Free Marilyn's Last Sessions by Michel Schneider Page B

she wasn’t of any use to him except to make him sad,
like a worn car tyre left lying on the tarmac of a parking lot, or a lost key. He saw her for the last time in Hollywood a few weeks before her death, and said afterwards, ‘She had never
looked better. She had lost a lot of weight for the picture she was going to do with George Cukor, and there was a new maturity about her eyes. She wasn’t so giggly any more. If she had lived
and kept her figure, I think she would still look terrific today. The Kennedys didn’t kill her, the way some people think. She committed suicide. But they paid one of her best friends, her
press attaché Pat Newcomb, to keep quiet about her relationship with them. That friend knew where all the skeletons were, and after Marilyn died, they sent her on a year-long cruise round
the world. For a whole year no one knew where she was.’
    Four years later, Truman Capote threw his famous black and white ball in New York’s grandest ballroom at the Plaza Hotel. He spent months drawing up lists, covering page
after page with names, underlining some, crossing out others. People thought he was working on his next novel, but it was his last party, his immolation on the funeral pyre of celebrity. He invited
five hundred people: hardly any writers, lots of Hollywood types, including Sinatra, a few ghosts, such as the old diva Tallulah Bankhead, but neither John Huston, for whom he had written Beat
the Devil and who had introduced him to Marilyn, nor Blake Edwards, who had massacred Breakfast at Tiffany’s . He wanted people to hide their faces and wear black or white, like
pieces in a chess game. After his death, a note from 1970 was found in his papers. ‘A white bishop. That’s how she saw me. Marilyn and I were destined to find each other but not touch.
It can be that way sometimes, like Holly and the narrator in Breakfast at Tiffany’s .’ Truman also noted in his diary, ‘Strange. After my parents’ divorce, I was
brought up in Monroeville, Alabama.’

 
Phoenix, Arizona
March 1956
    After fourteen months in New York, Marilyn returned to Los Angeles to film Bus Stop . On 12 March 1956, Norma Jeane Mortenson, as she still signed herself, became Marilyn
Monroe. ‘I am an actress and I found my name a handicap,’ she said. ‘I have been using the name I wish to assume, Marilyn Monroe, for many years and I am now known professionally
by that name.’
    On set, director Joshua Logan discovered just how much of a Freudian devotee the actress had become. In one scene Don Murray, who was playing a cowboy, was supposed to wake Marilyn with the
words, ‘No wonder you’re so pale and white. That’s the sun out there.’ Instead he said ‘so pale and scaly’.
    Logan called, ‘Cut.’
    ‘Don,’ Marilyn said gleefully, ‘do you realise what you just did? You made a Freudian slip . . . It’s a sexual scene and you gave a sexual symbol. You see, you
said “scaly”, which means to say you were thinking of a snake. And a snake is a phallic symbol. You know what a phallic symbol is?’
    ‘Know what that is?’ Murray retorted. ‘I’ve got one! Do you think I’m a fairy or something?’
    ‘What do I know? Let me tell you a story. You know Errol Flynn? Well, when I was about ten, I saw The Prince and the Pauper three times. And then ten years later I met him in the
flesh in Hollywood. Next thing I knew, my prince had whipped out his dick and was playing the piano with it. Errol Flynn! My childhood hero! I’d just got into modelling, and I went to this
half-ass party, and Errol Flynn, so pleased with himself, he was there and he took out his prick and played the piano with it. Thumped the keys. He played “You Are My Sunshine”. Christ!
Everyone says Milton Berle has the biggest schlong in Hollywood. I wouldn’t know about that. But I’ve seen Errol’s . . . So you’ll have to do better than that!’
    During the filming of Bus Stop in Sun Valley, Marilyn tried out the