Chapter Fourteen
MARILYN MONROE’S chronic inability to arrive on time for work was usually due to a variety of fears: that she was insufficiently prepared or that her appearance was unworthy of the camera. But most of all she was afraid that she would be rejected for a poor performance, that once again (as in her childhood) she would be sent away, unwanted, disapproved, unloved. Thus too, if corrections or suggestions were offered by a director, he had to speak with the utmost delicacy and gentleness to avoid Marilyn’s breaking down in sobs of remorse for her mistake; many shooting days were so lost during her career.
But her four-day absence from the Fox lot during the last two weeks of September 1954 had a quite different cause. The fateful night on Lexington Avenue and at the hotel, followed by the long flight to Los Angeles next day, left her weary to the point of illness, and in fact she was put to bed with a heavy cold that verged on pneumonia. The thirty-five-day schedule for The Seven Year Itch ran to forty-eight, and the film was not completed until November. Tom Ewell recalled that Marilyn repeatedly apologized during their kissing scenes: “I hope you don’t mind the smell of the medicine I’ve taken today.”
Against doctor’s advice but to Billy Wilder’s delight, she did manage a few days at the studio between September 18 and October 1. “I knew she was trying,” said her co-star, Tom Ewell, “and I liked her for that alone.” Like everyone on the production, he was sympathetic to the problems in her private life; and like Fox’s chief executives, he knew that Marilyn alone would make or ruin the picture’s chances for success. “Others could give you a good, funny performance,” Zanuck wrote to Wilder on September 20, “but nothing could make up for Marilyn’s personality in this film.” This was more warning than instruction, as Wilder well understood.
Not unexpectedly, there were problems: she had, after all, to render a completely rounded comic performance at a sad and painful time in her own life. If she was to be on the set in the morning, Marilyn required regular doses of sleeping pills from the studio physician, Lee Seigel; these she supplemented with handouts from Skolsky. “I have to sleep,” she told Sam Shaw. “My fans want me to be glamorous. I won’t let them down.”
On the other hand, her marriage was in utter disarray and for it the untidy, shabby house on Palm Drive was a metaphor: the kitchen and laundry were left untended, beds unmade, food left unfinished and undisposed. This neglect of basic tidiness was inevitable for a woman so busy, preoccupied, unhappy and habitually disorganized as Marilyn, although it is intriguing to speculate why no one ever thought to engage a housekeeper. Cleanliness was next to godliness for Joe but nearly impossible for Marilyn.
“When you got her to the studio on a good day, she was remarkable,” Wilder recalled, “even though that creature Lytess was still lurking and Marilyn depended on her approval for everything. I didn’t like it, but I went through anything to get the scenes right.” And so he did, against terrific odds. The Seven Year Itch, forced to comply with the moral requirements of the Code and the Legion of Decency, ended by being a static movie, enlivened only when Marilyn is onscreen—especially in the hilarious satiric sendup of television commercials. The story, alas, lacks any payoff, and its treatment of a married man’s moral dilemma often sounds just plain silly instead of being credibly comic.
The pleasant gloss of the film owed much to what Wilder has called Marilyn’s
flesh impact—she looks on the screen as if you could reach out and touch her, she’s a kind of real image, beyond mere photography. But there’s something else, too. She had a natural instinct for how to read a comic line and how to give it something extra, something special. She was never vulgar in a role that could have become vulgar, and somehow you felt good when you saw her on the screen. To put it briefly, she had a quality no one else ever had on the screen except Garbo. No one.
“I wanted so much to do something right in my art when so much in my life was going bad,” she said soon after. And so she did, although she of all people never appreciated the result. Marilyn astonished the crew of Itch one day late that September. Accustomed to long delays because normally she stuttered for the first word or two of a line and retakes were required, the crew dreaded filming a scene near the end of the film, a long and difficult sequence in which Marilyn had to explain to Ewell why she finds so ordinary and unromantic a man exciting and why his wife should be jealous. Axelrod and Wilder fully expected Marilyn to need several days to get the lines down. To their astonishment, she did it perfectly in three minutes and a single take, “letter perfect [thus Axelrod] and with an impact that made everyone on the set applaud.” Marilyn explained to her writer and director that the scene worked for her simply because she believed every word of it, and because it seemed so close to her own experience. Heard years later, it has a touching simplicity and sweetness of spirit:
EWELL: Let’s face it. No pretty girl in her right mind wants me. She wants Gregory Peck . . .
MARILYN: How do you know what a pretty girl wants? You think every pretty girl is a dope. You think that a girl goes to a party and there’s some guy—a great big hunk in a fancy striped vest, strutting around like a tiger—giving you that “I’m so handsome, you can’t resist me” look—and from this she is supposed to fall flat on her face. Well, she doesn’t fall flat on her face. But there’s another guy in the room—way over in the corner—maybe he’s kind of nervous and shy and perspiring a little. First you look past him, but then you sort of sense that he’s gentle and kind and worried, that he’ll be tender with you and nice and sweet—and that’s what’s really exciting! Oh, if I were your wife, I’d be jealous of you—I’d be very, very jealous.
[She kisses him.]
I think you’re—just—elegant!
On September 27, not two weeks after the DiMaggios returned to Palm Drive, Joe departed for New York and Cleveland to broadcast the World Series. For the next several days, Marilyn was in constant contact with her old friend Mary Karger Short (Fred’s sister), the first to learn of the DiMaggios’ separation.
When he returned to Beverly Hills on Saturday, October 2, Marilyn told Joe she had asked an attorney to draft divorce papers. In addition, she had informed Darryl Zanuck, who left instructions that Joe was to be barred from entering the Fox lot. Joe, believing that Marilyn could be calmed and a crisis averted, said nothing and simply moved from the upstairs bedroom to the downstairs den, maintaining a dignified, aloof silence.
But that night, neighbors heard a terrific fight at 508 North Palm. Mrs. John C. Medley, concerned, was on the alert for violence: she was one of several neighbors who then saw Marilyn, disheveled and wrapped in a fur coat, exit the house and walk for hours along the street and through the service alley back of Palm Drive.
Early Monday morning, Marilyn’s actions revealed that while her pain may have been acute, her stamina and survival instincts were stronger. Publicity-conscious as ever, and eager again to turn something potentially embarrassing into something positively beneficial to the image of Marilyn Monroe, she telephoned Billy Wilder to say she was ill and unable to report for work. Immediately thereafter—just as she had from San Francisco on January 14—she then called Harry Brand. Speaking quietly, as if in confidence, she said that she had retained Jerry Giesler, the most public criminal lawyer in Hollywood, known especially for defending celebrities in delicate cases. Giesler would represent her in what she hoped would be a swift, uncomplicated and uncontested divorce. Remain calm, Brand told her; he would manage everything. Such was the position, power and presumption of studio press agents that they were told and then managed news of births, marriages, divorces, illnesses and deaths involving the more incandescent denizens of Hollywood.
