Page 26 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Working from his bedroom, he continues to push Marilyn’s career as if she’s his only client.

He’s left all the others in the lurch, relying on his fuming colleagues at the William Morris Agency to pick up the slack.

But lovelorn Johnny is obsessively determined to make her a star. Even if it is the last thing he does.

“But they don’t like me there,” Marilyn protests. It was only three years ago that studio boss Darryl Zanuck declined to renew her contract, calling her unphotogenic.

“They will,” says Hyde. “This is it, honey. You’re in. Everybody is crazy about your work.”

Sometimes party chatter offers a more honest assessment than even the least flattering mirror.

“There goes the chinless wonder.” Those are the words Marilyn overhears as she passes by a cluster of well-dressed Hollywood partygoers.

Whitey Snyder checked her makeup before she left the studio lot, but even his best work can’t hide a flaw in her bone structure.

Marilyn makes an appointment with Dr. Michael Gurdin. His UCLA medical practice caters to Hollywood stars. Gurdin’s receptionist keeps a list of aliases to ensure discretion for those booking appointments.

She’s seen by Gurdin’s associate John Pangman, who diagnoses “a mild flatness of the chin” to be treated with a cartilage graft.

“No, Marilyn is not available for a screen test,” she has Johnny Hyde say to dodge the request. “She’s taken a fall on her chin.”

When the scar beneath her chin has healed, she resumes auditions and takes that screen test.

“Honey, you should have cut your chin two years ago,” the director says.

Her nose seems a little different, too, especially around the tip.

“Marilyn looks more beautiful than ever” is what she overhears at the next party.

Which are kinder, the insults or the compliments? It’s impossible to know for sure.

Marilyn auditions for All About Eve, and Joe Mankiewicz casts her in the supporting role of Miss Claudia Casswell, theater critic Addison DeWitt’s party date.

When Miss Casswell sees the fur coat belonging to the Broadway star played by Bette Davis, Marilyn delivers the scene-stealing line, “Now there’s something a girl could make sacrifices for. ”

Johnny Hyde is thrilled.

He was so happy for me, Marilyn thinks. No man had ever looked on me with such kindness. He not only knew me; he knew Norma Jeane, too. He knew all the pain, and all the desperate things in me. Nobody has ever loved me like that. I just wished in all my heart I could love him back.

Hyde proposes to Marilyn, but she declines. “I’m rich,” he wheedles. “I have almost a million dollars. If you marry me, you’ll inherit it when I die.”

She won’t think about him dying, won’t consider it, even as she recognizes that he shares many of Aunt Ana’s symptoms. “I’ll not leave you. I’ll never betray you,” she promises. “But I can’t marry you.”

Hyde continues to propose—often—but she does not, will not, accept.

She’s a romantic. She’ll marry only for love.

Though she telephones him often as his health declines, entertaining him with funny stories, she rarely visits his bedside, leaving Johnny to fret about her whereabouts and her companions.

There is something about the ailing man, the airlessness of his bedroom, and his increasing neediness that puts her off.

For Marilyn’s twenty-fourth birthday on June 1, Joe Schenck, the 20th Century-Fox production chief with whom she’s often seen around town, gives her a Chihuahua she names Josepha. She’s besotted with her new pet.

Maybe with its namesake, too, Johnny Hyde fears. Incessantly, he calls over to 1309 North Harper Avenue, the apartment Marilyn and her dog currently share with Natasha Lytess and her young daughter, Barbara.

“Where is Marilyn, Natasha?” Hyde begs of her acting coach. “I have been waiting. Never, in all my life, have I come across such cruelty or such selfishness.”

Hyde grows increasingly jealous. He cancels a photo shoot between Marilyn and her fellow 20th Century-Fox studio contract player Dale Robertson, to fend off impressions that she’s dating the handsome actor.

Marilyn’s next seen in six small scenes in The Fireball, starring Mickey Rooney as a roller-skating champion, and in an uncredited role as the fashion model Dusky Ledoux in Right Cross, a boxing drama starring June Allyson, Dick Powell, and Ricardo Montalban.

Both films are released the first week of October 1950, right before All About Eve hits screens to great accolades.

She signs a new three-year contract with the William Morris Agency on December 5.

A few weeks before Christmas, Johnny Hyde’s feeling well enough to travel to Palm Springs for the holiday season.

He suggests to Natasha Lytess and Marilyn that they go visit Tijuana, Mexico, and sends them south with enough money to treat themselves to some Christmas shopping.

But on December 18, 1950, fifty-five-year-old Hyde suffers a series of catastrophic heart attacks. “Marilyn! Marilyn!” are reportedly the last words on his lips in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in East Hollywood.

Marilyn hurries to his deathbed when she hears the news, legs shaking, eyes dark with heartache.

She stands over his corpse and slowly pulls back the white sheet, remembering what he used to tell her: All she had to do was lean over and hug his cold body and he would resurrect like Jesus to see her one last time.

“I did love you, Johnny,” she whispers. “Please know that I did.”

In the following days, Marilyn can’t stop crying. Devoid of her rock, her friend, her mentor, the one person who would move heaven and earth for her, she feels alone in the world.

She has so few friends. Reporters Sid Skolsky and Bob Slatzer.

Talent scout Lucille Ryman Carroll. Acting coach Natasha Lytess.

Whitey Snyder, the makeup artist. She seems to carry almost no one with her through life.

Now Johnny Hyde is dead, and she is eaten up by grief and guilt over not having rushed over in his last few days when he telephoned, begging her to come to the hospital.

“Be sure that Marilyn is treated as one of the family,” Hyde had instructed his secretary as he lay dying.

Instead, Hyde’s family not only repossesses all of the clothing and jewelry he’d gifted his beloved, but bars her from attending his funeral at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills.

Yet the grieving Marilyn is defiant. Heavily veiled and dressed in a new black suit purchased for the occasion, she and Natasha Lytess sneak into the funeral service.

Marilyn simply sits, weeps, waits. When the mourners finally disperse, she contemplates the altar for another hour, then waits alone at the grave until dusk, when a security guard asks her to leave.

In her final moments, she bends down and plucks a white rose from one of the bouquets on his grave.

She presses this rose flat into the pages of a Bible.

On Christmas Eve, like some ghoulish practical joke, Hyde’s pre-ordered Christmas presents are delivered all over town.

Marilyn is lying with her dog Josepha in the apartment on North Harper Avenue when a huge red box with a giant bow arrives.

“Every Star should have one of these” the message attached reads, signed, “All my love as ever, Johnny.”

Inside is a beautiful stole of the softest mink. Marilyn once again bursts into tears and clutches the fur to her face.

Natasha and Barbara Lytess come home with a bag of groceries. It’s Marilyn’s turn to cook dinner, but the kitchen is empty.

She can’t be asleep, can she? She does keep odd hours, but Lytess blames those wretched sleeping pills she’s been taking, lined up in bottles in the bedroom.

Lytess calls for her. There’s only silence.

Propped up on the table is a note. “I leave my car and my stole to Natasha.”

Another note is taped to Marilyn’s bedroom door. “Barbara, do NOT enter.”

What the hell has she done?

Lytess bursts in to find the curtains closed and clothes piled all over the room. On the bed is Marilyn, her arms above her head, her curls on the pillow, her face swollen.

Marilyn!

Lytess shouts in her ear and shakes her friend’s warm, limp body. There are greenish capsules half-dissolved in her mouth, and more down to the back of the throat. Marilyn’s lips are blue and her face is waxy, but she is still alive.

“Barbara!” Lytess yells to her daughter from the bedroom. “Call an ambulance!”