Chapter Thirteen
MARILYN MONROE’S CAREER spanned sixteen years. During the first eight, 1947 to 1954, she appeared in twenty-four productions; during the second half, from 1955 to 1962, only five. For years this diminution in professional activity—never caused by any loss of her worldwide popularity—was put down to laziness, alcohol and drug addiction and psychological problems that led at last to an almost blithe self-destruction.
It is true that Marilyn could be capricious and self-absorbed: with her emotional and psychological needs, she did well to be concerned with sorting the real from the specious requirements. Professionally, this often led her to be remiss in her duties, chronically late and apparently unconcerned for the welfare of her colleagues. But these were never deliberate, and anyone who knew her attested that whenever she was confronted with the turmoil her bad habits caused, Marilyn was truly contrite.
As for chemical dependence, Marilyn was never an alcoholic: in fact, she had little tolerance for liquor, as the premiere party for How To Marry a Millionaire demonstrated. A few evenings of overindulgence make for good gossip but not an accurate diagnosis of alcoholism. More serious was her addiction to sleeping pills, which began innocently in early 1954 during a period of routine insomnia due to jet lag. The pills were handed out to her in generous free samples from Sidney Skolsky, who had unlimited access to them at Schwab’s.
Chemical dependence was poorly understood as late as the 1960s; it was also something Marilyn’s colleagues, employers and friends did little to correct. Barbiturates to sleep, amphetamines to stay awake, narcotics to relax—in Hollywood, these were as plentiful as agents, and could easily be obtained through the studio front office. Bookshelves are heavy with horror tales of film stars’ lives imperiled or destroyed by careless physicians working for uncaring studio executives who ordered whatever was necessary to get a performer through a production. Errol Flynn, Judy Garland, Tyrone Power, Montgomery Clift, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor—the names are legion and stretch from the days of silent film to the time of music video. Sidney shared his supplies with Marilyn ignorant of the dangerous effects: he even boasted in his column that he offered her whatever she needed whenever she was ill or even irritable—that Joe called Marilyn and Sidney “pill-pals, not pen-pals.”
Yet of all movie stars, Marilyn Monroe’s reputation has suffered the most—perhaps because of her fundamental benevolence, her youth, her simplicity, her patent longing to belong. Such a woman, to whom the fantasies and hopes of an entire culture were attached, was disallowed weakness. She had to be as perfect as her onscreen beauty, her strength as unmarred as her face, the blond halo a sign of inner perfection: the culture was asking more of Marilyn Monroe than perhaps of anyone in its popular history. And because she was a woman, she seemed to fail twice as badly, to disappoint infinitely more than the tipsy chaps at the bar or the playboys sneaking in and out of Beverly Hills bedrooms.
But she was always a sign of contradiction, and so in a way the public wanted her to fail. She evoked forbidden desires, she represented the full flourishing of unabashed sexual femininity. In 1969, the drug-induced death of Judy Garland, never a sex symbol, elicited pity. But Marilyn Monroe, so it was implied, was receiving only fair retribution when, it was erroneously reported, she died of an accidental (or intended) overdose. But this idea of her failure and collapse, which has taken on the status of conventional wisdom, cannot be supported by facts.
Marilyn Monroe worked less frequently in films during the last eight years of her life not because her powers were failing but because they were being refined, because she tried to work more often and more deeply in life—and in this enterprise she succeeded remarkably often against appalling odds. The most artificial, expensive and undisciplined entertainment form in history was not the best place for a woman whose childhood melded into an adolescence founded on the enforced models of aspiring to stardom and entering a premature marriage.
To be sure, Marilyn’s benighted past led her to crave the effects of stardom: the applause, the wide field of anonymous adoration so often mistaken for personal love. Equally evident is the fact that she had neither the background nor temperament for the discipline serious acting requires. The problems of her last years derived in no small measure from the presence of those around her who insisted that she was a ready-made artist by virtue of her mere existence and had nothing to do except stand before the world and be recognized. Longing to believe this, Marilyn too often did, unwittingly affecting the manner of a great artist. Then, almost immediately, she recognized the absurdity of such a posture, showing her insecurities and setting herself up for all sorts of professional, social and sexual exploitation. Famished for respect, endorsement and simply a reason to believe in her own worth, she was ripe for the inconstant but well-oiled machinery of Hollywood. Ironically, by her own cooperation she had become something deeply artificial—Marilyn Monroe The Superstar—and of this she was acutely if inarticulately aware in her twenty-eighth year.
Marilyn’s actions throughout 1954 were an attempt to demonstrate her seriousness of purpose by daily deed rather than grand gesture, public apology or self-defense. During this year, she moved and acted quickly, openly defying her studio, then marrying, traveling abroad for the first time in a one-woman show and finally abandoning the troubled marriage and quitting Hollywood for New York.
First she withstood the studio. Suspended by Fox on January 4, 1954, for failing to appear on the set of Pink Tights and denied her normal income until she returned to fulfill her contractual obligations, Marilyn instructed her attorney, Loyd Wright, to tell the press that she was “not fighting over money. The whole trouble hinges on the fact that the studio has refused to let Marilyn look at the script. She wants to be sure it’s a good one for her.”
On two counts, this was an interesting position to publicize: first, because at stake was indeed her salary—only a portion of what less popular actors earned despite her status as one of the top five money-making stars in the world; second, although she had no right of script approval, she knew that studios often invited important actors to review a script—the unilateral imposition of one could result in a disappointing performance. It was, in other words, in the good self-interest of producers to find scripts that appealed to their employees. In the case of Marilyn, Fox thought it best to keep her in the successful rut of the last several pictures without consulting her first, while she (and, for different reasons, Joe DiMaggio and Milton Greene) wanted major changes in the direction of her life and career.
Of River of No Return and There’s No Business Like Show Business, Marilyn said a few years later:
I was put into these movies without being consulted at all, much against my wishes. I had no choice in the matter. Is that fair? I work hard, I take pride in my work, and I’m a human being like the rest of them. If I keep on with parts like the ones [Fox] has been giving me, the public will soon tire of me.
As for Pink Tights, she was adamant: “I read the script and didn’t like it. The part isn’t good for me. It’s as simple as that. Of course I’d like a salary adjustment, but right now I’m more interested in getting a good script so I can make a good picture.”
On Pico Boulevard, this brought men close to panic, for Fox stockholders and New York executives were beginning to jam the telephone lines, urging that this unfortunate and potentially disastrous situation be corrected with all dispatch. But Zanuck, less courteously than she, took as hard a line as Marilyn: “I couldn’t believe she’d be this crazy. We’ve got a $2,200,000 production planned; the script is completed to our satisfaction and we are not obligated to send it to her [which he already had done]. The picture is written and designed for her.” And so, for the first two weeks of 1954, the battle lines were drawn and no quarter given.
