Chapter Eleven
WHEN MARILYN MONROE met Joe DiMaggio in early 1952, she was twenty-five, he was thirty-seven. Inner conflicts and constant fears notwithstanding, she was becoming the most famous star in Hollywood history. He had recently retired.
Joseph Paul DiMaggio was the eighth of nine children and the fourth of five sons, born to Sicilian immigrants on November 25, 1914 in Martinez, a small town in Northern California. A year later, the family moved to San Francisco, where Giuseppe DiMaggio had better prospects for the crab fishing that supported his family; his boat, the Rosalie (named for his wife) was docked at North Beach.
Young Joe was raised in a strict Catholic household where discipline, modesty and sacrifice were taken for granted, and where family devotion, schoolwork and attendance at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul circumscribed the DiMaggio children’s activities. Joe’s parents constantly enjoined on him the importance of good manners and honest work; they also warned against allowing anyone to take advantage of him. No one must think the DiMaggios unworthy as they worked into the American mainstream.
From the age of six to eight, Joe had to wear awkward, heavy leg braces to correct a mysterious congenital ankle weakness. This period reinforced his personality as a somewhat withdrawn boy as well as his determination to excel at something physical. Free of the braces, he was soon playing baseball with his brothers Vincent and Dominic; born just before and after him, they were already talking about becoming professional ballplayers and eventually realized their goal.
Like many children of immigrants, Joe was raised to be proud of his Sicilian heritage, but he was also somewhat embarrassed by it and longed to be thoroughly, successfully American. Marilyn Monroe, too, had been discomfited by her early history and worked to overcome its effects, and this became one of the bonds between them. They were both shy but attractive teenagers, reserved with the opposite sex but clearly appreciative of stares and compliments. Joe preferred baseball, and at fourteen helped a Boys Club team win a championship.
By sixteen, Joe had reached his full height of an inch over six feet, and although wiry thin (his adult weight never topped 190), he was strong and naturally graceful. Like Marilyn, he quit high school in tenth grade—not to marry, however, but to work in an orange-juice bottling plant to help support his large family. On weekends and during every free daylight hour, he was in a park playing baseball. Before his eighteenth birthday, he was being paid to do just that as a shortstop with the San Francisco Seals, and by 1935, at the age of twenty-one, he was batting .398 under the guidance of his manager and friend Lefty O’Doul.
The following year Joe signed a contract with the New York Yankees, for whom he was very soon the all-star right-fielder and the most publicized rookie in twenty-five years. His salary was the very princely sum of $15,000, most of which he spent to move his family to a comfortable house on Beach Street. He also invested in a seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf (“Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto”), began to wear expensive suits, drove a Cadillac and was seen in San Francisco and New York in the company of pretty showgirls. By the time he was twenty-two, Joe DiMaggio was a folk hero—at a time when America, deep in a Great Depression, desperately needed idols and paragons. Admired by men, worshiped by schoolboys, desired by women, he was a powerful, smooth man whose impassive expression on and off the field made him all the more attractive and intriguing.
Like Marilyn at work, Joe was a serious, decent and respectful colleague; like her, too, he relished the results but not, it seemed, the effort. As friends and teammates found, Joe never seemed to play baseball for the joy it gave him: it was a matter of achievement, of pride, and (unlike Marilyn’s motivation) he played for the money. In 1938, for example, he began the season late after holding out for a higher salary than the $25,000 he had been offered (and which he finally accepted). Similarly, on August 2, 1939, in the ninth inning of a Yankee game against Detroit, he caught a fly ball almost five hundred feet from home plate, so remarkable a feat that reporters celebrated it and virtually ignored the fact that the Yankees lost the game. “I didn’t let myself get excited,” was Joe’s typical comment. Indeed, he never seemed to rejoice in his good fortune, even when he was hailed Most Valuable Player in the American League—a thrice-won distinction. Remote and (some reporters said) aristocratic, Joe DiMaggio at twenty-five physically rather resembled the new pope, Pius XII.
But with obvious differences. In 1937, voted one of the best-dressed men in the country, Joe had a bit part in the movie Manhattan Merry-Go-Round. Also in the cast was a good-humored blond showgirl named Dorothy Arnoldine Olsen. On November 19, 1939, they were married.
Joe told the press they would live in San Francisco in the winter, on the road with the Yankees during the ball season; Dorothy said she preferred Los Angeles and New York. He wanted a family woman like his devoted mother and his doting sisters; Dorothy wanted a career. From the start, then, compromises had to be negotiated. During the 1940 ball season, the DiMaggios rented a Manhattan penthouse on West End Avenue. Very soon thereafter, she began to complain to friends that he was out most evenings at sports clubs and restaurants with his cronies, a habit he saw no need to modify when Dorothy became pregnant in early 1941, nor when their son, Joe Jr., was born October 23. The marriage was a rocky business by 1942, although such matters were not typically found in the press, which had far more important world issues to report.
When his batting average sank in 1942, Joe’s fans became confused and his wife more dissatisfied, and he abandoned his $43,500 salary. In February 1943, Joe enlisted in the Army Air Force. Assigned to supervise physical-training units, he served on the baseball battlefields of California, New Jersey and Hawaii—and spent much of the time hospitalized for stomach ulcers.
By the time of his discharge in September 1945, his wife had won an uncontested divorce; she married a New York stockbroker the following year. Although Joe made some attempts at reconciliation with Dorothy after her second divorce in 1950, he continued to live offseason in his family’s San Francisco home, where his spinster sister Marie cooked, cleaned, sewed and attended his every household need; otherwise, he lived in New York hotels. “Joltin’ Joe” DiMaggio, returning to the Yankees, was a lonely, melancholy figure, apparently not much cheered by the historic $100,000 salary he was paid. He was, however, a steadying and influential presence on the team, often playing against doctor’s orders.
But some part of his personality seems to have become fixed in a kind of quiet, adolescent stasis, for his friendships with women were mostly transient, cool and uncomfortable after his divorce. Almost paranoid that people wanted to exploit his fame, Joe frequently complained that “everybody who calls me wants something.” As Allan Snyder recalled, Joe could be very difficult in social situations—especially those involving Marilyn—and surly and suspicious of everyone’s words and deeds.
Joe’s favorite New York hangout was Toots Shor’s restaurant, a clubby male preserve one woman called a gymnasium with room service. There, an atmosphere of jokey machismo prevailed; most conversations involved sports, girls and the comic pages. Over the years, regulars included Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, Damon Runyon and Ernest Hemingway, the columnist Bob Considine and George Solotaire, a rotund, loquacious fellow who ran the Adelphi Theater Ticket Agency. He could procure for Joe a choice show ticket and could broker a date with an attractive showgirl. George is credited with coining the word “dullsville” to describe a boring play and “splitsville” for divorce; it is tempting to believe that this talent sprang from his success, for he moved up from Brownsville (a poor section of Brooklyn) to Bronxville (a wealthy part of Westchester). Lefty O’Doul and George Solotaire were among Joe’s lifelong buddies.
In 1949, after heel surgery, Joe DiMaggio fell into a deeply depressive anxiety that made him, as he said, “almost a mental case,” and from which he emerged more taciturn and antisocial than ever—and more determined to prove himself valuable. Playing against the Boston Red Sox (who had won ten of their previous eleven games), DiMaggio hit four home runs in three games. “One of the most heart-warming comebacks in all sports history,” as Life magazine put it, made him “suddenly a national hero . . . even among people who never saw a game in their lives.” He played in one hundred thirty-nine games in 1950, hit .370 in the final six weeks, scored one hundred fourteen runs and hit three home runs in a single game.