Crack ex-reporter that he was, Brand mustered the troops. He dashed off a quick announcement to the newswire services that the world-famous marriage was ending “because of incompatibility resulting from the conflicting demands of their careers,” which must have amused everyone who knew that Joe was all but fully retired from just about everything except during World Series time. Brand then mobilized his platoon—Roy Craft, Frank Neill, Chuck Panama, Mollie Merrick and Ray Metzler—and gave each a list of major newspapers, reporters and columnists. Within seven minutes, each of twenty Los Angeles news outlets was “the first” to know the story.
The news was trumpeted worldwide next day, October 5, and that morning over a hundred reporters and photographers pitched camp on the lawn of 508 North Palm Drive. Inside, Giesler sat with Marilyn, who was in bed, sedated by Leon Krohn. She signed a page-and-a-half document pleading for divorce and alleging that in the eight months of her marriage she had suffered “grievous mental suffering and anguish, all of which acts and conduct on the part of the defendant were without fault of the plaintiff.”1 The complaint stated that the couple separated on September 27, when Joe went East, that there would be no request for alimony, that there was no community property to be divided. Giesler then descended to Joe and handed him the papers, informing him that he had ten days in which to contest the divorce before a default decree could be obtained. Joe said nothing, pocketed the papers and resumed watching television.
And now a brilliant little suspense drama was enacted for the benefit of the press. Giesler left the house, saying only to reporters that there was no possibility of a reconciliation but that the divorce was amicable—in testimony of this, he added that Miss Monroe was ill with a virus and that Mr. DiMaggio was thoughtfully preparing soup for her. Perhaps next day there would be further news and even an appearance of the principals.
By the morning of October 6, movie cameras had been set up on the lawn of 508 North Palm Drive. Huston or Hitchcock himself could not have improved on the melodramatic scene as a gray mist lifted and the hazy California sunshine broke through. At ten o’clock, there was much scurrying as Joe swiftly exited the house with his luggage, attended by his friend Reno Barsocchini. The two men climbed into his Cadillac (a duplicate of Marilyn’s), and Joe said that he was heading for San Francisco: “It is my home and always has been. I’ll never come back here.” In fact he did not proceed at once to San Francisco but instead remained in seclusion for six weeks at the home of Leon Krohn, who had befriended both him and Marilyn. According to Krohn, Marilyn telephoned Joe every night at Krohn’s home.
At ten fifty-five that morning, she appeared. Wearing a form-fitting black jersey sweater in striking contrast to her blond tresses, a black leather belt, a black gabardine skirt and black pumps, she seemed bound for a funeral. Leaning for support on Giesler’s arm, Marilyn made her way to the newsmen’s microphones. At her side in a moment was Sidney Skolsky, who turned to newsmen and announced, “There is no other man,” which was taken to mean that there certainly was. Giesler shot him an angry glance and seized control.
“Miss Monroe will have nothing to say to you this morning,” he began. “As her attorney, I am speaking for her and can only say that the conflict of careers has brought about this regrettable necessity.”
The press would naturally not permit Marilyn to depart silently. But in response to a volley of questions she said in a choked, hoarse voice, “I can’t say anything today. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” And then she broke down and sobbed, resting her head on Giesler’s shoulder and patting her eyes with a white handkerchief. From there she went not into the house but to a car, which took her first to Dr. Krohn’s office on North Roxbury Drive and then to the studio. Two hours later, she was back home and in bed.
Reactions were solicited immediately. Natasha Lytess, gloating, told the press:
The marriage was a big mistake for Marilyn and I feel she has known it for a long time. Things like this just don’t happen overnight. It is best this way. . . . Now at last it will be possible for Marilyn to develop her talent to the fullest. In this girl we have a potentially great dramatic star. Her recent experience was a handicap to fulfillment of this goal. Now that is all behind her.
As for Joe’s resentment of Marilyn’s screen image and dress, Natasha added disingenuously, forgetting that she shared his objections:
Some people are small enough to resent things that bring success to others, you know. They quarreled a lot. Marilyn kept hoping for the best, but Mr. DiMaggio never could consider her feelings.
Discussing the divorce only briefly with a few friends, Marilyn was succinct with Michael Chekhov: “Joe is a sweet guy, but we don’t have much in common,” and not long after, she confided bluntly to Susan Strasberg, “Bored—he bored me.”2 Later, she elaborated a little:
He didn’t like the women I played—he thought they were sluts. I don’t know what movies he was thinking about! He didn’t like the actors kissing me, and he didn’t like my costumes. He didn’t like anything about my movies, and he hated all my clothes. When I told him I had to dress the way I did, that it was part of my job, he said I should quit that job. But who did he think he was marrying when he was marrying me? To tell the truth, our marriage was a sort of crazy, difficult friendship with sexual privileges. Later I learned that’s what marriages often are.
Promptly at nine o’clock on the morning of October 7, Marilyn was back at work on The Seven Year Itch, looking very cheerful, as Billy Wilder recalled. “I feel alive for the first time in days,” she told him. “Had a wonderful night’s sleep, too.”
As for Joe, he retreated moodily from view. “I can’t understand what happened,” he said, clearly hoping she would drop the divorce complaint. “I hope she’ll see the light.” He then added, probably with unintentional condescension, “I think [Marilyn] is a good kid—young and naive—but I think she is being misled by the wrong friends.”
On October 26, Joe made a bold attempt to win back his wife by seeking the mediation of Sidney Skolsky. They went to Palm Drive, where Joe begged her to reconsider. “But Marilyn’s determination was always like iron,” Sidney recalled. “Her mind was set on divorce.”
Next day, Sidney accompanied Marilyn and Jerry Giesler to Santa Monica Court. Her attorney, as Sidney recalled with some astonishment, “told Marilyn how he wanted her to act for the reporters and cameramen. He worked like a good film director, explaining every mood and expression he wanted. Giesler got a flawless performance from Marilyn”—perhaps because there could be no retakes.
Meticulously and formally dressed in a black dress with a scooped neckline, a black hat, contrasting white leather gloves and white pearls Joe had given her on her birthday, Marilyn made another grand movie-star appearance. At only twenty-eight, she was living the most public year of her life, turning everything into a press and publicity event, creating and offering new facets of herself even as she discovered them.
