Marilyn & Me by Lawrence Schiller Page A

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 atthe 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 Marilynwas nothing like