Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  For thirty years Hal Schaefer kept silent about his relationship with Marilyn Monroe, not least because of the appalling price he paid. Interviewed for this book at his home in another state, however, the musician talked quietly of a period that he recalled as the most painful year of his life. When he first met Marilyn, Schaefer said, ‘She struck me as kind of fey, as not being altogether in this world, not all there. She was quiet, didn’t open up much. At first she had no confidence, but she reacted to my teaching and she got better. I made her go out and buy a bunch of Ella Fitzgerald albums, and that was the strongest influence on her — she really became quite good. …’ Professionally, she was fine to work with. There came a time when she started to show up late, but I told her it wouldn’t work with me. … I had my reputation established. I told her she didn’t impress me just because she was Marilyn Monroe, and she stopped being late.’

  For many months, said Schaefer, the relationship with Marilyn remained strictly professional. ‘It was during No Business Like Show Business,’ he remembered, ‘that I started to know her more personally. Marilyn seemed to feel that I was the kindest, most gentle man she’d been involved with. And she loved the way I played the piano, thought I ought to be world-famous. I wasn’t the world’s greatest lover, I wasn’t Tyrone Power, but I did give what she needed most — help. I didn’t use her. I was supportive — I cared about her.’

  There came a time when Schaefer and Marilyn became lovers, though he made it clear that sex was not at the core of their affair. He echoed the irony other lovers report, that ‘Marilyn must have been frustrated almost all of the time. I think she regarded it as her function, being this great attractive female, that she was supposed to have sex with a man, because that was something she could do, that she could give. She wasn’t very successful at it, in terms of her own fulfillment.’

  Schaefer insisted, ‘I was not the cause of the breakup with DiMaggio. It was already broken up, and not because of me. She would have left him no matter what. It had nothing to do with me. It was not to do with anyone else. But DiMaggio couldn’t believe that. His ego was such that he couldn’t believe that.’

  In midsummer of 1954 Marilyn had told Schaefer of her troubles with Joe DiMaggio. She was to claim to him, as she did to others, that her husband sometimes physically mistreated her, that he was hugely possessive. Quite soon, Schaefer said, he found that out for himself. He soon became convinced that DiMaggio’s detectives had Marilyn’s car wired for sound.

  ‘She had this big, black, Cadillac convertible,’ Schaefer remembered, ‘and sometimes she’d say, “Let’s just get in the car and go for a ride.” I took her once to that Jewish section on Fairfax Avenue — it wasn’t late — and she put on a black wig and no makeup. But finally somebody recognized her as we were leaving, and we got in the car and left. We were talking in the car, and talking about where we were going, and suddenly somebody shows up there. Either we were bugged or we had been followed. I told her I thought we were bugged.’

  After a while Schaefer and Marilyn had no doubt they were under surveillance. ‘The whole thing became a nightmare,’ he said. ‘She was terrified, and also furious, because she felt she couldn’t live her life. She was completely frustrated.’

  After weeks of this, Schaefer said he decided to have it out with DiMaggio. He called the house on North Palm Drive and spoke to Marilyn’s husband, who told him to come over in about an hour. At the last moment, Marilyn, fearing violence, persuaded Schaefer not to go.

  On the night of July 27, 1954, three months before the divorce, Schaefer failed to turn up for an appointment with friends. They finally found him at four o’clock in the morning, lying unconscious on the floor of his room at the studio. At the time it was said Schaefer had collapsed from overwork, but close friends knew he had tried to kill himself. Schaefer shuddered at the memory. ‘I drank typewriter cleaning fluid, I drank carbon tetrachloride [a cleaning fluid], I drank about a quart of brandy, and I took about a hundred pills — any thing that was there. …’

  Schaefer barely survived. ‘I just didn’t want to go on any more,’ he said. A great deal of the focus was on Marilyn, but it wasn’t totally that. It was the way I was in my life. I was despondent, depressed, drinking too much.’ Schaefer’s liver and kidneys were seriously damaged, and he suffered several relapses. Once released from the hospital he hired two male nurses and took a house on the coast north of Los Angeles, there to begin a long and painful recovery.