“Your Honor,” she said calmly to Judge Rhodes, in a statement transcribed worldwide,
my husband would get in moods where he wouldn’t speak to me for five to seven days at a time—sometimes longer, ten days. I would ask him what was wrong. He wouldn’t answer, or he would say, “Stop nagging me!” I was permitted to have visitors no more than three times in the nine months we were married. On one occasion, it was when I was sick. Then he did allow someone to come and see me.
And then she added words which may not represent the truth; in any case, they contradict much that she told friends and the press:
I offered to give up my work in hopes that would solve our problems. But even this didn’t help.
But then her voice broke:
I hoped to have out of my marriage, love, warmth, affection and understanding. But the relationship was mostly one of coldness and indifference.
Natasha wished to stand as witness, but Marilyn wisely enjoined her. To the stand, therefore, came Marilyn’s calm business manager Inez Melson:
Mr. DiMaggio was very indifferent and not concerned with Mrs. DiMaggio’s happiness. I have seen him push her away and tell her not to bother him.
In less than eight minutes, her interlocutory divorce was granted by Judge Orlando H. Rhodes; the final decree would be effective in exactly a year.
But Joe remained fiercely jealous, as was evident from a bizarre event that he and his friend Frank Sinatra engineered nine days later.
Since mid-October, Joe had contracted a private detective to follow Marilyn (evidently in the hope he could find evidence against her), and the end of his marriage did not terminate the contract. On the evening of November 5, the detective told Joe that he had followed Marilyn, variously disguised, to the same address several times: 8122 Waring Avenue, which happened to be the residence of Sheila Stuart, the actress and student of Hal Schaefer who with Harry Giventer had found him ill in his office. Summoned by the detective, Joe arrived on the scene and, enraged, wanted to break into Stuart’s apartment to find what Marilyn was doing and with whom.
The detective advised a few minutes’ caution, and he in turn summoned Sinatra, who arrived at the corner of Waring and Kilkea with a crew of men. Some of them then approached the apartment complex and together broke through a tenant’s door.3 There was an ear-splitting scream, and the private eye’s flashlight found someone: a thirty-seven-year-old woman named Florence Kotz sat upright in bed, terrified, clutching her nightgown and bedclothes round her and shrieking for help, which soon arrived. The gang might have been able to shoot straight, but they could not locate the door of Sheila Stuart, a few yards distant. The commotion routed Sheila, Marilyn and another guest, who scurried away while the melee continued. Soon after, Marilyn’s car was found parked at 8336 De Longpre Avenue, where she had rented an apartment after leaving North Palm Drive.
This became known for years as the night of the “Wrong Door Raid.” Florence Kotz sued Sinatra and DiMaggio for $200,000, and the case went to court. Sinatra denied being a participant, and after four years the case was dismissed in California Superior Court when Sinatra’s attorney Milton Rudin arranged an out-of-court payment to Florence Kotz of $7,500. As for Sheila’s guests, DiMaggio always insisted they were Marilyn and Hal Schaefer; to no one’s surprise, both of them denied those suspicions.4
On November 4, Marilyn completed principal photography on The Seven Year Itch and Charles Feldman gave a dinner party in her honor at Romanoff’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, inviting eighty guests to meet and praise her forthcoming hit. This was not only a generous and friendly gesture: Feldman had two other reasonable motives.
First, the gala evening was Feldman’s response to Darryl Zanuck’s increasing complaints about Marilyn’s absences, her lateness during production, and the necessity of multiple takes when she misread her dialogue. These were ridiculous objections, Feldman insisted: the day Marilyn completed work on Show Business she went to New York for location work on Itch. Her divorce took her out almost a week, but when she returned she worked fifteen consecutive days: “She has been most cooperative—this girl is really a sensational actress.” He added that as Zanuck well knew, twenty takes or more were not unusual by a meticulous filmmaker. William Wyler routinely wearied actors by doing sixty or more, and Elia Kazan often submitted Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh to dozens of takes before he got what he wanted for the film of A Streetcar Named Desire (which Feldman had produced for Warner, and which won several Oscars).
Feldman’s second reason was not quite so public. Marilyn was making quiet little noises about leaving Hollywood. Her attorneys were concluding lengthy examinations of her deals with Fox and finding loopholes by which her contracts could be declared null and void. This was being accomplished so that she and Milton Greene could form a creative business partnership known as Marilyn Monroe Productions, to make films they would control from first day to last, and on which they could realize not only vaster income than her Fox salary but also a handsome tax break. As part of the deal, it was also known that Marilyn was going to leave Feldman for new agents, the men at the Music Corporation of America, familiarly called MCA (with whom she signed on July 26, 1955).
“I feel like Cinderella,” Marilyn said when she arrived at Romanoff’s, wearing a brilliant red chiffon gown borrowed from the studio wardrobe. Clark Gable danced with her, Humphrey Bogart poured her a drink, Clifton Webb spread some sharp gossip, and Sidney Skolsky got material for weeks of columns. Zanuck attended, as did Jack Warner, Claudette Colbert, Samuel Goldwyn, Gary Cooper, Billy Wilder, Susan Hayward and Loretta Young. Marilyn knew, commented Sidney Skolsky in his column a few days later, “that the so-called elite of the town had finally accepted her. Marilyn had never felt she belonged. She had gained her fame because of her popularity with the fans,” but always felt neglected by Hollywood. “I have come up from way down,” Marilyn said later. Most memorable for her that evening was her introduction to Clark Gable. “I’ve always admired you and wanted to be in a picture with you,” she said while they danced.
“I ran Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” replied Gable, “and I told my agent you have the magic. I’d like to do a picture with you, too.” And so they would, but under circumstances not quite so pleasant as that evening.
Radiant and happy despite her exhaustion, Marilyn charmed everyone. Told by George Axelrod and Darryl Zanuck that after seeing the first seven completed reels of The Seven Year Itch they thought she was magnificent, Marilyn replied, “It’s because of Billy [Wilder]. He’s a wonderful director. I want him to direct me again, but he’s doing the story of Charles Lindbergh next, and he won’t let me play Lindbergh.”
Each day of 1954 continued to be filled with complex business and personal relationships, and with minor but uncomfortable health problems. At seven o’clock on Sunday evening, November 7, Marilyn arrived (three hours late) at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital “for correction of a female disorder she has suffered for years,” said her surgeon, Leon Krohn, referring to the procedure he performed next day in an attempt to correct her chronic endometriosis.
