Marilyn: The Last Take
Peter Harry Brown
My rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Regardless of its seeming irrelevance in the fifty-year blizzard of Marilyn biographies, I was unable to put down this curled and yellowed artifice, lent to me by a diehard fan, complete with pressed and mummified cockroach legs. So many Marilyn pieces are unreadable pulp non-fiction. This one earned its place in that handful of standout efforts.
Easy flowing, unpretentious yet thoroughly slick, the quality of workmanship held me throughout. Whilst lacking the glitzy hallmarks of more iconic, full-life biographies, this steers clear of popular Monroe mythology, sticking solidly to documented facts concerning only that contentious period imminent to her death.
So much was ado in 1962, as Marilyn, 20th Century Fox's most bankable star of the 1950s, commenced that studio's ill-fated Something's Got to Give, an updated remake of screwball comedy My Favorite Wife (1940). We read how, for months, she was insidiously undermined, goaded on-set, bullied by proxy, misrepresented by studio and media alike, defamed to the point of despair (and that was only her work life, without even starting on her personal life).
This vicious campaign of intimidation was spearheaded by ageing, drug-addled, acid-tongued director George Cuckor, aided by his buddies higher up the studio ladder. What's more, the film's already insultingly flimsy budget was being further siphoned away to cover that farcically expensive Burton-Taylor debacle, Cleopatra, which the ailing studio hoped would save it.
The effects of Cuckor's malicious vendetta on this, Marilyn's final movie, were compounded by a throng of Hollywood gossip columnists led by notorious Hedda Hopper and her archrival Louella Parsons. Fox's publicists also played a perversely pivotal role in wrecking her morale, as did the White House fraternity and its undercover henchmen, shielding the cracking image of a president at a critical time in his leadership.
In production reports and press releases, Monroe's genuine health issues were passed off as the temperamental play-ups of an unreliable diva. An underlying will to be rid of her simmered from office to office, coast to coast, awaiting some opportune moment. This involved studio heads and backers on one side and more sinister, undercover forces on the other, moving to prevent her affairs with President John F Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Bobby, becoming publicly confirmed (or, better still, to end them).
Before Something's Got to Give's shooting commenced, Monroe had notified producer Henry Weinstein that she had been asked by the White House to sing at President Kennedy's Madison Square Garden birthday honours on May 19, 1962. Weinstein had granted her permission, believing it would not hinder production. JFK had even personally assured her he would pull any necessary strings to prevent her Madison Square Garden appearance causing any contractual conflict with Fox.
Yet soon after the event her romantic and professional tide turned. Kennedy suddenly disowned her, and Marilyn was publicly fired, amidst widely publicized plans to replace her with Lee Remick who was fitted into Monroe's costumes and photographed with Cuckor. This was to backfire, with her fans up in arms and her select remaining handful of powerful industry allies resolute about saving her.
Similarly, co-star Dean Martin, with final approval of his leading lady, loyally refused to continue without Monroe. After an extended stalemate and a personally engineered campaign aimed at her furious fans, Marilyn was reinstated under new terms and conditions with public popularity on her side.
Her detractors became more peeved than ever. She had, infuriatingly, triumphed once more, in yet another battle of Hollywood egos.
Awaiting resumption of the troublesome shoot, she had never been healthier or happier.
In the damage control wake of her 'Happy birthday, Mr. President' appearance, amidst the prelude to an important by-election, Monroe was callously cut-off and ostracized by both Kennedy brothers and their phalange of bureaucrats and relatives. Politically vulnerable and under the supervision of political spin doctors and their ruthless father, each Kennedy brother changed his direct telephone number and refused to take her calls, offering Marilyn no explanation or farewell, resulting in the easily derailed star, with her lifelong abandonment issues, feeling used and discarded.
Yet now, no longer a forgotten orphan, or an impoverished starlet, but a legend at the peak of her stardom, she had the guidance, support and encouragement of therapists, minions and mentors, along with her money and fame.
Heartbroken yet more determined than ever before to fight back at life and re-empower herself, she planned a press conference to end all press conferences - one that would have blown the lid off the Kennedy administration and embarrassed its tentacular web of connections which, unsurprisingly, extended to entertainment kingpins, studio heads and financiers.
Having correctly assumed her house was being bugged, many of her calls pertaining to this messy strategy were made from roadside pay phones. But written notes on her planned press conference were kept at hand, along with intimately detailed diaries pertaining to the Kennedy affairs.
The rest, as we know, is history. She was suddenly found dead, tagged with the 'accidental suicide' label in a bungled post-mortem case that never concluded but saw scandalous levels of sensitive information swept under carpets and left there for decades. Her house, the scene of unidentified comers-and-goers in the still of that fatal night, was cleared before investigation teams even arrived at her death scene, those highly sensitive press conference plans vanishing along with her revealing diaries. As if working in with all this, publicity machines covered-up as much as they could by elaborating on her mental health problems and self-medication habits, emphasising the likelihood of suicide.
Monroe's autopsy, conducted August 5 by deputy coroner Dr. Thomas Noguchi, was pointedly clouded by the inexplicable disappearance of key liver and kidney tissue samples that would have proved she could never have self-administered the quantity of drugs that killed her.
For years, classified government files on her demise were kept tightly locked away, as were endless reels of Something's Got to Give footage showing she was never in better form, far from how the studio and its Washington connections would have had the world believe she had been in her final fourteen weeks on earth.
This book is no cheap conspiracy yarn, but a well-documented account of Marilyn Monroe's final months. A comprehensive lowdown on the contributing parties standing to benefit from the melee of cover-ups surrounding her premature and unresolved end.
Despite my sneezes with each crumbling page, it was well worth the tissues. An excellent read.
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