by Donald Spoto
But by the summer of 1951, repeated injuries and ailments had taken a toll, and one reporter summed up the prevalent opinion that Joe on the playing field was “very slow. He can’t pull a fast ball at all. He can’t run and he won’t bunt.” That year, a few weeks after his thirty-seventh birthday—suffering from arthritis, ulcers, calcium deposits on his throwing elbow and bone spurs on his heels—Joe DiMaggio retired. Two days later, on December 13, 1951, he signed a contract to act as host of a New York television show before and after every Yankee home game—a job for which his camera-shyness did not well suit him. Nevertheless, he was paid $50,000, and his role as a spokesman for various products assured that he would be a rich man for the rest of his life. Careful with his money, he had already developed a substantial investment portfolio. As the elder statesman of sports with a team of worshipful admirers at Toots Shor’s, Joe was considered even by those close to him as a “loner . . . aloof from locker-room highjinks, impassive, never speaking ill of other players but tense and variable.”
That winter of 1951–52, Joe wanted to meet Marilyn Monroe after he saw a news photo of her posing sexily in a short-skirted baseball outfit, aiming to hit a ball. Taking this image for a real-life interest, he learned from a friend that the statuesque blonde was a swiftly rising movie star; never mind, he said, he wanted to meet her. Introduced at an Italian restaurant on Sunset Boulevard (after she had kept him waiting two hours), Joe found that she had never attended a baseball game and knew nothing about the sport. For his part, suspicious of Hollywood and its concomitant adoration of what he believed to be phony glamour, Joe had no interest in moviemaking.
This mutual indifference alone might have scuttled any possibility of romance, but chemistry accomplished what conversation could not. Marilyn liked this quiet, tall and handsome man whose continental manners she took for a kind of courtly deference.
I was surprised to be so crazy about Joe. I expected a flashy New York sports type, and instead I met this reserved guy who didn’t make a pass at me right away. I had dinner with him almost every night for two weeks. He treated me like something special. Joe is a very decent man, and he makes other people feel decent, too.
He was also free with his counsel, and Marilyn heeded every word attentively. She must avoid Hollywood fakes and phonies, he insisted. She must be wary of reporters. She must earn as much money as she could and save most of it. All this she heard, but little of it seemed as important as his calm, paternal advocacy and his attractive physique.
A passionate romance was ignited that February, and the press soon duly noted the closeness between two of America’s most publicized celebrities. He agreed to attend the final day’s shooting of Monkey Business, which he did more reluctantly than she attended her first baseball game. “Joe is looking over Marilyn Monroe’s curves,” reported Sidney Skolsky puckishly, “and is batting fine.”
The attraction is not difficult to understand, and not only because of the considerable physical charm each projected.
Both of them knew the requirements of careers that depended on their bodies, and both were proud of their sex appeal. As her liaisons with Karger, Hyde and Kazan (and her attraction to Miller) demonstrated, Marilyn invariably preferred a parent figure to a mere lothario. She found in Joe a strong, silent defender, a man willing to protect and love her without any deflection of will or attention. Just as important, with him Marilyn moved into a wider circle of popular acceptance—beyond moviegoers to the level of association with a national hero.
On his side, Joe responded to this beautiful blond showgirl who might double as a devoted mother and homemaker; that, after all, had been his type of woman since he chose Dorothy, although (not strange to relate) he had little success finding a replacement. But in Marilyn Joe was choosing a newly celebrated, sexy woman at precisely the time her star was rising. Although her public image was seductive and exhibitionistic, he believed that Marilyn wished to settle down and have a family. He would have the most glamorous housewife in the world. “It’s like a good double-play combination,” Joe said.
Both Joe and Marilyn were characterized by a sharp timidity about accepting love. He constantly articulated and enjoined on her the danger of being exploited, and to this she responded at once. In this regard, both of them believed that their value derived entirely from their public success. But in an important way their apparent similarities did not augur well. Joe’s triumphs were in the past, and he was living on their interest; Marilyn had not even reached the brightest point of her career.
