Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  Natasha was not the only confidant to this bitter stage of Marilyn’s marital life: the Greenes, among others, were told of it later in excruciating detail, as were Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and Lee Strasberg. At the same time, an increasing reliance on barbiturates was Marilyn’s defense against the realization that she had indeed contracted an ill-advised marriage: more than anything, she needed and desired to sleep—not only to prepare for the next day’s work schedule, but also to avoid confrontations with Joe. Placid with strangers and acquaintances but condescending and often bitter toward women, he was not the right husband for her at that time of their lives; he was, in fact, very like Fred Karger, and Marilyn’s submission was much like a repetition of that earlier affair.

  More poignantly, she was repeating the pattern of trying to form an alliance with a man who really had a low appraisal of her, who derided her wardrobe and took for granted that he knew what was best for her. Once again, the relationship confirmed her own pathetic self-estimation, and with Joe the motif of manly condescension took a more overtly abusive quality—perhaps because, according to the paradox of such relationships, he did indeed love her in his fashion.

  It was perhaps inevitable, then, that Marilyn would again seek emotional satisfaction elsewhere, and this she found in the gentle, patient Hal Schaefer, her musical director during Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and River of No Return. He returned to work with her on Show Business at her insistence, and she later saw that he was given onscreen credit for his work with her—an achievement so highly regarded that Schaefer was loaned to Warner Bros. to work with Judy Garland in A Star Is Born (although, alas, without the appropriate credit).

  Schaefer was a kind and untemperamental man who guided Marilyn through four songs for Show Business and several more she recorded for RCA that year. Very soon there were such widespread rumors of a romance between teacher and student that DiMaggio spoke openly of his resentment. “It’s ridiculous that Mr. DiMaggio could be any more jealous of me than he is of other people working with Marilyn,” Schaefer said, perhaps unwisely. “She’s a wonderful girl and kind to us all. I’m embarrassed about the whole thing.” Such statements did nothing to diminish either the gossip or Joe’s fuming.

  And then a dreadful thing occurred. On the evening of July 27, Schaefer had an appointment to meet with Sheila Stuart, another actress-singer he was coaching, at the home of studio lyricist Harry Giventer. When Schaefer failed to arrive, they made several phone calls to his home, his office and mutual friends, but without success. Concerned because they knew of the Marilyn-Hal affair (or at least the rumors of it), they decided to drive to his bungalow at Fox, where at four in the morning they found him sprawled on the floor, unconscious. Giventer and Stuart rode with Schaefer in an ambulance to Santa Monica Hospital, where emergency gastric lavage saved him from an overdose of Benzedrine and Nembutal, washed down by a lethal liquid later identified as typewriter cleaning fluid. On this both police and hospital reports were unambiguous. As for the situation that precipitated this unfortunate incident, no one ever elaborated. At her husband’s insistence, Marilyn may have told Hal it was necessary to end this intense relationship, whatever its category; it has also been suggested that anonymous callers had threatened Schaefer.

  Giventer and Stuart confirmed that although Marilyn was not Hal’s only visitor during his recovery, she was the most constant. In fact, someone had called her at once, for Marilyn arrived just as Hal was wheeled into the emergency room, accompanying him as far as she was allowed, clinging to the stretcher and crying repeatedly, “It’s okay, baby—it’s Marilyn—I’m here—it’s okay.” At the request of Fox’s publicists, the press considerately but not convincingly reported Schaefer’s illness as nervous collapse due to overwork: the story occupied so much space for so long, however (and Giventer and Stuart gave such adamant denials of anything really serious), that no one believed the event was anything but the result of a romance somehow gone tragically wrong.

  Columnist Louella Parsons adored Marilyn, never accepted rumors of the troubled marriage to Joe and was the last to believe its rupture. She usually wrote of her rhapsodically, as if she were Hollywood’s very own Joan of Arc battling the treacherous enemies of capricious fame and fickle studios; she also heaped purple prose on Joe. But Parsons knew of the Marilyn-Hal business, and she informed her readers that Joe was “very unhappy when Marilyn went to the hospital many times to see Hal Schaefer when he was critically ill. . . . He was just as jealous of Marilyn’s relationship with Natasha Lytess, whom he once ordered out of their house.” Whatever the precise nature and extent of Marilyn’s relationship with Hal Schaefer, it was so revived at the time of her divorce from Joe that their friends believed it was an importing contributing factor. And events following the divorce proved them right.

