Page 80 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Isidore didn’t know. Arthur Miller and Inge Morath wed quickly up in New York. Marilyn reassures him, “I’m sure a letter must be on its way.”

Marilyn wants to make me feel right,her former father-in-law realizes.She wants me to protect her, but she also protects me.

Later that evening, after returning to his own hotel, he puts a hand in his coat pocket and finds that Marilyn has slipped in $200.

“I can’t tell you in mere words just how much your trip to Florida meant to me,” he writes her on Sea Isle stationery. “I don’t ever remember having such a good time!” He signs the letter “Love Dad.”

After leaving Miami, Marilyn travels up to see DiMaggio in Fort Lauderdale at a beachfront resort constructed to resemble an ocean liner. The Yankee Clipper Hotel has quickly become the favorite of the New York Yankees near their new spring training facility, Fort Lauderdale Stadium.

DiMaggio and Marilyn spend the night of February 19 in his hotel suite. The next morning, he sees Marilyn back to Miami International Airport and kisses her good-bye as she boards a Pan Am flight to Mexico City.

The shopping trip in Mexico from February 20 to March 3 to furnish the new house at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive is another suggestion of Dr. Greenson’s, who’s overseeing her move and some home repairs.

Marilyn’s personal publicist Pat Newcomb and hairdresser George Masters are irritated that housekeeper Eunice Murray is joining the trip. But Dr. Greenson insists.

At the Hilton Continental Hotel in Mexico City, Newcomb has organized an informal press conference. Marilyn has her next film to promote, along with a local itinerary that includes a visit to the country’s most important film set, Churubusco Studios, where she’ll meet famous Spanish director LuisBuñuel and the cast of his surrealist dinner-party comedy,The Exterminating Angel.

As Marilyn dresses, selecting an aqua-colored three-quarter-sleeve Pucci knit, she enjoys some champagne. When she arrives at the event, she smiles and blows kisses to the reporters and photographers she’s kept waiting for two hours, then sits down in an armchair with a fresh bottle of champagne on the side table.

Questions come fast and thick. All of them are personal.

Her measurements?

“I never measure myself,” Marilyn answers. “It’s other people who measure me.”

Why isn’t she wearing stockings?

“Don’t you like my skin?”

Does she wear underwear?

Marilyn gives her stock answer: “I only wear Chanel Number Five.”

Bitter about her failed marriages?

“No way, I still haven’t given up hope that I’ll find happiness.”

A fling with a Mexican actor?

“Why does he have to be an actor?” she asks. “Just being Mexican is enough for me.”

Marilyn finds a fling quickly. She chooses José Bolaños, a handsome Mexican screenwriter. They’re photographed dancing in a tight embrace at a Mexico City nightclub.

Bolaños makes Marilyn feel loved, showering her with flowers and gifts and affection. One evening he hires amariachi band and stands outside her hotel room window, serenading her to sleep.

An old friend of Dr. Greenson, American expat Frederick Vanderbilt Field and his fourth wife, Nieves Orozco, are Marilyn’s cultural guides to Mexico. Field, now an amateur archaeologist, and Orozco, once a favorite model of the artist Diego Rivera, live in the Zona Rosa section of Mexico City, an informal collective of leftist Americans.

Field is known as “the Reds’ pet blueblood,” having cast his vote in the 1928 US presidential election for the Socialist Party candidate. That decision cost him more than $70 million—the amount his industrialist uncle Frederick Vanderbilt was planning to leave Field before Vanderbilt disinherited his namesake nephew.

Field advises Bolaños to avoid being photographed with Marilyn.

The FBI has marked Field as a Comintern operative for the Russians, and they surveil and bug his home—where Marilyn and Mrs. Murray are out dining with Field.

A charming and affable host, Field pours champagne for Marilyn, keeping her talking about American political news. Her views, she explains, are informed by her friendships with Kennedys. How President Kennedy and his brother Bobby, the US attorney general, are dedicated to winning the space race, promoting global service through the Peace Corps, and monitoring the country’s slowly escalating involvement in Vietnam. There’s also Jack and Bobby’s intense dislike for that awful FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover.

“His goons follow everybody, all the time. They’d like to get rid of him,” she explains. “But apparently, it’s politically notthe right time. Although I have no idea why not. Surely, as I said to Jack the other day, if you’re President of the United States of America, you can do what you like?”

The file about Marilyn Monroe’s champagne-fueled indiscretions, including the private thoughts of the president and the attorney general and her meetings in the Zona Rosa, quickly reaches the FBI director’s desk.

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