The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story by Keith Badman

and immediately upped their offer, more than doubling it to a most generous $50,000. However, Strasberg still wasn’t happy. Desiring an even higher fee, he promptly dismissed it. But, this time, Fox weren’t listening and plans to engage Strasberg were swiftly shelved.
    Possibly as a way of killing even more time, he then reappeared on the scene, insisting he would not allow the actress to shoot the movie anyway, asserting that the pressures of this on top of the ongoing problems with her NBC TV drama play, Rain , were coming too soon after her traumatic stay at the Payne-Whitney clinic. Fox retaliated by insisting that, as long as she was capable of working and they had engaged (or attempted to engage) one of her favoured directors on the movie, she could not lawfully decline the part. Marilyn meanwhile was adamant. With neither Cukor nor Strasberg at the helm, she would not make the picture. Even the announced intention of Fox studio president and true Monroe supporter Spyros P. Skouras to drag her through the courts over the matter failed to change her mind.
    So, in May 1961, after almost 11 months of futile deliberations, and two full months after shooting was due to commence, Goodbye Charlie was finally put on hold (albeit until Hollywood actress Debbie Reynoldsrescued the role in 1964) and another suitable screenplay for Monroe was sought. After concurring with her attorney that she did still owe them one more movie, Skouras agreed not to sue the actress. He also gave his blessing to her appearing in Rain , but only on the proviso that it was completed by Monday 30 October – a date when, Fox hoped, she would finally be ready to commence work on her next (and final) film for them.
    In unison with the movie’s abandonment, following the realisation that Hollywood was the only place to be if she wished to prolong her profession, Marilyn packed her bags and, once more, returned to Los Angeles. She was reluctant to do so. As she had announced to the American press on Monday 27 February 1956, ‘My real home now is New York.’ In her mind, her return showed that her attempts at success as an actress away from Tinseltown had been a failure, and it hurt.
    She had worked tirelessly to drag herself out of the industry’s gutter, had married America’s most admired sports hero and the country’s most revered playwright and had toiled endlessly at the Actors Studio just to gain respect as an actress. ‘When she came to New York [in December 1954],’ Lee Strasberg recalled, ‘she began to perceive the possibilities of really accomplishing her dreams of becoming a great actress.’
    Marilyn loved being there. The city’s people, theatres, night-life and genuine sense of optimism agreed with her immensely. She mixed with intellectuals, socialised in creative circles and had even become friends with top-rated writers Truman Capote and Carson McCullers. She wholeheartedly identified with the place. Yet, just over six years later, she found herself back in Hollywood, back where she started, in a city she hated, filled with people she barely trusted and with whom she had precious little in common. ‘Even though I was born there,’ she once remarked to her writer friend, Truman Capote, ‘I still can’t think of one good thing to say about it. If I close my eyes and picture LA, all I see is one big varicose vein.’
    ‘This was the last act for her. She’d come back defeated,’ her close, New York-based friend Norman Rosten recalled. ‘She was going back to her roots,’ screenwriter Arthur Schulman observed, ‘back to the way she’d be treated when she was giving blow-jobs in the afternoon . . . She was a queen, but not to those people. They patronised her, saying, “You’re not really one of us.”’ Worryingly, Marilyn also knew that she was fast approaching 35, the age when many of Hollywood’s most famous female players were known to have been cast aside.
    Thanks in part to her few friends, however, Monroe