  Marilyn had visited Schaefer in the hospital immediately after his suicide attempt, and now she began visiting him at the beach. ‘Marilyn came up there,’ Schaefer said. ‘I think she may have stayed on a Friday or Saturday night, but not all the time. I don’t think Marilyn and I had any sex at that point. … I was still as sick as could be, and the male nurses were there.’ Now, said Schaefer, the harassment began once more.

  ‘Again, on one of the occasions Marilyn came,’ Schaefer recalled, ‘they followed her. I can’t remember it well because I was so sick. I can only remember them screaming through the window, and the threatening. And they said they were going to come in. We said we’d call the police. They said they’d cut the phone lines. I remember one night it was about dawn. And neither of us had slept, and Marilyn was standing in the corner. And after the threats they’d said, “We’ll come in, and we’ll just take her out and we’ll leave you alone. We won’t harm you. We know she’s there and we want to get her out.” Marilyn was terrified. Eventually, she slipped out, reached her car, and got away. There never was any actual violence.’

  The ordeal drew Schaefer and Marilyn closer to each other. ‘Marilyn came up to help nurse me. She was very sweet, and quite practical. I got well there, and Marilyn enjoyed it. She looked well, went swimming, got some sun — it was a very isolated spot. We thought, we really did think, we could build something for the future.’

  As summer turned to fall Schaefer recovered sufficiently to return to Los Angeles. He and Marilyn met rarely and in secret, hoping to avoid the publicity surrounding the DiMaggio divorce. They did not entirely succeed.

  On the day of the separation one major newspaper carried reports that DiMaggio had ‘disapproved’ of Marilyn’s visits to see Schaefer in the hospital the previous July. Columnist Louella Parsons, who knew Marilyn well, used this as the basis for a powerful lead. She wrote: ‘I believe that it was jealousy that reared its ugly head when Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio had their final battle. … Joe is Italian and of a jealous nature.’

  After the divorce had been formalized, the press began blathering about a possible reconciliation. Marilyn and DiMaggio were indeed engaged in a series of meetings, but they did not end happily. Things came to a head on November 5, a day that neither of them would ever forget.

  On the morning of that day Marilyn offered a firm comment for publication: ‘There isn’t a word of truth that we are reconciling.’ DiMaggio, already divorced and therefore without conjugal rights of any kind, was now at his most desperate. Meanwhile, staked out on street corners and in parked cars, his private detectives were still on the prowl. That night, accompanied by his friend Frank Sinatra, DiMaggio set in motion a great folly.

  What happened that Friday night was to boomerang on DiMaggio and Sinatra in an unpredictable way. Two years later a report in Confidential, a scandal magazine, would stir enough uproar to warrant probes by a California State Senate committee and a Los Angeles grand jury. The reconstruction that follows is drawn from evidence heard by those official bodies, a mass of conflicting eye-witness and press accounts, and new information gathered for this book.

  On the evening of November 5, James Bacon, the ubiquitous journalist who had himself once enjoyed Marilyn’s favors, took himself off to the Villa Capri restaurant. It was by no means the most star-studded watering hole in Los Angeles; it was more a cozy rendezvous serving spaghetti and meatballs, but it was patronized, even subsidized, by some famous Italians. These included Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, and both men were the
re when Bacon arrived.

  ‘Over at a nearby table,’ Bacon recalled later, ‘it looked like a Sons of Italy meeting — Sinatra, DiMaggio, and a few other paisanos. Hank Sanicola, Sinatra’s manager and a close friend in those days, was among the group. I didn’t join the table, although I have always been a friend of Frank’s, because I could see that DiMaggio was in a terrible mood.’

  Meanwhile, across the city, a quiet evening was ending for the inhabitants of an apartment building on the corner of Kilkea Drive and Waring Avenue in West Hollywood. In her tiny downstairs apartment, fifty-year-old Florence Kotz was having an early night. Mrs Virginia Blasgen, the landlady, was preparing for bed, and her teenage son was already asleep. Upstairs, on the only other floor, an actress called Sheila Stewart was giving late dinner to Marilyn Monroe. Stewart, aged thirty-seven, had been friendly with Marilyn for some time, and they shared a common interest in singing. That evening, Marilyn was studying a movie script.