In this matter, Marilyn was again taking a page from the life of Jean Harlow, who fought for years to overcome her image and play a wider variety of roles. She, too, went on strike for a better salary, a new contract, more artistic freedom and more serious pictures, goals in which she was encouraged even by the most studio-subservient Hollywood magazine, Photoplay. In January 1934, exactly twenty years before Marilyn’s adventure, Harlow got her new contract with Louis B. Mayer—a deal that would at first pay her $3,000 a week (at the height of the Great Depression) and ultimately twice that.1
Nor was the Harlow connection lost on the press when news of the Monroe-DiMaggio wedding filled headlines worldwide. “Marilyn herself is a girl full of surprises,” noted Time. “She is also the most talked about new star since Harlow.” Life agreed: she was “the inheritor of a tradition founded by Jean Harlow.” Anticipated for two years but announced only an hour in advance, the marriage was somehow not perceived as anticlimax: it was the union of two of the most adored (and poorly understood) Americans of the century. After a stormy courtship, everything subsequent happened with astonishing swiftness, from the ceremony itself through the short term of the marriage.
Self-promotion was second nature to Marilyn, and she saw the value of first informing a publicist at Fox. From San Francisco, at half past one on the afternoon of January 14, she telephoned Harry Brand. Then she stepped into the City Hall chambers of Municipal Judge Charles S. Peery, where bride and groom signed the registry: Joe stated his age accurately as thirty-nine; she gave her true legal name (Norma Jeane Mortensen Dougherty) but took three years from her age and wrote twenty-five. Wearing a dark brown broadcloth suit with an ermine collar, she then stood by Joe’s side, three orchids shaking slightly in her hand as she promised to “love, honor and cherish”—the absence of a vow to “obey” duly noted by the reporter permitted in chambers. Several relatives and friends of Joe were witnesses; Marilyn had no loved ones present. When the orchids quickly withered in the warmth of her hand, she turned to Joe: if she died before him, would he place flowers at her grave every week—just as William Powell had done at the grave of his beloved Jean Harlow? Joe promised.
Attempting a hasty retreat from the judge’s chambers, the DiMaggios were mobbed by two hundred reporters and photographers and more than three hundred fans admitted to City Hall. The newlyweds were forced to submit to flashbulbs and questions, to kiss for the camera, then to kiss again.
How many children did they plan? “I’d like to have six,” replied Marilyn. “One,” said Joe.
Where would they live? “Here, San Francisco,” said Joe. “I’m going to continue my career,” said Marilyn, adding after a glance from Joe, “but I’m looking forward to being a housewife, too.”
With that, Joe almost growled, “Let’s go.” He took Marilyn’s hand and hurried toward a rear staircase; they took a wrong turn toward the Assessor’s Office, then crashed into a score of autograph hounds on two staircases and finally reached Joe’s dark blue Cadillac outside. He raced the engine and they sped away, ignoring the last question about their honeymoon location.2
By late that afternoon, they had driven south to the town of Paso Robles, where at the modest Clifton Motel Joe took a six-dollar room, insisting on a double bed and a television set. “It usually rents for seven-fifty,” said the motel owner, Ernest Sharp, “but this is the offseason.” Days later, he told the press that Marilyn was “radiant” but Joe “solemn and tired.” He had, Sharp concluded, overheard Joe say to his bride enigmatically, “We’ve got to put a lot of miles behind us.”
Next morning, Marilyn telephoned Loyd Wright for news and messages; apparently as a gesture of good will toward her marriage, Fox had lifted the suspension. She was back on payroll and respectfully asked to return to work on January 20 for Pink Tightsrehearsals. But Joe was adamant: his wife would not appear in a movie scantily clad and portraying a woman of easy virtue. Her wedding vow formula notwithstanding, Marilyn obeyed. When she had not presented herself at work by the twenty-sixth, business considerations prevailed and the suspension was again imposed. Departing Paso Robles on January 15, the DiMaggios drove farther south, past Los Angeles to a hideaway near Palm Springs, where Joe demanded that their room be changed when he could not get first-rate reception on the television set.
Retired Joe might have been, but he was eager to retain his star status. Before the marriage, he had agreed to accompany his old friend and mentor Frank “Lefty” O’Doul and his new bride, Jean, to exhibition baseball games and rookie-training sessions in Japan. Marilyn, longing to be the loyal wife, decided to travel with him—even at the risk of further antagonizing Fox.
Just past midnight on January 29, the DiMaggios and the O’Douls prepared to depart for Tokyo on Pan American’s flight 831. Wearing an uncharacteristically matronly and dour black suit softened only by a leopard-skin choker, Marilyn arrived at San Francisco Airport with her right hand hidden in a mink coat. When one of the pressmen noticed a splinted and taped thumb peeking out, an embarrassed Marilyn was at once interrogated.
“I just bumped it,” she said awkwardly. “I have a witness. Joe was there. He heard it crack.” When pressed for details, she turned away coolly and became silent. This was the first indication, to the press and to their friends, that the union had a dark side. Signs of violence would surface with alarming frequency during the next eight months, and they were curiously enhanced by Marilyn’s ambiguous sobriquet for Joe—“my Slugger”—although, as she often said, she had never seen him play baseball.
The subject of the broken thumb was quickly changed by Joe, who was ordinarily silent during such reportorial encounters. He said Marilyn would visit army hospitals in Japan, where many American soldiers who had fought in Korea were recuperating. “Yes,” she added weakly, “I hope to do that.” Asked if she would soon return to movie acting, she replied simply, “I don’t know. I’m under suspension.”
“We’re not concerned about that now,” said Joe, escorting his wife away from the press. “We’re on our honeymoon.” The departure had not quite so gay an atmosphere, however.
A stopover in Honolulu provided little rest. A mob of fans pushed onto the tarmac screaming “Marilyn!,” sweeping round her and tearing at her clothes and hair. Amid her growing panic, six policemen rushed forward to escort the couple to a waiting lounge. “Airport officials,” reported United Press International on the spot, “said it was the most enthusiastic greeting given a movie star in years.”
On February 2, they arrived in Tokyo, where (as Time reported) Joe again “went virtually unnoticed as Japanese by the thousands swarmed to meet his bride. Marilyn’s fans pressed so thickly about the arriving couple that both were forced to scramble back into the airplane, escaping later through its baggage hatch.” At the Imperial Hotel, two hundred police were summoned to restore order as Marilyn’s devotees—demanding a glimpse of her or at least a photo of her room—caused a riot, fell into koi ponds, jammed themselves in revolving doors and broke plate-glass windows. Unwilling to disperse until she waved to them from a balcony, the crowd shouted until Marilyn reluctantly agreed to appear, saying she loved her public but this was going too far: she was being treated “like I was a dictator or something.”
According to Lefty O’Doul, this was the first time Joe appreciated just how much Marilyn’s celebrity exceeded his. And with this realization, Joe became surly. He would permit her to leave the hotel only to attend the ball game with him: “No shopping, Marilyn. The crowds will kill us.” She did not argue, but O’Doul saw that she resented being given orders.
As for Joe, his resentment blazed even hotter next morning, at the only press conference arranged in his honor. All the questions were directed at Marilyn, who with almost Zen-like composure about the intimacy of such matters had to field spontaneous replies:
Did she agree with the Kinsey report? “Not fully.”
Did she sleep naked? “No comment.”