  On their work, Schaefer was candid. “She had very little self-esteem,” he said years later.

  But at the same time she was a quite complicated woman with a sure grasp of what she wanted to accomplish. By this time, despite her insecurities, she was no longer hiding behind the music. I was with her all the time in the recording studio, and there was very little intercutting, editing or overdubbing. She trusted me, and we became quite close. I had been warned to stay away from her, not to socialize. I was gentle and considerate with her, which seemed to mean everything, and she warmed to this.

  The admonition to distance was delivered indirectly, from Fox colleagues and Marilyn’s agent, but the implication was clear: Joe did not suffer gladly any rival.

  But Schaefer found it impossible to resist Marilyn’s nonmusical overtures, both to work and to friendship. To compensate for what she considered this “stupid part in a stupid picture [Show Business],” Marilyn made a series of recordings for RCA, among them a stingingly bittersweet rendition of “A Fine Romance,” whose revised lyrics fairly described the swift decline of her own marriage: “a fine romance with no kisses . . . my heart’s not made of plastic, that’s why I’m so sarcastic. . . .”

  This number was completed in only two takes one summer afternoon with seventeen musicians under Schaefer’s leadership. “Breathe from your stomach, Marilyn,” Hal told her before they started, and she seemed at once to relax. He smiled: “Forget about your chest.” Schaefer coaxed her to a high B-flat, then to a husky low D-flat. “I won’t be satisfied,” she told him, “until people want to hear me sing without looking at me.”

  Perhaps more than any other recording, “A Fine Romance” conveys the range of her alternately brash, tender, wistful, seductive, angry emotions that year—indeed, as Schaefer said, she was “a complicated woman.” But for reasons that remain unclear, the song was not released until years after her death—despite RCA’s sale of more than 75,000 copies of “I’m Gonna File My Claim” (from River of No Return) during the first three weeks it was available that summer.

  The role of Vicky, hastily added to the final script of Show Business, seemed to Marilyn very like the studio’s revenge: it was a throwback to the unnecessary earlier parts, merely an inelegant gloss on Lorelei Lee. One of her numbers especially, “Heat Wave,” defied the censors with its photographic emphasis on Marilyn’s parted legs, abdomen and crotch as she bumped and ground: “We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave—it isn’t surprising, the temperature’s rising—you certainly can can-can. . . .” Seen years later, this is not so much camp entertainment as a dreary omen of ever bolder, more tasteless performance styles to come from others decades later. “Miss Monroe’s wriggling and squirming are embarrassing to behold,” ran a typical review of this number. She fared somewhat better, despite an absurdly plumed and spangled costume, singing “After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It.” Marilyn’s interpretation, according to Irving Berlin, showed him for the first time the sexy subtext of the song.

  Her achievement was all the more remarkable because Marilyn was that day in a state of extreme nervous anxiety—a condition detailed by Skolsky in his column on June 9. That same week her
attorney had to appear in court to answer charges of reckless driving filed against her by a man named Bart Antinosa, whose car was hit from behind by Marilyn as she drove along Sunset Boulevard on May 21. Antinosa asked three thousand dollars in damages; the court, after conferring with his repair shop, awarded him five hundred.

  Only a few cast members and choreographer Jack Cole knew, however, that Marilyn’s vulgar shenanigans in “Heat Wave” were the invention of Natasha Lytess: “I had a code with her, a certain gesture to indicate she should let go of certain muscles. They thought I was a Svengali.” The code gesture remained unknown for years, until Rita Moreno (also working at Fox that year) revealed it in 1991: “If Marilyn wasn’t doing what Natasha wanted, Natasha pointed to her own crotch. This was the signal that Marilyn’s performance wasn’t coming from the right place!”