There were disparities evident at the outset, but nothing (so it seemed) that could not be finessed. Joe had an Old World view of women, who should be modest and—such was taken for granted—obedient to their men. Proud of Marilyn’s beauty, he liked her to be admired, but from a decent distance, and any hint of attraction (even friendship) between Marilyn and another man immediately roused an almost irrational jealousy. In addition, he told her, there could be no better career than wife and mother: would she not consider retiring, too, so they could have a family and a private life? On this she would make no promises, saying only that yes, raising a family was her fondest dream.
Accustomed to a tidy Italian home, Joe was almost obsessively neat; Marilyn, like many busy and distracted performers, was sloppy to the point of genius. Joe was an earnest, loyal man in many ways perhaps emotionally repressed and distant from his own feelings; Marilyn was often hyperkinetic and gravid with possibilities. She had to live in Los Angeles; he preferred San Francisco. He devoted considerable time to money matters; she gave them scant attention. For the time being, these seemed negligible points of contrast. And further smoothing the relationship was Marilyn’s easy camaraderie with Joe’s twelve-year-old son, with whom she was both buoyant and generous, encouraging visits with his father but never attempting to supplant Dorothy.
Natasha was a different matter, as might have been expected. That February there was evident a mutual antipathy between coach and lover such as can perhaps openly be recognized by rivals. “She got really jealous about the men I saw,” Marilyn said a few years later. “She thought she was my husband.”
As for Natasha: “I first met him when I went to her apartment on Doheny one evening,” she recalled. “I disliked him at once. He is a man with a closed, vapid look. Marilyn introduced us and said I was her coach, which made no impression on him. A week later I telephoned her and Joe answered: ‘I think if you want to talk to Miss Monroe’—Miss Monroe!—‘you’d better call her agent.’ ”
At once, Marilyn herself played the canny mediator. The following day she went to Fox and asked that Natasha be engaged as the company’s chief drama coach. This request was immediately granted and Natasha had a two-year contract, for the studio was both eager to please Marilyn and glad for the chance to assure that her mentor would have other duties and not always be present on a Monroe picture. But her efforts at peace-making and her inability to comprehend possessiveness took a toll that month. William Travilla, her costume designer at Fox, recalled Marilyn weeping behind the set of Monkey Business. She felt inadequate for everyone, she said; no matter how she tried, she was disappointing those she loved. Not so her audiences, Travilla replied, and at once Marilyn was cheered.
He was proven quite right within days. Because it had been reported that she had seriously begun taking voice lessons with studio musician Hal Schaefer, Marilyn was asked to sing as part of an entertainment program at Camp Pendleton, south of Los Angeles. There she brought thousands of soldiers to their feet with her expert, smoky rendition of a song called “Do It Again.” Marilyn left no doubt to what the title pronoun referred, delivering a sexual summons complete with little moans of longing and pleasure as she invited someone to “Come and get it, you won’t regret it.” Her tone was unwavering and languorous, her breathing perfectly controlled; it was as if her own mind was racing from the studio to the bedroom. Never had so telling a hush fallen over an outdoor, makeshift theater as that day at Camp Pendleton. Mom
ents later, there was almost a riot of applause and a stampede toward the stage.
The song, composed by George Gershwin with lyrics by B. G. DeSylva, had been originally sung by Irene Bordoni in the 1922 Broadway show The French Doll. After Marilyn recorded it on January 7, 1953, it was only hers and every fantasy lover’s. Even the embargo on its sale added to the value, for it was often pirated at high costs admirers willingly paid. Years later, at last in commercial release, “Do It Again” remained an accomplished, amusingly erotic song.