But by the summer of 1951, repeated injuries and ailments had taken a toll, and one reporter summed up the prevalent opinion that Joe on the playing field was “very slow. He can’t pull a fast ball at all. He can’t run and he won’t bunt.” That year, a few weeks after his thirty-seventh birthday—suffering from arthritis, ulcers, calcium deposits on his throwing elbow and bone spurs on his heels—Joe DiMaggio retired. Two days later, on December 13, 1951, he signed a contract to act as host of a New York television show before and after every Yankee home game—a job for which his camera-shyness did not well suit him. Nevertheless, he was paid $50,000, and his role as a spokesman for various products assured that he would be a rich man for the rest of his life. Careful with his money, he had already developed a substantial investment portfolio. As the elder statesman of sports with a team of worshipful admirers at Toots Shor’s, Joe was considered even by those close to him as a “loner . . . aloof from locker-room highjinks, impassive, never speaking ill of other players but tense and variable.”
That winter of 1951–52, Joe wanted to meet Marilyn Monroe after he saw a news photo of her posing sexily in a short-skirted baseball outfit, aiming to hit a ball. Taking this image for a real-life interest, he learned from a friend that the statuesque blonde was a swiftly rising movie star; never mind, he said, he wanted to meet her. Introduced at an Italian restaurant on Sunset Boulevard (after she had kept him waiting two hours), Joe found that she had never attended a baseball game and knew nothing about the sport. For his part, suspicious of Hollywood and its concomitant adoration of what he believed to be phony glamour, Joe had no interest in moviemaking.
This mutual indifference alone might have scuttled any possibility of romance, but chemistry accomplished what conversation could not. Marilyn liked this quiet, tall and handsome man whose continental manners she took for a kind of courtly deference.
I was surprised to be so crazy about Joe. I expected a flashy New York sports type, and instead I met this reserved guy who didn’t make a pass at me right away. I had dinner with him almost every night for two weeks. He treated me like something special. Joe is a very decent man, and he makes other people feel decent, too.
He was also free with his counsel, and Marilyn heeded every word attentively. She must avoid Hollywood fakes and phonies, he insisted. She must be wary of reporters. She must earn as much money as she could and save most of it. All this she heard, but little of it seemed as important as his calm, paternal advocacy and his attractive physique.
A passionate romance was ignited that February, and the press soon duly noted the closeness between two of America’s most publicized celebrities. He agreed to attend the final day’s shooting of Monkey Business, which he did more reluctantly than she attended her first baseball game. “Joe is looking over Marilyn Monroe’s curves,” reported Sidney Skolsky puckishly, “and is batting fine.”
The attraction is not difficult to understand, and not only because of the considerable physical charm each projected.
Both of them knew the requirements of careers that depended on their bodies, and both were proud of their sex appeal. As her liaisons with Karger, Hyde and Kazan (and her attraction to Miller) demonstrated, Marilyn invariably preferred a parent figure to a mere lothario. She found in Joe a strong, silent defender, a man willing to protect and love her without any deflection of will or attention. Just as important, with him Marilyn moved into a wider circle of popular acceptance—beyond moviegoers to the level of association with a national hero.
On his side, Joe responded to this beautiful blond showgirl who might double as a devoted mother and homemaker; that, after all, had been his type of woman since he chose Dorothy, although (not strange to relate) he had little success finding a replacement. But in Marilyn Joe was choosing a newly celebrated, sexy woman at precisely the time her star was rising. Although her public image was seductive and exhibitionistic, he believed that Marilyn wished to settle down and have a family. He would have the most glamorous housewife in the world. “It’s like a good double-play combination,” Joe said.
Both Joe and Marilyn were characterized by a sharp timidity about accepting love. He constantly articulated and enjoined on her the danger of being exploited, and to this she responded at once. In this regard, both of them believed that their value derived entirely from their public success. But in an important way their apparent similarities did not augur well. Joe’s triumphs were in the past, and he was living on their interest; Marilyn had not even reached the brightest point of her career.
There were disparities evident at the outset, but nothing (so it seemed) that could not be finessed. Joe had an Old World view of women, who should be modest and—such was taken for granted—obedient to their men. Proud of Marilyn’s beauty, he liked her to be admired, but from a decent distance, and any hint of attraction (even friendship) between Marilyn and another man immediately roused an almost irrational jealousy. In addition, he told her, there could be no better career than wife and mother: would she not consider retiring, too, so they could have a family and a private life? On this she would make no promises, saying only that yes, raising a family was her fondest dream.
Accustomed to a tidy Italian home, Joe was almost obsessively neat; Marilyn, like many busy and distracted performers, was sloppy to the point of genius. Joe was an earnest, loyal man in many ways perhaps emotionally repressed and distant from his own feelings; Marilyn was often hyperkinetic and gravid with possibilities. She had to live in Los Angeles; he preferred San Francisco. He devoted considerable time to money matters; she gave them scant attention. For the time being, these seemed negligible points of contrast. And further smoothing the relationship was Marilyn’s easy camaraderie with Joe’s twelve-year-old son, with whom she was both buoyant and generous, encouraging visits with his father but never attempting to supplant Dorothy.
Natasha was a different matter, as might have been expected. That February there was evident a mutual antipathy between coach and lover such as can perhaps openly be recognized by rivals. “She got really jealous about the men I saw,” Marilyn said a few years later. “She thought she was my husband.”
As for Natasha: “I first met him when I went to her apartment on Doheny one evening,” she recalled. “I disliked him at once. He is a man with a closed, vapid look. Marilyn introduced us and said I was her coach, which made no impression on him. A week later I telephoned her and Joe answered: ‘I think if you want to talk to Miss Monroe’—Miss Monroe!—‘you’d better call her agent.’ ”
At once, Marilyn herself played the canny mediator. The following day she went to Fox and asked that Natasha be engaged as the company’s chief drama coach. This request was immediately granted and Natasha had a two-year contract, for the studio was both eager to please Marilyn and glad for the chance to assure that her mentor would have other duties and not always be present on a Monroe picture. But her efforts at peace-making and her inability to comprehend possessiveness took a toll that month. William Travilla, her costume designer at Fox, recalled Marilyn weeping behind the set of Monkey Business. She felt inadequate for everyone, she said; no matter how she tried, she was disappointing those she loved. Not so her audiences, Travilla replied, and at once Marilyn was cheered.
He was proven quite right within days. Because it had been reported that she had seriously begun taking voice lessons with studio musician Hal Schaefer, Marilyn was asked to sing as part of an entertainment program at Camp Pendleton, south of Los Angeles. There she brought thousands of soldiers to their feet with her expert, smoky rendition of a song called “Do It Again.” Marilyn left no doubt to what the title pronoun referred, delivering a sexual summons complete with little moans of longing and pleasure as she invited someone to “Come and get it, you won’t regret it.” Her tone was unwavering and languorous, her breathing perfectly controlled; it was as if her own mind was racing from the studio to the bedroom. Never had so telling a hush fallen over an outdoor, makeshift theater as that day at Camp Pendleton. Moments later, there was almost a riot of applause and a stampede toward the stage.
The song, composed by George Gershwin with lyrics by B. G. DeSylva, had been originally sung by Irene Bordoni in the 1922 Broadway show The French Doll. After Marilyn recorded it on January 7, 1953, it was only hers and every fantasy lover’s. Even the embargo on its sale added to the value, for it was often pirated at high costs admirers willingly paid. Years later, at last in commercial release, “Do It Again” remained an accomplished, amusingly erotic song.
Wearing a cashmere sweater and a tight skirt, Marilyn was completely at ease away from directors and coaches, cameramen and press officers. Her humor was sharp, her manner with the men exactly right. They whistled and stomped, cheered and clapped. The master of ceremonies came onstage to thank her, adding that she looked just fantastic and was the most beautiful sweater girl they had ever seen at Pendleton. Without a pause, Marilyn turned to her audience: “You fellows down there are always whistling at sweater girls,” she said into the microphone. “I don’t get all the fuss. Take away the sweaters and what have you got?” And with that, as she must have expected, a tumult arose. Her quickness did not desert her backstage. When an impertinent journalist asked if she was not wearing falsies, as she did in the movies, she replied: “Those who know me better, know better.”
Marilyn Monroe was quickly becoming the most publicized woman of 1952, and any doubt about her essential strength, her ability to confront a crisis and to turn it to her advantage, was dispelled by her management of the calendar scandal.
