Marilyn & Me (13 page)

I
n the years that followed, I’ve thought a lot about the little time I spent with Marilyn and how it seemed to go beyond my being a photographer and her being “Marilyn Monroe.” As a photographer, I’m always talking about myself in order to build relationships with my subjects, but I never expected one to develop with Marilyn.

She was
Stars and Stripes’
Cheesecake Queen of 1952;
Look
magazine’s Most Promising Female Newcomer; and
Photoplay’
s Fastest Rising Star that same year.
Redbook
named her Best Young Box Office Personality in 1953; and she received Golden Globe Awards for World Film Favorite in 1953 and 1961 and Best Actress in a Comedy for
Some Like It Hot
. It was her iconic status as both America’s Sweetheart and America’s Sex Symbol that made me believe that all I’d ever do was photograph her. I realize now that I spoke to her in paragraphs, babbling on and on, while she talked sparingly but concisely. And maybe that’s why I remember
much of what she said and how she felt poorly treated by the people she worked for. She had thought a lot about those things, and when she said them to me, they came out plainly and clearly.

Even though Marilyn always had people around her, I felt she was a lonely person. Almost everyone in her circle was there to serve her: do her hair, do her makeup, fix her wardrobe, handle her publicity, schedule her day. She had an acting coach to guide her; a driver to run her errands; a masseur to relieve her backaches; a psychiatrist to listen to her heartaches; and a bunch of doctors to give her pills to help her sleep or keep her awake, to calm her down or speed her up. But despite this assortment of helpers, she was, ultimately, alone.

I never had a desire to interview her, so our exchanges evolved naturally, always beginning with the camera and photographs. I wasn’t a writer at the time. I didn’t go home and jot down what we had talked about in a diary. Sometimes I would tell my wife things she had said, and other things she said just stuck in my memory. As her legend grew after her death, I thought about her, and I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to recapture her and the days on and off the sets of
Let’s Make Love
and
Something’s Got to Give
.

The Marilyn I remember is not the Marilyn I’ve read about in the books that have appeared in the fifty years since her death. I wasn’t a party to her reliance on barbiturates;
I couldn’t swear to any of her alleged affairs. I did see Bobby Kennedy at her house, but I didn’t see him in her bedroom. I overheard some of her heated comments about studio executives, but I never saw the violent rages that were later reported. I saw her complexity and her kindness. She was extremely giving when it came to posing for pictures, and she was also a good listener. On movie sets and elsewhere, she may have taken advantage of her position as a temperamental movie star, but it didn’t always work in her favor. She wished to be taken more seriously than she was.

When she spoke of being afraid that any child she might give birth to might have the family gene for mental illness, I couldn’t help wondering if her reported miscarriages were self-induced or if she somehow unconsciously willed her body to reject the fetuses. Her eyes had lit up when she talked about having eighty-four-year-old Carl Sandburg as a houseguest; I could see her genuine excitement at having someone of his stature as her friend … and dance partner! I saw the frustration in director George Cukor’s face when she kept him waiting on the sets of both of their movies, and I also saw Robert Kennedy’s look of boyish elation when she jumped into her own swimming pool. She brought a smile to men’s faces when she shuffled her hips as she walked by.

She survived, for one who had taken so many beatings, who had been passed from foster home to orphanage to foster home so many times that she looked upon marriage at
the age of sixteen as a way out of her misery and insecurity and loveless life. But a happy, successful, lasting marriage wasn’t in the cards for her. The first lasted until she started making movies; the second, to DiMaggio, didn’t even last a year; the third, to Arthur Miller, lasted almost four years, but she seems to have had a better relationship with his father than with the playwright, for whom she was a muse. She never lacked for male companionship—from photographers like Andre de Dienes, Sam Shaw, and Milton Greene, who adored her; to actors like Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Yves Montand, and Tony Curtis, who enjoyed her; to powerful studio executives, directors, and politicians like Joseph Schenck, Elia Kazan, and Jack and Bobby Kennedy, who may have exploited her.

Of course, there has been much speculation about her death. Did she commit suicide? Was it an accidental overdose? Was she murdered on orders from one of the Kennedy brothers? Murdered by the Mob?

I had witnessed how quickly Marilyn could polish off a bottle of Dom Pérignon by herself; all the studio photographers have said that she drank champagne and wine steadily during their shoots. We know from the amount of time she spent in therapy that she was depressed and an insomniac and that she always took pills to fall asleep. And at our last meeting, I myself saw signs of how upset she could get.

