Page 56 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

She is speechless with grief. The man who’d looked so like her father, with his wry smile and his rakish mustache, is gone.

The Misfits, filmed over months in the extreme desert heat and involving the unlawful capture of wild mustangs, was a physical, exhausting shoot. Stunt men took many of the risks, but in the climactic action scene Gable himself was dragged by the stallion he was trying to wrestle down.

“I felt guilty when he died,” Marilyn tells journalist W.

J. Weatherby, “in case I put too much strain on him while we were making the movie. But that was stupid. He had a bad heart. No one can give you that. But he was such a strong, upright man—a real gentleman—that it was a great shock. Like your father dying. I wept all night. I’d have gone to his funeral, but I was afraid of breaking down. ”

To Dr. Greenson, Marilyn muses, “Maybe it was subconscious. Maybe I kept him waiting, punishing him like my father, getting even for having kept me waiting my entire life.”

Weatherby recalls Clark Gable’s words on the set of The Misfits, “She’s worth waiting for.”

In New York, Marilyn returns to her studies with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. She also agrees to a series of conversations with Weatherby. “Don’t write about it now,” she tells him. “Do it when I retire!”

They meet in a nondescript bar on Eighth Avenue, not far from the Greek Revival church building that houses the Actors Studio.

“Apologies, apologies, apologies,” she says when she arrives late. “I was sleeping. I took some pills. Will you forgive me?”

Dressed in pants that hide her shape, her hair covered in a scarf, Marilyn sits in a back booth without being recognized.

“Sometimes it would be a big relief to be no longer famous,” she says. “But we actors and actresses are such worriers—such, what is your word?—Narcissus types. I sit in front of the mirror for hours looking for signs of age.”

Weatherby listens with rapt attention, committing her words to memory.

“Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young but then you’d never complete your life, would you?”

That includes new love.

“Have you someone in mind?” Weatherby asks. “Is there a leading candidate?”

“Sort of,” Marilyn says, running a finger along her glass of gin and tonic. “Only problem is, he’s married right now. And he’s famous; so we have to meet in secret.”

Weatherby doesn’t press and Marilyn keeps talking.

“He’s in politics.”

“In Hollywood?” Weatherby asks.

“Oh, no,” Marilyn giggles. “In Washington.”

On Christmas Eve, a lonely Marilyn sits on a windowsill in her New York apartment at 444 East 57th Street, the one she used to share with Arthur Miller. Despite the wintry air, she’s opened her bedroom window wide so she can stare out at the city lights.

Her maid, Lena Pepitone, enters the room and sees Marilyn poised on the edge, as if she is going to jump, dropping thirteen stories into the street below. Pepitone sprints across the room to grab Marilyn by the waist.

“Let me die!” Marilyn cries, as Pepitone struggles to pull her back to safety. “I want to die. I deserve to die. What have I got to live for?”

And yet, on Christmas Day, someone remembers her fondly.

Several scarlet poinsettias are delivered in full bloom—a gift from Joe DiMaggio.

Later that day, the man himself arrives.

It’s as if he’s heard her clarion call of sadness.

On several occasions over the next few days, he discreetly uses the service elevator to reach her apartment unseen.

They have supper together, they watch television together.

Sometimes he stays the night. His company is comforting.

There’s still the unresolved matter of Marilyn’s divorce from Arthur Miller. She’s not disputing his keeping the Connecticut house and Hugo the Basset Hound, but they need to make it legal. She’s hired a new personal publicist who devises a brilliant plan.

Pat Newcomb of the Arthur P. Jacobs public relations firm is a sharp strategist. The daughter of a Washington judge, Newcomb is equally well-connected in Hollywood and Washington, and is a friend of the Kennedy clan.

January 20, 1961, will be president-elect John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration Day.

That’s exactly when Newcomb suggests that Marilyn travel to Mexico to finalize her divorce paperwork.

“It’s the best day,” Newcomb insists. “The eyes of the world will be elsewhere.”

The movie star and her publicist fly out of New York on January 19, ahead of the winter storm that’s blanketing Washington, DC, in over eight inches of snow.

At the National Guard Armory in Washington, Frank Sinatra has organized a fundraising gala to balance out the $2 million Kennedy campaign debt.

Thousands of supporters brave the weather, paying $100 per ticket—$10,000 per box—to see Nat King Cole, Gene Kelly, Jimmy Durante, Ethel Merman, and Sinatra himself perform.

“We are all indebted to a great friend, Frank Sinatra,” President-elect Kennedy says. “Long before he could sing he was pulling in votes in a New Jersey precinct … Tonight, we saw excellence.”

That’s what Kennedy’s supporters see the next day in the smiling man in the top hat, formal day dress, and striped trousers as he walks alongside Jackie Kennedy from the White House to the Capitol.

In subfreezing temperatures, he receives the oath of office from Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and becomes the thirty-fifth president of the United States.

In a small, hot office in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a local judge presides over the dissolution of the four-and-a-half-year marriage between Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe on the grounds of “incompatibility of character.”

She signs the papers without even reading them.

In the thirty minutes it takes Marilyn to become the ex–Mrs. Miller, photographers surround the building.

Flashbulbs pop, capturing the image of a despondent woman with unwashed hair dressed in a black suit. She battles her way to the waiting car, unable to escape the sound of her name until she shuts the door and blocks everything out.