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I recently read the 1992 book, Marilyn: The Last Take, by Peter Harry Brown and Patte B. Barham. It’s a fascinating look at the final months of the star’s weary, exciting, and exhausting life.
I tend to veer away from yet also be fascinated by conspiracy theory. Hard not to be titillated sometimes, especially when it comes to the juiciest tales. And some of the juiciest tales, without question, arise from the American 1960s. You’ve got Marilyn Monroe, dead in 1962; John Kennedy, killed in 1963; Bobby Kennedy killed in 1968; Martin Luther King, also killed in 1968. And we’re just getting started.
A couple years ago I started a biography on Monroe and got about a third of the way through. I forget the name of the book now. It was well written and intriguing, but I (typical) got distracted by another book and never finished it. Then more recently I stumbled into this book covering the last months of her life. I figured I’d read a few pages and get bored. I’d bought the book with a Christmas bookstore gift certificate. But from page 1 I couldn’t stop reading.
In all honesty, in terms of strong writing, fantastic structure, solid arc and magnificent pacing, the story is one of the most compelling I’ve ever read. The authors—just from a glance at the book jacket—are solely “entertainment journalists,” not necessarily seasoned nonfiction book authors. (Though both have “several” books under their belt, it said.) I’m not saying that their writing is anything in the arena of “serious literary Art” or anything dubious like that. But as far as just simply creating a damn fine barnstormer of a story, they nailed it.
Here's the scene they paint. It’s spring, 1962. Twentieth Century Fox has one final movie in the contract with their famous client, Marilyn Monroe. Monroe—1926 to 1962 (36)—had not had an easy life. Abandoned by her father, and with a mentally unstable mother, she’d briefly lived in foster care before going out on her own in LA and getting married young. Being incredibly beautiful—understatement—she fell into the modeling world. One thing led to another and a producer in the film world found her photos and called her in. He wanted to see if she could act. She did her first film called Dangerous Years in 1947, at the tender age of 21.
By the time 1962 rolled around, she’d done nearly 30 films, including, most famously, Some Like it Hot, The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop and The Misfits. She’d been with multiple film corporations but in ’62 she was with Fox. At the time, as the book explains, Fox was in a complete, anarchic financial mess. Not just financial but organizational.
The main problem was this. Two films were simultaneously being produced by FOX at the time, Cleopatra in Rome with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and Something’s Got to Give in Hollywood with Marilyn Monroe and Dean Martin. The problem was that FOX had promised an exorbitant amount of money to Taylor, and then she’d spent like a madwoman while on set. FOX in the end purportedly spent a whopping 42 million dollars on the film, which ended up being a flop. Worse, the sexual affair between Taylor and Burton (both married) caused a major scandal.
Monroe had always been searingly jealous of Taylor. Taylor always seemed to be on the cover of far more magazines; she got paid much more; she was internationally respected. On the contrary, Monroe seemed to be constantly disrespected and mocked, and more or less seen by the film industry as a sort of poor prostitute who happened to have looks and somehow, magically, made films and became famous. It felt like a class thing, mostly, the perception of Marilyn’s supposed lack of sophistication and social refinement.
Ergo: Something’s Got to Give got far less money from the studio. Add to this the sad, frustrating fact that the director for this film, George Cukor, loathed Monroe. He, like many others in the film world, perceived that Monroe was some sort of spoiled debutante who didn’t have any talent and didn’t deserve to be in any more films. She was constantly late. Sometimes she came to the set drugged-up from her sleeping pills, or else hungover. A few times she O.D.’d on pills. The studio, as with many other actors back then, gave her “hot shot” injections of methamphetamine. (Yes, really.) This woke her up in a jolt and sustained her energy for clips of time.
Monroe had dated many men—legend in the industry was that she’d slept with many men to get to where she’d gotten—including baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, among others. During this time she was single. She had a relatively “modest” house (for a star) at 5th Helena Drive in Brentwood. She suffered from terrible insomnia and took sleeping pills for it. She wrote vigorously in notebooks, detailing her daily life. She loved using the telephone. Depression sometimes descended. She drank too much, most often Dom Perignon and Champaigne. She enjoyed reading books. People said she possessed a sharp, quick mind. She was stunning and charming when she wanted to be or needed to be.
Monroe met John Kennedy at a dinner party in New York City in 1962. They had a brief affair—according to this and many other accounts—and then it was suddenly terminated because of the obvious potential public controversy, and because JFK was the president and was married. It seems that Monroe had some brief delusions that “Jack” would leave his wife and make Monroe First Lady, but that was non-reality.
Through JFK she met his brother Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s younger attorney-general brother. According to this book, they developed a secret (or not-so-secret) love affair and were seeing each other on and off for a couple of months. This time, according to sources from then, people felt they were in love. Bobby, of course, was also attorney general under his brother, was married, and was fighting against the mafia in court.
During all of this Monroe was slowly working on Something’s Got to Give. But it was sluggishly moving. Several times she got seriously sick, coming down with Sinusitis. She’d gotten this after a trip to New York to see JFK. She also took time off to fly yet again, later, to NYC and, in front of JFK and a large crowd (Jackie chose not to attend because of Monroe), at Madison Square Garden, she sang a hyper-sensual, incredibly-sexualized rendition of Happy Birthday to president Kennedy. She was wearing a $12,000-dress which showed off her completely nude body minus some thin fabric blocking her private areas…barely. It caused a national sensation. Many within Kennedy’s circle were enraged. It seemed out of line, immoral, disrespectful. JFK, of course, was a notorious womanizer. Always had been.
And so, with all of this going on, the film clipped along very slowly. Making things ever worse and slower, director Cukor tortured Monroe by making her redo basic scenes sometimes as many as 30, 40 times in a row, with no discernible differences in the takes (people discovered later), totally exhausting her. Cukor and others mocked Monroe when she was sick—she even went several times to a hospital in Hollywood—claiming that she was faking the whole thing and didn’t want to work.
For decades, the FOX film archives of what had been filmed (it was never completed) of Something’s Got to Give had been hidden away, unfindable. Then an employee of FOX in the early 1990s located the film and made it public to people in a pro-Marilyn group. For thirty years people had been told that on this film Monroe had been a disaster, that she’d been stumbling and drugged-up and high. People were shocked when they watched the remaining footage of outtakes and filmed scenes. She looked professional, and her acting was superb; some of her strongest.
Why had the studio lied?
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