Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

                                                 

                                          THE LAST TIME I SAW MARILYN

                                                                         by James Gray-Gold

   


    July 29, 1962:  There are some dates that are seared into one's memory forever. The last hot Sunday of July 1962 is one of those days.  My roommates and I took jobs as parking attendants at Cal-Neva Lodge after graduating high school.  The very same casino Frank Sinatra would subsequently make famous by entertaining such Mafia figures as Sam "Momo" Giancana, the New Jersey Don, Herbie Friedman from Miami and other assorted "wise guys."

    Since we parked the cars at Cal-Neva, nobody came in or out that we didn't see.  Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, The McGuire Sisters, The Crosby Brothers, etc.  In other words, whomever showed up at the lake paid their respects at the Lodge sooner or later.  Cal-Neva is a gaming casino and resort with a conglomeration of cabins set on a ridge above sky blue waters.  A beautiful setting for what would be an ugly scene.

    It was ladies "Bingo & Brunch" that Sunday as the black Lincoln pulled in.  As I happen to have been by the front doors, I took the next car matter-of-factly.  A woman stepped hesitantly out of the back, head down.  I took her hand to steady her.  At the time I remember thinking "another one of Sinatra's imports." As she raised her head, that thought quickly faded.  Old memories welled up inside of me.  It was Marilyn Monroe and I hadn't seen her in eight years. She smiled at me and was whisked away by Ed Pucci, a Sinatra bodyguard.  I stood there for the longest time wondering if Marilyn had remembered me.  After all, I was only a young boy the last time I had seen her.

    February 1954:  My father had been a major league baseball player and manager by the name of Lefty O'Doul.  In the late forties and fifties, he was taking major league ball clubs to Japan on goodwill tours.  On this trip he was taking an old protégé and good friend, Joe DiMaggio.  Joe and Marilyn had just gotten married at San Francisco City Hall, and my mother, Jean, had acted as Marilyn's maid of honor while Lefty acted as Joe's best man.

    Lefty had planned a goodwill tour-honeymoon for the newlyweds.  Marilyn would come over to our house in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco and spend hours talking with my mother about what she should wear and what Japan was like.  Marilyn liked to know about what she was getting into before she went.  Surprises didn't thrill her much.  My mother and Marilyn flew to Los Angeles just to go to The Don Loper Salon and pick out Marilyn's honeymoon trousseaux.  Marilyn kept asking, "Jeannie, don't I look fat?"  Of course, she looked sensational.  Marilyn was twenty-seven and at the top of her career.  She had recently completed "How To Marry A Millionaire" and she could do no wrong at the box office.

    As we left for the ride to the airport that would take them to Japan, I couldn't keep my eyes off her. Marilyn was nervous, but she had this wonderful glow to her.  Flashbulbs exploded as we left as we left the car to enter the waiting room that had been reserved for a quick press conference.  The huge Pan-Am clipper waited on the runway.   I had been through this the year before with Leo Durocher, then the Giants' manager, and his movie star wife Lorianne Day.  This time it was much bigger.  The pushing, screaming, the absurd questions.  One reporter actually asked me, "Are you Marilyn's secret son?"  Marilyn held me very close during the press conference.  She understood that this kind of attention was confusing to a boy of nine. I walked them to the boarding steps and Marilyn kissed me goodbye.  "Be a good boy Jimmy.  I'll see you when we get back."

    I followed their exploits in the paper, and on the television news.  After a week, I received a phone call from them.  They were leaving Japan and going on alone to Korea.  Marilyn was to entertain the troops and my mother was with her.  In subsequent interviews, Marilyn would say that the USO tour to Korea was the happiest she had ever been.  She was newly married, on her honeymoon and universally adored. Marilyn was on top of the world and had found in my mother a new friend who really cared about Marilyn the person, not the star.

    My mother had been asked many times to write about the tour and her relationship to Marilyn.  But she never was comfortable talking about the private lives of other people, and a few years before she died, she told me,  "You write about it someday.  You lived it too and after all, you were the one who saw her at the end."

