Page 43 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

It’s not until the plane is airborne that she removes her Ray-Ban Wayfarers and shakes her blond curls free from the wig that’s kept them under wraps.

She’s successfully evaded the press all the way to the airport—unlike last month, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where she had been in-patient for a week after undergoing surgery for endometriosis.

Though a nurse had tried to help her sneak out a back exit, hundreds of reporters and photographers were there to snap photos of her looking pale and ill, and covering herself in a long mink coat.

On board the last flight out of Los Angeles, she’s sleepless with nervousness and excitement.

From her window seat, she stares out at the dark sky, trying not to bite her nails any shorter than they already are.

At age nineteen, she’d set her sights on a career in Hollywood.

Nine years later, she’s fleeing its corrupt dream factory.

There is no one to keep her here any longer.

Her marriage to Joe DiMaggio is over. The studio system is suffocating her.

Aunt Ana is dead. So is Grace McKee. Her mother’s weekly letters contain a string of impossible demands.

That Gladys be released from the sanitarium.

That Marilyn return to God and to the Christian Science faith.

The last time she reinvented herself, Norma Jeane became Marilyn Monroe.

This sad bitter child who grew up too fast is hardly ever out of my heart, she thinks. With success all around me, I can still feel her frightened eyes looking out of mine. She keeps saying, “I never lived. I was never loved.”

MARILYN HAS LEFT HOLLYWOOD , newspaper headlines venture, then ask, “Where’s Marilyn?” Darryl Zanuck can’t answer that question. Neither can Charles Feldman or Sid Skolsky.

Marilyn tells almost no one of the secret project she’s hatched with fashion photographer Milton Greene, drawing up the papers with a New York lawyer. She’s creating her own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc. She’ll be president, and Greene will be vice president.

She met Greene a little over a year ago, when he was assigned to photograph her for a September 1953 Look magazine cover story. Marilyn had greeted the youthful-looking thirty-one-year-old, “Why you’re just a boy!”

“And you’re just a girl!” Greene answered right back.

Their fast friendship led to an intimate creative partnership. Two months ago, in October 1954, Marilyn posed in Greene’s New York photography studio for the “Ballerina Sitting” series, barefoot in a white tulle and satin gown.

Now Greene and his wife, Amy, pick Marilyn up from New York’s Idlewild Airport and drive her into an unfamiliar landscape.

She presses her face against the windowpane, staring at the snow-covered fields and the bare, frosted trees of Fairfield County, Connecticut, where the Greenes live in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in rural Weston.

She spends the holidays in their rambling bohemian farmhouse, helping trim the Christmas tree and meeting the Greenes’ artistic friends.

Among their sharp crowd are dancer Gene Kelly, star of films like Singin’ in the Rain and most recently Brigadoon ; composer Leonard Bernstein and his actress wife, Felicia; and novelist and screenwriter Truman Capote, whom Marilyn previously met on the set of The Asphalt Jungle .

She listens to them gossip about unfamiliar ideas and people, then steals away to the Greenes’ library to educate herself.

Amy Greene—a former model for Saks Fifth Avenue—helps Marilyn create a New York look, enlisting her friend the designer Anne Klein.

“Come get what you want,” Klein says of her new capsule collection of black dresses in slip and sheath cuts.

Marilyn still insists on bleaching her own hair, but she begins wearing clothes with more forgiving lines and much less makeup, forgoing her signature red lipstick. Before stepping out, she dons one of Klein’s simple black slip dresses and a tight black cap that covers her curls.

Back in Los Angeles, the lawyers are still arguing. It’s like The Girl in Pink Tights all over again. Marilyn is in breach of her contract. She can’t just walk out and abandon her obligations. There’s a script and a film to be made.

The plans for Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc., are finalized on December 31, 1954. With characteristic misspellings, she writes out her resolutions for 1955:

Must have the disipline to do the following —

z— go to class—my own always—without fail

x— go as often as possible to observe Strassberg’s other private classes

g— never miss actor’s studio sessions

v— work whenever possible—on class assignments—and always keep working on the acting exercises

u— start attending Clurman lectures—also Lee Strassberg’s directors lectures at theater wing—enquire about both

l— keep looking around me—only much more so—observing—but not only myself but others and everything—take things (it) for what they (it’s) are worth

y— must make strong effort to work on current problems and phobias that out of my past has arisen—making much much much more more more more more effort in my analisis. And be there always on time—no excuses for being ever late.

w— if possible—take at least one class at university—in literature —

o— follow RCA thing through.

p— try to find someone to take dancing from—body work (creative)

t— take care of my instrument—personally & bodily (exercise) try to enjoy myself when I can—I’ll be miserable enough as it is.

She takes up residence at the Gladstone Hotel on Park Avenue in New York. On January 7, Marilyn calls a momentous press conference. She’s announcing her new role: as president of her very own company.

“I feel wonderful! I’m incorporated!” she declares. Sipping a glass of sherry, Marilyn signals her newfound self-worth. Single. Free. In control.

“I am going to do some pictures and TV and things,” she says. “I want to expand, to get into other fields, to broaden my scope … People have scope, you know, they really do.”

What kind of scope is she thinking?

“Strong dramatic parts,” she states. “Like Grushenka, in The Brothers Karamazov … I don’t know how to spell it. I only hope I can act in it.”

Three times a week, Marilyn studies craft at the Actors Studio.

In 1947, her friend Elia Kazan and others affiliated with Konstantin Stanislavski’s Group Theatre had founded a new artistic home here in New York. Membership to the Actors Studio is granted only by audition, but Artistic Director Lee Strasberg bends the rules and permits Marilyn to observe.

