Marilyn was stunned—she had miscalculated. It was not 1954. Fox considered her damaged and aging goods. And, they could not allow her and Elizabeth Taylor to be seen as running the asylum. Forty million had been sunk into “Cleopatra.” Taylor could not be reprimanded. Marilyn, they thought, was expendable.

In fact, she was not. Marilyn mounted a tremendous campaign. She posed sleek and soignée for Vogue. She romped youthfully on the beach for Cosmopolitan. She was interviewed by Life magazine and Redbook. To critics of her special needs, she said, “An actor is a sensitive instrument. Issac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on Issac Stern’s violin?!” And speaking to her lifelong issues of being shunted around; told what to do in foster homes, she declared: “I do not appear at a studio for discipline, or to be disciplined. That has nothing to do with art.” (In fact, it does, but Marilyn, like her friend and astrological sister, Judy Garland, would not be corralled nor accept being a “product” to an unsympathetic system.)
Public interest and sympathy was high. The film could not continue without her. Dean Martin rejected all replacements. Fox capitulated, yet again. She was re-hired. She would receive twice her contracted salary. The script she initially approved would be re-instated— with “more jokes”— and George Cukor would be replaced by Jean Negluceso, who had directed her successfully in “How To Marry a Millionaire.”

This is where Marilyn Monroe’s professional life stood on Saturday night, August 4th. Her career hung in the balance, but she was secure in the moment. She had won, again. It was a gossamer triumph, but enough. Various personal issues swirled—Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, the brothers Kennedy, her apparently insoluble physical and emotional issues, which led to barbiturate and alcohol abuse. But when had it been otherwise? No one who knew her intimately would have ever said, at any time. “She’s such a happy girl”—although she was capable of summoning up an infectious, joyful façade. It was her own disapproval of herself, her self-loathing which drove her to excel and reach ever up and beyond. (She could call on Isek Dinesen, Truman Capote and Carl Sandberg as friends.) Her struggle was heroic, and her accomplishments are ill-served when placed in the mode of inevitable failure and victimization. In her last interview, to Life magazine she said, “That moment, between me the camera. I want it to be perfect. As perfect as I can make it, anyway.” She had not despaired of her great career high—though she hardly expected it to be “Something’s Got To Give.”

She also said, in those final weeks, “Fame has its compensations. It does. But it also has its drawbacks. And I’ve experienced both. It’s like caviar. It’s good to have caviar, but not when you have it every damn day. Too much caviar!” And her summation of what she’d worked for? “Fame may go by. And, so what? I’ve had fame. It’s something I’ve experienced. But it’s not where I live.”

Had she lived, the white hot of fame would have passed by. But in a cooler climate, she might well have found all she desired. We would not talk of her as we do now, as an almost mythological figure, a repository of endless fantasy and speculation. She would speak for herself.

Marilyn Monroe’s death was an accidental blip, one wretched night she couldn’t escape. Had she risen above it, been saved, thought it over, she would have survived. She would have been…Mrs. Robinson! (Could Mike Nichols have resisted casting her in “The Graduate”?) The legendary “correctness” of her passing—the right place, the right year, the right age—works for historians, conspiracy buffs and fans. The woman herself would have wanted more time. This was Marilyn weeks before she died, referring back to her 1955 declaration of finding herself: “There has been an alteration with time. I used to think if I could find myself as an actress, I would fulfill myself as a person. Now I feel if I fulfill myself as a person, I’ll find myself as an actress. The thing is, it seems like I have a superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation!”