Page 44 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

But ambitious promotional plans are derailed as film censors and advertising partners begin to weigh in. Some are pushing for the flying-skirt scene to be cut entirely.

Telegrams fly between producer Zanuck and producer Charles Feldman.

“They’re replacing a big cutout of Marilyn outside Loew’s Theatre in Times Square.

It was showing Marilyn with her skirts blowing above her waist. Not good taste …

Some papers refuse to accept the wind blowing ad because of Kefauver investigation and pressure groups … this is a very delicate situation.”

Despite their divorce, she has not cut him out of her life entirely.

When he’s in New York, he takes her to his favorite Italian restaurant in the Village, and to celebrity clubhouse Toots Shor’s.

He writes her letters, all addressed to Mrs. Joe DiMaggio.

“Dear Baby,” he wrote last October as the end of their marriage loomed.

“I love you and want to be with you. There is nothing I would like better than to restore your confidence in me.” Marilyn keeps the letter, reading and rereading the postscript scribbled in pencil.

“Please forgive me, my perfect girl. I love you.”

“No, we’re not getting back together,” she tells reporters at the premiere, smiling through bright red lips. “We’re just good friends. Very good friends.”

Innuendo delights the press, but not the censors.

Director Billy Wilder telegrams the Catholic Legion of Decency: “I do not have the reputation of ever being connected with pictures of lascivious character. Obviously, the picture deals with a man’s temptations but they are very human and utterly harmless.”

The film is a phenomenal success.

“Miss Monroe brings a special personality and a certain physical something or other to the film,” says the New York Times in its review.

Marilyn appears at an even more important premiere on September 29, 1955, when she attends the Broadway opening of Arthur Miller’s newest play, A View from the Bridge, a one-act drama written in verse and based on stories from his Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn—and on his own internal conflicts.

Also at the Coronet Theatre premiere are his parents, Isidore and Augusta Miller.

Miller introduces them to Marilyn, though he keeps from them the nature of their relationship—as he’s still married to Mary Slattery, his wife of nearly sixteen years and the mother of his two children, eleven-year-old Jane and eight-year-old Robert.

Miller is a man utterly obsessed but not fully happy, either with his personal life or with the production.

How to get up on the stage and describe to the actors the sensation of being swept away, of inviting the will’s oblivion and dreading it?

Marilyn has become Fox’s most bankable star. Her last five films have grossed a spectacular $50 million. Yet her contractual rate remains $1,500 per week. Milton Greene, her business partner in Marilyn Monroe Productions, is determined to right the imbalance.

How is it possible, Greene argues to the Fox legal team, that director Billy Wilder has been paid $500,000 and producer Charles Feldman $318,000, while the film’s star is paid a fraction of her worth?

The once-mighty studio system proves no match for Marilyn’s unimpeachable demands.

She’s offered a new, seven-year contract.

During that time, she’ll owe Fox four A-level pictures and be paid a salary of $400,000 for each.

From director to story to cinematographer, she’ll have total creative control—and freedom to make her own films through Marilyn Monroe Productions. The contractual bonuses are mammoth.

The breakthrough deal is the first of its type. As a Hollywood businesswoman, she is truly a pioneer.

Zanuck concedes defeat.

Straw Head has won.

On December 20, 1955, Marilyn purchases a black Ford Thunderbird with a V8 engine and a convertible top. She registers the car to Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc.

Eleven days later, on New Year’s Eve, she signs her new contract with 20th Century-Fox. It’s one year to the day since she finalized the plans for the company that bears her name.

In January 1956, the Los Angeles Mirror News reports: “Marilyn Monroe, victorious in her year-long sit-down strike against 20th Century-Fox, will return to the studio next month with a reported $8,000,000.00 deal. Veterans of the movie scene said it was one of the greatest single triumphs ever won by an actress.”

Over the past year, Marilyn’s realized many, so many, of the resolutions she made upon arriving in New York.

But old demons won’t be outrun. In his diary, Truman Capote records his sense of impending tragedy.

“Saw Marilyn M. and Arthur Miller the other night, both looking suffused with a sexual glow. They plan to get married, but I can’t help feeling this little episode is called ‘Death of a Playwright.’”

Marilyn calls Miller “Arturo” and he calls her “Sugar Feeny” after his cat. The lightness is a reprieve from their shared burdens of fame. In Marilyn, Miller sees “a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”

Capote makes the stark assessment that “1955 was a year of growth and discovery for Marilyn. It was also the time when she started swallowing too many pills and drinking too much champagne.” He also knows a secret in the workings of Marilyn Monroe Productions.

Its president and vice president are being over-prescribed by Milton Greene’s doctor brother.

“Tons of pills,” Milton’s wife Amy Greene admits.

“Anything we wanted, uppers, downers, it was all available.”

Sleeping pills at 3 a.m., then Dexamyl to puncture the soporific bubble on the way to a 9 a.m. meeting. And maybe stronger drugs too.

Marilyn is a frequent presence in the apartment at 135 Central Park West where Actors Studio Artistic Director Lee Strasberg lives with his second wife, Paula, also an instructor at the Studio, and their teenage children, Susan and Johnny.

The place is filled with Strasberg’s extravagant collections of classical music recordings, theater books—and celebrity guests.

Though Marilyn trusts Paula, it’s seventeen-year-old Susan Strasberg in whom she often confides. “I always felt I was a nobody,” Marilyn tells her. “And the only way for me to be somebody was to—well, be somebody else, which is probably why I wanted to act.”