Was her walk natural? “I’ve been walking since I was six months old.”
What kind of fur was she wearing? “Fox—and not the Twentieth Century kind.”
Did she wear underclothes? She shot a withering glance at the translator and replied caustically à la Rose Loomis (in Niagara), “I’ll buy a kimono tomorrow.” It is not hard to imagine Joe’s reaction when the Tokyo press dubbed his wife “Honorable Buttocks-Swinging Actress.”
As if it had been sketched for a television comedy, the DiMaggio situation became even more complex the following day, February 3. Just as Joe tried to separate Marilyn from press and public, an invitation arrived from General John E. Hull’s Far East command headquarters. If necessary government clearances and USO status could be obtained, would Miss Monroe like to visit American troops still stationed in Korea—perhaps to entertain them with an improvised one-woman show? With Joe and Lefty scheduled for days of baseball and nights of meetings with Tokyo’s sports reporters, Marilyn considered this an excellent suggestion—in the great tradition of those performers who went to sing for the men in uniform. Joe, however, was adamantly opposed, and according to two friends, “the marriage seemed to go wrong from their honeymoon, [when] some general asked her to go to Korea. . . . Marilyn looked at Joe. ‘It’s your honeymoon,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Go ahead if you want to.’ ” She did. On February 8, Marilyn received USO Entertainer Serial Number 129278 and her clearance papers for Korea.
For four days, beginning February 16, Marilyn, accompanied by Jean O’Doul and army entertainment officer Walter Bouillet, traveled by airplane, helicopter and open jeep to ten wintry sites where more than 100,000 soldiers and 13,000 marines welcomed her with deafening roars and prolonged applause for a dozen performances. In two days alone, her audiences included grateful troops of the Third, Seventh, Twenty-fourth and Fortieth Army divisions—sixty thousand men. Most of them had never seen a Monroe film, for they had been in the service since her rise to stardom. But they knew her photograph, the calendar, the snapshots, the thousands of pictures in newspapers and magazines.3
At each stop, Bouillet alighted first, like a sideshowman about to produce a rabbit from his hat. Then, instead of a furry white bunny, out popped Marilyn, eyelashes fluttering, kisses flying from her mouth to her palm, then blown over the hillside teeming with uniformed soldiers. She wore clam-tight olive drab pants, a windbreaker and dazzling rhinestone earrings before changing into her show gear: heedless of biting winds and freezing temperatures, she wore a tightly fitted lavender dress she kept as a memento for the rest of her life. On makeshift stages Marilyn sang, among other songs, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and “Do It Again.” The temperature may have risen some few degrees as she sang the second song, whose lyrics only seemed to question the title of the first.
“There were seventeen thousand soldiers in front of me,” Marilyn told Ben Hecht a few months later:
and they were all yelling at me at the top of their lungs.
I stood smiling at them. It had started snowing. But I felt as warm as if I were standing in a bright sun. . . . I’ve always been frightened by an audience—any audience. My stomach pounds, my head gets dizzy and I’m sure my voice has left me.
But standing in the snowfall facing these yelling soldiers, I felt for the first time in my life no fear of anything. I felt only happy.
One of her accompanists, a pianist named Al Guastafeste, recalled her lack of star attitude: “She was Marilyn Monroe, but she didn’t seem to realize it! If I made a mistake, she said she was sorry. When she made a mistake, she apologized.”
Her sixth audience was composed of ten thousand Dutch, Thai and American troops. Flanked by two tanks onstage, Marilyn was asked by a presiding officer how she felt. “Safe,” she replied, and the crowd roared with laughter. But she could be serious, and there was no doubt to chroniclers of the tour that Marilyn’s intentions were indeed earnest.
“She gave us the feeling she really wanted to be there,” recalled Ted Cieszynski, on duty with the Army Corps of Engineers as photographer for the Public Information Office. He had a front-row seat to her performance at K-2 airbase at Tae-Gu.
This wasn’t an obligation she had to fulfill, and it wasn’t a self-promotion. Of all the performers who came to us in Korea—and there were a half dozen or so—she was the best. She showed no nervousness and wasn’t anything like a dumb blonde. When a few of us photographers were allowed to climb up on the stage after her show, she was very pleasant and cooperative and told us how glad she was to be with us. She took her time, speaking with each of us about our families and our hometowns and our civilian jobs. It was bitter cold, but she was in no hurry to leave. Marilyn was a great entertainer. She made thousands of GIs feel she really cared.
Marilyn knew that she was the object of ten thousand male fantasies, yet somehow she wanted to communicate that it was not desire she wished to arouse but understanding. “This is my first experience with a live audience,” she told a crowd as she prepared to depart in a helicopter after her last performance, “and my greatest experience with any kind of audience. It’s been the best thing that ever happened to me.” Later, she added:
I felt I belonged. For the first time in my life, I had the feeling that the people seeing me were accepting me and liking me. This is what I’ve always wanted, I guess. Please come visit us in San Francisco.
The chopper blades whirred and Marilyn turned to climb aboard. Smiling gallantly and (thus an eyewitness) with tears in her eyes, she called her farewell:
Goodbye, everyone. Goodbye, goodbye—and God bless you all. Thank you for being so nice. Hold a good thought for me!
There were cheering and loud applause as the men removed their caps and waved farewell.
The importance of these four days cannot be overstated. Far from Hollywood, Marilyn had given brilliant, spontaneous performances (happily, they are preserved on newsfilm). This she did, free not only of her husband’s critical appraisal but also from the scrutiny of her drama coach, directors and executives who always reinforced her conviction that she was not good enough or that she lacked real skills. Instead of being paralyzed with anxiety as was often the case on the set, she found an outpouring of love from enthusiastic audiences. “When I went to Korea,” she told Sidney Skolsky later, “I wasn’t nervous, not one bit. I didn’t break out with red blotches on my arms or chest or anything. I was perfectly at ease.”
Thus her potentially disastrous live performances went extremely well because she was allowed to be spontaneous, to be herself. And whereas a Hollywood set exacerbated her painful selfconsciousness and caused her to forget and stumble on her lines, in Korea she never missed a word. Nor was she required to analyze every gesture, but simply to sing boldly and with feeling, and for that she received an outpouring of unconditional love. Like orphans and disabled children to whom she related so well, the anonymous soldiers were in a way the perfect counterparts to the famous ballplayer, the overbearing director, the name or the face that asked too much of her.
Back in Tokyo, Marilyn rushed to Joe like an excited child, telling him she had never felt so accepted. “It was so wonderful, Joe! You never heard such cheering!” But Joe, ever the realist, seemed not to care. “You never heard such cheering, Joe!” she repeated.