The press documented her hospitalization, with special attention to the fact that Marilyn was delivered to the hospital by Joe, that he was the only visitor during her five-night stay and that he was present all day, every day, through dinner and each evening. On Tuesday, he brought a bottle of Chanel No. 5 to her fifth-floor room, and this set off widely reported rumors of a reconciliation. “There’s no chance of that,” Marilyn said firmly on Wednesday, “but we’ll always be friends.”
On Friday, November 12, Marilyn was permitted to return home, and because Joe had briefly returned to San Francisco she asked Mary Karger Short to help her depart the hospital. Intrusive, infamous pictures were taken that day of a wan, disheveled Marilyn almost weeping as she tries to hide her face from a herd of insolent photographers. But these reflect not (as often maintained) emotional breakdown but the simple fact that she had hoped she might exit unnoticed by using the hospital’s rear freight elevator. With her hair unbrushed and without her usual cosmetics, she did not wish to be seen, much less photographed—thus her distress when the boys from the Daily News leaped out at her.
But she did not abide the doctor’s orders to rest. The next evening, Joe was back in Los Angeles, and the couple dined at the Villa Capri, where they had met almost three years earlier. The first to honor his upcoming fortieth birthday on November 25, Marilyn presented him with a gold watch, which he proudly wore for years afterward, until it was accidently smashed in a minor traffic mishap.
Sidney continued to squire Marilyn during November to social events, and that month they were seen at the Tiffany Club, the Palm Springs Racquet Club and the Hob Nob Club. And at one evening, Marilyn Monroe made history in a new, unexpected fashion.
In the 1950s, Hollywood nightclubs did not invite nonwhite artists to perform, and when she learned that agents for her idol Ella Fitzgerald had been denied any discussion of an engagement, Marilyn personally called the owner of the Mocambo. “She wanted me booked immediately,” Fitzgerald remembered, “and if he would do it, she would take a front table every night I was there. She also told him—and it was true, due to Marilyn’s superstar status—that the press would go wild. The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night.” With this, Marilyn Monroe placed herself firmly in the vanguard of a controversial support of civil rights—a concern that would become intense in the years to come as she read, asked questions, challenged lawmakers and learned about one of the shabbiest prejudices in American life.
That same season, a different sort of culture came into her life in the person of the English poet Edith Sitwell, whom Marilyn met at a Hollywood tea and to whom she expressed her own sincere interest in poetry. Dame Edith said that if Marilyn ever came to London she would be pleased to invite her to luncheon.
Everything seemed to accelerate toward the end of 1954. Milton Greene arrived in Los Angeles with preliminary papers for the formation of Marilyn Monroe Productions, thenceforth familiarly called “MMP” by everyone. Just as she was taking the unpopular step of supporting the rights of minorities, so was there evident another kind of rebellion. Weary of being typecast by unimaginative studio executives, offended by the prospect of another seven years of servitude at Fox and aggrieved at the absence of the verbally promised but still unpaid $100,000 bonus for The Seven Year Itch, she longed for better stories and scripts, more ambitious roles and the right to choose her projects and her directors.
Such demands were not to be taken seriously in Hollywood, but just as she had broken nightclub rules, so now Marilyn was ready to fight with Zanuck, Skouras, stockholders and critics. Aware of her power and prestige, with the success of the Romanoff party still fresh in her mind, she chose this season to make a break. She knew the studio needed her to promote Itch the following spring, and she knew she was America’s biggest star. Thus Marilyn was ready for a major gamble—one with enormous risks, for there was no guarantee she could in fact survive without the machinery she had come to detest.
Perhaps nobody but photographer Milton Greene could have preserved Marilyn’s career by paradoxically taking her away from Hollywood. With time out for brief sojourns at Columbia and MGM, she had been Fox’s chattel since 1947, and now she felt her own seven-year itch. No longer willing to be treated capriciously by a boss or a husband, she was attracted to Milton not only because he photographed her brilliantly but because he was not an industry figure. He had no more sense of how to make a movie deal than she, and no idea, either, of the intricacies of production control, budget or the thousand details of filmmaking. In a way, their partnership was a blind endeavor, but she would have it no other way. Part of her wanted not to be a sexy starlet but a serious actress; part of Milton Greene did not want to be a popular photographer. “He, too, wanted to rise above his past,” said his close friend, the writer and publisher Michael Korda. “He wanted to be a stage producer, a movie producer, a mogul—almost anything other than what he had done already.” At twenty-eight and thirty-two, Marilyn and Milton were primed for adventure.
The enterprise briefly succeeded, at least in part because it took Hollywood by surprise. Milton Greene and his attorneys Frank Delaney and Irving Stein could maneuver deals because the West Coast movie people did not take seriously those on the East Coast they considered ignorant arrivistes. MMP was thought to be a typical bit of Marilyn’s fey daydreaming, like her occasional statements that she would like to play Grushenka in a film of The Brothers Karamazov.
At the same time, Marilyn felt that Charles Feldman’s friendship with Zanuck put her at a disadvantage. Famous Artists and Feldman did more business and had more clients at Fox than any other agency in town, and this did not go down well with her. Suspicious of almost everyone connected with the studio, she left Feldman—casually breaking that contract, too, even though she owed him $23,350 advanced to her as a personal loan; at the encouragement of Milton Greene, she now went over to MCA.5There, agency president Lew Wasserman saw to it that she would be managed on both coasts: by himself and his colleagues in California, and by Jay Kanter and Mort Viner in New York.
Feldman, ever the gentleman, chose not to force his contract with a volatile and unhappy client; he did, however, insist on being repaid the money she owed him, although it would take five years for him to collect. As for Wasserman and company, Marilyn knew he was the most powerful agent in the business. He had already negotiated an historic deal for James Stewart by which the actor waived a portion of his salary for a percentage of a film’s profits. This was the origin of the so-called percentage deal, which revolutionized actors’ fees, eventually enabling them to be producers as well and creating the phenomenon of the hyphenate—the actor-producer-writer-director becoming the jack of all Hollywood trades.
As for Marilyn, she felt that thus far she had
never had a chance to learn anything in Hollywood. They worked me too fast. They rushed me from one picture into another. It’s no challenge to do the same thing over and over. I want to keep growing as a person and as an actress, and in Hollywood they never ask me my opinion. They just tell me what time to show up for work. In leaving Hollywood and coming to New York, I feel I can be more myself. After all, if I can’t be myself, what’s the good of being anything at all?
The fear that she was not indeed herself, that there were major parts of her person unknown and unexplored, was her central concern for the rest of her life.
