Life hit highs, lows then crashed to terrible end

The memorial park was a  little difficult to find, up a sort of access way between a couple of commercial buildings on the busy main drag then into what is a small lawn cemetery, so once arrived, Marilyn (and we’re sure she would forgive the informality) is soon located. As you enter the grounds, she’s tucked off in the left corner, not buried but above ground in a crypt.

A simple nameplate on the facing stone states “Marilyn Monroe 1926 – 1962”, and workers periodically clean off the red lipstick kisses from fans, leaving a pinkish hue. There are flowers and a stone bench inscribed “In remembrance of Marilyn Monroe from her many fans”, and that’s that, Marilyn tucked away somewhat, rather deliberately, off the beaten path.

As biographers Sheridan Morley and his second wife Ruth Leon acknowledge in their 1998 book, when Marilyn died full of barbiturates on August 4, 1962 just 36 years old and with only some 20 films behind her (depending on how you count them – editor), she “was not the greatest actor or singer in the history of motion pictures but certainly its greatest star. If, for the first half of this century, it was Garbo who captured the hearts and minds of film-goers worldwide, for the second half, and long after her death, it has been Marilyn”.

Sheridan Morley (1941-2007), the son of British actor Robert Morley, also wrote biographies of his father and other thespians including his grandmother Gladys Cooper, David Niven, Noël Coward, Rex Harrison, Robert Shaw, Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn. These are all available through the auspices of Dean Street Press, a publisher proclaiming itself as devoted to uncovering and revitalising good books. That’s a commendable raison d’être.

As noted by Morley and Leon in 1998, 300 books had been published about Marilyn since her death, and decidedly the tally has increased since then. At a slim 59 pages, this Dean Street Press reissue must be one of the most succinct accounts of what is recalled here as a short and troubled career that has been much documented and pored over. The book also has a chronology, bibliography (listing eight of the 300-plus) and a muddled filmography.

Barely 15 years passed between Marilyn’s first and last films, as she graduated from nude calendar girl, model, film extra and “part-time tart” to feature player of considerable resources, Morley-Leon write as they cover the pertinent points sympathetically and balanced without hagiography. Here was someone from a humble and unstable background that left her to become largely self-educated and responsible for her own livelihood.

The father of illegitimate Norma Jeane Mortensen, salesman Stanley Gifford, wanted nothing to do with this child of his mistress, the married Gladys Mortensen. And Gladys had endless stays in mental institutions, leaving Norma Jeane to be brought up in a series of orphanages and foster homes. The young girl said she was consistently raped from the age of eight.

An aunt, Ana, took her at age 11, giving her a little confidence and self-esteem, then effected a marriage between the 16-year-old and aircraft mechanic Jim Dougherty, 21. He was soon sent to war, returning to find her nude on calendars and unwilling to play the loyal wife.

Marilyn is quoted throughout: “Even when I was just starting out as a cover girl, I knew that was really not how I intended to finish up. I told myself a million times that I was an actress because that seemed to me something golden and beautiful – not just an art, but a game you played that enabled you to step out of your own loneliness and unhappiness into worlds so bright they made your heart leap just to think of them.”

20th Century Fox signed the pin-up known by soldiers and medics as “Miss Flamethrower,” “The Girl Most Likely to Thaw Alaska” and “The Girl They Would Most Like to Examine”. But the studio dropped her after a couple of walk-on roles and she had to join the hundreds of other Hollywood hopefuls who were freelancing. Broke, she needed modelling to get by.

Marilyn suddenly showed what she could do in two films, “The Asphalt Jungle” and “All About Eve (both 1950), though the latter confirmed her as a down-market dumb blonde.

Morley-Leon recount how Fox took her up again but began loaning her to other studios for three years, and it wasn’t until her thirteenth film, “Clash By Night” (1952), that she played a key part in a commercial and critical success. While making the Cary Grant-Ginger Rogers farce “Monkey Business (1952) she met baseball star Joe DiMaggio, drawing the comment: “America’s most loved sportsman was marrying Hollywood’s most desired star, and the only way she could have done herself any more good would have been to marry a Kennedy or Prince Rainier of Monaco.  But Marilyn was the kind of girl princes and presidents took to bed rather than to the altar, and she knew it.”

Wed in January 1954 the couple were divorced the following October, DiMaggio disgruntled as Marilyn demonstrated she was never going to be happy simply as a home-bound wife. On her sudden arrival at superstardom, and no longer having to sexually serve studio executives or important distributers, she told one of her many acting coaches as they read her rave reviews, “Well, that’s the last cock I ever have to suck.” Her box-office appeal was immense.

But Marilyn’s head was a mess with her marriage problems, she was deep into psychoanalyis and beginning to drink heavily and develop a drug problem. She made increasingly frequent visits to hospital for “minor internal surgery”. Fox suspended her for refusing a film.

Otto Preminger, who directed her in “River of No Return” (1954),  despaired, calling her vulnerable and insecure. “Directing Marilyn was like directing Lassie – you needed 14 takes even to get the bloody bark right.” Director Billy Wilder’s “The Seven Year Itch” was a triumph for her and the biggest comedy hit of 1955, but it widened the gulf with DiMaggio and ended the marriage so soon. He hated the famous billowing dress-subway grate scene.

“Bus Stop” (1956) further proved her strength as an actress but “The Prince and the Showgirl” (1957) was a widely panned disaster. She arrived later and later on set and upset the British cast and crew wih her entourage in tow and Method approach. “Some Like It Hot” (1959) was another excellent script from Wilder but Marilyn took 40 takes to say “Where’s the bourbon?” and 61 for the line “It’s me, Sugar”. Nonetheless, it received rave reviews.

Her third and final marriage to playwright Arthur Miller unravelled as he tried but could not cure her despair. An inability to have children further damaged her always fragile mental health. “In the last three years of her life,” the biographers write, “Marilyn seemed hell-bent on self-destruction despite finally having found a distinguished writer to love and marry her and movies which at last did not seem to be a waste of her remarkable talents.”

Now, clinics for regular miscarriages, drug overdoses and low-key suicide attempts, alcohol, affairs with married actor Yves Montand, President John Kennedy, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy and singer Frank Sinatra, an imprudent interview for a Hollywood gossip columnist, her final film terminated in mid-shoot as she wrecked the schedule… Fox said it would sue.

The sad and lonely end in her bed was a tragedy but also a beginning, for true legendary status, myriad conspiracy theories, 300-plus books and red kisses on a crypt in Westwood, California. Sheridan Morley and Ruth Leon sum it all up in concise and considerate fashion.