There was a pause, and he looked away. “Yes, I have,” he said calmly.4
The marriage was already deeply troubled by the time Marilyn and Joe returned to San Francisco on February 24. When the annual Photoplay awards for best performances were announced for the previous year, Marilyn was the winner again, this time for her work in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How To Marry a Millionaire. But when she went to Los Angeles to pick up the prize, her husband did not accompany her and again Sidney filled in as escort. “Joe hates crowds and glamour,” she told him, unable to conceal her disappointment in her husband’s indifference. Nevertheless, when she entered the Beverly Hills Hotel dining room on March 8, the earlier scene there was repeated. Wearing a dazzling white satin sheath cut low from the shoulders, Marilyn looked somehow different, and it took some reporters a while to notice that her hair had been recolored from honey blond to a brilliant halo of platinum. Like Harlow, Marilyn now undertook to have as much white in her life as possible—not only her hair and her wardrobe, but her furnishings as well. Everything she chose was calculated to bedazzle, as if she could again win from her public the adoration she was denied at home.
After the ceremony, Marilyn and Sidney had a nightcap in her suite. And then, for perhaps the first time, she stunned him.
“Sidney, do you know who I’m going to marry?”
“Marry? What are you talking about?”
“I’m going to marry Arthur Miller.”
“Arthur Miller! You just got home from a honeymoon. You told me how wonderful Joe was, how happy he made you, and what a great time you had! Now you tell me you’re going to marry Arthur Miller. I don’t understand.”
“You wait. You’ll see.”
There is no evidence of a reunion or correspondence between Marilyn and her favorite playwright, but this was one fantasy she intended to realize.
Prolonging her sojourn at the Beverly Hills Hotel that March, Marilyn took the advice of Charles Feldman and Hugh French that there would be superb publicity and perhaps a respectable income from a published movie star autobiography, a genre just appearing on literary horizons. Marilyn agreed, with the understanding that a first-rate ghostwriter would be required, someone with whom she could speak freely about her past; she also demanded approval of the contents.
Thus it happened that Marilyn’s agents quickly contacted Jacques Chambrun, agent for the prolific journalist, novelist and screenwriter Ben Hecht; that spring a deal was struck. Marilyn and Hecht, who had met cordially during production of his script forMonkey Business, scheduled meetings several times weekly—often, at her insistence, with Sidney Skolsky ready to chime in. Hecht wrote quickly (in those days before convenient tape recorders), and before the end of April a first draft of her autobiography was ready. “Marilyn wept and wept for joy at what I had written,” Hecht wrote to Chambrun.5
The result had a strange and tangled history, for the book was not finally published until 1974, after the deaths of both star and writer. My Story, as it was titled, contains imaginative anecdotes created in 1951 and 1952 by Marilyn and Sidney; life stories told that spring of 1954 by Marilyn and Sidney to Hecht; heavily redrafted portions of an unauthorized serialization of the Hecht manuscript, which were published in the London Empire News from May to August 1954 (a serialization illegally sold by Chambrun without the approval of Monroe or Hecht); and the final reworking of the text in the early 1970s by Milton Greene and an unknown writer or writers engaged by him.
Hecht’s draft, preserved among his papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago, contains no account of some of the most commonly believed moments in the life of Marilyn Monroe. According to the writer’s widow, the disorganized and incomplete 168-page typescript submitted to the Empire News was not the work of her husband, but was instead prepared under the supervision of the shrewd (not to say unethical) Chambrun, whom Hecht subsequently fired for multiple acts of misrepresentation, unauthorized publication and downright theft of income.
By careful comparison of the published version with the unpublished Hecht draft, it is clear that none of the first sixty-six pages of My Story was composed by Hecht at all. As internal evidence, there are Rose Hecht’s detailed notes to Folder Twelve of her husband’s papers, as well as a comparison with the corpus of Hecht’s work: the vocabulary and diction of My Story in these sections bear scant resemblance to anything ever written by Ben Hecht. For external evidence, there is the absence of Hecht’s completedmanuscript as differentiated from the typescript of these pages, both of which he always personally approved. The various typed versions (even those not of Hecht’s provenance) found their way into the Hecht papers simply because Chambrun, when fired, was required to return to Hecht’s attorneys everything relative to his work. “Sit down and try to think up something interesting about yourself,” Hecht said to Marilyn when they began their task. She did, he did, Sidney did (and later Milton Greene did).
As part of the task, Marilyn telephoned her old friend Lucille Ryman Carroll, asking her to welcome Ben Hecht and to be entirely frank about Marilyn’s early days in Hollywood. “But you’re married to Joe now,” said Lucille, surprised. “Surely you don’t want me to tell Hecht everything! This will be the end of your career and your marriage.” But Marilyn insisted, perhaps because she hoped Hecht would indeed print the entire truth, thus simultaneously assuring ever-fresh controversy for herself as well as precipitating what Lucille feared, the end of her marriage to Joe. The calendar he had ruefully accepted as Marilyn’s momentary aberration; her days on the boulevard would surely be difficult to justify. But Hecht knew what could be published in those more discriminating days, and the more incandescent details of Marilyn’s life “walking the boulevard” were entirely omitted. Alas, the entire Monroe-Hecht enterprise collapsed that June, when Hecht learned that Chambrun had sold extracts from the manuscript—much of it doctored by Chambrun himself—to the London Empire News without the permission required of himself and Marilyn. At the same time, Skolsky was not about to let a good thing entirely evaporate: he quickly drafted a little book about Marilyn that received her endorsement when it was published serially in newspapers and between covers later that year. (The first book about her was a slim volume under one hundred pages—news items stitched together into a narrative by Joe Franklin and Laurie Palmer, published in 1953.)
But by this time Marilyn had other concerns. She rented a house at 508 North Palm Drive, Beverly Hills (Jean Harlow had lived at 512), and a reluctant Joe agreed to move from San Francisco to live with her there—at least part-time, for by the end of May she was back on a movie set. Of this he did not approve, but neither did he wish her to work without some sort of supervision.
Although Feldman had been representing Marilyn unofficially and without contract since the death of Johnny Hyde, the William Morris agency legally had rights to a percentage of her earnings through 1953. With that deal now expired, Marilyn signed with Famous Artists at last, on March 31, 1954—just as Feldman and French were concluding the terms of her reconciliation with Fox.
Marilyn’s arrangement with the studio was straightforward, although it, too, would soon be open to question and become the basis for a complicated battle when she left Hollywood later that year. For the present, however, things looked manageable. Fox agreed to drop their demand that Marilyn appear in Pink Tights. Instead, if she would play a supporting role in the musical There’s No Business Like Show Business, they would give her the leading role later that year in the film version of George Axelrod’s Broadway hitThe Seven Year Itch, to be directed by Billy Wilder.
Marilyn was back on her contracted salary—but only until August 1954, when a new seven-year deal would commence. There would also be a bonus of $100,000 for The Seven Year Itch, although this was never put in writing, was never entirely paid and became a bargaining chip when she next defied Fox and (they claimed) reneged on her contractual obligations.
A singular bit of contention was caused by Marilyn’s insistence on the studio paying for her drama coach (Natasha), her choice of music coach (Hal Schaefer) and her dance director (Jack Cole) for There’s No Business Like Show Business. These concessions she won, but Fox still feared losing the world’s biggest star; they demanded, therefore, that her time of suspensions (two periods from January to April) be added to her current contract before the new seven-year deal took effect in August. Thus Marilyn would have to be available for another film—a clear reflection of their anxiety that she would repeat the ploy of absence. Little did they know at the time that this demand would have disastrous consequences for them.
