Page 93 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Greco’s upset. He doesn’t know Marilyn well, but he’s heard stories about her previous issues, and he’s worried enough to follow her outside to make sure she’s all right.

He finds Marilyn sitting alone by the pool in the moonlight, looking pale and out of it, so he escorts her back to her bungalow.

Marilyn doesn’t want to be alone. She calls the front desk and keeps the line open all night. The operator can hear her breathing.

Marilyn passes the next hours suspended in a fog. She may have nearly OD’d. She may have fallen out of bed. She may have been unknowingly assaulted.

Whatever it was, maybe it’s best if she just blocks it out.

“I have the most wonderful memory for forgetting things,” Marilyn once told Hollywood journalist Sidney Skolsky.

That talent is convenient now.

What’s certain is that the “relaxing” weekend in the Sierras is cut short. By Sunday afternoon, Marilyn is flown back to Los Angeles with Peter Lawford on Frank Sinatra’s private plane.

She stumbles off the plane, barefoot and bedraggled, and walks straight to a limo waiting to take her home.

Lawford is driven home by the pilot, Frank Lieto. En route, Lawford insists that they stop while he makes a twenty-minute phone call from a pay phone.

Marilyn’s a loose cannon, and there are people he has to warn.

CHAPTER 67

NOW THATSomething’s Got to Giveis set to resume production, Hollywood reporters are willing to put a more positive spin on their coverage.

In theNew York Journal-American,Dorothy Kilgallen writes:

Marilyn Monroe’s health seems to be much improving. She’s been attending select Hollywood parties and has become the talk of the town again. In California, they’re circulating a photograph of her that certainly isn’t as bare as the famous calendar, but is very interesting … And she’s cooking in the sex-appeal department, too; she’s proved vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman who is a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio in his heyday. So don’t write off Marilyn as finished.

Marilyn would agree. She’s nowhere near finished. She’s busy working the phones.

“They are not calling back,” she says of the Kennedys, whenshe telephones her friend Bob Slatzer in Ohio. “Bobby and Jack used me. They used me.”

I’m not going to stand for that. I’m going to tell everyone about us.

When Marilyn hears that Bobby will be attending a legal conference in San Francisco this weekend, she works the problem. Surely Pat Lawford will tell her where he’s staying. San Francisco is 350 miles north of Los Angeles, but the distance is not important. She has to see Bobby.

A big confrontation is looming. Surely the journalists will be on her side. Walter Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen, they’re always looking for a scoop. What could be bigger than the true story of Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys?

She calls her friend Henry Rosenfeld in New York. She asks the dress manufacturer, an early investor in Marilyn Monroe Productions, to meet her in Washington, DC, next month and escort her to the premiere of the new Irving Berlin musical,Mr. President. Joshua Logan, who directed Marilyn inBus Stop,is also directing this stage production.

More crucially, she’s heard that John and Jackie Kennedy will be attending the party. She wants to make sure Jack knows what he’s missing. And she has just the designer to create a new evening look: Jean Louis, who created the “skin and beads” gown she wore to serenade the president at his birthday gala. She’s already put in an order at a cost of $6,000.

Why not make a hair appointment, too? She books Mickey Song to come to her house.Who would know more about the Kennedys’ private life than their hairdresser?

Has Song seen Bobby or Jack with “other women”? Marilyn wants to know.

She doesn’t get many answers, but that’s all right. Peter Lawford is having a dinner party at his beach house tonight. Surely, she’ll pick up some information there—especially if she brings drinks to share.

She greets Lawford’s friend Dick Livingston with a bottle of Dom Perignon.

“Champagne is so zestful,” Marilyn says, pouring herself a glass over ice cubes and breathing into the glass as if ingesting the elixir of life. She’s in good spirits and has spent the morning at a nearby nursery ordering citrus plants and flowers for her garden.

Livingston eyes Marilyn’s odd outfit—“a pair of hip-huggers with a bare midriff that revealed her gallbladder-operation scar, and a Mexican serape wrapped around her neck”—but focuses on her unhealthy pallor, “absolutely white, the color of alabaster.”

“My God, Marilyn, you ought to get some sun,” he advises.

“I know,” she replies, looking at him over her champagne glass. “What I need is a tan … and a man.”

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