In 1955, she set for herself several tasks—producer, acting student, analysand—that suggested her desire to try a very different persona than “Marilyn Monroe,” whom she all but abandoned that year. If this were mere caprice, or a series of shallow “experiences” to which she gave herself in lieu of serious pursuits, it would be easy to label her as many did: an immature, self-absorbed, lazy dilettante. But in fact she was nothing of the kind. At twenty-eight, much of her experimentation was a legitimate kind of self-exploration that would only become permissible later for people of post-college age in American culture; in the 1950s, uniformity and the aspiration to stability were set forth as prime national virtues, and by one’s early twenties a respectable person was expected to have achieved a passport into some aspect of the commercial scramble. Honest enough to admit that she was neither familiar nor comfortable with an identity she poorly understood and had in fact not yet achieved, Norma Jeane/Marilyn for a year disposed of The Monroe and became a frank wanderer into new realms.
In this regard, her lifelong obsession with mirrors was not simply the sign of an actress’s narcissism. Colleagues at work and friends at home often found her before a wall of mirrors, or seated at a three-paneled vanity table as if it were sacred triptychs; she gazed not in dreamy, mute adoration but in ruthless assessment, studiously refashioning and recreating, ever dissatisfied with the image she beheld. Constantly dressing and undressing, reviewing, repainting, drawing once again the lip and brow lines, washing and recommencing the application of a new look on a new face, she lived in a perpetual state of self-criticism, ever trying and retrying to focus some unrealized image of an unfinished self.
As she embarked on the search for a new Marilyn, the men at Fox were rightly alert to their own best interests and wise enough to find mechanisms to sustain them. For an entire year, from the end of 1954 to Marilyn’s signature on a new Fox contract at the end of 1955, Greene’s lawyers dealt with Fox’s.
The eventual collapse of the traditional studio system and its ownership of actors owed much to her tenacity and to the success of efforts exerted by her, Greene and his attorneys. Marilyn Monroe was Fox’s prodigal daughter, to be sure, but ultimately she was enthusiastically welcomed home and very much on her terms. It was as before a relationship of mutual benefit, for Marilyn and Milton needed Fox’s money, and Fox needed her to bring them profits.
As for the personal association between the star and her new partner, it had its fantastic side. Neither Monroe nor Greene was remarkably articulate, both depended on spokesmen and in conversation there were often long pauses with mysterious non sequiturs. Of the hundreds of transcripts of meetings between Marilyn Monroe and Milton Greene, most suggest they might have been playlets drafted by the young Harold Pinter.
Marilyn came East to stay with the Greenes for Christmas 1954 and to plan a life in New York that would include regular attendance at Broadway plays and study with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. She would, she said, leave the details of business and financial matters to Milton, his lawyers and his accountant. With the new year 1955, everyone’s hopes were high with artistic expectations and friendly trust; even personal problems might have easy resolutions.
Marilyn spent a good deal of quiet time with the Greenes at their home on Fanton Hill Road in Weston, Connecticut, during the next twenty-eight months. Since his city childhood, Milton had wanted a country home, and from its origins as a stable the house was enlarged over the years and became one of the most charming and architecturally admirable in the area. The stable became the living room, with a two-story cathedral ceiling and a large fireplace. There were guest rooms, a large country-style kitchen and a photographer’s studio.
The Greenes brought Marilyn into the many social and professional circles of their life. “With us she had something entirely new,” Amy recalled,
and that was a structured life in an organized house. She had her own little room when she visited. But most of the time we were in the New York social whirl. We were invited everywhere and were doing everything. She wanted to become an educated lady, but she also wanted to be a star. That was a conflict. But in the beginning she was very happy, functioning well, fighting Zanuck, feeling her oats.
Jay Kanter, one of her New York agents at MCA, agreed. “Marilyn seemed to me very free that year, animated, enthusiastic, looking forward to serious work. She liked being out of the Hollywood film business. It was a time full of promise and she seemed to me to be taking hold of a new life.”
On Friday evening, January 7, part of that new life was publicly announced. Milton gathered eighty pressmen, friends and potential investors in MMP at Frank Delaney’s home on East Sixty-fourth street. Every Manhattan columnist and every reporter of any status was present except Dorothy Kilgallen and Walter Winchell, both of whom had been excluded by Milton “because of their general hostility toward Marilyn.” The star, as usual, was an hour late, finally arriving all in white, wearing a borrowed ermine coat, a white satin dress and her hair a new shade of subdued platinum; she resembled nothing so much as a reincarnation of Jean Harlow. “She really wanted to be Jean Harlow,” according to Amy.
That was her goal. She always said she would probably die young, like Harlow; that the men in her life were disasters, like Harlow’s; that her relationship with her mother was complicated, like Harlow’s. It was as if she based her life on Harlow’s—the instant flash, then over.
In a calm voice, Marilyn formally announced that evening the establishment of her new company, with herself as president and Milton Greene as vice-president. “We will go into all fields of entertainment,” she said, “but I am tired of the same old sex roles. I want to do better things. People have scope, you know.” When asked how this related to her status at Fox, Delaney interrupted: she was no longer under contract to Fox.
Delaney’s quiet, brief remark reached executives on Pico Boulevard before their workday was over, and they reacted with perhaps predictable shock and called their own press conference. Marilyn Monroe was most certainly legally bound to work for them, it was announced—and for four more years. That, it seemed, was that. But in fact it was not, and over the next several weeks the discord was daily served up in the nation’s papers.
After the press party, Marilyn told the Greenes she wanted to continue the celebration at the Copacabana, where Frank Sinatra was singing. That would be impossible, Amy Greene said: Frank’s show had been sold out for weeks. “Never mind,” Marilyn replied. “If you all want to hear Frank, follow me.” She scooped up her ermine wrap and led the contingent of partygoers to the Copacabana, where Milton suggested they enter through a rear door and ask to see Angelo, the maître d’hôtel. Within minutes, additional tables and chairs were pushed onto the nightclub floor. Sinatra, distracted, stopped singing and the room was hushed. There in front of him, shimmering in white, was Marilyn, who just raided through the wrong door but was in the right place. Sinatra had to smile, he winked at her, and the show resumed. “So we couldn’t get in?” Marilyn whispered to Amy. “I stand corrected,” her friend replied. “She knew,” Amy said years later, “precisely the power and influence she had.”
