J. Taraborrelli: The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

*Perhaps Marilyn Monroe historian Charles Casillo best put these events into perspective: “Clearly, Michael Selsman showed poor judgment in bringing Carol Lynley to Marilyn’s house uninvited. Imagine! Bringing a beautiful younger blonde actress (from the same studio) to a private meeting to discuss publicity photographs with Marilyn Monroe? And Carol was pregnant, to boot! He knew that Marilyn had been unable to have children. Bad call. Bad judgment. Also, maybe it wasn’t so outrageous that Marilyn destroyed the negatives by cutting them into tiny pieces. With any other star, it would have sufficed to simply cross them out with a red grease pencil. With Marilyn, any scrap of her was valuable and would eventually be exploited. No one understood that better than Marilyn herself. Look at what happened after she scratched out the photos she disliked taken by Bert Stern on the negative. Soon after she died, he released them—all scratched and crossed out! And years after that, they were digitally retouched so that her mark of disapproval was erased forever.”

*A classic Newcomb/Murray story is this one: Eunice Murray, in the last months of Marilyn’s life, said to her, “Pat Newcomb is going all over town telling everybody she’s your best friend.” In her peculiar genius, Marilyn retorted, “Eunice, if she were my best friend, she wouldn’t have to tell anybody.” Of course, as interesting as that story is, it does come via Eunice Murray, and there was definitely no love lost between her and Pat.

*Jacobs says that his boss, Frank Sinatra, never indulged in dalliances at Pat’s home, “because he had too much respect for her… more, I guess, than her own brother.”

*On her revised script for Something’s Got to Give (dated February 12, 1962), Marilyn recognized that the story was still not a good one. She wrote on the title page, “We’ve got a dog here—so we’ve got to look for impacts in a different way, or as Mr. [Nunnally] Johnson says, the situation.” On page 12, she noted, “The only people on earth I get on well with is [ sic ] men so let’s have some fun with this opening scene.” And on page 23, she commented on Cyd Charisse’s character, “Let’s remember she is frigid—We all know what Kinsey found out about most females.”

*Nunziata Lisi, a friend of Jackie’s sister Lee Radziwill, recalled, “Lee told me that there wasn’t a big fight between Jackie and JFK over the matter of Marilyn at Madison Square Garden. She just made a quiet decision that if he wasn’t going to care about her feelings—if he didn’t care that she would be humiliated—then, fine. She just wasn’t going to go and there would be nothing he could do to persuade her otherwise. She told Lee, ‘Life is too short to worry about Marilyn Monroe.’ She would take the children to the Glen Ora retreat, a couple hours outside of Washington, where she enjoyed riding her horses.”

*Marilyn Monroe historian James Haspiel recounts this story: “[The actress] Sheree North told me that when she was at 20th Century-Fox one day, she ran into Allen ‘Whitey’ Snyder, who was pacing outside of a closed door, very frustrated. She asked him what was wrong. He said, ‘Marilyn is in there and she won’t let me in. She’s making up her own face.’ I’m not saying Whitey never made up her face. Of course, he did. But there were times when all he needed to do was make a touch-up. She—Marilyn—was the real master of that look.”

*Because of the nature of his service to Marilyn Monroe, this doctor asked for anonymity. Therefore, we are using a pseudonym to protect his identity.

*Frank Mankiewicz was the son of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who cowrote Citizen Kane with Orson Welles. They both won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay for the 1941 film.

*Of course, Elizabeth Taylor had just been paid a million for only one film— Cleopatra —but that was an unprecedented deal in the business. Considering that Marilyn was only compensated $100,000 for Something’s Got to Give , this new contract was quite amazing and also one of the biggest in show business up until that time. Beyond its obvious financial reward, it marked a big personal win for her, too. That she and Fox were able to come to these terms despite everything that had occurred on the set of her most recent film suggests that the studio had finally begun to understand just how valuable a property Marilyn was to them—at whatever financial inconvenience it may have been when she worked on a movie.

*“At the side of her bed was a lot of Seconal, which I had never given her,” said Dr. Engelberg. “Also, her liver showed that she had a lot of chloral hydrate. I never gave her chloral hydrate and I don’t think any doctor in the United States gave it to her. She must have bought it in Tijuana.

*While Marilyn may have had certain projects in the offing, the fact remains that she was still in financial straits at the end of her life. In a letter dated June 25, 1962, her attorney, Mickey Rudin, warned her, “I feel obligated to caution you on your expenditures since at the rate you have been making those expenditures, you will spend the $13,000 in a very short period of time and we will then have to consider where to borrow additional monies.” As stated earlier in this text, Marilyn always had financial problems.