Because The Seven Year Itch would be co-produced by Wilder and Feldman (who had a particularly good relationship with Fox and many clients there), Marilyn realized that once again she would be making other people rich without either her creative control or fair financial compensation. At the same time, she was in fact planning a longer absence than anyone expected. Throughout 1954, letters and telephone calls were exchanged between her attorney, Loyd Wright and Milton Greene’s attorney, Frank Delaney—both men eager to find financial backing for a new venture to be called Marilyn Monroe Productions. This was all discussed in remarkable secrecy, for had Fox learned her plans, the contract might well have been legally invalidated by virtue of her contrary intentions.
Marilyn spent most of April and May in San Francisco, where she and Joe lived with his sister Marie and others of his family. As before with the Kargers, Marilyn tried to attach herself to a family, longing to find what had been denied in childhood. But the idea of Marilyn as a simple housewife is ludicrous, as are fantasies of her scrubbing the stovetop, sewing booties for children-to-be and tasting to see if the pasta is perfectly al dente.
She returned to Hollywood in late May and worked daily with Hal Schaefer and Jack Cole for her numbers in Show Business.6 Shooting began on May 29, with Natasha, at Marilyn’s request and to Joe’s annoyance, back on the set and very much in her life again. He was also jealous of the time his wife had with Schaefer, a handsome, polished bachelor with whom Marilyn spent long hours at the studio, often into the evening. For weeks, Marilyn ignored Joe’s jealousy over this, and (as she later said) Joe ignored her completely: they seemed, in fact, like mere roommates who met occasionally at Palm Drive.
There’s No Business Like Show Business was little more than a Cinema-Scope excuse for overdesigned musical numbers by Irving Berlin, the sequences vaguely stitched together by the story of a terribly sweet family of Irish vaudevillians (Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Mitzi Gaynor, Donald O’Connor and Johnny Ray). Marilyn had the superfluous supporting role of a hat-check girl who falls in love with one of them and proves she can sing, pose and posture. But she and the film sink in an extravagant cuteness of bloated production values, excessively fussy costumes and saccharine pieties including everything from little homilies on sobriety to discourses on performers becoming clergymen.
* * *
Throughout the filming that summer, Marilyn was ill with bronchitis (the lingering effects of a virus she had picked up in Korea), anemia and, for the first time, serious side-effects of sleeping pills, which made her groggy, moody and weepy on the rare mornings she appeared on time for shooting calls. Director Walter Lang and the other cast members were annoyed and alarmed when Marilyn repeatedly arrived confused, shaky and unprepared. According to Natasha,
At night she would do scenes beautifully with me in a rehearsal, but the following morning she had forgotten the words entirely. “You don’t know how unhappy I am,” Marilyn said. And that was all she said, but the company working with her was driven half insane by the delays.
There was, her coach noted, “this conflict between her laziness and her ambition.” But even Natasha had to admit that more than an indictment of sloth was at stake here; she spoke dolefully of how Marilyn
called me at two or three in the morning that spring when DiMaggio was being so filthy to her, when he beat her. She couldn’t stand being treated that way. I talked to her for hours, until my hand was clammy on the telephone. She knew she could call me at any time, and that spring she did.
This reliance on Natasha explains an otherwise odd occurrence on June 14, when Marilyn telephoned Hugh French and insisted that Natasha be kept on the Fox payroll with an increased salary. When studio executive Lew Schreiber flatly refused this request, Marilyn threatened to resign from moviemaking for four years. This provoked a series of hastily called meetings among Marilyn, Zanuck, Feldman and French. Natasha got her raise. In light of that victory, Marilyn went further. She refused to sign the new Fox contract for The Seven Year Itch unless she was guaranteed her choice of dialogue, vocal and dance coaches on all forthcoming pictures. She insisted (thus the interoffice memoranda at Famous Artists) that she was “tired of having to fight the studio when all she was interested in was getting great parts.”
Natasha was not the only confidant to this bitter stage of Marilyn’s marital life: the Greenes, among others, were told of it later in excruciating detail, as were Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and Lee Strasberg. At the same time, an increasing reliance on barbiturates was Marilyn’s defense against the realization that she had indeed contracted an ill-advised marriage: more than anything, she needed and desired to sleep—not only to prepare for the next day’s work schedule, but also to avoid confrontations with Joe. Placid with strangers and acquaintances but condescending and often bitter toward women, he was not the right husband for her at that time of their lives; he was, in fact, very like Fred Karger, and Marilyn’s submission was much like a repetition of that earlier affair.
More poignantly, she was repeating the pattern of trying to form an alliance with a man who really had a low appraisal of her, who derided her wardrobe and took for granted that he knew what was best for her. Once again, the relationship confirmed her own pathetic self-estimation, and with Joe the motif of manly condescension took a more overtly abusive quality—perhaps because, according to the paradox of such relationships, he did indeed love her in his fashion.
It was perhaps inevitable, then, that Marilyn would again seek emotional satisfaction elsewhere, and this she found in the gentle, patient Hal Schaefer, her musical director during Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and River of No Return. He returned to work with her onShow Business at her insistence, and she later saw that he was given onscreen credit for his work with her—an achievement so highly regarded that Schaefer was loaned to Warner Bros. to work with Judy Garland in A Star Is Born (although, alas, without the appropriate credit).
Schaefer was a kind and untemperamental man who guided Marilyn through four songs for Show Business and several more she recorded for RCA that year. Very soon there were such widespread rumors of a romance between teacher and student that DiMaggio spoke openly of his resentment. “It’s ridiculous that Mr. DiMaggio could be any more jealous of me than he is of other people working with Marilyn,” Schaefer said, perhaps unwisely. “She’s a wonderful girl and kind to us all. I’m embarrassed about the whole thing.” Such statements did nothing to diminish either the gossip or Joe’s fuming.
And then a dreadful thing occurred. On the evening of July 27, Schaefer had an appointment to meet with Sheila Stuart, another actress-singer he was coaching, at the home of studio lyricist Harry Giventer. When Schaefer failed to arrive, they made several phone calls to his home, his office and mutual friends, but without success. Concerned because they knew of the Marilyn-Hal affair (or at least the rumors of it), they decided to drive to his bungalow at Fox, where at four in the morning they found him sprawled on the floor, unconscious. Giventer and Stuart rode with Schaefer in an ambulance to Santa Monica Hospital, where emergency gastric lavage saved him from an overdose of Benzedrine and Nembutal, washed down by a lethal liquid later identified as typewriter cleaning fluid. On this both police and hospital reports were unambiguous. As for the situation that precipitated this unfortunate incident, no one ever elaborated. At her husband’s insistence, Marilyn may have told Hal it was necessary to end this intense relationship, whatever its category; it has also been suggested that anonymous callers had threatened Schaefer.
