Naked under a mink coat, Marilyn did seduce her French lover. But does this photo really prove he made her pregnant?
THERE is no movie icon in living memory who evokes greater fascination than Marilyn Monroe.
Some 55 years after her naked body was discovered sprawled face-down across her bed, with one arm stretched out clutching a telephone receiver after an apparent drug overdose at the age of 36, the screen’s ultimate sex symbol continues to be the subject of lurid claims about her private life.
The latest, arising from an auction held in Los Angeles in November, concerns photographs of Marilyn taken in 1960 by a close friend, the late Frieda Hull.
They show a radiant Monroe, dressed as she often was, in clothes that appeared much too small for her, with a pronounced abdominal bump.
Miss Hull’s neighbour, a croupier called Tony Michaels from Las Vegas, who bought the photographs at auction for £1,800, claims Hull confided in him that Marilyn was, indeed, pregnant at the time, and that Hull knew ‘for certain’ that the father was not Monroe’s husband, American playwright Arthur Miller. She named the French actor and singer Yves Montand, who had co-starred with Marilyn several months earlier in the screen musical Let’s Make Love.
Before her death in 2014, Hull told Michaels that she believed Marilyn had miscarried when making her next film, The Misfits.
That Marilyn mourned her inability to become a mother is not in question. According to her close friend Norman Rosten: ‘It was a dagger at her ego: the love goddess, the woman supreme, unable to have a child.’ It made her feel unloved, ‘cursed by the universe’.
Betty Grable, her celebrated co-star in How To Marry A Millionaire, told me a year after Marilyn’s death in 1962: ‘You have to understand that all her problems had to do with her not being able to have a child. She would have been a wonderful mother, and it would have saved her life if only she could have had children.’
It is a tragic irony that Monroe’s physical frailty, her greedy pursuit of stardom and perhaps a deep-rooted fear of a genetic legacy of mental illness all conspired to deny her the dream of motherhood.
Her own mother suffered from schizophrenia and manic depression, an uncle developed paranoid schizophrenia and both her maternal grandparents lived out their twilight years in mental institutions. According to one of her co-stars, Celeste Holm, this gave Marilyn a lifelong terror of giving birth to an abnormal child.
Mr Michaels’ claims this week have been rubbished by film historians; they point out that there is not an iota of evidence that Monroe really was pregnant.
He is accused of a distasteful attempt to drum up publicity for the photographs before selling them on for profit.
There are strong reasons for believing that the bump was not an indication of pregnancy — more of which later. The affair with Montand, however, is well known.
Her opinion of him, soon after he was chosen as her leading man in Let’s Make Love, was to become headline news: ‘Next to my husband, and along with Brando, Yves is the most attractive man I’ve met.’
Gallic charmer Montand was seen as the archetypal great French lover — although, in fact, he wasn’t French at all. He was born in Tuscany, the son of Italian-Jewish peasants.
After the fascist dictator Mussolini tightened his grip on power, the family moved to Marseilles, and by the age of 19, Montand was a star of the Moulin Rouge in Paris — thanks to the particular interest shown in his talent by the singer, Edith Piaf.
Arthur Miller knew and liked Montand. They shared similar Left-wing political views.
Miller famously refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating his Communist leanings. In 1956 this led to a suspended sentence of a month’s imprisonment for contempt of Congress, which was later reversed on appeal.
MoNTANd, meanwhile, had been introduced to extreme Left-wing politics by his wife, the French star Simone Signoret, following their marriage in 1951. He did not renounce Communism until 1968.
So it was that in January 1960, the Montands and the Millers moved into Bungalows 20 and 21 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where they joined each other for home-cooked meals and sat around talking into the night.
Montand was clearly dazzled by Marilyn’s luminous beauty, but he found her deeply exasperating. When, one day, she failed to turn up on the set of Let’s Make Love, and refused to leave the bungalow, he was furious and put a note under her door berating her. It ended with the words: ‘Capricious little girls have never amused me.’
It was an act that spurred Marilyn’s interest in him. When Signoret left for costume fittings for her next film and Miller also departed Hollywood on business, Montand phoned a friend of both couples in ‘an absolute state’.
‘Arthur’s leaving me with Marilyn, and our apartments are adjoining. do you think Arthur doesn’t know that she is beginning to throw herself at me?’
He wasn’t wrong about that. Marilyn turned up at his door wearing a mink coat, under which she was stark naked.
Montand succumbed to her sexual overtures, but by the end of filming on Let’s Make Love, the affair was over. He had made it brutally clear he had no intention whatsoever of leaving his wife.
Signoret dealt with the rumours of their liaison calmly. ‘If Marilyn is in love with my husband,’ she said, ‘it proves she has good taste. For I am in love with him, too.’
So what of the claims of the pregnancy resulting from that affair?
The photographs that have just come to light of Marilyn were taken by Frieda Hull on July 8, 1960, outside the Fox Studios in New York.
ONLY two weeks later, Marilyn was to fly to Nevada to co-star with her great childhood idol, Clark Gable, in The Misfits, for which her husband had written the screenplay.
