Fleece stabs a Reno casino dealer and is arrested

Fleece’s Reno visit turns an invitation to be Marilyn Monroe’s guest of honor into a mounting crisis of debt, damage, and violence. After days of destructive excess, she is arrested for stabbing a casino blackjack dealer; Marilyn Monroe’s payment of her bail ends the immediate detention but not the rupture, as Fleece soon disappears from Reno, leaving only a note for Norma Jeane Baker.

The invitation and the hotel

Fleece eagerly accepted the invitation to Reno, but returned her plane ticket and traveled instead by Greyhound. At the Zephyr Hotel, three days of room service cost more than three hundred dollars, mostly for alcohol. The bill was only part of the damage: cigarette burns and assorted liquid stains marred the room, and Fleece fell asleep in the bathtub with the taps running. Water poured through the floor into the room below, and Norma Jeane Baker had to pay for the damage.

Fleece also pawned the gold Bulova watch Norma Jeane Baker had impulsively taken off her own wrist and given her. The watch had originally been a gift from Mr. Z, inscribed for Sugar Kane. Fleece pawned other objects stolen from the hotel as well, including a brass lamp shaped like a rearing horse, which she carried away wrapped in the shower curtain. The hotel room thus became an inventory of the visit’s excess: unpaid indulgence, damage passed on to Norma Jeane, and objects converted into cash.

Gambling and the failed visit

At Reno’s casinos, Fleece lost every penny of the hundred-dollar stake Norma Jeane Baker had provided. She did not go to the set of The Misfits even once. The contrast between her invitation as an honored guest and her absence from Norma Jeane’s work sharpened as the visit proceeded: the money and hospitality were accepted, but the expected appearance at the set never came.

The attack and arrest

Fleece’s conduct became more volatile during a late-night dinner in Reno. Drunk, she passionately kissed Norma Jeane Baker on the mouth in front of the Playwright, who was himself slightly drunk—or may have been pretending to be. Fleece then abandoned Norma Jeane and the Playwright at the restaurant. In the early morning, she was arrested in a casino bar after stabbing a blackjack dealer with a knife; a security attendant was also involved in the incident. She remained in jail facing several charges, including armed assault.

The arrest brought the private disorder into public view. The National Enquirer published the story with a photograph of Marilyn Monroe arriving to secure Fleece’s release: sleepy, wearing dark glasses, her lipstick smeared, and trying to shield her eyes from the photographer’s flash. Marilyn paid one thousand dollars in bail, and Fleece was released.

Departure and aftermath

Not long after her release, Fleece vanished from Reno, probably aboard a Greyhound. She left no explanation in person, only a note slipped beneath the door of Norma Jeane Baker’s hotel room. Its affectionate farewell called Norma Jeane Mouse and wished her a lasting life within Marilyn for all of them; Fleece signed it with a declaration of love. The tenderness of the note sits uneasily beside the theft, the hotel bill, the abandonment, and the knife attack. Her departure closes the episode without resolving that contradiction: affection remains in the farewell, while responsibility for the harm is left behind.