Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1963)

Continued from page 65 So I did a double take, I backed the car around and I said, ‘Are you Marilyn Monroe?’ She was wearing dark glasses. ‘How did you recognize me?’ she said. I told her I just did and she said, ‘Do you want me to take my glasses off?’ and she did, and then she said, ‘Why don’t you pull the car over, we’ll talk.’ And I did. We talked for a long time. It was very personal, very sweet. She was a nice girl . . . with dungarees . . . out in the country . . . with a child.” They wrote now of her intense love for children. A friend: “It was the great tragedy of her life that she could never have a baby. She never spoke about this to anyone. But the tears, they always touched her eyes whenever she looked at someone else’s infant.” Alan Levy, journalist: “She said to me once, about her three former stepchildren (Robert and Jane Ellen Miller and Joe DiMaggio Jr.), ‘I take a lot of pride in them. Because they’re from broken homes ... I can’t explain it, but I think I understand about them. I think I love them more than I love anyone. I’ve always said to my stepchildren that I didn’t want to be their mother — or stepmother — as such. I wanted to be their friend. Only time could prove that to them and they had to give me time. But I love them and I adore them. Their lives that are forming are very precious to me. And I know that I had a part in forming them.” They wrote now of the one man who had truly loved her — a man who somehow hadn’t been able to show it, not all the way, not one hundred per cent, while she lived. A reporter for Newsweek magazine: “Three times each week, a florist delivers six long-stemmed roses to Marilyn Monroe’s crypt at Westwood Memorial Park. The sender: Ex-baseball star Joe DiMaggio, second of Marilyn’s three husbands. A cemetery official told of the flowers, adding: ‘Mr. DiMaggio said they were to be provided forever.’ ” They wrote now of their own feelings of loss. Again, Diana Trilling: “I think my response to her death was the common one —it came to me with the impact of a personal deprivation but I also felt it as I might a catastrophe in history or in nature — there was less in life because she had ceased to exist. In her loss life itself had been injured.” Again, Isadore Miller: “I lost a daughter when she went. She was like my own.” “Please don’t do it” Again a Photoplay reader: “I think about that Saturday night when she sat there alone, contemplating death and thinking only sad thoughts — I feel, as I’m sure countless others do, that if only I could have been there to talk to her. to remind her of the things she had to be happy about, to remind her that we all of us have our problems. To at least just talk to her, so she wouldn’t have had to feel so alone and maybe to say to her. ‘Don’t do it. Please, don’t do it. You’ve got so much to live for, and we’ll all miss you so much, and there must be another way. There must be another way. . . .’ ” And so they wrote. And wrote. These past nine months. Of Marilyn. To Marilyn. Letters . . . letters ... all the letters she ever waited for and all signed: “Love.” They were the letters Marilyn Monroe had waited for in life and had never received. —Ed de Blasio See 20th’s upcoming new film, “Marilyn.” Continued from page 63 than Your Husband.”) Says Jackie about her husband : “He always seems so right.” Says Grace about her husband: “His word is law.” Skirmish #7. (Or, “Who Said it Originally and Who is the Echo?”) Says Jackie: “I’ll be a wife and mother first.” Says Grace, on the same subject: “My husband and my children are my prime interest and have first call on my time.” Flowers and ashtrays Skirmish #8. (Or, “The War of the Roses.”) Much has been made of Mrs. Kennedy’s love of flowers and her skill in arranging them. Chief White House Gardener Robert M. Redmond reported, “One of the first things Mrs. Kennedy said to me when she came into the house was to get rid of all the potted plants.” The charming, casual flower arrangements — and, unlike her predecessor, Jackie put enough ash trays everywhere — made a hit when the Kennedys gave their first White House reception. Grace replaced the Palace potted plants with fresh cut flowers, after becoming First Lady of Monaco, and ordered that f cigarette boxes always be kept filled (she, unlike Jackie, doesn’t smoke herself) and that plenty of ashtrays be available. Gos sips wondered aloud how she felt when Jackie ran her house the same way. Skirmish #9. (Or, “Last One in the Pool is a Rotten Egg.”) The way the publicity spotlight keeps focusing on the Kennedys’ activities above, on and under water, you’d think that the New Frontier was really the Wet Frontier and that they’d first invented H^O. Now see what happened when Elsa Maxwell threw a fabulous costume ball to celebrate the opening of an indoor swimming pool at Monaco’s Hotel Paris. As chronicled by writer Maurice Zolotow, “Rainier disguised himself in a long black mustache and a hairless wig that made him look like a bald-headed Sicilian. Princess Grace put on a rubber false-face mask, gruesomely ugly, and wore a floppy straw hat with fake hair braids dangling down. On her feet were two large flippers. The guests wined and dined and watched fireworks and, at 4:00 A.M., began swimming. “ ‘Princess Grace,’ reported Miss Maxwell. ‘put on her flippers and swam like a fish, as did Prince Rainier.’ ” Skirmish #10. (Or. “Which Lady is the Movie Star?”) Grace had to give up her career as an established film actress when she became First Lady of Monaco. But Jackie made a movie, “Jacqueline Kennedy’s Asian Journey,” which was released by the United States Information Agency in twenty-nine languages to 106 foreign countries, as well as this country. A pattern of rivalry So from all these incidents, a pattern emerges : a pattern of rivalry. But for one woman to try to emulate another is not, gossips and columnists to the contrary, the same as having one woman jealous of another. To compete as First Ladies, as wives and as mothers, as beauties, as fashion leaders, as homemakers and home renovators, as hostesses, as unofficial diplomats, as devotees of culture, as supporters of charity, as devoted religionists and as representatives of American womanhood does not necessarily imply jealousy. Let’s put one of these alleged skirmishes back into context and see what it really amounts to. That photo of Grace gazing adoringly at JFK, with the insinuating caption underneath: (Grace) “. . . and I had to settle for a Prince.” Now the fact is that the words Grace is supposed to have said were something dreamed up by a writer or editor trying to be funny. The picture-caption appeared in a satiric book. Who's In Charge Here? — in which actual news photos were juxtaposed with far-out absurd “quotations.” (Another example: news shot of Indian Prime Minister Nehru in a white uniform: below it the caption — “Sorry, we’re all out of cherry vanilla.”) But the photo itself, you say, how about the photo? You can’t fake adoration unless you cut Grace out of a picture in which she’s looking adoringly at her own husband and then splice it to a shot of Jack Kennedy. True. The news shot is authentic. It ivas taken. Grace did look at Jack that way. But the word “adoringly” — that was the gossips’ word; it might just as well have been “intensely” or “lovingly” or “friendly.” Or “near-sightedly.” The photo was shot on May 24, 1961. at the White House when the Kennedys entertained the Rainiers at an informal luncheon, and was reproduced on page one of Time and on a full page of Life. Fine. But what about the look on Grace’s