Page 60 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe
“How are you, Marilyn?” the assembled crowd shouts at her, upping the intensity as they push closer. “Give us a smile, Marilyn!” “Feel any better?” “Are you remarrying Joe DiMaggio?” “Did Arthur Miller visit you?”
Pat Newcomb fights her way through the throng to get Marilyn into the waiting car.
Marilyn is frightened by the jostling of the crowd. “I thought they were going to pull me to pieces!” she exclaims as she falls back into her seat, tentatively holding her abdomen. Her surgical wound has started to bleed; it’s still raw and hasn’t yet formed a protective scar.
It’s the kind of light fare that meets Dr. Greenson’s approval. Marilyn books daily appointments, staying at the doctor’s office for at least an hour and sometimes two, so she can review with him everything she’s written in her little red book.
Greenson begins to cancel sessions with his other clients in favor of spending more time with Marilyn. He has been collecting newspaper cuttings about her. He has boxes of them, piles of photographs. There are well-thumbed interviews and posters from her films.
Marilyn’s friends are skeptical of the doctor. There’s “something sinister about Ralph Greenson,” her makeup artist, Whitey Snyder, thinks. He worries that the doctor exerts “enormous influence over her.”
A knock sounds on Marilyn’s apartment door. She answers, barefoot, in a red kimono, her unbrushed hair falling over her face. In front of her is a short middle-aged woman with cropped gray hair, in a sensible white shirt and winged spectacles.
“Good day to you,” the woman says, with a tight smile. “My name is Eunice Murray. Dr. Greenson said you’d be expecting me.”
Marilyn hadn’t exactly been expecting Mrs. Murray, whom Dr. Greenson has hired to be her new housekeeper. But “it wasn’t hard to understand,” says Pat Kennedy Lawford. “Eunice was simply Greenson’s spy, sent down to report back on everything Marilyn did.”
“How can I put it?” asks Marilyn’s hairdresser George Masters. “She was terrifically jealous of Marilyn, separating her from her friends. She was a divisive person.”
Joe DiMaggio turns up on December 23 with a Christmas tree, lights, and presents. He fills Marilyn’s refrigerator with her favorite champagne and caviar.
Four weeks pass. The pine needles have long since dropped, the lights are broken, and the ornaments are hanging limply from the bent branches. Mrs. Murray keeps suggesting they tidy up and take down the tree, but Marilyn won’t have it. She wants to keep a little bit of DiMaggio in the apartment.
Reliable, kind Joe. He spent Christmas Day eating turkey at the Greensons’, despite his innate dislike of strangers and Dr. Greenson’s evident dislike of him.
Also, extremely generous Joe. He’s offered to help her buy a home of her own. Her first.
A movie star as famous as Marilyn would be expected to buy a home as chic and glamorous as the Lawfords’ beach house in Santa Monica. But what Marilyn craves is privacy.
Mrs. Murray finds a listing for 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood.
The property at the end of a cul-de-sac is a single-story home with a tiny guest house, high white walls, and a lush garden.
With pretty floor tiles, it looks and feels like a Spanish hacienda, just like the Greensons’ nearby house.
“And look, Marilyn,” says Mrs. Murray as they tour the grounds around the “cute little Mexican-style house with eight rooms,” with Dr. Greenson walking behind, nodding his approval. “A swimming pool!”
Everything Mrs. Murray says to Marilyn has a patronizing edge, a tone exacerbated by their chosen forms of address. To Marilyn, the housekeeper is “Mrs. Murray,” yet Mrs. Murray calls her employer only by her first name.
“Oh, an actual swimming pool, Mrs. Murray!” enthuses Marilyn.
“What do you think, Maf?” she asks the little dog in her arms. The white Maltese that she sometimes calls a poodle was a present from Frank Sinatra.
Marilyn named him Maf, short for Mafia, as a little joke between the two of them.
“Imagine how athletic I would be if I swam every morning.”
They walk the garden, taking in the abundant planting and the beautiful fruit trees, before returning to the porch at the front of the house.
“ Cursum Perficio, ” she says slowly, reading out the letters in the tilework. “ Cursum Perficio —what does that mean?”
“It’s Latin,” says Dr. Greenson. “It means ‘I complete the race,’ or journey’s end, the end of the road. Something like that.”
“The end of the road?” Marilyn asks, wrinkling her nose. “As in your final resting place?”
“Or ‘welcome,’” chips in Mrs. Murray. “As in, you’ve reached the end of your journey. You’re here.”
“I am here,” agrees Marilyn. “I like it! Let’s buy it!”
The house costs $77,500. Marilyn might be the world’s most famous movie star, but she hasn’t got that level of cash at her disposal.
Generous Joe lends her the money for the down payment, as promised.
It’s now February. She’ll pay him back in April, as soon as she starts shooting Something’s Got to Give.
On February 12, Fox sends over the latest version of Nunnally Johnson’s script, bound in blue paper and stamped with the studio’s corporate logo. Using pen and pencil, Marilyn marks up the script with her notes on blocking and dialogue.
Marilyn plays Ellen Arden. But her character’s entrance strikes her as under-written. “The only people on earth I get on well with are men,” she notes in the margin of page 12 , “so let’s have some fun with this opening scene.”
In the script, Nick Arden (Dean Martin) has married Bianca (Cyd Charisse), believing his first wife, Ellen, died in a shipwreck years earlier. Once Ellen returns, very much alive, Bianca questions Ellen’s sanity, calling her “psychosomatic.”
“Would she come right out with this sort of thing?” Marilyn questions on page 7 . “Gives away what she will be saying later … No! She is not a Nut but a cold Hard dame.”
With notes on 32 of its 108 pages, Marilyn returns the script for rewrites.
Screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who won an Oscar for On the Waterfront, is also struggling with a different Fox script—the adaptation of The Enemy Within, Bobby Kennedy’s account of corruption within the Teamsters.
How does one write honestly about the attorney general, brother of the president, without compromising the script? How does one write honestly about labor racketeering without being considered anti-labor?
It’s been a year since the New York Times announced: ATTORNEY GENERAL ROBERT KENNEDY ’ S BOOK SOLD TO FOX STUDIO , naming the author as a producer on the film.
The attorney general is highly involved with the script, conferring frequently with Schulberg.
Isn’t it exciting that the president’s brother has a reason to be on the Fox lot? Maybe the president, too?