If Marilyn had been pregnant at that time, I believe the last thing she would have allowed were photos in which she paraded her condition in public. The immediate outcome would almost certainly have been to lose the chance of playing opposite Gable.
In addition, Marilyn had from youth suffered with endometriosis, a gynaecological condition causing intense pelvic cramps, pain during intercourse, difficulty in conceiving and miscarriage. It can also cause bloating of the abdomen.
Her gynaecological problems were so severe that she had undergone numerous surgical procedures. These also included terminations to allow her film career to flourish.
American novelist Norman Mailer, in his controversial 1973 biography of Marilyn, claimed that she had had at least 12 abortions, all before she was 29, although he produced no documentation in support of this claim.
By the time Marilyn arrived in the gruelling 108-degrees heat of the North Nevada desert to begin filming The Misfits in the late summer of 1960, she was in a pitiful state.
There was no indication of the joy one would expect from a woman who was increasingly desperate to have a child. Instead, her failed affair with Montand and her growing estrangement from Miller had increased her dependence on prescription drugs.
The director, John Huston, a hardened Hollywood veteran, was shocked by her appearance and condition. In certain scenes she appeared to be actually ‘staggering’.
Significantly, Monroe’s contract for The Misfits specified that she was to be released from filming when she had a period. It was on these grounds that she was allowed to leave the Nevada set on August 26 to fly to Los Angeles to spend a week in the Westside Hospital in Los Angeles.
It was not, as Tony Michaels claims he was told by Frieda Hull, to recover from a miscarriage; it was to detox from the now dangerous levels of her barbiturate regime so she could complete the film.
We also have the evidence of Monroe’s most reliable and bestdocumented biographer, donald Spoto, that the third, and last, of the miscarriages she suffered, in december 1958 — a month after completing filming Some Like It Hot — was her final attempt to become a mother.
There is another factor that helps to explain the bump in the photos Hull took. Marilyn, whose weight fluctuated throughout her life, was at her heaviest in 1960 as she moved into her mid-30s. Her obsession with always appearing curvaceous and
sexy caused her to order outfits and skirts much smaller than her actual size. Often she had to be sewn into dresses, under which she wore no underwear.
This was most apparent in the 1957 film The Prince And The Showgirl, when she appeared in virtually every scene in the same tight white dress, stretched taut across her stomach, resulting in an obvious bulge.
During my only meeting with Marilyn, when as a star-struck 15-year-old I presented her with roses at the house she was renting in Englefield Green, Surrey, while making The Prince And The Showgirl, I recall that bulge as she trotted towards me in an equally tight white dress on very high heels.
Monroe’s reluctance when it came to heterosexual sex did not help her chances of motherhood either.
It is an ironic fact that the big screen’s greatest sex symbol came to fear intercourse with men because of the pain it caused her.
Her first marriage to Merchant Marine Jim Dougherty was almost sexless. His friend Martin Evans revealed: ‘Jim told me privately that she spent most of their early marriage locked in the bathroom.
‘She had sex books and manuals that were given to her, but none of them made a difference. She was scared...she even asked if it were possible for her to never have sex with Jim. Could they just be friends, she wondered?
‘To be honest, I don’t think they had a good sex life ever.’
The film-maker Jean Negulesco, who directed Marilyn in How To Marry A Millionaire, said: ‘She told me once that she had never had an orgasm with a man in her entire life.’
aS SHE grew older, Marilyn turned increasingly to sexual relationships with women. They included the rampantly bisexual Joan Crawford, two other veteran Hollywood stars, Barbara Stanwyck and Marlene Dietrich, and Natasha Lytess, a failed actress who became Marilyn’s drama coach.
Her second husband, the legendary baseball player Joe DiMaggio, once confided to a newspaper columnist, Walter Winchell, that the real cause of the breakdown of their marriage was Marilyn’s lesbianism.
On June 7, 1961, at Frank Sinatra’s cabaret opening at the Sands Hotel and casino, Las Vegas, Marilyn had a one-off sexual encounter with her rival as the Queen of Hollywood, Elizabeth Taylor, who was six years her junior.
‘Her touch was electric,’ wrote Taylor of Marilyn in her diary. ‘I wanted to see how far the bitch would go. But she had to do all the work.’
For those still inclined to believe that Marilyn Monroe was pregnant by Yves Montand, there was to be an interesting sequel to the saga.
In 1997, six years after Montand’s death, aged 70, a French court ordered his body to be exhumed from the Paris cemetery where he was buried next to Simone Signoret. It was to enable DNA tests to settle a paternity suit brought against his estate by a 22-year-old girl, Aurore Drossart, who claimed to be his daughter. No genetic match between Montand and Mlle. Drossart was found.
In 2004, there was an even more sensational development when Signoret’s daughter by her first marriage, the actress Catherine Allégret, claimed in her book, entitled World Upside Down, that her stepfather Montand had sexually abused her from the age of five.
It is a somewhat sordid postscript to the poignant tale of Marilyn’s last ‘pregnancy’ — yet another dramatic episode in our enduring fascination with her.