Page 34 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

GRACE MCKEE LIES in bed, dying of uterine cancer.

Painkillers, sleeping pills, uppers, downers, the apartment is awash with them.

Some are prescribed to McKee by doctors.

Others are procured from Schwab’s by Sid Skolsky, whom Joe DiMaggio calls Marilyn’s “pill-pal not pen-pal.” Skolsky’s column has made the place a top Hollywood destination, so he’s allowed anything he wants.

Marilyn’s bathroom cabinet is full of them. When, two or three times a week, she arrives at the studio to dress for an event, she slaps a plastic bag full of pills onto her dressing room table—uppers, downers, vitamins—no one is quite sure what cocktail of drugs the mixture contains.

McKee, who’s struggled with alcoholism, is astonished by how many pills Marilyn takes and how often.

“Don’t worry,” Marilyn replies. “I have been taking them every day for years.”

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell are standing in white rhinestone-encrusted dresses and high heels on the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard.

It’s June 26, 1953, and the co-stars of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes are promoting the 20th Century-Fox musical comedy ahead of its August release.

An enthusiastic crowd has gathered to watch as the pair—Hollywood’s “First Blonde” and “First Brunette,” according to newsreels—place their hands and feet in wet cement.

Continuing the tradition that Grauman’s began in the 1920s, the actresses make their hand- and footprints, then sign their names—Marilyn dotting the i in hers with a rhinestone—and scrawl Gentlemen Prefer Blondes across their adjoining squares.

Marilyn recalls going to Grauman’s as a child.

I used to go to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and try to fit my foot in the prints in the cement there.

And I’d say ‘Oh, oh, my foot’s too big. I guess that’s out.

’ … When I finally put my foot down into that wet cement, I sure knew what it really meant to me, anything’s possible, almost.

“It’s for all time, isn’t it?” Marilyn observes.

“Yes,” Russell replies. “It’s for all time, or as long as the cement lasts.”

Then the fun begins. Marilyn cheekily suggests that Jane, for whom Howard Hughes once designed a special bra, immortalize her bust in the cement, while she imprints her buttocks, famous for her wiggle walk in Niagara, on the slab.

It’s only a joke. They don’t go through with it. Marilyn’s on enough of an emotional high. This could be her life’s proudest moment.

But when she scans the crowd, looking for familiar faces, there are none. Joe has refused to attend. Jane Russell disappears with her husband and children, leaving Marilyn entirely alone.

Even the studio has abandoned her. They didn’t even book her a car. If not for the kindness of her hairdresser, Gladys Whitten, Marilyn would have no way home.