Wearing a cashmere sweater and a tight skirt, Marilyn was completely at ease away from directors and coaches, cameramen and press officers. Her humor was sharp, her manner with the men exactly right. They whistled and stomped, cheered and clapped. The master of ceremonies came onstage to thank her, adding that she looked just fantastic and was the most beautiful sweater girl they had ever seen at Pendleton. Without a pause, Marilyn turned to her audience: “You fellows down there are always whistling at sweater girls,” she said into the microphone. “I don’t get all the fuss. Take away the sweaters and what have you got?” And with that, as she must have expected, a tumult arose. Her quickness did not desert her backstage. When an impertinent journalist asked if she was not wearing falsies, as she did in the movies, she replied: “Those who know me better, know better.”
Marilyn Monroe was quickly becoming the most publicized woman of 1952, and any doubt about her essential strength, her ability to confront a crisis and to turn it to her advantage, was dispelled by her management of the calendar scandal.
About March 1, the press department at Fox received the news that the photograph of the nude woman circulating round the country on the John Baumgarth Company’s 1951 calendars had been reprinted (such was the demand) for 1952. Now that Marilyn at least partly clothed was being seen more frequently in movies, magazines and newspapers than ever before—especially since she was socially connected to the great DiMaggio—not much time was needed to identify her with the bare figure of “Golden Dreams.” And so Harry Brand, Roy Craft and the entire press staff at Fox had potential national ignominy at the studio gates.
No American movie star had ever been proven to have done anything comparable, although there were the usual rumors. Hollywood traditionally dealt in playful innuendo and ingenious provocation, but since the introduction of censorship in 1934 the studios had been forced by moral watchdogs, acting with the hearty approval of the government, to deny stardom to anyone who threatened the nation’s purity by something as wicked as posing nude for a photo. Nineteen fifty-two was, after all, the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s demented warnings: at any moment, Russians would be creeping over the windowsills of America’s homes—an invasion entirely due, he and his supporters warned, to the national collapse of morals. Still in the throes of the great Allied victory, the United States was in a kind of schizoid adolescence, perhaps inordinately proud of being “the leader of the Free World,” which meant not only the obvious great freedoms but also the fact that America was the richest nation with the most weapons.
At the same time, Hollywood studios bowed to the pressure of a few self-appointed vigilantes like Joseph Breen and his cronies at the Motion Picture Production Code. They happily did business with organized criminals on one day and the next took a magnifying glass to scripts and finished prints, excising from movies any visual or verbal implication of human activities typically conducted in bedrooms and bathrooms. Even the screen-time for a kiss was regulated, and married couples never shared the same bed (unmarried couples, of course, did not exist). It was, in other words, an era of false angelism and dangerous repression, much assisted by groups like the Legion of Decency, whose name alone indicated its self-righteous Victorianism. This vigilante group, operating with the benediction of America’s Roman Catholic bishops, did nothing to advance the cause of tolerance (much less art or Christianity): their opponents, the Legion implied, were unprincipled libertines. Until the group was whisked away by more tolerant breezes in the Church more than a decade later, their nervous, institutionally celibate executives could condemn a film for using the word “virgin” (The Moon Is Blue); thus they were in the curious position of disallowing a word that was hallowed by daily use in prayer. But that movie, a sharp and satiric adult comedy, was widely boycotted because of the condemnation, for if the Legion sneezed, Hollywood caught cold. Of such astonishing cultural schizophrenia (not to say moral hypocrisies) was American life fairly replete in the 1950s.
The men at Fox were terrified that March, and telephones jangled hourly with calls between executives in New York and California. Marilyn was summoned to the front office, shown “Golden Dreams” and asked if the rumors were true. Without hesitation or embarrassment she nodded yes, “although I really thought that Tom [Kelley] didn’t capture my best angle.”
For years after her death, many men and women took credit for dealing with the matter, but it was Marilyn herself who devised the successful strategy by which crisis was averted and her image untarnished—indeed, much enhanced—by this disclosure.