When he said Marilyn was no longer bound to Fox, Delaney spoke neither cavalierly nor without grounds. He had taken careful count of the days Marilyn was put under suspension in early 1954, and of the time when Fox was obliged to exercise their option forShow Business and for Itch. Late by a few days in renewing that option and remiss in putting on paper the single verbal guarantee of a $100,000 bonus for Itch, the studio was technically in arrears; in addition, they had relied on Feldman to get Marilyn to sign two relevant documents, but she had cannily avoided doing so. Furthermore, as Delaney pointed out to all who would listen, “it seems legally impossible that Mr. Feldman could have become both Miss Monroe’s agent and the producer [of Itch] without a separate agreement and the consent of Miss Monroe.” This made Itch separate from the rest of Marilyn’s deal, a situation never put in writing. Delaney, therefore, could claim that de facto the production of The Seven Year Itch terminated the Monroe-Fox contract of 1951.
By happy accident for MMP, someone at Fox mentioned to someone at Variety that “Miss Monroe had indeed made [Itch] under a new agreement which gave her a substantial salary increase.” This bit of publicity aided the MMP cause immeasurably: according to California law, publication of such a statement meant that Marilyn now had no further obligations to Fox until a new contract was negotiated. At the same time, she received a letter from Fox in which it was casually admitted that her 1951 contract was effectively terminated by oral agreement when they began Itch. “It is the damndest letter you ever saw, and a lawyer’s dream,” wrote Irving Stein, “because seldom does an opponent make so good a record of an oral arrangement. I am convinced that Twentieth had best bargain realistically or they will lose a diamond mine.” For the moment, things were almost hilariously favorable for MMP.
As might have been predicted, sabres were at once duly and loudly rattled in the offices of both Fox and Greene. First of all, the studio suspended Marilyn—an empty threat, as she was still being paid her weekly salary because Itch was officially still in production and required her presence for a few final retakes in Hollywood that January. But she would be further penalized, Fox announced, if she did not remain for her next assignment, How To Be Very, Very Popular—which, because she was to have the role of a stripper, Marilyn had no intention of accepting.
Duly fulfilling her obligations for Itch, Marilyn and Milton flew to Hollywood on Sunday, January 9, and next day she was at the studio for the final shots. “You’re looking good,” said Billy Wilder in welcome. “Why shouldn’t I?” replied Marilyn. “I’m incorporated!” The first picture of her new company, she said somewhat proleptically, might be the life of Jean Harlow.
Back in Manhattan, MMP’s wiry, hyperkinetic corporate lawyer Irving Stein was hard at work. An honorable man thoroughly dedicated to the success of the new company, Stein was an old friend of Greene’s attorney Frank Delaney and had been brought in as counsel for the new venture. He worked tirelessly for them, frequently without regular pay, for MMP had no income until Milton refinanced his Connecticut home that spring to help provide seed money and daily operating expenses—such as the cost of Marilyn’s New York apartment.
Stein proved his worth at once, urging that in case Fox should attempt a lawsuit, Marilyn ought to make herself a legal resident of the State of Connecticut (which, as an additional benefit, had no income tax). Accordingly, before the end of January she applied for a driver’s license and registered to vote there. Just as important, Stein realized the significance of Marilyn’s continuing relationship with Joe DiMaggio, who had visited her in New York during the Christmas holidays—indeed, had stayed with her at least one night at her hotel.
Irving Stein saw the relationship from a strategic viewpoint: it could present either a difficulty or become an advantage for the business simply because Marilyn was obviously not emotionally free of Joe. “It might be fatal for us,” Stein noted in his corporate diary on January 27, “since Joe is inducing pressure to have Marilyn return to California.” And then, significantly, he added: “Leave her alone and we’re in trouble.” Four days later, he wrote himself a reminder: “Get Joe DiMaggio to talk to Frank [Delaney]. Milton and Marilyn had a row in [the] car coming down from Conn[ecticut]. We must know DiMaggio!” On February 2, his corporate notes indicate that he told Delaney it was appropriate to relay to Marilyn news of Fox “only while DiMaggio was in town.”
This was not difficult, for wherever Marilyn went, Joe was sure to follow. When she and Milton traveled to Boston to visit a potential contributor to MMP, Joe popped up at their hotel, and so she abandoned Milton and spent five days with her ex-husband in Wellesley, Massachusetts, at the home of his brother Dominick. The press was delirious with rumors of a renewed love match.
“Is this a reconciliation?” asked a newsman, interrupting their dinner at a Boston restaurant.
“Is it, honey?” asked Joe sweetly, turning to his ex-wife.
Marilyn hesitated a moment. “No, just call it a visit.”
The man Milton and Marilyn had traveled north to visit was a wealthy dress manufacturer named Henry Rosenfeld, a New Yorker whose business had brought him to Boston that month. A legendary figure in fashion, he had founded a company during World War II with the idea that wealthy women could wear inexpensive clothes that would nevertheless be as chic as designer models. At that time his spare, casual shirtwaist dresses, for example, sold for eight to ten dollars and were hailed by office girls, actresses and society ladies alike; by 1955, his annual volume had leaped to eighty million dollars. Dubbed the Bronx Christian Dior, Rosenfeld had developed many professional interests, and Milton hoped to make film production one of them. This attempt failed on the grand scale, but for several months Rosenfeld provided small sums for MMP’s operating expenses, and there were rumors (impossible to corroborate) that Marilyn used her charms in private to convince Rosenfeld of the seriousness of her company’s venture.
At the same time, very many people—Sam Shaw, Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford and Milton’s own team—believed that the company’s principals had resumed their own affair. It is clear that the shots Milton took of Marilyn during 1954 and 1955 are some of the most seductive and erotic ever rendered by any photographer. In some, like the diffused, so-called Black Sitting in which she seems like a Berlin vamp circa 1928, she wears little more than fishnet stockings, a kind of teddy and a hat, her expression and attitude oddly distracted, almost madly, intoxicatingly carnal.
For years, Amy Greene firmly denied the rumors that Marilyn and Milton were in fact lovers; she claimed that she of all people would have known of such an involvement. But Amy had to admit that “Marilyn was a homewrecker, although she didn’t want to be,” and that Milton was a cagey and elusive man, given to excesses and indulgences he often seemed unable or unwilling to control. After the Monroe-Greene partnership was dissolved, however, Marilyn spoke quite freely to others (her publicist and confidant Rupert Allan, for one) of her ongoing liaison with Milton throughout his marriage. Since the time of André de Dienes, a confident and persuasive photographer was perhaps the single most powerful, irresistible aphrodisiac to Marilyn Monroe.
