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

his way through a sequence of inconclusive, ill-informed answers. At first he confessed his ignorance of his client’s admittance to the hospital; then, after checking that she had in fact been admitted, decided to deny that the hospital specialised in dealing with psychiatric cases. His third statement was even more absurd, announcing that the actress had been admitted to ease her persistent cough. His fourth was both humorous and honest. ‘I have no idea what’s wrong with her,’ he confessed.
    Preposterous stories about Marilyn and the hospital didn’t just originate from her unwitting press agent. Other stories broke which said that theactress had been a patient at the hospital since Tuesday 5 December and, far from being confined to her small room, she had been bestowed with the privilege of being allowed to ‘periodically leave the building on a pass’ and had been seen out about on dates with Joe DiMaggio and The Misfits ’ actor Montgomery Clift.
    Journalists gathered in the Payne-Whitney’s lobby were now frantic for the truth. However, their endeavours for veracity were continually thwarted by the hospital’s tight-lipped officials. ‘Is she under restraint?’ asked one reporter. ‘Is she coherent?’ enquired another. But no answer was forthcoming. Nonetheless one shrewd reporter, Chiari Pisani, the American correspondent for the Italian magazine Gente , managed to accomplish what no other reporter was able to do. By contacting a staff doctor friend at the hospital and asking him to call one of the psychiatrists at the clinic familiar with Monroe’s case, she was able to pierce the hospital’s extremely tight barriers around the actress.
    While Pisani eavesdropped intently, the friend asked the Payne-Whitney medic, ‘Has Marilyn inherited her mother’s mental condition, schizophrenia?’ Without any hesitation, the doctor clarified there were no symptoms. In her subsequent Gente column, Pisani reiterated this – ‘Schizophrenia is not a sickness you can inherit like epilepsy’ – and neatly summed up Monroe’s stay in the hospital by adding, ‘Marilyn does not have any mental problems. She is only psychiatrically disconnected in an acute way because she works too hard, two movies in one year and the recent third divorce.’
    These revealing disclosures of course meant little to Marilyn, whose heart-rending pleas for assistance to escape her psychological tormentors were finally answered on Friday 10 February, when Joe DiMaggio appeared at the hospital. The actress had used her one permitted phone call to contact her former husband, who was in Fort Lauderdale at his Yankee Clipper Motel. After listening to tales of her torment, and realising that he was the one who had given his blessing to her admission, he assured Marilyn he would fly to New York immediately and do everything he could to release her.
    When he reached Payne-Whitney’s reception desk early on Friday morning, he was in no mood for small talk. ‘I want my wife,’ he demanded aggressively. No one had the courage to point out to him that he and Marilyn were no longer legally married and that they had been separated for almost seven years. Instead, they tried telling him that they had no authority to release Miss Monroe to him or to anyone else. But DiMaggio was insistent. ‘If you do not release her to me,’ he warned, ‘I will take this place apart, brick by brick, piece of wood by piece of wood.’
    Suddenly, following a hasty telephone discussion with Dr Kris, thePayne-Whitney staff were informed by the hospital’s hierarchy that Monroe was indeed free to leave. It seemed that DiMaggio’s influential contacts had yanked the correct strings. (Assertions by Monroe biographer Donald Spoto that, at this point in time, she and the baseball legend ‘had not met for almost six years’, are completely inaccurate.) Just before she left the building, the actress looked across at the doctors and told them they should get their