Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Yyou can judge a woman by the people she lives with. For the past few months I have been talking to people Marilyn Monroe surrounded himself, during the 36 years of his activities on earth. Obviously and mainly, I was doing this to make a documentary for the radio, which started on her 100th birthday. But I also had a second secret goal: I wanted to know if – maybe in another life – Marilyn and I would have been friends.
The first thing to say about Monroe’s friends is that she had many. The fact that more than sixty years have passed since his death, and it is possible to find enough people alive to interview him, tells you something. This is very strange because MM (as she is sometimes called in fan circles) seems to be a very, very immortal goddess who would not do anything like having a mate. And while it’s possible to imagine her being followed by a group of tragically religious men – like Tom Ewell’s character in The Seven Year Itch – her sexist image means that people find it hard to imagine her having real relationships with women.
But Monroe can truly be what some would call a “girl’s girl”. Amy Greene is a former model and the widow of Milton Greene, the photographer with whom Monroe formed her independent film company, Marilyn Monroe Productions (MMP), in 1955. Greene shared her home with the star for several years in the mid-1950s, and recalls the shock of the arrangement: “Girls you’d meet in your house would say, ‘Would your wife tell you?’ I would say, ‘What’s wrong with you? There is nothing there. They’re friends!’ And when we got to know each other and became real friends, I knew he wouldn’t hurt me by hitting Milton.”
Girlfriends also appear in his films. He dates Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable in 1953’s How to Marry a Millionaire (more of a Charlotte to their Miranda and Samantha), and has a close relationship with Eileen Heckart’s Vera in Bus Stop – important, as this was MMP’s first collaboration. However, the most memorable is Men Love Blondesin which Monroe played Jane Russell, a brunette who can fight him because of the symbol of mid-century sex.
Monroe was being paid a fraction of Russell’s £200,000 salary, but despite this disagreement, the pair developed a long-lasting romance after filming. In Russell’s 1985 memoir, My Path and My Detours, he recalls a day at the beach with close female friends: “(We) had wine, music and lots of talk by the fire . . . I thought of Marilyn. That was August 1962. The next day Russell got a message that Monroe he was dead.
Marilyn also had relationships with Hollywood celebrities who were a few sisters. In 1953, Mamie Van Doren, now 95 years old, was hired as Universal’s “answer to Marilyn Monroe” and remembers always meeting her rival in town. Van Doren described Monroe to me as “a lovely person (who) didn’t have a bad bone in his body”, but he also has a gossip line – see his latest record, You Thought I Was Dead (coming out on 2 July) – which comes from a little shadow (“Everyone thought I was taking him, but it was less” unrepeated-of-legal-reasons. However, his best thoughts were connecting with a young girl at the mercy of the studio dominated by men: “We had the same problems; what we were expected to do if we wanted to have a part. And she had bigger problems with that than I did.”
As for male friends, everyone has heard of Monroe and John F Kennedy. Some say that their fight contributed in some way to Monroe’s death. Although JFK may have been the most powerful man in the world, my opinion from talking to his confidants is that his standing in Monroe’s heart was very small.
The men who mattered most to her were platonic friends and partners. Men like photographer Lawrence Schiller, with whom Monroe worked on the second scandalous nudity of her career. The first was the “red velvet” series, which was shot when Monroe was young and broke, and was later used by Hugh Hefner to launch Playboy (Monroe was never paid a cent more than the first $50).
The second was all of Monroe’s thoughts, the iconic image created on the 1962 set of her final, unfinished film, Something’s Gotta Give, reminding the world – and the studios – of her star power. As Schiller puts it: “Very few people understand the light. Marilyn did. She is unlike any other woman I have ever met in the entertainment business . . .
Another long-time friend of hers was Sam Shaw, the man who took the star’s most famous photo – where she stood on top of a subway car in a white dress. In Shaw’s later book, Dear Marilyn, he credits her “beauty and pure joy” for her success. Their letters reveal a warm, supportive friendship, rooted in shared artistic interests and their troubled childhood, which eventually grew into Monroe’s chosen family. Shaw’s daughter Edie, who, like Monroe, was born on June 1, told me about the circus tour with the movie star to celebrate Edie’s 10th and Marilyn’s 29th birthday: “He was a difficult person. He spoke in the same language that you would speak to him. So if he was a child, he was sweet and soft.
Monroe was good with children and her thwarted desire to become a mother is often at the center of her tragedy. But Greene believes, based on their conversations around the kitchen table, that his true feelings were unusual: “He used to (say), ‘Oh, I want kids.’ He liked the word ‘children’. But it was a fantasy, and he knew it. They were not supposed to have children. He couldn’t deal with them. She was not a housewife.”
Also, as the memories of Shaw’s family testify, Monroe had children in her life, with many opportunities to express motherly love. On the day she died she was on the phone to comfort her former son Joe DiMaggio Jr over his recent grief.
Put all these pieces together, and the picture that emerges is very different from the tragic tale of a lovelorn sexpot who died because the Kennedy brothers despised him and could not live with his family. Monroe’s friends remember that she was a happy woman, funny, intelligent, full of desire to create. Anyone would be lucky to have him as a friend.