Also in January 1955, Milton leased a suite for Marilyn at the Gladstone Hotel on East Fifty-second Street near Lexington Avenue. There she could meet the press, be available for interviews and take advantage of whatever New York activities seemed helpful. She would also be close to Milton’s studio at 480 Lexington Avenue, where business meetings and photo shoots were frequently scheduled. Marilyn quickly learned, as she said on national television in April, that if she slipped on dark glasses and a scarf, wore an old coat but no makeup, she could stroll around New York quite untroubled, without even being recognized, much less importuned for autographs. “Marilyn Monroe,” after all, would surely be a knockout if one were ever to turn a corner and meet her face-to-face, and the effort of being Marilyn Monroe was not something to which she dedicated herself in 1955.6
Instead, she had more serious concerns. Marilyn decided to avail herself of Paula Strasberg’s offer to meet her husband and to visit the Actors Studio. Shy of simply telephoning for an appointment, Marilyn turned to two of Strasberg’s former colleagues, Elia Kazan and producer Cheryl Crawford, who were both preparing for the premiere of Tennessee Williams’s new play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. They provided a recommendation, and she set off to meet the most famous and controversial drama teacher in America. The introduction of Monroe and Strasberg was the start of a relationship both personal and professional that was as important as any in her life and that endured until her death.
Lee Strasberg, then fifty-four, was born Israel Srulke in 1901 in Poland. He came to America in 1909 and grew up among the immigrants of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a materially poor but culturally rich community. In his early twenties, he trained as an actor with Richard Boleslavski, the Russian director who had worked with Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. Then, in 1931 (renaming himself Strasberg), he co-founded the legendary Group Theater with Cheryl Crawford and Harold Clurman. With the Group, he was actor, producer and director as well as supervisor of training, and here he began to develop an approach to acting which was called The Method. Quitting the Group in 1937 after arguments about The Method’s principles, Strasberg worked independently and 1951 was named artistic director of the Actors Studio, four years after its founding by Kazan, Crawford and Robert Lewis.
The Studio was a place where actors met to explore, a kind of theatrical laboratory where performers tried out characterizations before an audience of colleagues, took chances, made mistakes, were mocked and encouraged by their peers. Most of their work was never seen by the public, but was only by members, for members. With no formal classes, members simply arrived at Strasberg’s twice-weekly sessions (Tuesdays and Fridays from eleven to one), perhaps rehearsing at other times privately with moderators or coaches—or, if they were among the chosen few, with Strasberg himself at his home, where they were charged the absurdly low price of thirty dollars a month for three sessions each week. Attendance at the Studio sessions was by invitation only, based on an audition before Strasberg.
A short, slight, intense and severe man who was an absolute authoritarian within his domain, Strasberg affected a distant, rather stern manner with many of his students as well as with his opponents (among the latter were other important drama teachers: Herbert Berghof, Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler). “We were like converts to a new religion,” said actor Eli Wallach of the Studio’s early days. “We didn’t understand anyone else’s acting except our own. Everyone else was a pagan.” Early members of the Studio (no one was called a student) were in deadly earnest about its superiority, according to Shelley Winters, another attendant from the start. “We were dedicated to the idea of great theater. We all thought we would do Shakespeare plays and marry each other.”
Strasberg himself was something of a sign of contradiction. His legion of admirers and devotees emphasized his ability to dissect a performance down to the smallest gesture and the slightest pause, illuminating every element that helped and hindered true characterization. Less enthusiastic were those who observed his tyrannical manner, his emotional coldness with all but those few favorites, and the intimate nature of some of his improvisations. “He sometimes got into areas that were better left to a psychiatrist,” remembered Anne Jackson, a member who did perform Shakespeare and who married Eli Wallach.
“Lee was enshrined” at the Studio, according to Elia Kazan, who added that for years Strasberg
noticed that actors would humble themselves before his rhetoric and the intensity of his emotion. The more naive and self-doubting the actors, the more total was Lee’s power over them. The more famous and the more successful these actors, the headier the taste of power for Lee. He found his perfect victim-devotee in Marilyn Monroe.
Briefly and synthetically set forth, The Method according to Strasberg was based on several indisputable doctrines.
First, the task of the actor is not merely to imitate but to reproduce reality through the use of “emotional recall” or “affective memory.” Because of this, the actor’s behavior onstage must be psychologically sound, motivated by a single purpose based on one’s unique personality. To ensure that the character and the play are lifelike and spontaneous, improvisation is encouraged during rehearsals (and even in some cases during performances). And over all these principles is an almost mystical commitment to the art of acting and to the truth that it can reveal.
Because of Strasberg’s emphasis on true emotion based on the actor’s personal history, he urged that anything preventing access to the inner life be confronted forthwith; endorsing psychotherapy, he became a kind of analyst-doctor to his students. After Marlon Brando’s celebrated performance in A Streetcar Named Desire and his equally celebrated term of psychoanalysis, the link between acting and therapy was firmly and respectably established. “It made me a real actor,” said Brando, praising Strasberg’s Method (although he also studied with Stella Adler, whose approach was quite different). “The idea is you learn to use everything that happened in your life in creating the character you’re working on. You learn to dig into your unconscious and make use of every experience you ever had.”
This angle led to an array of actors subsequently accused of being nothing but jumbles of tics and habits, looking ever more deeply into themselves and overloading performances with personal problems. George C. Scott, who acted in Strasberg’s critically lacerated production of The Three Sisters in 1963, derided much of his director’s tactics, his preference for wounded, mannered and dependent performers, and later referred famously to “Lee-you-should-excuse-the-expression-Strasberg.”7
In the days when Kazan was the primary teacher at the Actors Studio, the emphasis of The Method was on action and emotion, with grave fidelity to the text of the play and the integrity of the character. But with Strasberg’s ascendancy, there was a shift to the dredging and prodding of sense memories and individual history, which led to a certain hyperemotionalism about which Robert Lewis made the apt comment, “Crying, after all, is not the sole object of acting. If it were, my old Aunt Minnie would be Duse!”
Among the most respected opponents of everything Strasberg represented was none other than Laurence Olivier, who believed that acting was a matter of carefully prepared technique and the accumulation of external details from which a character emerges. Reflection on one’s personal history seemed to him inconsistent with the actor’s goal of reproducing not his own but the playwright’s intentions. Once, surrounded by devotees of The Method, Olivier fulminated:
All this talk about The Method, The Method! What method? I thought each of us had our own method! . . . What they call “the Method” is not generally advantageous to the actor at all. Instead of doing a scene over again that’s giving them trouble, they want to discuss, discuss, discuss. I’d rather run through a scene eight times than waste time chattering away about abstractions. An actor gets a thing right by doing it over and over. Arguing about motivations and so forth is a lot of rot. American directors encourage that sort of thing too much.