Being around celebrities, I’ve seen how they can lose themselves. As they take more and more drugs, they can’t find their way out of the forest. Night becomes, in a way, a companion, a safe haven. I can see Marilyn using not only the darkness of her bedroom, which she kept pitch-black, but also the darkness of sleep as a safe haven.

Did she want to kill herself? I don’t think she did. I think she overdosed accidentally. I can imagine Marilyn drinking champagne that night—just like any other. Drinking champagne, popping some pills, talking on the phone, forgetting about the pills she had already taken and taking some more, and, finally, in the safe haven of the darkness, knocking herself out. Only this time she didn’t wake up.

She died fifty years ago, and the mystery of how she died remains unsolved, though perhaps there is a bigger mystery. Marilyn Monroe is a bigger star today than she ever was when she was alive.

Ten years after her death, I was asked to put together an exhibition of photographs taken by some of the great photographers who had captured her over the course of the fourteen years that she had held the public’s imagination. As I looked over the collection of photographs, I began to see that there was no
one
Marilyn. She seemed to have been a different person for each of us. Andre de Dienes’s Marilyn
was nothing like Milton Greene’s; Richard Avedon’s was nothing like mine.

In 1972 it occurred to me that there was the potential for a great book from these stunning photographs, and I considered the writer Gloria Steinem before finding Norman Mailer to write the text. Marilyn had captured his imagination as surely as she had captured the imaginations of the photographers whose work was included in the book.

The resulting book, published a year later, became a huge best seller; and in 1975, after several disagreements, I returned to Billy Woodfield the few poolside photographs of Marilyn he had given me back in 1962.

For Mailer, Marilyn was “every man’s love affair with America … queen of the working class … a mirror of the pleasures of those who stare at her.… She was our angel, the sweet angel of sex … a sly leviathan of survival … [who] had an artist’s intelligence … [and was] not so much a movie star as a major figure in American life.”

For me, she was an assignment that changed the course of my life. I had been a photographer when I met Marilyn and I was a photographer when she died, but during the days that I was around her, something changed inside me. She used to tease me about my entrepreneurial spirit, but in fact she ignited it. After the success of the Marilyn book, Mailer and I would collaborate on four more books, one of which,
The Executioner’s Song
, would win Mailer his second
Pulitzer Prize. In the years that followed, I became a writer myself. I went on to produce and direct a number of television movies, including one about Marilyn, and for that picture I surrounded myself with people who had worked with her, including Whitey, to make sure I did her justice. John Huston took time to walk me through his experiences directing Marilyn. And now I have put my memories to rest with this memoir.

Marilyn Monroe came into my life in 1960, and she is still a living, breathing, extraordinary presence for me fifty-two years later. I think about her often.

Since 1994, I have written a number of books about the times in which we live, always looking at them through the window of some event that has captured the public’s interest. Last June, I remembered that this year would be the fiftieth anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, so I went to my archive. The memories came flooding in.

As I noted in the preface of this book, Lawrence Grobel has been interviewing me for years, so it only made sense that I would ask him to work with me on the first draft. My first wife, Judi, was helpful in triggering my memory. Over the years I have worked with a fine editor, Veronica Windholz, who has put her hand to four of my books and now again with this memoir. Two of my close friends, Mike Lennon and David Margolick, read the manuscript and made important suggestions and contributions. Author Kaylie Jones dashed off suggestions to me after reading my second draft. My brother, Martin, came up with the book’s title.

Benedikt Taschen had seen my photographs in years
past. He jumped aboard and is publishing my work as a signed limited art edition. I soon realized it was my dream to have my words also published as a stand-alone memoir. My son Howard helped me to develop a presentation I could take to the right publisher; and my daughter, Suzanne, has preserved Hefner’s original letter to me and Billy for all of these years.

Without telling my friend Gay Talese, I asked his wife, Nan, to read this book. She loved it and asked if she could publish it as a small memoir. Well, was it possible for two publishers to publish the same book at the same time in two editions? Sonny Mehta, Knopf’s publisher, and Tony Chirico, the president of Doubleday/Knopf, supported the idea and I thank them for their confidence in my work. Nan brought her years of experience to the table, and the skills of her publishing house. Andy Hughes, head of production, Peter Andersen, head of design, Pei Loi Koay, and John Fontana all jumped in to make this little memoir happen. I can’t thank Nan enough for her support.

But there’s one person I must thank from the depths of my heart: my wife, Nina Wiener. She lit the fire of this book from day one, and has seen it through to the end.