During her conversations with Schagrin, Susan would often refer to the ups and downs of her career: her triumph as Anne Frank; her disastrous romance with Richard Burton; the biker movies she had made with Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda during the 1960s; her travels to Australia, Japan, Africa, and India. For the past 20 years she’d been on a spiritual journey that totally engrossed her. She was writing about it, she said. Her earlier memoirs, Bittersweet and Marilyn and Me (about her close friendship with Monroe), had both been best-sellers.

She did not tell Schagrin that in the new book she was trying to resolve once and for all the terrible pain and disappointment she felt toward her father for disinheriting her and her younger brother, Johnny.

Strasberg had left everything to Anna and their two young sons, Adam-Lee and David-Lee; he had not left Susan a single memento, not even the gold toothpicks she had given him or the long silver spoon she’d bought him for the coffee ice-cream sodas he loved to make with pineapple syrup. “Actually,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir, “I hadn’t expected anything major for myself in spite of the fact that I’d given my father so much money over the first thirteen years of my career.”

Susan recalled how Lee had said to her, “Don’t worry, Jenny will be taken care of like the boys.” He promised that over and over again, Susan wrote, yet there was no mention of Jenny—his only granddaughter—in his will. “He had adored Jenny,” Susan wrote. When friends told her she’d been naïve and too trusting, she would cry, “It must have been a mistake!”

An irony not lost on Susan was “that a good part of [my father’s] estate was 75% of Marilyn’s estate.” The troubled star had assumed that Lee Strasberg would “care for her, protect her in death as he had tried to do,” Susan wrote, “if unsuccessfully in life. Now she would be in the hands of people who had never known or loved or respected her as she so desperately wanted. Marilyn Monroe, who was not so unreasonably paranoid about strangers, now belonged to them.”

Later, according to her memoir, a lawyer friend of Strasberg’s confided to Susan, “Lee cried when he changed his will.” (Through her spokesman, Peter Browne, Anna Strasberg maintains that she did not know the will had been changed until she heard it read in the lawyer’s office.)

usan did not tell Schagrin any of this. When she spoke of her father, he says, it was in glowing terms: he had a “jeweler’s eye for discovering talent”; he nurtured talent, revered talent; he said that talent is not only something you are born with but also what you allow yourself to experience and perceive. But Susan did admit to a rivalry with Marilyn Monroe after she moved to New York to study acting with Lee at the Actors Studio and became a virtual member of the Strasberg family. “My dad treated Marilyn Monroe more like his daughter than me,” Susan would tell Schagrin, and then she would laugh her beautiful, sad, melodious laugh.

Schagrin says that when he put the check for $100,000 in his pocket that morning he was looking forward to seeing Susan smile when he gave it to her. “Susie had the most radiant smile—infectious. You automatically smiled back. Her smile radiated so much energy and intelligence and humor.”

At 10:45 a.m. he knocked on the door of the apartment on Central Park South. “It was a little early, but I knew it didn’t matter.” Mildred Smith opened the door, but she didn’t even say hello, Schagrin recalls. She just darted about the hall. Then Schagrin followed her into a bedroom, where they found Susan lying across a little daybed. Her stomach was horribly distended, and she wasn’t moving. Schagrin ran over and tried to make her more comfortable, cradling her in his arms and speaking to her, but she didn’t answer. Her eyes were open. He could feel a little breath come out of her like a sigh, “and then she was gone.”