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

a late-night meeting with the show’s scriptwriter, Rod Serling.
    Second, she was there to prepare for an operation to remove her gall bladder, a procedure which had to be brought forward when, during the evening of Wednesday 28 June, she began suffering from severe intestinal pains. An ambulance was summoned to her apartment and, with Joe DiMaggio by her side, she was taken to the local Polyclinic Hospital. X-rays confirmed that an impacted gallstone was causing the inflammation and discomfort, and emergency surgery was scheduled. The successful operation (classed as an emergency because it took place outside the normal morning operating hours) took place the following evening, Thursday 29 June.
    On Tuesday 11 July, after two weeks of recuperation in her private room, the actress was deemed fit enough to leave hospital. Before doing so, her obligatory New York hair stylist (and that of the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy), the eminent Kenneth Battelle, known professionally as plain ‘Kenneth’, was urgently summoned to fix the actress’s tresses. ‘I had flown in from Europe that day,’ he recalled in 1961. ‘I flew to New York for three hours just to do Marilyn’s hair’ (he received a cool $1,000 for doing so). Since many of her stomach muscles had not yet stretched back to normal and were not fully functioning, she was unable to walk properly, so she was forced to exit the building in a wheelchair. A crowd of approximately 500, comprised of journalists, photographers, well-wishers and the curious, were waiting to witness her departure. ‘I feel wonderful,’ she shouted before she gingerly stood on her feet and climbed aboard her waiting car, which was ready to escort her back to her Manhattan apartment. One of her other New York press agents, Howard Haines, was ready there to help her inside, where waiting to greet her was her half-sister, Berniece Miracle.
    There is no truth in the story that, shortly after Marilyn’s exit from the hospital, she and Miracle were driven to Connecticut by the actress’s close friend and masseur, Ralph Roberts, for a vacation. At this point, the actress was still barely able to move. Medical reports dated Monday 24 July revealthat, two weeks after she left the clinic, the actress was still recuperating at her New York home and was now just about able to leave her bed, but only for ‘several hours a day’. Further evidence that she remained holed up in her apartment for many weeks after her operation came from the manager of Westhampton House on Westhampton Beach, who revealed that, one week after the actress was discharged from the hospital, the ever-thoughtful Joe DiMaggio booked, as a surprise for the actress, two rooms at the Long Island resort. When quizzed about the reservations, an astounded Monroe was quoted as saying, ‘I have no plans to go anywhere at all.’ Nor did she. Closely abiding to a restrictive two-month diet which had been set by her doctors, she did not venture out of her apartment again until Tuesday 8 August.
    During her New York internment, however, she did record a voice-over for a new American television special. Entitled USO – Wherever They Go , the show was a tribute to the United Service Organization (USO) on its 20th anniversary and to the entertainers who had performed for the American armed forces at bases at home and abroad, in peace and war. Naturally, footage of Marilyn’s performance with the Anything Goes Band before the troops in Korea in February 1954 was to be one of the show’s high spots. ‘She had just been released from the hospital when we called,’ the programme’s producer, Jesse Zousmer, recalled in 1961. ‘So we went to her apartment with a projector, sound equipment and the necessary technicians to show her what we were doing. She got such a kick out of the film and she eagerly agreed to write her own narration.’ The finished programme became NBC TV’s all-star ‘DuPont Show Of The Week’ when it aired on Sunday 8