About March 1, the press department at Fox received the news that the photograph of the nude woman circulating round the country on the John Baumgarth Company’s 1951 calendars had been reprinted (such was the demand) for 1952. Now that Marilyn at least partly clothed was being seen more frequently in movies, magazines and newspapers than ever before—especially since she was socially connected to the great DiMaggio—not much time was needed to identify her with the bare figure of “Golden Dreams.” And so Harry Brand, Roy Craft and the entire press staff at Fox had potential national ignominy at the studio gates.
No American movie star had ever been proven to have done anything comparable, although there were the usual rumors. Hollywood traditionally dealt in playful innuendo and ingenious provocation, but since the introduction of censorship in 1934 the studios had been forced by moral watchdogs, acting with the hearty approval of the government, to deny stardom to anyone who threatened the nation’s purity by something as wicked as posing nude for a photo. Nineteen fifty-two was, after all, the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s demented warnings: at any moment, Russians would be creeping over the windowsills of America’s homes—an invasion entirely due, he and his supporters warned, to the national collapse of morals. Still in the throes of the great Allied victory, the United States was in a kind of schizoid adolescence, perhaps inordinately proud of being “the leader of the Free World,” which meant not only the obvious great freedoms but also the fact that America was the richest nation with the most weapons.
At the same time, Hollywood studios bowed to the pressure of a few self-appointed vigilantes like Joseph Breen and his cronies at the Motion Picture Production Code. They happily did business with organized criminals on one day and the next took a magnifying glass to scripts and finished prints, excising from movies any visual or verbal implication of human activities typically conducted in bedrooms and bathrooms. Even the screen-time for a kiss was regulated, and married couples never shared the same bed (unmarried couples, of course, did not exist). It was, in other words, an era of false angelism and dangerous repression, much assisted by groups like the Legion of Decency, whose name alone indicated its self-righteous Victorianism. This vigilante group, operating with the benediction of America’s Roman Catholic bishops, did nothing to advance the cause of tolerance (much less art or Christianity): their opponents, the Legion implied, were unprincipled libertines. Until the group was whisked away by more tolerant breezes in the Church more than a decade later, their nervous, institutionally celibate executives could condemn a film for using the word “virgin” (The Moon Is Blue); thus they were in the curious position of disallowing a word that was hallowed by daily use in prayer. But that movie, a sharp and satiric adult comedy, was widely boycotted because of the condemnation, for if the Legion sneezed, Hollywood caught cold. Of such astonishing cultural schizophrenia (not to say moral hypocrisies) was American life fairly replete in the 1950s.
The men at Fox were terrified that March, and telephones jangled hourly with calls between executives in New York and California. Marilyn was summoned to the front office, shown “Golden Dreams” and asked if the rumors were true. Without hesitation or embarrassment she nodded yes, “although I really thought that Tom [Kelley] didn’t capture my best angle.”
For years after her death, many men and women took credit for dealing with the matter, but it was Marilyn herself who devised the successful strategy by which crisis was averted and her image untarnished—indeed, much enhanced—by this disclosure.
An interview had been scheduled for the following week with United Press International correspondent Aline Mosby. Marilyn dutifully answered questions and posed for a photo. She then asked Mosby to remain with her alone and, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, she said, “Aline, dear, I have a problem, and I don’t know what to do.” Marilyn reached for a facial tissue and dabbed at her eyes, where tears had already formed.
A few years ago, when I had no money for food or rent, a photographer I knew asked me to pose nude for an art calendar. His wife was there, they were both so nice, and I earned fifty dollars I needed very bad. That wasn’t a terrible thing to do, was it? I never thought anybody would recognize me, and now they say it will ruin my career. I need your advice. They want me to deny it’s me, but I can’t lie. What shall I do?
On March 13, 1952, the story broke in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner under Aline Mosby’s headline, “Marilyn Monroe Admits She’s Nude Blonde of Calendar.” Condemnation, as Marilyn had rightly predicted, was forestalled by her throwing herself like Little Nell on the mercy of the press and the public. Within days, the story was picked up by every wire service, magazine and newspaper in the country and many in Europe.
Thus Marilyn turned potential personal and professional disaster into conquest, gaining with this single deed unprecedented access to the press and a favorable publicity siege for herself and Fox that neither could ever have bought. She also orchestrated a brilliant exposure—not of her nakedness but of her candor and apparent purity of heart, and she created a moving and credible little drama of difficult early days (an element irresistible to just about everyone). Advertising her body and her sexuality in the frankest possible way, she simultaneously appeared to be as innocent as a cherub in a Renaissance painting. For weeks she humbly met the press, a grown-up ragamuffin straight from the pages of Dickens, an innocent whose body only a pervert could denounce. Of her former plight she begged understanding—not, it must be noted, forgiveness. She presented herself as an honest working girl who had come up from a poor and bitter situation: surely people would sympathize with that? The Salvation Army, had they press representatives, could not have devised a better scheme to win support for a street urchin or a fallen woman. She was not ashamed, she said repeatedly and emphatically.
I’ve been on a calendar. I don’t want to be just for the few, I want to be for the many, the kind of people I come from. I want a man to come home after a hard day’s work, look at this picture and feel inspired to say “Wow!”
Marilyn indeed made herself “the biggest news of the day,” as reporter Joe Hyams said. And so she was. She appeared on the cover of Life magazine’s April 7 issue, photographed by Philippe Halsman, wearing an off-the-shoulder white dress, her eyes half closed and her mouth slightly open; typically, she was posed as if almost quivering with her trademark blend of innocent surprise and sexual availability. The air of intimacy was highlighted by positioning her in a corner, wedged between a cabinet and a door.
Halsman had photographed her for Life earlier, with other aspiring starlets; now he found her much less selfconscious than before, and surrounded by exercise equipment, by photographs and by serious books (Shaw, Steinbeck, Ibsen, Wilde, Zola and the Russian novelists) and treatises on art (the works of Goya, Botticelli and da Vinci). As he worked, every move and gesture was a mixture of conscious and unconscious appeal to men—“the way she giggled, the way she stood in the corner flirting with the camera and especially the way she walked.”
“Marilyn Monroe: The Talk of Hollywood,” proclaimed the Life cover. The inside story showed a small reproduction of the nude calendar photo next to one of her (fully clothed) at home, dreamily listening to classical music: thus the most traditionally American weekly magazine was approving Marilyn Monroe. She was receiving five thousand fan letters a week, Life reported, adding that “Marilyn is naive and guileless but smart enough to have known how to make a success in the cutthroat world of glamour.” After a résumé of her childhood—with the appropriate arabesques—the article concluded that “with all Hollywood at her feet . . . a possible future project for Marilyn is a film biography of Harlow”: exactly what she and Sidney told Life they were planning to produce. Throughout the year, she was frequently called “the successor to Harlow,” a designation quietly circulated by Marilyn and Sidney themselves.
Henceforth, the content of every interview she gave and story she approved was magnificently contrived—not to hoodwink, but to advance herself and to contradict the prevailing Hollywood hypocrisies. As for the slightly fictitious tints (she was not either hungry or homeless when she posed for Kelley), Marilyn always believed those points to be incidental.
At this time, with waves of adoration, forgiveness and pity washing over her, Marilyn began to meet more often with Sidney Skolsky, who urged her to continue the embellishment of the legend and helped her to do so. “If anything was ‘wrong’ in a star’s biography,” as producer David Brown said, “it could be changed by the Publicity Department, or by a star’s prudent mentor. Names were changed, ages, birthplaces, new parents were assigned—anything was possible to serve the myth-making.”
One of the hoary anecdotes devised about the early life of Norma Jeane involved the incredible story of a madwoman (sometimes named as her mother, frequently her grandmother, often a neighbor) who, when Norma Jeane was one year old, attempted to suffocate her with a pillow and had to be forcibly removed. This grotesque fiction seems to have been inspired by her recent film Don’t Bother to Knock (not yet released), for in its climactic moments Nell binds and gags a little girl, nearly suffocating the child. Blurring the distinction between her real self and her movie self, she made herself the victimized child of the movie.
