conventioneers wouldn’t give for an invitation to the Jack Pack’s favorite party spot—the Spanish-style oceanfront home on 625 Palisades Road in Santa Monica owned by Peter Lawford and Pat Kennedy.

Lawford, a former MGM contract player, bought the place directly from studio founder Louis B. Mayer, who famously hosted a 1939 pool party there for Judy Garland’s seventeenth birthday.

These days, Marilyn is a frequent guest of Lawford’s too—and with Arthur Miller away working onThe Misfitsscript, she’s alone in LA and her evenings are free.

Jack Kennedy is also without his wife on this trip. Following the advice of her doctors, a pregnant Jackie Kennedy remains at home in Massachusetts, answering campaign mail and writing a syndicated column called “Campaign Wife.”

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