Giventer and Stuart confirmed that although Marilyn was not Hal’s only visitor during his recovery, she was the most constant. In fact, someone had called her at once, for Marilyn arrived just as Hal was wheeled into the emergency room, accompanying him as far as she was allowed, clinging to the stretcher and crying repeatedly, “It’s okay, baby—it’s Marilyn—I’m here—it’s okay.” At the request of Fox’s publicists, the press considerately but not convincingly reported Schaefer’s illness as nervous collapse due to overwork: the story occupied so much space for so long, however (and Giventer and Stuart gave such adamant denials of anything really serious), that no one believed the event was anything but the result of a romance somehow gone tragically wrong.
Columnist Louella Parsons adored Marilyn, never accepted rumors of the troubled marriage to Joe and was the last to believe its rupture. She usually wrote of her rhapsodically, as if she were Hollywood’s very own Joan of Arc battling the treacherous enemies of capricious fame and fickle studios; she also heaped purple prose on Joe. But Parsons knew of the Marilyn-Hal business, and she informed her readers that Joe was “very unhappy when Marilyn went to the hospital many times to see Hal Schaefer when he was critically ill. . . . He was just as jealous of Marilyn’s relationship with Natasha Lytess, whom he once ordered out of their house.” Whatever the precise nature and extent of Marilyn’s relationship with Hal Schaefer, it was so revived at the time of her divorce from Joe that their friends believed it was an importing contributing factor. And events following the divorce proved them right.
On their work, Schaefer was candid. “She had very little self-esteem,” he said years later.
But at the same time she was a quite complicated woman with a sure grasp of what she wanted to accomplish. By this time, despite her insecurities, she was no longer hiding behind the music. I was with her all the time in the recording studio, and there was very little intercutting, editing or overdubbing. She trusted me, and we became quite close. I had been warned to stay away from her, not to socialize. I was gentle and considerate with her, which seemed to mean everything, and she warmed to this.
The admonition to distance was delivered indirectly, from Fox colleagues and Marilyn’s agent, but the implication was clear: Joe did not suffer gladly any rival.
But Schaefer found it impossible to resist Marilyn’s nonmusical overtures, both to work and to friendship. To compensate for what she considered this “stupid part in a stupid picture [Show Business],” Marilyn made a series of recordings for RCA, among them a stingingly bittersweet rendition of “A Fine Romance,” whose revised lyrics fairly described the swift decline of her own marriage: “a fine romance with no kisses . . . my heart’s not made of plastic, that’s why I’m so sarcastic. . . .”
This number was completed in only two takes one summer afternoon with seventeen musicians under Schaefer’s leadership. “Breathe from your stomach, Marilyn,” Hal told her before they started, and she seemed at once to relax. He smiled: “Forget about your chest.” Schaefer coaxed her to a high B-flat, then to a husky low D-flat. “I won’t be satisfied,” she told him, “until people want to hear me sing without looking at me.”
Perhaps more than any other recording, “A Fine Romance” conveys the range of her alternately brash, tender, wistful, seductive, angry emotions that year—indeed, as Schaefer said, she was “a complicated woman.” But for reasons that remain unclear, the song was not released until years after her death—despite RCA’s sale of more than 75,000 copies of “I’m Gonna File My Claim” (from River of No Return) during the first three weeks it was available that summer.
The role of Vicky, hastily added to the final script of Show Business, seemed to Marilyn very like the studio’s revenge: it was a throwback to the unnecessary earlier parts, merely an inelegant gloss on Lorelei Lee. One of her numbers especially, “Heat Wave,” defied the censors with its photographic emphasis on Marilyn’s parted legs, abdomen and crotch as she bumped and ground: “We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave—it isn’t surprising, the temperature’s rising—you certainly can can-can. . . .” Seen years later, this is not so much camp entertainment as a dreary omen of ever bolder, more tasteless performance styles to come from others decades later. “Miss Monroe’s wriggling and squirming are embarrassing to behold,” ran a typical review of this number. She fared somewhat better, despite an absurdly plumed and spangled costume, singing “After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It.” Marilyn’s interpretation, according to Irving Berlin, showed him for the first time the sexy subtext of the song.
Her achievement was all the more remarkable because Marilyn was that day in a state of extreme nervous anxiety—a condition detailed by Skolsky in his column on June 9. That same week her attorney had to appear in court to answer charges of reckless driving filed against her by a man named Bart Antinosa, whose car was hit from behind by Marilyn as she drove along Sunset Boulevard on May 21. Antinosa asked three thousand dollars in damages; the court, after conferring with his repair shop, awarded him five hundred.
Only a few cast members and choreographer Jack Cole knew, however, that Marilyn’s vulgar shenanigans in “Heat Wave” were the invention of Natasha Lytess: “I had a code with her, a certain gesture to indicate she should let go of certain muscles. They thought I was a Svengali.” The code gesture remained unknown for years, until Rita Moreno (also working at Fox that year) revealed it in 1991: “If Marilyn wasn’t doing what Natasha wanted, Natasha pointed to her own crotch. This was the signal that Marilyn’s performance wasn’t coming from the right place!”
Joe and his friend George Solotaire were present on August 27, the day Marilyn filmed the “Heat Wave” dance. After perhaps the fifteenth take, she ran to embrace him, but he pulled back as if she were a cobra; there was no welcome, no encouragement for her. Soon she was recalled before the camera, and after five minutes of watching her cavort suggestively in a skintight two-piece outfit—and watching the usual crowd on a movie set ogle her—he stormed out, muttering about movies in general, about Jack Cole, about Hal Schaefer: no one nearby was uncertain of his opinions.
Anxious and embarrassed, Marilyn at once lost the musical beat, fell out of step, forgot her lines and, perspiring heavily, slipped and fell. From another corner of the soundstage, Sidney Skolsky jumped to her rescue. While she regained her composure and had her makeup and hair retouched, he introduced her to two other studio guests: sixteen-year-old actress Susan Strasberg and her mother Paula, wife of the director and drama teacher Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio in New York.
Marilyn had known of the Strasbergs ever since her days at the Actors Lab in Hollywood. As Paula Miller, Mrs. Strasberg had acted in Night Over Taos, which Marilyn had studied; and Lee had been set before Marilyn by the Carnovskys and by Kazan as a valuable teacher for a serious actor. “I’ve heard so much about your husband,” Marilyn told Paula that day at Fox. “I’ve always dreamed of studying acting with Mr. Strasberg.”7 Paula replied that Marilyn would be welcome to visit the Actors Studio whenever she came to New York. That idea must have seemed all the more appealing in light of Show Business and the obvious dissolution of her marriage.
Like Jean Harlow, Marilyn was never happy trying to be a tidy and effective homemaker. This role Joe wanted of her, but in vain, for she had neither the time nor the inclination for such chores. Harlow and Hal Rosson had also contracted an unwise marriage, and within a year they were divorced, incompatible lifestyles being cited as the major factor corroding the union. “I kept thinking of her, rolling over the facts of her life in my mind,” Marilyn said later. “It was kind of spooky, and sometimes I thought, am I making this happen? But I don’t think so. We just seemed to have the same spirit or something, I don’t know. I kept wondering if I would die young like her, too.”
