Screen siren, singer, sex symbol and... sensational babysitter: Milton Greene's son on being looked after by Marilyn Monroe
Joshua Greene has blissful childhood memories of pillow fights, tickling sessions, and jumping in puddles with his babysitter.
However, the sitter was not a friendly neighbour but global superstar Marilyn Monroe.
58-year-old Greene, the son of late photographer Milton Greene, recalled his ‘wonderful’ memories of the screen siren looking after him to the New York Post.
Firm friends: Marilyn Monroe was close friends with celebrity photographer Milton Greene and used his Connecticut home as a retreat where she would look after his young son, Joshua. Monroe and Greene are pictured here in Los Angeles in 1956, after she had been away for 14-months
Celebrity photographer Milton Greene was great friends and one-time business partner with Monroe, who died 50 years ago on August 6.
Greene’s rural Weston, Connecticut retreat became a home away from homes for Monroe, where she was able to escape the spotlight following her divorce from baseball legend Joe DiMaggio.
During the winter of 1954-55 and intermittently, Monroe sought refuge at the Greene’s family home, where she would relax and look after little Joshua.
Greene remembers how Monroe would give him bubble baths, ‘I was lucky, what could I say?’ he joked to the New York Post.
Of course, he was too young to know that the caring family friend was also a world-famous sex symbol.
As rumours of affairs with Frank Sinatra and Clark Gable circulated, Monroe enjoyed a brief stint of domesticity.
Babysitter: As well as a model, actress, singer and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe was a fantastic babysitter, according to Joshua Greene, the son of late photographer Milton Greene
‘Those years were the happiest of her life because she had the safe, family environment,’ Greene told the Post.
There were no drugs or negativity fuelling Monroe’s insecurities and Milton worked hard to ensure the star was all right, he added.
Besides enjoying her role as house-guest, Monroe sought to become a more serious actress enrolling at Lee Strasburg’s Actors Studio in Manhattan.
And Milton Greene helped Monroe seize more control over her career and image from her film studio, 20th Century Fox. In 1956, they founded their own company Marilyn Monroe Productions.
Interviewed for a rerelease of the documentary Marilyn in Manhattan, Joshua’s 82-year-old mother, Amy Greene, remembers Monroe as a helpful house guest, who enjoyed winter walks through the woods.
‘It was the home she never had,’ she explained to the Post, recalling how the Hollywood starlet would make her own bed and clean up after herself.
Joshua says that without her red lipstick and hair done up, Monroe simply looked ‘like a blond woman with her hair pulled back or a scarf over her head.’
'Marilyn Monroe was a character she created, someone she would just go and turn into — a bit like any superhero or whatever,' Greene says.
In the Marilyn in Manhattan documentary, Oscar-winning actress Ellen Burstyn, now 79, says Monroe showed no ego and huge talent while they trained at the Actors Studio.
It was this time in Manhattan when Milton Greene also introduced Monroe to the jazz scene leading to her famously befriending Ella Fitzgerald.
On August 5 1962, 36-year-old Monroe was found dead in her Los Angeles home.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2177255/Milton-Greenes-son-looked-Marilyn-Monroe.html
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