    I was standing on the runway when my parents and the DiMaggios returned to San Francisco International.  Marilyn had told me on the phone that they would be back in time for my birthday, which was in two days.  Sure enough, on February 25th, they arrived.  I had told my friends that Marilyn Monroe was coming to my birthday party.  On that day, February 27th, a crowd of more than one hundred stood on our front lawn; the word was out.  Unfortunately, Marilyn had come back very ill.  She had caught pneumonia in the freezing cold of Korea.  Marilyn had refused to cover up while on stage.  She told my mother, "These boys expect to see a lot of me and I won't disappoint them."  She almost died keeping her word, dressed only in a red sequinned dress slit up the sides with spaghetti shoulder straps. On my birthday, my mother gave me a present with a letter in a pale blue envelope that read, "Dear Jimmy, please forgive me for not coming to your party today. You are one of my favorite people, but the doctor won't let me out of bed. I'll be thinking of you.  All my love, Marilyn."  She sent a white tennis sweater along with it.  But it was the letter I will always remember.  I wouldn't see Marilyn again until that late Sunday afternoon at Cal-Neva.

    Marilyn had visited our restaurant (Lefty O'Doul's) the year before and asked for me, but I was standing in the dusk of a late summer afternoon thinking about the woman who had just been in front of me.  Her eyes looked frightened, confused.  She had been fired by 20th Century Fox, the studio she had been such a big star for.  I went home determined to see her later that night.

    There was a numbing pain inside of me.  Marilyn's glow was now a glimmer.  As I sat in the living room of our cottage, one of my roommates rushed into the house and yelled, "You'll never guess who's at the Lodge."  "I already know," I said, "Marilyn."  He looked upset that I knew.  "Who told you?" he demanded.  "I helped her out of her car.  She had Ed Pucci with her.  It doesn't look like Sinatra wants anyone near her."  "To hell with him," he said.  "You've known her a long time, just go to her cabin.  She's in Number Fifty."

    It was three days before I got up enough nerve to chance bypassing the hulking bodyguards.  I had heard Marilyn wasn't well.  The people Sinatra surrounded himself with didn't seem to be invited for any reason other than to express confidence in each others' money.  Stories of all night parties and degagé sex abound. So many girls had come and gone that summer at the Lodge.

    On August 2nd, I was walking through the casino when Marilyn started toward me.  Ed Pucci must have been distracted and she literally escaped his heavy-handed dogging.  The day was very warm, but Marilyn was wearing a full-length mink coat, no dress or underwear.  Marilyn never liked underwear anyway.  Her gait was halting as she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.  "Jimmy, Wingy (Wingy Grover , a casino boss) just told me you were working here.  Why haven't you come to see me?  I've been here for a week!"  Actually, she'd been there four days, but she wasn't in any condition to count the days.  I told her I had wanted to see her, but "security had seemed a bit severe."  Marilyn didn't speak for the longest time, then she looked at me sadly and said, "Well, anyway we're here now."  We spoke about my mother, Joe D. And about the last time we had seen each other.  She couldn't have been sweeter.  It made me very sad to see her so disheveled and unhappy.  I told her I would see her later that night, that I was driving to Los Angeles the next day, but I promised to drop by.  Right then Ed Pucci appeared, taking her arm and escorting her away.  She looked back at me. She seemed so alone. These people, I thought, were not her friends. They were jaded men just using her.

    I went back later that night, but Marilyn had overdosed on Nembutol and was under the house doctor's care in secret.  I left the next morning, August 3rd on U.S. 395 for a long drive to L.A..  I picked up some girl friends and turned around the next evening and drove back.  I hadn't heard any news or read a paper in two days. When we arrived at the lake, my roommates were strangely silent.  "What's wrong?" I asked. "You all look like somebody died!"  On the evening of August 4th, I had left Los Angeles to return to the lake Marilyn lay dying only miles away.  Life didn't seem fair if someone that beautiful was gone.

    There is a place in all our memories reserved for favorite things, favorite years, and favorite people. Marilyn resides in mine.