There were deeper differences and they had to do with their belief in what constituted a marriage. For Joe it was very likely manly supremacy: he could never accept that she wanted to continue working as an actress, that she refused to retire, that she wanted to invite friends to their rented home. And she could not understand his shame at her frank enjoyment of her body and her pleasure in others taking pleasure in admiring it. There were, finally, serious storm warnings coming from rumors about Hal Schaefer—that Marilyn’s late evenings were not always or only spent rehearsing, recording or singing. In this regard, Joe’s jealousy and suspicion may not have been without foundation, but Marilyn always spoke of Hal only as a musical mentor.
Meantime, Joe’s mistress was television: he preferred sports events, but just about anything would suffice to amuse him. Marilyn’s tastes were more ambitious. She craved excitement, company, live diversions; she wanted to see plays, attend concerts. She bought books and longed to discuss poetry and plays with Joe. These left him cold, and he saw no reason to go out and present themselves to “phonies,” who just wanted to exploit them and stare at them. The old differences were there, and constant togetherness made them sharper. That spring, she gave him a gold medal for his watch chain, inscribed with a maxim from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince: “True love is visible not to the eyes, but to the heart, for eyes may be deceived.” Joe’s response: “What the hell doesthat mean?”
The DiMaggios did have in common a tough, street-smart outlook and a suspicion about people’s loyalties. In addition, neither had completed high school, and they both longed to rise above their humble backgrounds by fame and achievement. There was a fierce physical desire binding them, too, but this had been satisfied for two years and could not lighten every sacrifice and burden of normal married life.
Joe DiMaggio never spoke on the record about Marilyn Monroe, never expressed a word of praise or pride about her, never spoke to historians, journalists or biographers either before or after her death and rarely did he allow her name to be mentioned even by his closest friends. Contrariwise, Marilyn was always open in her respect for Joe—before, during and after the marriage—and she often seized opportunities to praise his appearance. “He has the grace and beauty of a Michelangelo [figure],” Marilyn had said early on. “He moves like a living statue.” This turned out to be prophetic praise, for very soon Joe’s attitude was one of stony diffidence. “He wouldn’t speak to me for days at a time,” she said later that year. “I asked him what was wrong, but he said, ‘Stop nagging me.’ I was permitted to have no visitors unless I was sick.” They were, after two years of romance, deeply bored with one another.
“When I married him, I wasn’t sure of why I married him,” Marilyn confided later to friends. “I have too many fantasies to be a housewife.” Part of the reason for the legality seems to have been pity for Joe’s grief over the death of a brother, who had drowned in 1953. Joe had wept for days, turning to Marilyn for comfort, and this had given her a brief sense that she was of importance to him. For her part, she wanted the stability and protection of this strong, silent father figure.
But she could not be satisfied by television, baseball games or variety shows, and when Joe ignored her for them she was thrown straight back to her condition of early childhood neglect. Joe was almost twelve years older, dominant, apparently serene, a man to take control—but he was also, ironically, the absent father of Norma Jeane’s youth, the fantasy man she loved and longed to win over.
To please Joe, she had to be, from the beginning, a docile child playing at being a married woman—much as she had been with Jim Dougherty. She tried to conform to these expectations, but in so doing she was repeating the situation of her first marriage. Joe wanted Marilyn to be for him only, but this she resented: she also needed to please the crowd. Maybe Irving Berlin was right: “after you get what you want, you don’t want it.” She had wanted to be protected, not possessed.
On the other hand, Joe may have had his fantasies. One might reasonably ask to what he was attracted if not the woman he had known? To whom did he wish to commit himself after a two-year affair if not the Marilyn Monroe who was by this time even more a public figure, less easy to control? He seemed at times to resent his wife because she was available to him. He distrusted what he could possess and worshiped what eluded him: thus his lifelong attraction (outside marriage) to transient showgirls and, even after their divorce, his unfailing interest in Marilyn. Happy in the pursuit of control, he may have felt he had found the ultimate fantasy in Marilyn, as she felt she had found one in him. But for him, too, Irving Berlin’s words were a fair description.
Perhaps Joe also believed he could change her, could “retire” the mythic Marilyn as he had retired Joltin’ Joe. He, too, was victimized by fame; he, too, had little identity except as a star, and this he jealously guarded. There was, then, a fateful rivalry between husband and wife. A traditionalist, he resented her income, fame and independence: Joe wanted his wife at home, nicely subordinate. And very near the core of their incompatibility was the fact that he looked to the past for his glory, for the public valuation of his image and compensation for it, while Marilyn looked to the immediate present and the future.
But she could only do so with the emotional perceptions imposed by her past. Always attempting to be someone better than she believed herself to be, yearning ever to become the accepted, deeply and permanently loved one, Marilyn tried constantly to rise to others’ expectations. She learned to play billiards with Joe on their honeymoon, but her enthusiasm was feigned; she went fishing with him in San Francisco, but this she found painfully tiresome; she tried to learn the fine points of baseball and the details of a television western series, but none of this engaged her. She had been so accustomed to making herself over to please others—Grace Goddard, Jim Dougherty, Fred Karger, Johnny Hyde, Natasha Lytess—that she assumed the role of “Mrs. DiMaggio” automatically.
Throughout 1954, Marilyn Monroe’s schedule might have seemed daunting to a marathon runner: everything was happening with breathless speed even as the tensions in her private life grew more unendurable. She completed There’s No Business Like Show Business at the end of August and at once began location shooting in New York on The Seven Year Itch. In the latter, Marilyn’s role was that of a nameless Manhattan girl, the unwitting temptress of a nervous married neighbor, played by Tom Ewell, whose wife is away for summer vacation. They flirt, they talk, he worries, but the filmscript ends with virtue preserved (unlike the play, which did not have to cater to the Motion Picture Production Code).
Everyone connected to Itch was working with all dispatch: George Axelrod, finishing the adaptation of his play for the screen; Billy Wilder, meticulously planning the texture and mood of each scene; and designer William Travilla, completing sketches for all ten of Marilyn’s outfits in one weekend. One he designed for a scene of The Seven Year Itch is among the most famous costumes in movie history: a simple halter-front, écru-colored summer dress with sunburst pleats, whose skirt was to be blown high by a blast of cool air propelled through a sidewalk grating as a subway train roars below.
On September 8, Joe bade farewell to Marilyn, who boarded the night flight for New York and arrived at eight-fifteen next morning. Harry Brand’s publicity department had assured that five hundred airport employees were informed of her arrival. In defiance of the fashionable new flat-chested, loose-fitting dress mode from Dior that season, Marilyn exited the airplane in a form-fitting sheer woolen dress. She posed on a platform and chatted happily with reporters until police pushed back the throng and escorted her to a limousine. Then she was whisked off to six morning interviews, a luncheon with magazine reporters and a press conference at the Daily News Building.
The media were kept duly alerted throughout the week. On September 13, a thousand spectators attended the first of two outdoor New York scenes. These could have been easily photographed on the Fox lot, but that would have sacrificed fantastic publicity (which was the entire point of this journey to New York). Every newspaper and magazine carried feature stories and interviews, and the accountants at Fox were already guessing the extent of the forthcoming profits on The Seven Year Itch.
