Her romance with young Charlie ended when he found Marilyn tucked into bed with his brother Sydney, but they remained close friends for the rest of her life, James told Goddess author Summers.
She met Eddy through Charlie, James said, and they had a fling while she was making 1953’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and he was trying to make it as an actor. (A few years later Eddy was a cowboy in her movie Bus Stop and the assassin hiding in the cake in Some Like It Hot.)
“We three men were a sort of trio,” James recalled, “and Marilyn saw us all occasionally, together or separately, for the rest of her life. They were all depressive, Marilyn, Charlie and Eddy, and they would hunt each other down when things were bad…But Charlie and Eddy were suicidal, more so than Marilyn. They couldn’t make it on their own, and they couldn’t deal with their famous names. Sometimes it was Marilyn who literally kept them alive.”
As a boy, Charlie witnessed his parents’ nasty custody battle and he ended up raised primarily by his mother, Lita Grey, the second of his father’s four wives. He died of a pulmonary embolism at 42 in March 1968. Eddy suffered a fatal heart attack at 40 in February 1970.