Marilyn assumed the difficult task of sometimes justifying her life by dramatizing it. “My childhood was like this movie, which you can see later this year,” she was saying. “But I survived.” Just as she acquitted herself of a charge of pandering by claiming to have been photographed nude because she was hungry and almost homeless, so with the fabricated stories she accumulated about her childhood (fourteen foster homes, for example). The lost little girl who was in fact part of her own real self was becoming thesingle vital element endearing her to the world.
As Marilyn had predicted to Natasha, Joe sternly disapproved of the nude calendar, by then in print all over the world. He perhaps did not discuss this with her, but for much of late March and early April (while he was preparing his broadcast season with the Yankees), Joe did not contact her quite so frequently. He broke his silence, however, to rush to her side when yet another revelation about Marilyn’s past made news that spring. Contrary to her earlier accounts of an orphaned childhood, the press then learned that her mother was indeed alive—in fact she was sufficiently well to have been released from the state hospital at Agnew and was working temporarily as an aide at a private nursing home called Homestead Lodge on Colorado Boulevard, in the Eagle Rock section of Los Angeles near Pasadena. But because it had been years since Gladys had lived anything like a normal life, her behavior was erratic (especially around other psychiatric patients).
The matter surfaced on the death of a man named John Stewart Eley, to whom Gladys was briefly married during this time. An electrician who lived in West Los Angeles, he died there of heart disease at the age of sixty-two on April 23, 1952. At about this time, Gladys wrote to her daughter, addressing her by her new name:
Dear Marilyn,
Please dear child, I’d like to receive a letter from you. Things are very annoying around here and I’d like to move away as soon as possible. I’d like to have my child’s love instead of hatred.
Love,
Mother
The letter, which Marilyn kept to the end of her life, cut her to the heart; she had not shown Gladys any ill will. But she refused to visit her, despite Inez Melson’s transmission of Gladys’s requests; nor, it seems, would she ever contact her mother in any way. That Marilyn so acted denotes another paradox in her complex character. She helped her, but from a distance—by writing checks, making arrangements for her care and, eventually, by providing for her in a trust fund. But in 1952, Marilyn seems to have reached a point in her life when all her energies and talents were devoted to the creation and maintenance of an entirely new person, and it was as this new person that she wished to act—more, to become. Gladys was a reminder of an unhappy past, a family history that, she had been told by Grace McKee Goddard, was full of dark and dangerous illnesses that could be inherited. Better to be a new person with a new fresh identity—the new Jean Harlow, perhaps, or just Marilyn Monroe.
“I knew there was really nothing between us,” she said defensively of her mother a few years later, “and I knew there was so little I could do for her. We were strangers. Our time in Los Angeles was very difficult, and even she realized that we didn’t know each other.” And she concluded this statement—one of her rare discussions of her mother—with the telling words: “I just want to forget about all the unhappiness, all the misery she had in her life, and I had in mine. I can’t forget it, but I’d like to try. When I am Marilyn Monroe and don’t think about Norma Jeane, then sometimes it works.”
Much of Marilyn Monroe’s own psychological suffering in years to come would derive from her inability to forget; and much of the psychotherapy failed to deal directly with her guilt and its aftermath.1
With the revelation that Gladys was alive, the studio for the second time that year had to devise a way of coping with the press and with public opinion. Once again, Marilyn was summoned to the executive offices, and once again she found a way to deflect resentment of the previous falsehoods and turn the issue to her advantage. The columnist Erskine Johnson was invited to receive an exclusive interview. “Unbeknown to me as a child,” Marilyn said with uncharacteristically antique vocabulary (the speech was written by Sidney Skolsky),
my mother spent many years as an invalid in a state hospital. I was raised in a series of foster homes arranged by a guardian through the County of Los Angeles and I spent more than a year in the Los Angeles Orphans Home. I haven’t known my mother intimately, but since I have become grown and able to help her I have contacted her. I am helping her now and want to continue to help her when she needs me.
To this she added, in a July letter to the editor of Redbook, that she had
told the story the way I knew it as a child, and even since knowing of her existence, I have tried to respect my mother’s wish to remain anonymous. . . . We have never known each other intimately and have never enjoyed the normal relationship of mother and daughter. If I have erred in concealing these facts, please accept my deepest apologies and please believe that my motive was one of consideration for a person for whom I feel a great obligation.
What she meant by her mother’s wish to remain anonymous is unclear. All that can be known for certain about Marilyn’s attitude to Gladys is that fear made her seem callous. Resenting her past, she tried to cloak it.
More to the point, her illegitimacy had to remain hidden. “Marilyn’s father was killed in an automobile accident,” wrote Johnson, “and her mother subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown.” Little else concerned the studio executives, glad to have the question of Marilyn’s maternity settled because that year a number of women had stepped forward claiming they were her mother.
Although Marilyn appeared for only a minute in another Fox anthology movie in 1952, she was billed as the star when it was released. O. Henry’s Full House begins with “The Cop and the Anthem,” in which an amusingly pompous vagrant, played by Charles Laughton, tries vainly to have himself arrested in order to assure a warm bed and food for the winter. For his last effort, aware he is being watched by a patrolman, Laughton approaches Marilyn, a well-dressed streetwalker, to proposition her. But he whispers that he cannot afford to give her money or buy her a drink and, touched by her beauty and simplicity, offers her his only possession—his umbrella: “for a charming and delightful young lady,” he says, tipping his bowler hat. As he hurries away, she gazes at him with a long, sad gaze. The policeman approaches: “What’s going on here? What’s happening?”
“He called me a lady!” she says in grateful astonishment, and as the scene fades she begins to weep—for herself rather than for him, it is implied. This was one of the most touching moments in Marilyn’s screen career—a perfect vignette delicately acted.
In addition to his frequent Los Angeles trips to play umpire for Marilyn with the press, Joe attended her during an incident that earned her even more sympathy. Two Los Angeles sharpies were arrested and charged after it was proven that photographs of a nude woman they peddled were indeed of Marilyn. It seemed that every week of her life was newsworthy: every relationship, every part of her history, everything past, present and possible, especially now that she was seen and photographed so often with Joe. Rumors of imminent marriage swirled in and out of Hollywood.
On April 18, Marilyn’s option was, to no one’s surprise, exercised by Fox: she would receive seven hundred fifty dollars a week for the year beginning May 11—one of the lowest salaries then paid any important star. She had not yet officially signed with Feldman and Famous Artists; her status with the Morris agency was still unclear; and even if representatives had gone to seek redress and a new contract in light of her increased value to the studio, their chances would have been slim. A seven-year contract was in full force, and there was nothing to be done about it.
After months of intermittent distress, she then had her appendix removed, on April 28, at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. When Dr. Marcus Rabwin lifted the hospital linen to begin surgery, he was astonished to find that Marilyn had taped a handwritten note to her abdomen, a plea that revealed her terror of infertility:
Dr. Rabwin—most important to read before operation!
Dear Dr. Rabwin,
Cut as little as possible. I know it seems vain but that doesn’t really enter into it. The fact that I’m a woman is important and means much to me.
Save please (I can’t ask you enough) what you can—I’m in your hands. You have children and you must know what it means—please Dr. Rabwin—I know somehow you will! Thank you—thank you—thank you. For Gods sake Dear Doctor No ovaries removed—please again do whatever you can to prevent large scars.
Thanking you with all my heart.
Marilyn Monroe
Rabwin, slightly disarmed, thought it a good idea to have a gynecologist present during the surgery, and so Dr. Leon Krohn was brought in to assist. From that day, he became Marilyn’s specialist, caring for her during a lifetime of chronic menstrual and reproductive problems. On May 6, Marilyn was back at home with only a small scar and, she happily told Joe, her ability to conceive intact.
During May, she recuperated at the Doheny Drive apartment, but before the end of the month—because fans had learned her address and were besieging her with mail (and unwanted visits)—she decided, with Joe’s help, to move into a small suite at the Bel-Air Hotel.