Marilyn had been in the audience at the Cort Theatre a few months earlier, on October 5, 1955, when the teenager made her Broadway debut in the title role of The Diary of Anne Frank .

That the New York Times praised Susan as having “the soul of an actress” astonished her father.

“I just don’t know how she picked it all up. She’s never had any formal training.”

Marilyn and Susan Strasberg are friends as close as sisters, often sharing a room and vying for Lee Strasberg’s attention.

“My dad treated Marilyn Monroe more like his daughter than me,” says Susan. “He constantly validated her. With her Pop was vulnerable, paternal, permissive. With me he was impersonal, critical, forbidding.”

Like many of the men in her life, Marilyn calls Lee Strasberg “Daddy.”

The first film in Marilyn’s new contract with Fox will be Bus Stop .

Marilyn is set to play the role of Cherie, a Phoenix café singer kidnapped by the rodeo cowboy who loves her more than he should.

Last year, she met with columnist Hedda Hopper at the Waldorf Towers on Park Avenue, where Marilyn sublet Suite 2728 from British American comedienne and Broadway star Leonora Corbett for an eye-watering $1,000 per week.

“I heard Darryl Zanuck bought Bus Stop for you,” Hopper said at the time.

Bus Stop, William Inge’s new play—after Come Back, Little Sheba and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Picnic —is a hit at the Music Box Theatre on Broadway.

“I hope it’s true,” Marilyn replied, “but I’ve heard nothing about it from the company. All I’m asking for is good stories from good directors because I have to learn.”

Bus Stop fits the bill, as does Marilyn’s choice of director, Joshua Logan, who directed Picnic on Broadway and adapted it into a 1955 Oscar-winning film.

Logan also credits his studies in Moscow with Konstantin Stanislavski for his Pulitzer Prize–winning achievement as co-author, co-producer, and co-director of the 1949 stage musical South Pacific .

It’s the challenge she wants.

“I never had a chance to learn anything in Hollywood. They worked me too fast. They rushed me from one picture into another,” she says.

“It’s no challenge to do the same thing over and over.

I want to keep growing as a person and as an actress, and in Hollywood they never ask me my opinion.

They just tell me what time to show up for work.

In leaving Hollywood and coming to New York, I feel I can be more myself.

After all, if I can’t be myself, what’s the good of being anything at all? ”

On February 7, 1956, Marilyn welcomes visitors at her new apartment on 2 Sutton Place. Sir Laurence Olivier, the Oscar-winning actor widely regarded as the best in the world, enters with both his agent and popular and prolific British playwright Terence Rattigan.

Marilyn has decided that her next project after Bus Stop will be The Prince and the Showgirl.

The movie is a film adaptation of Rattigan’s play The Sleeping Prince: An Occasional Fairy Tale, which opened in London in 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.

Olivier will reprise his starring role as a prince regent who attempts to seduce an American showgirl—played on stage by his wife, Vivien Leigh, who won an Oscar in 1940 as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind .

It’s the first acquisition for Marilyn Monroe Productions.

“Last week there was persuasive evidence that Marilyn Monroe is a shrewd businesswoman,” Time magazine reports, “apparent when Marilyn Monroe Productions bought a property to serve as a starring vehicle for its president, M. Monroe.” Milton Greene and Olivier will both be producers, and Warner Bros. will distribute.

The now forty-eight-year-old Olivier, who will also direct the picture, is looking to revive his somewhat stodgy reputation by starring in the film adaptation alongside the sexy Hollywood starlet.

Marilyn is hoping that the association with the highly respected legend of stage and screen will confer more respectability upon her.

“Monroe and Olivier,” says Bus Stop director Joshua Logan, “that’s the best combination since black and white.”

Although Marilyn keeps her guests waiting for an hour and a half, Olivier is instantly smitten with his future leading lady.

One thing was clear to me: I was going to fall most shatteringly in love with Marilyn. She was adorable, so witty, and more physically attractive than anyone I could imagine.

He sends her a floral arrangement and a note:

“Marilyn, It has been so lovely meeting you, knowing you and now knowing that such exciting things and such fun are ahead. Love and Thank You, Larry.”

The co-stars make their first public appearance together on February 9, posing cheek-to-cheek in the neo-Renaissance Terrace Room at the Plaza Hotel, with its arched openings, floral motifs, and crystal chandeliers that replicate those in the Palace at Versailles.

Much fanfare greets the announcement of their new project. The film will also be Olivier’s non-Shakespearean directorial debut.

“What do you think of Marilyn as an actress?” reporters ask him.

“She is a brilliant comedienne, and therefore an extremely good actress,” Sir Laurence says. “She has the cunning gift of being able to suggest one minute that she is the naughtiest little thing, and the next minute that she is beautifully dumb and innocent.”

As if on cue, the strap of Marilyn’s black slip dress suddenly snaps. It’s not unusual for her seams to pop, since she insists on tailoring all her clothing skin tight. Amid an explosion of blinding flashbulbs, she deftly prevents her bosom from spilling out.

“Sir Laurence has always been my idol,” Marilyn says.

When he returns to London, he sends her a note. “I am terribly excited at our prospects. You were so angelic in New York. Thank you for all your sweetness. I think with great joy of our future meeting. Ever, Larry.”