And so as crowds cheered and were then asked to keep silence, Marilyn leaned out a window of 164 East Sixty-first Street, shouted “Hey!” and tossed a pair of shoes to Ewell. “Hi!” she cried gaily. “I just washed my hair!” Cut. Retake. Retake. Print. And that was that. It seemed too easy. But according to George Axelrod, who was present during production, Marilyn was as usual terrified when the moment of filming arrived. This was the moment when her image would be captured forever; this was the means by which she would be seen, assessed, accepted and appreciated (or not), and therefore loved and remembered (or not). Unlike photographs she could review and over which she always demanded the right of approval, Marilyn had to beg directors for take after multiple retake in order to reassure herself, which she never could. She was bright and witty, Axelrod recalled, and she had a natural intelligence and sense of humor, none of which she trusted. “But although she was full of aspirations and frantic to succeed, she had no technical vocabulary about acting or filmmaking, and that gave her ‘protectors’ the advantage over her. They taught and encouraged her—although not too much, or they’d have been out of work.”
But Marilyn also adored the attention of the crowds, and when she was adored, the exhibitionist came to life—and perhaps never more vividly than from one to four o’clock on the chilly morning of September 15. The famous skirt-blowing scene was to be filmed outside the Trans-Lux Theater, on Lexington Avenue at Fifty-second Street, and the press and public were again put on notice. Several hundred professional and amateur photographers had gathered, and by midnight they were joined by almost two thousand bystanders eager for as much of Marilyn as they could glimpse. Wilder’s assistant announced the procedure: if everyone would cooperate by remaining behind barricades so the scene could be shot, the camera would then be pulled away and every photographer could snap away to his heart’s content.
What ensued was promptly dubbed by columnist Irving Hoffman “the shot seen round the world.” Marilyn stood over the grating, special effects chief Paul Wurtzel controlled a huge fan below the street, and Marilyn’s white dress flew up, revealing (as planned) white panties but no underskirt or half-slip. The photographs appeared worldwide. For two hours, the crowd roared, she smiled, she giggled, she waved, she cooperated with everyone. Twice she requested a brief break, stepping into the theater to warm herself with a cup of coffee, for the strong wind machine and the cool night air gave her a chill. “She was shaking like hell that night and caught a virus,” recalled Tom Ewell. But like Jean Harlow, Marilyn was never remote from her public and never affected the glamorous aura of an otherworldly visitor.
The event was the canny idea of photographer Sam Shaw, who had been friendly with Marilyn since 1951 and was working on assignment from co-producer Charles Feldman to document the making of Itch. From the time of pre-production he had in mind the skirt-blowing scene as the logo for the entire picture. “The location work on Lexington Avenue,” he said years later, “was of course for the sake of publicity. Everyone knew it would have to be photographed again back in the studio.” Wilder and Wurtzel confirmed this plan in advance, aware that the closeups would have to be reworked later simply because there was too much ambient noise to record dialogue. In fact most of the still photographs from that night reveal more than the finished film of The Seven Year Itch: in the final scene as completed at Fox, Marilyn steps over a grating, a blast of air lifts her skirt just to knee level, and the camera discreetly cuts to her face as she looks around, grateful for the cool breeze. Disney could not have supervised it more delicately.8
But there was nothing amusing in what followed.
The previous afternoon in Beverly Hills, Joe had received a call from his old friend, the columnist Walter Winchell, who advised that quite a spectacle was about to occur on Lexington Avenue. Joe caught a plane for New York that night. But by the next evening he was exhausted and, indifferent as always to moviemaking, he decided to await Marilyn’s return at the St. Regis Hotel bar. Winchell arrived, and, taking a cue from Othello’s Iago, tried to create a good story for his column by urging Joe to join him on Lexington Avenue. But Joe refused: “It would make her nervous, and it would make me nervous, too.”
“Oh, come on, Joe. I have to be there. It might make some copy for me.”
“No, you go, Walter.”
But Winchell prevailed, and the two men arrived to see what Winchell expected and Joe feared most of all. As his wife’s skirt flew up again and again and the crowd shouted approval, he turned furiously to Winchell: “What the hell’s going on around here?” Billy Wilder recalled “the look of death” on Joe’s face as he and Winchell hurried back to the hotel bar. One might reasonably ask why it had not occurred to Joe that many people on Lexington Avenue that night (not to say countless others) had certainly seen much more of her on the calendar.
Later, shouts and screams were heard from the DiMaggios’ suite. Natasha, in the adjacent room, went to investigate but was turned away by Joe. Next morning, she and Gladys Whitten, Marilyn’s hairdresser on the picture, confronted an appalling sight: “Joe was very, very mad with her,” Gladys recalled, “and he beat her up a little bit. There were bruises on her shoulders, but we covered them with makeup.”
That afternoon, September 16, the DiMaggios returned to California. Two weeks later, Marilyn filed a petition for divorce.
1. Similar studio wars were ignited by feisty, determined performers such as Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Olivia de Havilland.
2. Among cities worldwide, London was pre-eminently excited by the wedding. “Marilyn weds,” announced the Daily Express in a banner headline. “Oh, what a housewife!” exclaimed the Daily Sketch. “I’m yours for keeps, Joesey boy,” the Daily Mirror improvised.
3. The premiere issue of Playboy magazine in December 1953, which featured Marilyn on the cover and at the centerfold, was not easy to obtain and was unavailable on newsstands. It remained a valuable collector’s item, more reported on than owned or even seen.
4. Skolsky told the story somewhat differently. “Joe, did you ever have ten thousand people stand up and applaud you?” Joe’s voice was “as unemotional as a pair of discarded spikes. ‘Seventy-five thousand,’ he answered quietly” (Skolsky, p. 213).
5. Speed was one of the qualities that made Hecht so attractive to Hollywood, although even a partial list of his achievements indicates that quality did not suffer for it. After receiving the Oscar for Underworld in 1929, he wrote (or doctored, without credit) more than two hundred screenplays, among them The Front Page (with co-author Charles MacArthur), Queen Christina, Twentieth Century, Nothing Sacred, Wuthering Heights and Whirlpool. He was also, although uncredited, a major contributor to the final script for Gone With the Wind and he wrote or rewrote many Alfred Hitchcock films, among them Foreign Correspondent, Spellbound, Notorious, The Paradine Case, Rope and Strangers on a Train.
6. That year, Henry Hathaway had hoped to direct a film of Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage, which would feature James Dean with Marilyn. Zanuck would not even discuss so serious a project for her.
7. While romancing Elia Kazan during the filming of Viva Zapata!, Marilyn had met and socialized with the star, Kazan’s protégé Marlon Brando. He had studied with Strasberg and held him in high regard. In 1954, Brando was also working at Fox (on Désirée), and one day at lunch he again recommended Strasberg and the Studio to her.
8. Disney would not, however, have approved of a line in this scene that had to be cut because of censors’ objections. “Don’t you wish you could wear skirts?” Marilyn asks Ewell as the breeze refreshes her. “I feel sorry for you men in your hot pants.”