Nineteen fifty-two was, then, the first year Marilyn Monroe engrossed universal attention. From the calendar to the news of her mother and her relationship with Joe; from the release of not one but five films (Clash by Night in June, We’re Not Married and Don’t Bother to Knock in July, Monkey Business and O. Henry’s Full House in September and October); from her frequent appearances in Sidney Skolsky’s column to her presence on magazine covers and in news stories at least thrice weekly and sometimes more—never before, perhaps in the history of the world, had someone other than a great ruler or head of state received such celebration. Pictures, interviews and news of Marilyn Monroe flowed in an uninterrupted cascade.
On June 1, she turned twenty-six and was informed by Fox that a color film test made a week before had been approved. She was already scheduled to appear in a Technicolor picture that summer—Niagara, a thriller to begin immediately with location shooting at the falls. Now it was announced, on her birthday, that in the autumn she would have the plum leading role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a musical comedy based on stories, a book, a silent film and a Broadway musical by Anita Loos. Originally planned for Betty Grable, the second role went to Marilyn because of her increasing popularity; because at her contracted weekly salary she came much cheaper than Grable; because she was ten years younger than Grable; because Zanuck, after hearing the unreleased recording of “Do It Again,” was persuaded she could handle the musical numbers; and perhaps most of all because she was championed for the role by Jule Styne, who wrote the Broadway songs, including what would become Marilyn’s signature tune, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
On June 8, Marilyn left a farewell note for Sidney at Schwab’s and flew to New York. Sharing the news with his readers, he observed on June 10, “My, how fast the months go—and the calendars!” Two days later, his entire column was devoted to a résumé of her life and career.
By this time, she and her co-stars in Niagara—among them Joseph Cotten and supporting players Jean Peters and Max Showalter (then known as Casey Adams)—were enduring the sounds and furies of both Niagara Falls and Henry Hathaway, a director not known for his friendliness to actors. He was leading them through a script by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch and Richard Breen about a tortured former mental patient named George Loomis (Cotten), who is to be murdered in a plot hatched by his wantonly voluptuous wife Rose (Marilyn) and her young lover Patrick (Richard Allan). While the cataract rages, so do everyone’s passions: George is mad with jealousy, Rose seethes with lust, and Patrick is hot to kill for his mistress. At the finale, the plot is foiled by George, who kills the lover and Rose before going over Niagara Falls to his own death.
To the surprise of many, Marilyn and Hathaway worked seriously and cordially together, although she was terrified during production in New York and California that summer: “She never had any confidence,” according to the director, “never sure she was a good actress. The tragedy was that she was never allowed to be.” Somewhat to the contrary, however, Niagara permitted her just that latitude, and her portrait of Rose, generally disregarded because of the camera’s emphasis on her walk and her nakedness under the bedclothes, is convincingly sluttish. There is nothing of the breathless, innocently sexy, comic ingenue here—only the surly, selfish tart, confident of her power to seduce and destroy, her voice coated with contempt for a weak and ineffectual husband who refuses to help himself.
Joseph Cotten found Marilyn easy to work with and a genial colleague. “If you wanted to talk about yourself, she listened. If you wanted to talk about her, she blushed. A rather lost little girl, I found her to be.” As for her tardiness, Cotten recalled Marilyn replying to the unit manager, “Am I making a picture or punching a time clock?”
Like Nell Forbes in Don’t Bother to Knock, Rose (as portrayed by Marilyn) is entirely at odds with the safe, sexy beauty with whom Fox and America’s audiences felt comfortable. In these two films, Marilyn’s appeal is dangerous; she cannot be trusted; her allure is deadly. From these pictures it would be only a slight turn of type to the coy, manipulative dumb-when-convenient gold diggers of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How To Marry a Millionaire, roles that made her even more determined to escape typecasting. Yet in Niagara, she had a little more to do: indeed, this was the film that established her stardom.
In an early scene, arriving at the tourists’ community party in Niagara Falls wearing a tight red dress, Marilyn as Rose reclines languidly and hums a few measures of the song “Kiss,” which she has requested. She is at once the incarnation of every male fantasy of available sex, and every young man in the sequence turns away from his date, stupefied by this force of nature. “Kiss” and the more innocent gathering are then aborted when Rose’s husband smashes the record. This moment was improvised on the set at the last minute, when studio watchdogs, after an outraged representative of the Woman’s Clubs of America visited the shooting, felt forced to proclaim Marilyn’s singing as too suggestive.
In the fully preserved recording of the Lionel Newman/Haven Gillespie song (unreleased until years after her death), Marilyn’s significant gifts as a singer are evident. There is, in her sureness of pitch and breath control, in the silkiness and calmness of her approach to each phrase, a certitude of winning her request; she makes, in other words, the stereotypical 1950 love lyrics both credible and enticing: “Kiss me . . . thrill me . . . Hold me in your arms . . . This is the moment . . .” One hears in her smoky vibrato the influence of Ella Fitzgerald (whose recordings she studied nightly at home), and even the dynamics of contemporary singers like Julie Wilson, Jo Stafford and Doris Day. But this is no simple composite of imitations: had her complete catalog of recordings been commercially available in the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe would have been hailed as one of the finest balladeers of her time.
Henry Hathaway called Marilyn “the best natural actress I ever directed,” an assessment not generally shared by critics (although Time and Newsweek took note of her growing dramatic abilities). Her nuances of expression, her impatience and her lusty bravado throw this Technicolor film noir, about mismatched couples at romantic Niagara Falls, into a state of constant anxiety. Desire, her performance implies, is as perilous as proximity to the torrent. It was also, as Allan Snyder recalled, the film in which she accidentally learned her famous hip-swinging walk. The crew was shooting her as she walked a long distance away from the camera, but the uneven cobblestone street threw her high heels off, and the result was a seductive swivel she used forever after.
For Hathaway, she was
marvelous to work with, very easy to direct and terrifically ambitious to do better. And bright, really bright. She may not have had an education, but she was just naturally bright. But always being trampled on by bums. I don’t think anyone ever treated her on her own level. To most men she was something that they were a little bit ashamed of—even Joe DiMaggio.
Hathaway was right. On weekends in June and July, Marilyn sped to Manhattan to be with Joe, who was broadcasting for the Yankees. Both at the stadium and in the television studio, Joe was nervous and unsure of himself with microphone and camera, forcing himself to interview players, awkwardly reading cue cards and beer commercials. But he would not accept any advice from Marilyn, who had a few tips of her own—breathing exercises she learned from Natasha, a few moments of inner focus counseled by Chekhov.
“A lot of guys used to hang around that [television] studio just to see her,” according to Yankee player Phil Rizzuto. “She’d sit in the stands before the games and talk to some of the players. They were kids and just liked the idea of going home and telling their friends they knew a movie star.” This did not at all please Joe, however, who disliked the attention others paid to Marilyn as much as he resented her low necklines and tight skirts. “Joe loved her,” Rizzuto said. “I know that.” But the problem was that Joe was “a jealous guy, and he didn’t like all the men looking at her.” One might as well have asked the waters of Niagara to cease falling.
But Marilyn knew how to dilute resentment. For propriety’s sake, she suggested that they book two separate rooms at the Drake Hotel; they used only one. In public, the lovers were seen at expensive restaurants like Le Pavillon, and they signed autographs everywhere. “It’s the seventh inning stretch in the Marilyn Monroe—Joe DiMaggio love game,” Sidney Skolsky reported. But the event was destined for overtime.
Back in Hollywood for studio work on Niagara while Joe had to linger in New York with the Yankees, Marilyn was urged by Hathaway to quit the Bel-Air Hotel. He also advised her (in vain) to give up the lessons with Natasha Lytess, which he felt did nothing but make Marilyn feel more inferior and more selfconscious. Then, for a few scenes in Niagara, Hathaway asked her to wear her own clothes, but she replied without embarrassment that she possessed only slacks, sweaters and one black suit, which she bought for Johnny Hyde’s funeral. “That’s why I have to borrow clothes from the studio when I go out,” Marilyn explained. “I don’t have any of my own.”
