Page 57 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“I DON’T THINK The Misfits is going to knock ’em over,” Marilyn tells journalist confidant W. J. Weatherby. “First reactions are very mixed.”

“Wait and see. It’s too early,” he says.

“Maybe I didn’t have enough—you know—distance from the character. Arthur wrote me into it and our marriage was breaking up during that period. Maybe I was playing me too much, some ideal me —”

To a remarkable degree, Marilyn predicts the reaction of film critics.

“The casting of the film is almost impeccable,” says The New Yorker in its review on January 27, 1961. “In a part literally made for her, Miss Monroe displays a gentleness and a tired, childlike grace that are appropriate and moving, and, very evidently, a reflection of herself.”

On January 31, Marilyn appears at the world premiere at the Granada Theater in Reno, Nevada, on the arm of co-star Montgomery Clift.

“Gable has never done anything better on screen,” raves the New York Daily News, “nor has Miss Monroe.” The Hollywood Reporter states, “Miss Monroe has seldom looked worse,” but softens the blunt assessment with praise for her acting: “But there is a delicacy about her playing, and a tenderness that is affecting.”

The film is on track to cover its $4 million budget, hardly a commercial success.

Since The Misfits wrapped, Marilyn has visited her New York psychiatrist forty-seven times, leading Dr. Marianne Kris to believe her patient is suicidal.

On Sunday, February 5, Kris drives Marilyn to Weill Cornell Medical Center on the Upper East Side.

She has persuaded Marilyn that she needs to check herself in for a good rest and some good meals to restore some of the weight that has tumbled off her lately.

After signing the admission papers as “Faye Miller” to avoid publicity, Marilyn is taken through the cavernous hospital corridors to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic.

A male doctor gives Marilyn a gratuitous breast examination under the guise of looking for cancerous lumps in her bosom.

She is then ushered on to the floor for “disturbed patients.” Her clothes are taken from her, and she is given a hospital gown to wear.

Then she is placed in a padded room, where the door is slammed shut and locked from the outside.

She’s alone.

Marilyn starts to panic. It’s as if all the nightmares that she had at the orphanage have come true. All her life, she’s feared inheriting her mother’s insanity. It feels like it’s finally come for her. She is Gladys.

It’s all happening so quickly, so suddenly, that she goes into shock. She’s hysterical. Screaming, she pounds on the metal door with her bare hands. Her fists are raw and bleeding, and still no one comes, no one answers.

“I’m not crazy,” Marilyn yells, her face pressed against the small glass window. “Open the door, open the door. I won’t make trouble. I’ll be good. I promise. Just open the door!”

She paces around the cell like a caged tiger. She shakes her head, pulling at her hair. Suddenly, she gets an idea from her film role in Don’t Bother to Knock . She picks up the room’s only chair and hurls it at the door, repeatedly.

Eventually the small window in the steel door shatters. The staff at last comes running—with a straitjacket. After securing Marilyn in the restraint, four male nurses carry her to a more secure unit on the ninth floor, where she is sedated.

The true identity of patient “Faye Miller” spreads throughout the hospital. During the night, doctors and nurses form a procession. One by one, they peek through the small window at Marilyn Monroe, bound up in a straitjacket, screaming, crying, and rolling around on the floor of her cell.

None of her friends know where she is.

Three days later, a sympathetic nurse loosens the jacket and gives her a pen and paper, which she uses to write to Lee and Paula Strasberg, begging them to get her out. Her handwriting is spiky, the spelling is erratic, but her terror at the captivity is obvious.

Dear Lee and Paula,

Dr. Kris has had me put into the New York Hospital—pstikiatric division under the care of two idiot doctors. They both should not be my doctors.

You haven’t heard from me because I’m locked up with all these poor nutty people.

I’m sure to end up a nut if I stay in this nightmare.

please help me Lee, this is the last place I should be—maybe if you called Dr Kris and assured her of my sensitivity and that I must get back to class …

Lee, I try to remember what you said once in class ‘that art goes far beyond science’

And the science memories around here I’d like to forget—like screeming women etc.

please help me—if Dr. Kris assures you I am all right you can assure her I am not. I do not belong here!

I love you both

Marilyn

P.S. forgive the spelling—and theres nothing to write on here.

I’m on the dangerous floor its like a cell.

can you imagine—cement blocks they put me in her because they lied to me about calling my doctor and Joe and they had the bathroom door locked so I broke the glass and out side of that I havnt done anything that is uncooperative

But her message goes unanswered; no help comes.

The press gets a tip that Marilyn Monroe’s been admitted to a clinic. The doctors deny that she’s schizophrenic like her mother. One says that she is “psychiatrically disconnected in an acute way because she works too hard.”

Eventually, she is allowed one telephone call. Only one person is strong enough to get her out of this situation.

Joe DiMaggio.

DiMaggio is in Florida. He has signed on as a spring training instructor with the Yankees, who are practicing at Huggins-Stengel Field in St. Petersburg. He catches the next flight to New York and comes directly to Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic.

“I want my wife,” DiMaggio demands, with all the might of a former professional athlete.

Behind the reception desk, the staff quakes at his forcefulness.

“I want my wife,” he repeats. “And if you do not release her to me, I will take this place apart—piece of wood, by piece … of … wood.”

Out of loyalty, guilt, love, or perhaps a mixture of all three, Marilyn’s second husband has never remarried.

According to one friend, “He carried a torch for Marilyn that was bigger than the Statue of Liberty.” Another echoes, “He deeply loved that woman.”

Marilyn is released. She leaves the hospital via the service entrance in the basement and straight into Dr. Kris’s waiting car.

DiMaggio is waiting at Marilyn’s apartment, where he and a furious Marilyn hear the doctor’s regretful confession.

“I did a terrible thing,” Kris says. “I really didn’t mean to, but I did.”

Marilyn refuses to accept any apology. She eliminates Dr. Kris from her life.