She also ousted her sister out of her own house, to make room for the Robert Kennedys, and rented another temporary home for the sister. When Joe heard how sick Marion really was, he sent off three specialists to see her. But Marion paid all the bills.
Earlier, she put on a fine performance, too, to appear on one of my television shows. By this time she was in the middle of her three-year fight with cancer. When word got out that I’d asked her, Kay Gable waxed indignant. “She can’t possibly do it,” said Kay. “She’s not well enough.”
“Why do you think I asked her?” I said. “For one reason only—to lift her morale.”
“But she looks so ill.”
“Take it from me, she’ll look beautiful.”
On the day the show was due to be filmed, I went to Marion’s house wearing the make-up Gene Hibbs had already given me at my home. I brushed aside her compliments: “Wait until you see what he does for you. And George Masters is coming, too, to do your hair.”
She was so weak that her nurse, Mrs. Mauser, had to help her downstairs to the dressing room where the two wizards were waiting to ply their arts. I went off to the bottom of her garden to shoot some scenes there. When I came back, the transformation had been worked. It was as if a magic wand had waved lovingly over her. She looked thirty years younger than when I’d left not more than an hour before.
She literally danced out of that dressing room and hurried upstairs to put on a blue satin gown. Her body was so thin I had to pin the dress in with safety pins all up the back to keep it from falling off. Her arms were as thin as wrists. “You need a mink stole,” I said, “to wear around your shoulders.” When that last touch had been added, she took a long look at herself in a mirror. “You look beautiful,” I said. She nodded agreement, smiling like a girl on her way to her first prom.
I got Charlie Lederer on the telephone. “Come over to Marion’s right away. I want you to see something.”
“What is it?” he said instantly, afraid as we all were that her illness was taking a bad turn. I refused to tell him, let him see for himself. At the first sight of Marion with her age and sickness erased, he burst into tears and left the room.