The reason was simple economics. Of her seven-hundred-fifty-dollar salary, Marilyn took home less than five hundred dollars after taxes. From this she paid ten percent to William Morris, almost two hundred dollars weekly for drama, diction and singing lessons, at least fifty or sixty dollars a month to Inez Melson, and more for Gladys.
Returning to California in late July, Joe asked Marilyn to meet him in San Francisco, where he introduced her to his family. There, she picked up the cues that a DiMaggio woman was an expert in the arts of housewifery—cooking, sewing, ironing, housekeeping. To Joe and to reporters, Marilyn subsequently said that being a homemaker was the one job to which she longed to devote herself. “I think I’ll reach some real stature when I have a family,” she added.
Before summer’s end, Joe asked her to consider abandoning moviemaking: did it not, after all, cause her only anxiety? This she was not prepared to do, but neither was she willing to disconnect herself from him. And so she asked for time. This only made DiMaggio the more pursuant. “I didn’t want to give up my career,” she said later, “and that’s what Joe wanted me to do most of all. He wanted me to be the beautiful ex-actress, just like he was the great former ballplayer. We were to ride into some sunset together. But I wasn’t ready for that kind of journey yet. I wasn’t even thirty, for heaven’s sake!”
* * *
Ensuring her ongoing primacy in the national press, Marilyn continued to surprise. With no advance advertising, for example, she made her live radio debut on the “Hollywood Star Playhouse” that summer, reading with poise and conviction a role in an unexceptional one-act play. On October 26, she was heard on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s radio show, trading wisecracks with Bergen’s characters Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd.
She also risked shocking the horses. To columnist Earl Wilson she gave the new information that she wore “nothing, but nothing at all—no panties, slips, girdles or bras” beneath her outerwear, a custom very rare in 1952. “I like to feel unhampered,” she explained. Accounts of her undress ran throughout the rest of that year. At a benefit baseball game in Los Angeles, for example, a group of actresses wore jerseys and shorts, “but La Monroe showed up to toss the first baseball of the game in a tight dress with absolutely nothing on underneath.” About this same time, photographer George Hurrell had a session with Marilyn at the studio. “She did the same routine that Harlow did,” he recalled. “[She arrived] wrapped in something and, all of a sudden, let it fall. I presume the idea was to get you going. Well, they were exhibitionists.”2
Equally daringly, on a promotional tour for Monkey Business that summer Marilyn wore a dress cut so revealingly from shoulder to navel it was quite evident she wore neither slip nor brassiere. The film’s national premiere was in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and so studio publicists arranged with officials of the Miss America Pageant for Marilyn to be the first female Grand Marshal of the parade.
When this news circulated, a branch of the United States government wanted to benefit from her visit, too. On Monday, September 1, Marilyn was asked to pose with uniformed servicewomen as part of an advertising drive to recruit more ladies into the armed forces. Flanked by several of them wearing regulation dark suits and ties, Marilyn smiled broadly in her low-cut white summer dress with red polka-dots. Because the photographer insisted on snapping the picture from a balcony and asked Marilyn to lean slightly forward, her ample bosom appeared all too prominently, perilously close to total exposure in the resulting photo. Three hours after United Press International had wired it round the country, an army official ordered the picture withdrawn and Marilyn canceled from the recruiting campaign. “This picture might give parents of potential women recruits a wrong conception [of military life],” said an unidentified officer with absolute gravity. Marilyn fired off a reply at once: “I am very surprised and hurt.”
Next day, September 2, she was even more boldly semidressed when leading the Miss America parade. For days there were loud shock waves and indignant announcements from some church and women’s groups as newspapers across the country showed a beaming Marilyn, wearing a wispy black item with little here, less there, nothing much anywhere and a neckline that plunged to the waist and threatened to keep on going. The result was predictable: she had more attention than any of the contestants. “People were staring down at me all day long,” she said innocently a few days later, “but I thought they were admiring my grand marshall’s badge.” After Joe met her in Los Angeles and angrily expressed to Marilyn his fierce disapproval of such public displays, she summoned a reporter: “That dress was designed for eye level,” she said, “not for photographers who stood on a balcony and shot downward. I’m embarrassed and hurt.” Sidney Skolsky helped to calm the troubled waters, too: “Photographers stood on a high platform and shot down,” he wrote indignantly. “What did they expect to see?”
Such bold exploits, designed to shock and therefore attract attention, are often typical of performers, who require publicity to maintain their careers; but all actors are to some extent exhibitionists, some more literally so than others. Nor is this need for attention inconsistent with an acute shyness or reticence in private life; an actor’s true nature, after all, is very often wildly variant from the public persona.
In this case, “Marilyn Monroe” was indeed becoming a carefully calculated role she assumed: an audacious, luxuriantly sensuous woman with ever blonder (and eventually white platinum) hair and moist lips, smiling for crowds and singing saucily for thousands. In a way, the role of Marilyn Monroe fulfilled and released a part of her that, she said, had dreamed of nudity and the adoration of masses since childhood. Since she began to speak of that dream at this time in her life, it may indeed have been a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The increasing danger, however, was that while dedication to a film career sometimes endorsed and enhanced her self-image, it long prevented her from achieving a solid inner basis from which to live; that which she so fiercely desired, in other words—to portray convincingly other people—was a hindrance for one who had little sense of her own identity.
Although she was not hesitant to appear nearly naked for certain public events throughout her life, Marilyn was hereafter seen less frequently at Hollywood nightclubs, parties, restaurants and premieres than any actress of her time and fame. She was available and admired on screen, in magazines and newspapers, but people seldom saw her in person, and only a handful of other celebrities met her at intimate gatherings. A notable exception was her presence at a party given by Fox at the home of bandleader Ray Anthony in late 1952. The occasion celebrated Anthony’s recording of the song “Marilyn,” by Ervin Drake and Jimmy Shirl. She delighted the guests by playing the drums under Mickey Rooney’s direction.
Otherwise, there were two reasons for her social reticence: first, while she was comfortable being a focus of a crowd’s attention, singing, smiling or waving, Marilyn was hesitant to speak in public. She always hated impromptu interviews and press conferences, for which she felt unprepared, and she was fearful of appearing stupid or socially inept and therefore unacceptable. In addition, by restricting her Hollywood personal appearances, she was effectively making herself the celebrity of celebrities, fascinatingly enigmatic for movie folk as well as the world at large.
Clothes occupied much of her time that autumn. While interior sequences, retakes and dialogue redubbing for Niagara remained to be done at the studio, Marilyn set herself an important task. Joe heartily agreed with Henry Hathaway that her wardrobe needed major additions, and he accompanied her, providing advice and expressing opinions as she purchased blouses, dresses and suits from startled clerks in Los Angeles clothing stores.
The general astonishment at one store derived not so much from the presence of celebrities shopping (a common enough occurrence in Los Angeles, after all) but from Marilyn’s choice of tightly fitted trousers below an equally clinging blouse leaving a bare midriff. In the dressing room of another store, she shocked an employee in attendance when, about to try a sleeveless white dress with a plunging neckline, she removed her jeans and sweater and stood stark naked.3
As she may have expected, this brought loud disapproval from Joe, and more than once that autumn there were news reports of “some estrangement” and a “rift” separating America’s favorite unmarried couple. This was all the more rumored around October 1, when Joe left town after what Marilyn later termed “a lot of name-calling [by Joe].” And so, on the afternoon of Saturday, October 4, Marilyn (who never liked to shop alone) asked Natasha to accompany her on a shopping expedition to Jax, a store on Wilshire Boulevard. There she selected several pairs of lounging trousers, shirts, blouses and accessories and wrote a check against her account at the Bank of America for $313.-13. Beneath her signature, she added her current address: 2393 Castilian Drive, where she and Joe had taken a two-month sublease to avoid the annoying reporters surrounding them so often at the Bel-Air Hotel.4
* * *
Before the end of 1952, Marilyn was at work on the twentieth film of her career and her sixth that year—the Technicolor musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (written by Charles Lederer), which forever enshrined her in memory as the luscious, nubile gold digger, apparently witless but in fact savvy about the ways of men, misers and millionaires. “I thought you were dumb!” remarks the father of her rich boyfriend. “I can be smart when it’s important, but most men don’t like it.” This crucial bit of dialogue (as the script assistant’s notes reveal) was inserted at Marilyn’s direct suggestion: as usual, she understood the part better than anyone, and her addition is her own sly riposte to the prevailing sexism of the 1950s. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn was Lorelei Lee, and Jane Russell was cast as her wisecracking brunette sidekick, Dorothy Shaw. (At her contractual fee of $1,250 per week, Marilyn received about $15,000 for the picture; Jane Russell was paid $150,000. She was still subject to the terms of her contract, and the tangled skein of her relationship with the Morris and Famous Artists agencies had not yet been unraveled.)
