Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [127]
CHAPTER 17
In the meantime, my own life was about to change. I was about to become, of all things, a writer, just as Sidney Kingsley had predicted. I got there by a curious twist of fate.
Years before, when I was still living in London, I became friends with Milton H. Greene, the glamorous photographer of high-fashion and show-business celebrities who had himself leaped into international celebrity of the most sensational kind when he made a deal with Marilyn Monroe to become her business partner and her producer.
Milton was a small, darkly handsome man, with an open, boyish smile of considerable charm that contrasted oddly with his brooding eyes. Though nobody could have guessed it at the time, his celebrated partnership with Marilyn was at once the zenith of his career and the beginning of his downfall. It resulted in one of Marilyn’s worst pictures—The Prince and the Showgirl—and one of her best, Bus Stop, but in the end Milton was no more capable of controlling Marilyn (or saving her from herself) than Twentieth Century–Fox had been.
It was typical of Milton’s charm that he had seduced Marilyn Monroe in one instant, right on her own doorstep. He had been sent out by Look magazine to photograph her, and when she opened her door and saw Milton, he looked so young that she said, “Why, you’re just a boy!” Milton looked her up and down slowly and carefully, taking in all of that lush figure, and said, in his quiet, gentle voice, “And you’re just a girl.”
Milton not only charmed her, he somehow managed to soothe her—no easy task, given her high level of anxiety, her pill taking, and her mind-numbing hysteria. He persuaded her that he could help her break away from the tyranny of the studio—with which she had had a love-hate relationship since she was in her teens—choose her own roles, make her own movies, and become a serious actress in New York. The ink was not even dry on the contracts that linked them before Milton realized that he had bitten off more than he could chew, but by that time it was too late.
In these unhappy circumstances, Milton spent a good deal of time sitting in the small mews house he had rented just off Grosvenor Square during the shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl, around the corner from the elegant apartment building where my Aunt Alexa was living. Milton and Alexa met and became friendly, and since I was often at Alexa’s, it was inevitable that I met him.
Against all the odds, Milton and I became friends, despite the difference in age. Milton, it transpired, loved to play chess, and since this was one of my skills—my father had taught me to play on a tiny, folding, pocket-size board during a train trip across the United States when I was eleven—I took to coming over at odd hours, in case Milton was free. Mostly, he was. Neither Laurence Olivier, who was costarring and directing, nor Marilyn wanted him on the set, and as producer there was not much for him to do but sit at home while other people spent his money. Occasionally, Marilyn wandered through the house, dazed and distracted, with a shopping list of complaints for Milton.
Soon after I had become a more or less permanent guest at Milton’s house, his wife, Amy, arrived from their home in Connecticut. Amy Greene was a diminutive, exquisite woman, something like a high-fashion model in miniature, whose energy surrounded her like a bright aura. Unlike Milton, who could sit for hours without saying a word, perfectly content, Amy was as bright and restless and chatty as a parrot, forever in motion and determined never to be bored—the complete opposite, in some ways, of her husband. The last thing Amy wanted to see was Milton and me sitting around the house playing