The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story by Keith Badman

a plan for getting out here for more than a temporary basis. Please get back to me as soon as possible as time is of the essence.’ (It took him five weeks to reply.)
    Marilyn also drafted a note to her acting coach, Lee Strasberg, in which she proposed that he should temporarily leave New York and head back to Los Angeles to assist with her new enterprise. When he appeared unwilling to do so, the actress flew to the Big Apple in the second week of December to talk over the matter with him personally. However, this still failed to sway his mind. Sadly, despite her most valiant attempts, and Brando’s initial willingness to discuss Marilyn’s plans, the idea never reached the functioning stage.
    Her December trip to New York did nevertheless have a high point: she finally got to meet the 83-year-old, American-born Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, editor and poet Carl Sandburg. Their meeting took place at the apartment belonging to his close friend, fashion and beauty photographer Len Steckler. As he recalled on the website, thevisitseries.com, ‘Marilyn was three hours late, but [she] had an excuse. She had been at the hairdresser.’ The individual in question was her regular East Coast stylist, Kenneth Battelle. During her eleventh-hour visit to his salon, housed in Lilly Daché, Manhattan’s most elegant millinery and beauty emporium, located at 70–80 East 56th Street between Park and Madison, she asked him to match her hair colour to Sandburg’s: white. ‘Hours later I went to open the door,’ Steckler recalled for the Reuters news agency, ‘and there I was, face-to-face with Marilyn Monroe, and she looked more ravishing than on the screen.’
    That afternoon, while Marilyn and Carl spoke and supped Jack Daniels whiskey, Steckler took out his Nikon camera and proceeded to capture a photographic record of the event, throughout which the actress sported her butterfly-shaped shades. She enjoyed Sandburg’s company immensely and excitedly counted down the days until they would meet again.
    Back in Los Angeles, there were other troubles for Fox to contend with. George Cukor was now unavailable too. Work on his current project, The Chapman Report , had fallen way behind schedule and was not set to wrap until Boxing Day. This unforeseen delay meant that the filming of Something’s Got To Give had to be pushed back by seven weeks. With no other alternative, a new start date of Thursday 4 January was reluctantly pencilled in by both Cukor and the disgruntled Fox executives.
    Marilyn had been unconcerned by the suspension or postponement. On Saturday 18 November, consistent with her contract, she knew she was due to be placed back on the Fox payroll. she was set to start earning a weekly wage again, despite the fact that the cameras on the picture had yet to roll. (She had been due to receive payment this way while working on Let’s Make Love two years earlier; a paltry $7,142.82 – before tax – every seven days.) As it turned out, Marilyn would fail to draw any money whatsoever from her new movie.
    Although a request to receive her $100,000 fee for Something’s Got To Give movie in one lump sum had been flatly rejected by executives, the fact did not greatly trouble her. At this point, thanks to her recently received United Artists loan and her share of the Some Like It Hot profits, she was not short of money. A spokesman for the Mirisch Company, the producers of the comedy, spelt out the actress’s financial status during an interview in 1963. ‘Marilyn had received more than a quarter of a million dollars in the four years since the movie was released,’ he declared. Although in essence, for the previous two years, this and the loan had been her only sources of income, on Friday 17 November 1961, her City National Bank of Beverly Hills savings account book boasted a sum of $40,000.
    Nevertheless, by following the advice of her lawyers – primarily Rudin – and choosing, for tax reasons, to take a deferment