Lorelei and Dorothy sail from America to Paris; they meet millionaires; they work in a nightclub; they cope with various silly misadventures surrounding Lorelei’s weakness for rich men and her fragile fidelity to her wimpy fiancé; and the stars save a thin story from total collapse by sheer energy in several song-and-dance numbers (which really ought to be designated “strut numbers”).
Most notable, however, was Marilyn’s legendary rendition of the song “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” by Jule Styne and Leo Robin. Surrounded by dozens of men in black tie and tails, Marilyn fairly shimmers in Travilla’s pink strapless gown against a garish red cyclorama. Like the other musical numbers, the sequence was directed not by Howard Hawks (whose métier was not musical comedy) but by the respected choreographer Jack Cole. But Marilyn did not really dance: she skipped, ran, leaped, strolled, pointed, threw her arms about and was whisked here and there by a platoon of men as she caresses ropes of diamonds and rhapsodizes over the erotic appeal of “Tiffany’s . . . Cartier’s . . . Speak to me, Harry Winston!!!” This was a parody of greed-as-sex, legitimized in 1953 (so the studio and critics thought) by its own amoral cuteness. The number succeeds in spite of itself and remains the most frequently shown piece of Monroe footage because Marilyn played it for high-class satire.
On this number Marilyn worked tirelessly, as if she knew the sequence would endure as a kind of national icon: according to the actor Ron Nyman (one of the team of adoring chorus men in the “Diamonds” sequence), she was very much liked on the film, but her shyness hindered the kind of immediate warmth Jane Russell projected. In addition, when Marilyn insisted on something (a retake, an alteration to the number, a conference with Natasha), she got it (“when she put her foot down, it was down,” as Nyman said). Musical director Lionel Newman recalled the recording sessions, for which Marilyn insisted on singing with the orchestra—an unusual practice for film recording, which usually depends on voice overdubbing of prerecorded music. She also asked for eleven takes, agonizing to get the song perfectly. “She was damned sure of what she wanted,” according to Newman, “[but] the men in the orchestra adored her. She was always congenial, courteous, not temperamental, and never forgot to thank everyone who worked with her.”
Marilyn (perhaps the least materialistic movie star in history) performed “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” as if it were a kind of satire. Hers is an unreal cupidity, as her winks and smiles attest. “I feel as though it’s all happening to someone right next to me,” she said of the resulting notoriety when the picture was released. “I’m close, I can feel it, I can hear it. But it really isn’t me.” (“There wasn’t a real thing about her,” said Hawks. “Everything was completely unreal.”) For this sequence, Marilyn prepared with almost manic ferocity, according to Jack Cole. Hal Schaefer, Fox’s chief music coach responsible for developing and arranging the picture’s score and coaching Marilyn privately, agreed. “She loved to sing, she sang well, and she just adored her idol, Ella [Fitzgerald]. The most important influence on Marilyn’s vocal art was in fact a recording I gave her called Ella Sings Gershwin, for which there was only Ellis Larkin’s piano accompaniment.”
The role of Lorelei Lee fixed Marilyn in the world’s consciousness as the exaggeratedly, dishily seductive blonde—all body; no thought; little feeling; all whispery, high voice and no sensibility. Impossibly lacquered, moistly cosmeticized, she is at once a kind of winsome Kew-pie doll and a clear peril to a man with money. Defined by avarice, Lorelei Lee on paper is little more than a buxom cartoon. Marilyn, however, made her the satiric icon of a decade. “My great ambition,” she said that winter, “is to have people comment on my fine dramatic performances, [but] I also intend to concentrate on singing and comedy parts.”
She was, however, of clearly divided mind, whether to aspire to such high dramatic roles or to concentrate on musical comedy. Of this time, she later said:
I had to get out, I just had to. The danger was, I began to believe this was all I could do—all I was—all any woman was. Natasha and everybody else was talking about how convincing, how much of me must have been in this role, or how much of the role was in me. I knew there was more I could do, and more that I was. Nobody was listening to me.
“She wants to be a star so much she aches,” said Sidney Skolsky during production of this elaborate movie, which took from November 1952 through February 1953. This desire was frankly admitted by Marilyn herself: “I want to be a big star more than anything. It’s something precious.”
But the intensity of her desire was not quite so evident to those who observed her chronic lateness and her terror of beginning to work even when she finally arrived on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Natasha Lytess hovered, Allan Snyder gently encouraged, Howard Hawks (his direction unhampered by subtlety) cajoled, co-star Jane Russell befriended Marilyn. Still, she hesitated to show herself on the soundstage for both small scenes and complex musical numbers. Lorelei Lee was dedicated to the proposition; Marilyn Monroe was committed to every detail of her craft. Any man with a bankroll was fair game to her movie character; anyone who would increase her confidence and refine her art was a friend to Marilyn.
“She was terrified,” according to Jane Russell, always known as an amiable, calm and courteous professional; she attributed Marilyn’s anxiety to her “desperate, desperate desire to be a star.” To help calm Marilyn’s nerves, Jane invited her to informal religious discussions held at the home of fellow Christians that winter; for her part, Marilyn gave Jane a book on Sigmund Freud. “Neither of us converted the other,” according to Marilyn. Jane quickly recognized that Marilyn was “far more intelligent than people gave her credit for,” and she admired Marilyn for remaining long after the day’s shutdown to work with Jack Cole—and then arriving next morning with “no makeup, tangled hair and blue jeans,” Jane recalled, “for dance rehearsals that were hard, sweaty work.” Marilyn was, as Cole added, quite aware that she had no dance technique,
that she was just a terribly pretty girl whom all this had happened to, and all of a sudden she was a star, she was going to have to go out and do it and everybody was going to look at her. And she was just terrified! She knew that she was not equal to it. What made her not show up at the studio was that she couldn’t sleep [from fear]. . . . She would get into makeup and comb her hair “just one more time” because she was so frightened of coming out. And she was such a little girl she didn’t know how to apologize.
Not much help was provided by the ubiquitous Natasha, who was now directing her on the set immediately after she had received points from Hawks. Against the bright lights, Marilyn shielded her eyes after each shot, looking for her coach’s approval. When Hawks could no longer endure this interference, he followed the actions of Fritz Lang and removed Natasha from the soundstage, but Marilyn reacted by simply arriving later and later. Natasha was readmitted within a week, and Hawks continued to find her “the most frightened little girl [who] didn’t think she was good enough to do the things she did. But [when] she got out in front of the camera, [it] liked her.”
According to Jane, Marilyn nevertheless always seemed a little angry or unhappy. Much of the distress had to do with the increasing tension between Joe (who visited the set two or three times, only to be ignored because of all the dither about Marilyn) and Natasha (whom Joe saw at the center of the storm, and as a more important person—at least professionally—to Marilyn than himself).