  Out in the darkness, a young private detective, twenty-four-year-old Philip Irwin, was cruising around in his car. He was employed by Barney Ruditsky, the detective hired by DiMaggio to watch Marilyn, and he had been involved in the surveillance for months.

  Now, on a run past the Kilkea Drive apartment, Irwin spotted Marilyn’s parked car. He hurriedly telephoned his boss. Ruditsky arrived, staked out the house for a while, then went off to call Frank Sinatra at the Villa Capri.

  In the restaurant reporter Jim Bacon watched as Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio argued, then bustled out. DiMaggio was first to arrive at the apartment building. He circled the block twice, then parked behind his ex-wife’s car.

  ‘He was very upset. He was proceeding toward the apartment,’ Irwin later testified. ‘I stopped him and tried to calm him down.’ Frank Sinatra drove up shortly afterward.

  It was now that the landlady, Virginia Blasgen, looked out of the window. She said she saw two men, ‘a tall one and a short one … the tall one was mad, and was walking up and down … the little one was jumping up and down and grinning at me. …’ Mrs Blasgen recognized the large man as Joe DiMaggio, the small one as Frank Sinatra. About an hour later, at 11:15 P.M., mayhem came to Kilkea Drive.

  The greatest shock was for Florence Kotz, asleep and oblivious to the strange comings and goings outside. She awoke to a crashing and splintering as men broke down her door, then to the glare of white light as the intruders began taking photographs. Mrs Kotz screamed. Then the men fled as quickly as they had come, tumbling over each other in haste.

  The DiMaggio war party, searching for Marilyn, had blundered into the wrong apartment. The idiotic adventure was to be known henceforth as the ‘Wrong Door Raid.’

  At the time, in 1954, the assault at Kilkea Drive was written off by the local police as attempted burglary. The frightened victim, Florence Kotz, was left with a broken door and a bad case of nerves. Not until 1957, when the California State Senate looked into the doings of unethical private detectives, was there any public accounting. The hearings then turned into a tussle for credibility between Philip Irwin, the detective who had spotted Monroe’s car in the first place, and Frank Sinatra.

  Ironically, it had been another dawn raid, with himself as the target, that forced Sinatra to answer the senators’ questions: he had been served with a subpoena by two Los Angeles policemen who had marched into his Palm Springs bedroom at four o’clock in the morning. Then, under oath, Sinatra flatly denied that he was one of the men who broke into the Kotz apartment. He claimed he was sitting outside in his car when Joe DiMaggio, Barney Ruditsky, and Philip Irwin broke down the door. Irwin insisted that Sinatra had been one of the participants, and contested much of the detail in Sinatra’s story. State Senator Edwin Regan, having listened to both statements, said drily, ‘There is perjury apparent here.’ The matter was referred to a grand jury.

  Sinatra’s lawyers, hunting for information to counter Irwin’s claims, now hired another flamboyant Hollywood detective, Fred Otash. Otash sought to show that Irwin was a liar, and that nobody could have recognized Sinatra on the dark night of November 5, 1954. The matter was never fully resolved. The Grand Jury proceedings fizzled out, with jurors referring the case to the Chief of Police for ‘other possible testimony.’

  Joe DiMaggio never gave his version of the ‘Wrong Door Raid.’ Two years later, when the California State Senate and the Grand Jury wanted to question him, he sent messages saying he was unable to attend. He did so from the safety of the East Coast, where he was beyond the reach of a California subpoena.

  The official airing of the case did bring some small comfort to the aggrieved Florence Kotz. She sued Sinatra and DiMaggio, along with various friends and the detectives, and accepted an out-of-court settlement of $7,500.

  In all the verbiage expended on the ‘Wrong Door Raid,’ one name is glaringly absent — that of the real intended target, Marilyn’s lover, Hal Schaefer. Marilyn’s hostess that night, Sheila Stewart, revealed in an interview for this book that ‘Hal Schaefer was there with Marilyn that evening, and I made dinner for them. They were sitting in the dining room, and I had taken the dishes into the kitchen when we heard the crash.’