He was referring, he said without apologies, to Lee Strasberg. Olivier’s hesitation notwithstanding, Strasberg was not a crackpot who attracted only or even primarily neurotic dependents. Fine actors by the dozens came to Strasberg at the Studio, which in 1955 moved from shabby, cramped quarters on West Fifty-second Street to an abandoned Greek Orthodox church at 432 West Forty-fourth Street, between Ninth and Tenth avenues.
Strasberg was himself far too fine an actor not to realize (and on occasion to admit) that great acting, like every true craft or art, has something ineffably mysterious about it—that in great acting, the actor virtually vanishes behind the role; that actors can indeed utilize their own frailties to create a character—and that good actors will directly and invariably do so. Attracted especially to the young, to stars, to the ill and to the emotionally frail, he took on with especial concern those with acute sensitivities. He also insisted—and here he was often on dangerous ground—that some students were not good candidates for The Method unless they underwent a systematic unblocking of feelings, a prolonged and parallel exploration of hitherto hidden mines of the past—specifically, through psychoanalysis.
This was the enterprise that he enjoined on Marilyn Monroe, making it a condition of her dramatic training when she visited him in early February 1955. “My father wanted,” according to his daughter Susan,
to arouse everything undealt with, everything repressed about her past, and to tap all her explosive energy. To bring all that up, he said she’d have to work on it in a formal, professional setting. . . . Marilyn was drawn to my father because although she had little formal education, she understood human nature and at once agreed with his suggestion. Human nature, especially her own, fascinated her. They were really destined to meet and work together.
Marilyn agreed, for she wanted everything in her life to begin afresh. Without knowing it, Natasha Lytess was from that day dropped forever from her life and career.
Marilyn, Lee said, simply had to open up her unconscious. In a general way, this was sage advice, and it had a certain intellectual allure for her; in other regards, it was disastrous. Any depth work must be undertaken in a person’s own time and rhythms, not under duress, not out of respect for a guru, not as an object lesson or as a passport to a tangible goal. Marilyn’s early life was a tangle of loss, deprivation and abuse, some of it acknowledged, some not so. And while certain people are crippled, severely limited by not confronting repressed feelings and memories, others cannot or will not do so except at enormous personal pain. It is axiomatic that each inner life has its own integrity, that there are guidelines but no absolute rules for attaining psychological health and maturation. Accordingly, there are concomitant risks when an inappropriately enforced system of exercises or a formula of exploration is enjoined on someone too vulnerable or impressionable to make an independent judgment. And this was the clear and present danger when Marilyn set off to seek a psychiatrist of whom Lee Strasberg would approve—and who, she also needed to be sure, would not alien-ate her from Milton Greene and their new business venture.
Her choice was no surprise. Within two weeks, Marilyn began three, four and often five times a week to travel from her sixth-floor suite at the Gladstone to 155 East Ninety-third Street, to the consulting room of a psychotherapist named Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, who for several years had been treating Milton Greene.
“Milton did more than recommend Hohenberg to Marilyn,” according to Amy. “He actually brought her to Hohenberg, although he was at first skeptical because he thought that as two women they wouldn’t get along.” A large, stout fifty-seven-year-old Hungarian immigrant whose white hair was bound in tight braids, Margaret Herz Hohenberg began a rigorous course with her new patient. She had studied medicine in Vienna, Budapest and Prague, worked in hospitals for the insane and then specialized in psychoanalysis before coming to New York in 1939 and beginning private practice. “I like talking to her” was all Marilyn said to Amy.
The year 1955 was therefore to be the year in which “Marilyn Monroe,” the glamorous, sexy, Technicolor star, was indeed put aside; neglected, too, was the image of Jean Harlow that had been so controlling an element. The replacement was almost a female version of Brando, as Marilyn affected the theatrical fashion of the serious actor she aspired to become: on the sidewalks and streets of New York, she wore blue jeans and plain trousers, sweatshirts and only the merest touch of makeup, if any at all. But within there was only a chrysalis, something still childlike. No longer presenting to the world a painted face, a manufactured product, she wished somehow to be (as it is called) a real person, and to do so, she started as if with a clean slate.
Even in this enterprise, Marilyn was somehow stymied, for in place of artifice there was a new, subtler peril. She now thought that she was independent, that she was doing something for herself and by herself alone, not to please others. This was the most poignant illusion of all.
1. Giesler blithely informed the press that this was standard vague legal diction and could refer to anything as “common as political differences.”
2. Skolsky agreed with this blunt assessment: “Joe DiMaggio bored Marilyn. His life-style added up to beer, TV, and the old lady—the wife who ran third to Gunsmoke or The Late Show and a can of beer, night after night after night. She couldn’t settle for that—not even with an all-American hero.”
3. Accounts differ: Sinatra maintained he waited in a car nearby, and he went to court to protest the evidence of private eye Philip Irwin.
4. The so-called Wrong Door Raid was widely reported in the press on November 6 and 7, although Sinatra’s representatives were at the time able to keep his and DiMaggio’s names out of the stories: see UPI and AP wire-service reports for those dates. But Confidential magazine (vol. 3, no. 4 [September 1955]) broke every detail of the story, and it is both interesting and important to note that the State of California later instituted an investigation of the magazine’s methods, practices and results. The result of the inquiry, presumably much to DiMaggio’s and Sinatra’s chagrin, cleared Confidential and in fact stated that they were “quite zealous in checking out and documenting their reports to the public. . . . As well, the activities of detectives [engaged by the magazine] were well within the rigorous code of regulations prescribed by the state for their business.” See the New York Times, March 2, 1957, p. 19.
5. Feldman advanced Marilyn money to buy story rights for a project never realized; to pay Natasha; to pay her attorneys; and to commission an original screenplay.
6. One day that February, she was leafing through an issue of Variety and found an advertisement taken by RCA for two of her songs from There’s No Business Like Show Business. Alongside the titles was her portrait in a circle, with a phonograph arm placed provocatively, like a hand, across her upper, unclothed chest. She burst out laughing.
7. Among scores of famous actors at the Studio for various lengths of time: Anne Bancroft, Marlon Brando, Ellen Burstyn, James Dean, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, Sally Field, Ben Gazzara, Julie Harris, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Jackson, Patricia Neal, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Geraldine Page, Estelle Parsons, Sidney Poitier, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Stanley, Maureen Stapleton, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach, Shelley Winters and Joanne Woodward.