The imminent stardom, which everyone felt was sure to follow the release of Niagara and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953, did not, however, convince Marilyn she could sustain it, much less grow as a good actress. “I’m really eager to do something else,” she told a reporter during production that autumn. “Squeezing yourself to ooze out the last ounce of sex allure is terribly hard. I’d like to do roles like Julie in Bury the Dead, Gretchen in Faust and Teresa in Cradle Song. I don’t want to be a comedienne forever.” Nor was she much gratified when critics, typically, stressed only her looks in assessing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
As if to prove the seriousness of her higher aspirations, Marilyn took a cue from Natasha, who saw an item in the Los Angeles Times. Natasha’s old friend and mentor Max Reinhardt had died in 1943, and now his first wife was about to auction one hundred seventy-eight of his Regiebücher: production notebooks with his markings concerning action, timing, scenery and cuts. These materials would be wonderful additions to Marilyn’s library, said Natasha, doubtless eager for access to them herself.
And so on Wednesday, December 3, the two women rushed off to the Goldenberg Galleries in Beverly Hills. After the bidding rose beyond a few hundred dollars, Marilyn battled for the prize against the rare book dealer Jake Zeitlin, who was acting on behalf of the University of Southern California: their Doheny Library already housed more than three thousand items in its Reinhardt Collection, and the university was eager to complement the archives. The sums had reached thirteen hundred dollars.
“Thirteen twenty!” called Zeitlin.
This amount was repeated from the podium, and there was a pause.
“One thousand three hundred and thirty-five!” cried Marilyn deliberately, thus winning the collection.
Like Notre Dame’s football team that season, Marilyn had won a victory against the University of Southern California; also like Notre Dame, the victory did not make her very popular when the matter was trumpeted in the newspapers during the next week.
On December 5, the university’s librarian, Lewis Stieg, announced that he hoped Marilyn would donate the collection to the Doheny Library. Through reporters, she replied that so valuable a collection, she now realized, should be available to all drama students; she was considering Harvard and Stanford, among others, as the appropriate repository. To further his cause, Stieg then asked Marilyn to join him in a choice viewing location on the fifty-yard line at the Rose Bowl game on New Year’s Day. She declined.
A few weeks later, Marilyn received a letter from Reinhardt’s son Gottfried: “Surely you will understand, dear Miss Monroe, that aside from monetary expenditure, these books belong to [me] and not to you.” Following a gracious agreement from Marilyn, he was about to send her a check for the amount she paid when the auctioneer informed him that she had neither collected nor paid for the books; payment, therefore, was due directly to the Galleries by Gottfried.
On a chilly Christmas Eve, Marilyn returned alone from a studio party to her rented suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Unlocking the door and switching on the lights, she was surprised to find Joe, reaching up to place the last silver ornament atop a lavishly decorated tree. There was champagne in a silver ice bucket, and logs blazed cheerfully in the fireplace. It was, she told friends later, her merriest Christmas ever.
1. On October 28, 1952, noting that Gladys did not “get a complete [Christian Science] healing,” Grace Goddard wrote to Marilyn Monroe urging that her mother be transferred either back to the hospital at Agnew or to the Rockhaven Sanitarium in Verdugo City. As usual, Grace’s counsel was followed; the following February 9, Gladys was moved to Rockhaven, and thenceforth Marilyn paid the monthly fee of two hundred fifty dollars for her care.
2. In 1929, Jean Harlow arrived at a Hollywood movie set wearing a black crocheted dress “with not a stitch on under it,” according to director Arthur Jacobson. “You couldn’t tell whether she had put it on or painted it on.”
3. A similar story was told by designer Ceil Chapman when Marilyn visited New York during a break from shooting Niagara: a saleswoman at Saks Fifth Avenue was angry with Chapman “for bringing in a girl who was trying on things without underwear or stockings.”
4. These details would not be remarkable but for the outrageous claims made by one of the strangest fans ever to have met Marilyn Monroe. While filming scenes at Niagara Falls that summer, she was asked by a twenty-five-year-old visitor from Ohio named Robert Slatzer to pose with him for snapshots. For such impromptu photos and importuned autographs, no public figure was ever more generous and cooperative with admirers and strangers than Marilyn, nor was any more exploited before or since her death. But in this case, she unwittingly contributed to Slatzer’s fame. There is no evidence that Marilyn Monroe and Robert Slatzer ever again met, and there are neither letters, additional photos nor any documentation of a relationship between them. Years later, however, one of the most preposterous claims in American popular history was launched.
In 1972, with Marilyn conveniently unable to contradict him, Slatzer approached journalist Will Fowler with a short, incomplete article in which Slatzer speculated that Marilyn Monroe’s death was caused by a political conspiracy—a popular hypothesis in light of the rumors then swirling round the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy; his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and others. “Too bad you weren’t married to Monroe,” Fowler said, unimpressed with Slatzer’s proposal. “That would really make a good book.” Soon after, Slatzer contacted Fowler again, saying he had forgot to mention that he had indeed been married to Marilyn. “Slatzer made a career of being a pretender,” according to Fowler, “selling gullible talk show producers who don’t do their research very well with the deception that he was married to Marilyn. He was never married to her. He met the star only once, in Niagara Falls. . . . He never met Marilyn before or since.” Eventually, Fowler withdrew from the project.
Nevertheless, Robert Slatzer proceeded and eventually published The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe under his own name. Among the most persistent but injudicious of his assertions is his absurd claim that he spent the weekend of October 3 to 6, 1952, with Marilyn Monroe in Tijuana, Mexico, where they were married on October 4. This marriage, according to Slatzer, was annulled a few days later because she was “afraid of Joe, of what the studio would say, and of Natasha Lytess, who was very jealous and possessive and who had a tremendous influence over her.” Quite apart from the fact that Marilyn was in Los Angeles that entire weekend, Slatzer could never produce a written record of the union or its dissolution: the marriage paper, he reports, was burnt by a petit fonctionnaire in Tijuana.
It is important that, since the publication of Slatzer’s book in 1974, there has not been a single witness to attest the truth of his marriage. A man named Noble Chissell once said he had been present at the event, but before he died Chissell admitted to Will Fowler that he was “just trying to help out a friend” with the false attestation. Moreover, Chissell told photographer Joseph Jasgur that Slatzer had promised him a much needed one hundred dollars to support the lie. Allan Snyder, one of Marilyn’s closest friends and confidants, was with her on every film throughout 1952. “I never believed Slatzer married Marilyn,” he said. “There was no proof of it, and there was always something that suggested to me it never happened.” Kay Eicher, to whom Slatzer was married from 1954 to 1956, has always laughed heartily when the Monroe-Slatzer marriage is mentioned: among many others, she confirmed that he met her only once, at Niagara Falls, when the impromptu snapshot was taken. “It’s the one photo he’s always using to tell his story,” according to Eicher. “He’s been fooling people too long.” Slatzer did not, of course, claim to have been married to Marilyn until long after her death, which was a wise choice: her immediate contradiction would otherwise have killed a great enterprise.
But the “marriage” was not sufficient drama for Slatzer, who also claimed to have been Marilyn’s most intimate confidant until her death—the man who knew and kept all the secrets of her career and her love life. It was a bold assertion, for not one of Marilyn’s friends, relatives, business associates, colleagues, spouses or lovers could ever recall meeting him (much less Marilyn ever mentioning him), nor is he to be found in any of her personal telephone or address books; indeed, not one of her intimates ever heard of Robert Slatzer during her lifetime or after her death—not, indeed, until the appearance of his book. Worst of all, however, has been Slatzer’s influence on Marilyn Monroe’s chroniclers. The nonsense about a love affair between her and Robert F. Kennedy, and Slatzer’s accusations that Kennedy was directly involved in her death, owed much to the improvisations of Slatzer. For years—in print and on television talk shows—Slatzer turned an enormous profit. He also furthered his unsubstantiated claims of intimacy with Marilyn by selling photographs he claimed to have taken of her in 1962 on the set of her last, unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give. But the negatives and contact sheets for the photos he sold prove that those pictures were taken not by Slatzer (whom no one can recall visiting director George Cukor’s closed set) but by James Mitchell, Fox’s still photographer assigned to the production. Few have profited so richly and undeservedly as Slatzer, whose claims could otherwise be ignored except that he and a few cronies have greedily created a nefarious industry that has persisted for decades, and one by which reputations have been gravely, deliberately and systematically vilified. On this entire matter, see the Afterword: “The Great Deception.”