  Schaefer, who admitted he was there, still recalled the shock. ‘It was like somebody set off a bomb,’ Schaefer recalled. ‘The whole house shook. It was terrifying. …’ Asked whether he and Marilyn were in bed at the time, Schaefer said, ‘Not at that moment, no … but we were two grown, consenting adults, and she was already separated. …’ He added, ‘It was so lucky they got the wrong door. I think they would have done me terrible injury.’

  Sheila Stewart said Marilyn understood at once what was going on. She and Schaefer left the apartment in separate cars, and made their way to their separate homes. For Marilyn there was to be a confrontation with Joe DiMaggio that night. Yet another private detective, one of the large team assigned to the operation, was watching from the shadows two hours after the raid, when DiMaggio turned up on his ex-wife’s doorstep. She let him in, and DiMaggio was still there when the detective finally left in the early hours of the morning.

  Marilyn’s avalanche of trouble was not yet over. She had been described, at the time of separation, as ‘emotionally and physically ill.’ Her lawyer said she had a virus, and denied she was pregnant. He did say, however, that she was being attended by Dr Leon Krohn.

  Dr Krohn, ‘Red’ to his friends, was a prominent Hollywood gynecologist for several decades. His rare male patients, whom he served as a general physician, included his friend Frank Sinatra. Krohn mixed his profession with his social life, and played a special role following the collapse of the DiMaggio marriage. Joe DiMaggio became his house-guest, and he fielded dawn telephone calls from Marilyn, who checked regularly ‘to see if Joe was okay.’

  Dr Krohn had been looking after Marilyn for two years now, ever since her demand that a gynecologist be present at her appendix operation. On the morning after the ‘Wrong Door Raid,’ an event that would remain hidden from the press for a long time, it was announced that Marilyn would enter the hospital within twenty-four hours for ‘an operation of a corrective nature,’ to be performed by Dr Krohn.

  Next day, Marilyn, feeling ‘sick to the stomach,’ appeared at the studio to pose for publicity photographs. Then, driven by Joe DiMaggio, she checked into the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, by now a familiar port of call, for the operation. Dr Krohn told the press that the procedure was to correct a gynecological problem from which Marilyn had suffered ‘for years.’ Joe DiMaggio spent the night at the hospital, catnapping in the doctors’ lounge or pacing the corridors outside Marilyn’s room.

  Marilyn was released after four days, ungroomed and haggard, and without speaking to reporters. That night she and DiMaggio were seen dining at the Villa Capri, the restaurant where he had embarked on the ‘Wrong Door Raid’ just a week earlier. There would be more such meetings in the next month, and the press would again prattle about reconciliation. Marilyn, however, had decided otherwise.

  Within weeks
Joe DiMaggio would find himself truly alone. Soon he would become a frequent visitor to the office of Marilyn’s business manager on Sunset Boulevard, a sad hulking figure begging to know whether Marilyn had mentioned his name. He would see Marilyn many times in the future, would become famous as the man who carried a torch for her till her death and beyond. Marilyn would humor his obsession, would be grateful for his help, but she would never give him her heart.

  In December 1954, as the newspapers watched DiMaggio’s struggle to turn back the clock, nobody paid attention to the other man who waited. Hal Schaefer, now deeply in love with Marilyn, was soon discarded. He received a phone call from her in which she said, ‘Perhaps, one day, we’ll meet again,’ and he knew he had lost her.

  In his interviews for this book, Schaefer still spoke of DiMaggio with a fear that the decades had done little to erase. He remembered Marilyn with sadness. ‘She told me that she loved me,’ he said quietly, ‘but I don’t think she really knew what that meant.’

  Within twenty-four hours of the ‘Wrong Door Raid,’ and on the eve of her gynecological operation, Marilyn had danced till 3:00 A.M. at a party in her honor at Romanoff’s to celebrate the completion of The Seven Year Itch. She had looked in wonderment at the guests and whispered to Sidney Skolsky, ‘I feel like Cinderella. I didn’t think they’d all show up. Honest.’

  Marilyn had arrived an hour late because her car had run out of gas. Those lining up to sign a huge ‘Marilyn’ souvenir portrait included Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Claudette Colbert, William Holden, Jimmy Stewart, Susan Hayward, Gary Cooper, and Doris Day. For the first time Marilyn met her childhood idol, Clark Gable, and they discussed making a movie together.