Page 72 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

NOW THAT Something’s Got to Give is set to resume production, Hollywood reporters are willing to put a more positive spin on their coverage.

In the New York Journal-American, Dorothy Kilgallen writes:

Marilyn Monroe’s health seems to be much improving.

She’s been attending select Hollywood parties and has become the talk of the town again.

In California, they’re circulating a photograph of her that certainly isn’t as bare as the famous calendar, but is very interesting …

And she’s cooking in the sex-appeal department, too; she’s proved vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman who is a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio in his heyday. So don’t write off Marilyn as finished.

Marilyn would agree. She’s nowhere near finished. She’s busy working the phones.

“They are not calling back,” she says of the Kennedys, when she telephones her friend Bob Slatzer in Ohio. “Bobby and Jack used me. They used me.”

I’m not going to stand for that. I’m going to tell everyone about us.

When Marilyn hears that Bobby will be attending a legal conference in San Francisco this weekend, she works the problem. Surely Pat Lawford will tell her where he’s staying. San Francisco is 350 miles north of Los Angeles, but the distance is not important. She has to see Bobby.

A big confrontation is looming. Surely the journalists will be on her side. Walter Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen, they’re always looking for a scoop. What could be bigger than the true story of Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys?

She calls her friend Henry Rosenfeld in New York.

She asks the dress manufacturer, an early investor in Marilyn Monroe Productions, to meet her in Washington, DC, next month and escort her to the premiere of the new Irving Berlin musical, Mr. President .

Joshua Logan, who directed Marilyn in Bus Stop, is also directing this stage production.

More crucially, she’s heard that John and Jackie Kennedy will be attending the party.

She wants to make sure Jack knows what he’s missing.

And she has just the designer to create a new evening look: Jean Louis, who created the “skin and beads” gown she wore to serenade the president at his birthday gala.

She’s already put in an order at a cost of $6,000.

Why not make a hair appointment, too? She books Mickey Song to come to her house. Who would know more about the Kennedys’ private life than their hairdresser?

Has Song seen Bobby or Jack with “other women”? Marilyn wants to know.

She doesn’t get many answers, but that’s all right. Peter Lawford is having a dinner party at his beach house tonight. Surely, she’ll pick up some information there—especially if she brings drinks to share.

She greets Lawford’s friend Dick Livingston with a bottle of Dom Perignon.

“Champagne is so zestful,” Marilyn says, pouring herself a glass over ice cubes and breathing into the glass as if ingesting the elixir of life. She’s in good spirits and has spent the morning at a nearby nursery ordering citrus plants and flowers for her garden.

Livingston eyes Marilyn’s odd outfit—“a pair of hip-huggers with a bare midriff that revealed her gallbladder-operation scar, and a Mexican serape wrapped around her neck”—but focuses on her unhealthy pallor, “absolutely white, the color of alabaster.”

“My God, Marilyn, you ought to get some sun,” he advises.

“I know,” she replies, looking at him over her champagne glass. “What I need is a tan … and a man.”

Bobby Kennedy arrives in San Francisco with Ethel and four of their children on Friday, August 3, the same day that Marilyn’s story in Life hits newsstands. They have weekend plans at Bates Ranch before the attorney general is scheduled to speak at the American Bar Association on Monday.

Marilyn tries several times to contact Bobby at his hotel, the St. Francis, but he’s not answering or returning her calls.

She calls Bob Slatzer again, fuming.

“I’m going to blow the lid off this whole damn thing! I’m going to tell everything!” Marilyn tells him. “That the Kennedys got what they wanted out of me and then moved on!”

Slatzer attempts to calm her down and talk her out of holding a press conference.

Try to be a little more discreet, he cautions.

“Well, I’ve told a couple of people already,” she admits.

Everyone is worried about Marilyn’s state of mind. No one wants her talking to the press in her current state. Who knows what she’ll say?

Dr. Greenson has been coming over once, even twice, a day. Peter Lawford invites her to near-daily gatherings. Pat Newcomb finds pretexts to sleep over at Marilyn’s house.

Newcomb takes her out to La Scala. Marilyn drinks too much, then swallows sleeping pills in an attempt to get some rest.

But sleep is elusive. Throughout Friday night and into Saturday morning, Marilyn is repeatedly woken by the shrill ringing of the white telephone by her bed, her personal line.

“Leave Bobby alone, you tramp. Leave Bobby alone,” an unknown woman repeatedly curses at her.

“Ethel?” asks Marilyn.

The line goes dead.

Was that Bobby’s wife on the telephone? Did she imagine it?

It’s a hot night, the baking heat is blowing off the Mojave Desert, and her little dog, Maf, is barking into the darkness, as Marilyn tries, once more, to sleep.