He does insist that she undergo psychoanalysis.

Key to Method acting, known simply as the Method, is an actor’s using her own emotions.

Milton Greene recommends his own Upper East Side analyst, Dr. Margaret Hohenberg.

Marilyn begins attending five sessions a week, hoping to unblock what she’s holding inside herself via Freudian techniques.

Of the intensive therapy, Strasberg says, “Do this and you’ll feel something.”

Marilyn’s association with the Actors Studio brings it nearly as much attention as two films from last March that featured Studio members like Sidney Poitier and Elia Kazan.

In Blackboard Jungle, Poitier plays a rebellious teen whose life is changed by his teacher.

And founder Kazan’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s bestselling novel East of Eden features a performance by newcomer James Dean that’s already drawing comparisons to Studio mainstay Marlon Brando.

Kazan recently directed Brando in On the Waterfront, for which he’s garnered a Best Actor Academy Award nomination. That ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on March 30, but first he’ll be attending the East of Eden world premiere at New York’s Astor Theatre on March 9.

When word gets out that Brando and Marilyn will serve as celebrity ushers, the event instantly sells out.

Ticket sales are to benefit the not-for-profit Actors Studio and its new venue—a former church building on West 44th Street.

Marilyn’s fans snap up tickets for three times their face value.

Unfortunately for Lee Strasberg, the take won’t include scalpers’ profits.

She arrives at the theater in full Hollywood regalia—an off-the-shoulder gown in biscuit-colored brocade, opera gloves, and a white ermine wrap.

One of the ticket holders is Arthur Miller.

The longing that kindled back in 1951 has quickly ignited into a passionate love affair.

A daring, secret one. They check into hotels as “Mr. and Mrs. A Miller,” noting the expense as “for meeting held at suite with De Laurentis and MCA officials from time to time.”

The playwright attends the East of Eden premiere with his sister, not his wife. I no longer knew what I wanted, Miller’s told himself, certainly not the end of my marriage, but the thought of putting Marilyn out of my life was unbearable.

After the premiere, Miller is followed going to Marilyn’s hotel.

Gossip columnist Walter Winchell breaks the story—“America’s best-known blonde moving picture star is now dating the darling of the pro-left Intelligentsia”—all but spelling out Winchell’s allegiances to FBI Director J.

Edgar Hoover and anti-Communism crusading senator Joseph McCarthy.

Hoover first started a file on Miller in 1944, closely timed to the opening of Miller’s first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck .

The bureau deemed his entire résumé suspicious.

His years in the mid-1930s as a student-journalist-turned-playwright at the University of Michigan.

His support of the 1938 American Relief Ship for Spain to supply anti-fascist rebels during the Spanish Civil War.

His exemption from World War II service due to a knee injury sustained playing high school football.

His opposition to nuclear weapons and affiliation with the American Labor Party, which the FBI deemed “a communist front.”

The couple takes to meeting in remote corners of New York City. With Marilyn dressed plainly, they bicycle in Coney Island, walk in Battery Park, or attend poetry readings hosted by Norman and Hedda Rosten.

In an interview with NBC, Marilyn reveals only that she’s “fallen in love with Brooklyn,” that she enjoys “almost everything” about the borough. “I just like walking around,” she says. “The people and the streets and the atmosphere, I just like it.”

Author Truman Capote, who at age seventeen had a job at The New Yorker magazine and who published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, at twenty-three in 1948, quickly sweeps his friend Marilyn into his New York social circle.

On March 24, the pair is photographed dancing at the El Morocco club.

Marilyn, in the black slip dress that’s become her signature New York attire, throws off her high heels so that she doesn’t tower over her diminutive partner.

Capote introduces her to seventy-seven-year-old Constance Collier, famed acting coach to Katharine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, and Audrey Hepburn. Marilyn becomes Collier’s newest pupil, one she affectionately calls “my special problem.”

Their sessions are nothing short of astonishing.

“I suppose people would chuckle at the notion, but really, she could be the most exquisite Ophelia,” Collier tells Capote.

“What she has—this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence—could never surface on the stage. It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera.

It’s like a hummingbird in flight: only a camera can freeze the poetry of it.

But anyone who thinks this girl is simply another Harlow or harlot or whatever is mad. ”

Collier recognizes that Marilyn’s gifts are fragile, and so is she.

“Somehow I don’t think she’ll make old bones,” the acting coach confides. “Absurd of me to say, but somehow I feel she’ll go young. I hope, I really pray, that she survives long enough to free the strange, lovely talent that’s wandering through her like a jailed spirit.”

On April 25, it’s Constance Collier who dies unexpectedly of a sudden heart attack.

The funeral service for Collier is held on April 28 at the Universal Funeral Home at Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street, just down the street from the Waldorf Astoria.

Marilyn covers her hair in a black chiffon scarf, her face in large black sunglasses, her legs in black silk stockings, and her famous figure in a loose-fitting black dress. Even to Capote, she’s barely recognizable. The friends steal into the chapel’s back row.

“I hate funerals,” Marilyn tells Capote afterward, as they wait for the crowd to clear.

“I’m glad I won’t have to go to my own. Only, I don’t want a funeral—just my ashes cast on waves by one of my kids, if I ever have any.

I wouldn’t have come today except that Miss Collier cared about me, about my welfare, and she was just like a granny, a tough old granny, but she taught me a lot. She taught me how to breathe.”