An interview had been scheduled for the following week with United Press International correspondent Aline Mosby. Marilyn dutifully answered questions and posed for a photo. She then asked Mosby to remain with her alone and, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, she said, “Aline, dear, I have a problem, and I don’t know what to do.” Marilyn reached for a facial tissue and dabbed at her eyes, where tears had already formed.
A few years ago, when I had no money for food or rent, a photographer I knew asked me to pose nude for an art calendar. His wife was there, they were both so nice, and I earned fifty dollars I needed very bad. That wasn’t a terrible thing to do, was it? I never thought anybody would recognize me, and now they say it will ruin my career. I need your advice. They want me to deny it’s me, but I can’t lie. What shall I do?
On March 13, 1952, the story broke in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner under Aline Mosby’s headline, “Marilyn Monroe Admits She’s Nude Blonde of Calendar.” Condemnation, as Marilyn had rightly predicted, was forestalled by her throwing herself like Little Nell on the mercy of the press and the public. Within days, the story was picked up by every wire service, magazine and newspaper in the country and many in Europe.
Thus Marilyn turned potential personal and professional disaster into conquest, gaining with this single deed unprecedented access to the press and a favorable publicity siege for herself and Fox that neither could ever have bought. She also orchestrated a brilliant exposure—not of her nakedness but of her candor and apparent purity of heart, and she created a moving and credible little drama of difficult early days (an element irresistible to just about everyone). Advertising her body and her sexuality in the frankest possible way, she simultaneously appeared to be as innocent as a cherub in a Renaissance painting. For weeks she humbly met the press, a grown-up ragamuffin straight from the pages of Dickens, an innocent whose body only a pervert could denounce. Of her former plight she begged understanding—not, it must be noted, forgiveness. She presented herself as an honest working girl who had come up from a poor and bitter situation: surely people would sympathize with that? The Salvation Army, had they press representatives, could not have devised a better scheme to win support for a street urchin or a fallen woman. She was not ashamed, she said repeatedly and emphatically.
I’ve been on a calendar. I don’t want to be just for the few, I want to be for the many, the kind of people I come from. I want a man to come home after a hard day’s work, look at this picture and feel inspired to say “Wow!”
Marilyn indeed made herself “the biggest news of the day,” as reporter Joe Hyams said. And so she was. She appeared on the cover of Life magazine’s April 7 issue, photographed by Philippe Halsman, wearing an off-the-shoulder white dress, her eyes half closed and her mouth slightly open; typically, she was posed as if almost quivering with her trademark blend of innocent surprise and sexual availability. The air of intimacy was highlighted by positioning
her in a corner, wedged between a cabinet and a door.
Halsman had photographed her for Life earlier, with other aspiring starlets; now he found her much less selfconscious than before, and surrounded by exercise equipment, by photographs and by serious books (Shaw, Steinbeck, Ibsen, Wilde, Zola and the Russian novelists) and treatises on art (the works of Goya, Botticelli and da Vinci). As he worked, every move and gesture was a mixture of conscious and unconscious appeal to men—“the way she giggled, the way she stood in the corner flirting with the camera and especially the way she walked.”
“Marilyn Monroe: The Talk of Hollywood,” proclaimed the Life cover. The inside story showed a small reproduction of the nude calendar photo next to one of her (fully clothed) at home, dreamily listening to classical music: thus the most traditionally American weekly magazine was approving Marilyn Monroe. She was receiving five thousand fan letters a week, Life reported, adding that “Marilyn is naive and guileless but smart enough to have known how to make a success in the cutthroat world of glamour.” After a résumé of her childhood—with the appropriate arabesques—the article concluded that “with all Hollywood at her feet . . . a possible future project for Marilyn is a film biography of Harlow”: exactly what she and Sidney told Life they were planning to produce. Throughout the year, she was frequently called “the successor to Harlow,” a designation quietly circulated by Marilyn and Sidney themselves.