  Joe and his friend George Solotaire were present on August 27, the day Marilyn filmed the “Heat Wave” dance. After perhaps the fifteenth take, she ran to embrace him, but he pulled back as if she were a cobra; there was no welcome, no encouragement for her. Soon she was recalled before the camera, and after five minutes of watching her cavort suggestively in a skintight two-piece outfit—and watching the usual crowd on a movie set ogle her—he stormed out, muttering about movies in general, about Jack Cole, about Hal Schaefer: no one nearby was uncertain of his opinions.

  Anxious and embarrassed, Marilyn at once lost the musical beat, fell out of step, forgot her lines and, perspiring heavily, slipped and fell. From another corner of the soundstage, Sidney Skolsky jumped to her rescue. While she regained her composure and had her makeup and hair retouched, he introduced her to two other studio guests: sixteen-year-old actress Susan Strasberg and her mother Paula, wife of the director and drama teacher Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio in New York.

  Marilyn had known of the Strasbergs ever since her days at the Actors Lab in Hollywood. As Paula Miller, Mrs. Strasberg had acted in Night Over Taos, which Marilyn had studied; and Lee had been set before Marilyn by the Carnovskys and by Kazan as a valuable teacher for a serious actor. “I’ve heard so much about your husband,” Marilyn told Paula that day at Fox. “I’ve always dreamed of studying acting with Mr. Strasberg.”7 Paula replied that Marilyn would be welcome to visit the Actors Studio whenever she came to New York. That idea must have seemed all the more appealing in light of Show Business and the obvious dissolution of her marriage.

  Like Jean Harlow, Marilyn was never happy trying to be a tidy and effective homemaker. This role Joe wanted of her, but in vain, for she had neither the time nor the inclination for such chores. Harlow and Hal Rosson had also contracted an unwise marriage, and within a year they were divorced, incompatible lifestyles being cited as the major factor corroding the union. “I kept thinking of her, rolling over the facts of her life in my mind,” Marilyn said later. “It was kind of spooky, and sometimes I thought, am I making this happen? But I don’t think so. We just seemed to have the same spirit or something, I don’t know. I kept wondering if I would die young like her, too.”

  There were deeper differences and they had to do with their belief in what constituted a marriage. For Joe it was very likely manly supremacy: he could never accept that she wanted to continue working as an actress, that she refused to retire, that she wanted to invite friends to their rented home. And she could not understand his shame at her frank enjoyment of her body and her pleasure in others taking pleasure in admiring it. There were, finally, serious storm warnings coming from rumors about Hal Schaefer—that Marilyn’s late evenings were not always or only spent rehearsing, recording or singing. In this regard, Joe’s jealousy and suspicion may not have been without foundation, but Marilyn always spoke of Hal only as a musical mentor.

  Meantime, Joe’s mistress was television: he preferred sports events, but just about anything would suffice to amuse him. Marilyn’s tastes were more ambitious. She craved excitement, company, live diversions; she wanted to see plays, attend concerts. She bought books and longed to discuss poetry and plays with Joe. These left him cold, and he saw no reason to go out and present themselves to “phonies,” who just wanted to exploit them and stare at them. The old differences were there, and constant togetherness made them sharper. That spring, she gave him a gold medal for his watch chain, inscribed with a maxim from Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince: “True love is visible not to the eyes, but to the heart, for eyes may be deceived.” Joe’s response: “What the hell does that mean?”

  The DiMaggios did have in common a tough, street-smart outlook and a suspicion about people’s loyalties. In addition, neither had completed high school, and they both longed to rise above their humble backgrounds by fame and achievement. There was a fierce physical desire binding them, too, but this had been satisfied for two years and could not lighten every sacrifice and burden of normal married life.

  Joe DiMaggio never spoke on the record about Marilyn Monroe, never expressed a word of praise or pride about her, never spoke to historians, journalists or biographers either before or after her death and rarely did he allow her name to be mentioned even by his closest friends. Contrariwise, Marilyn was always open in her respect for Joe—before, during and after the marriage—and she often seized opportunities to praise his appearance. “He has the grace and beauty of a Michelangelo [figure],” Marilyn had said early on. “He moves like a living statue.” This turned out to be prophetic praise, for very soon Joe’s attitude was one of stony diffidence. “He wouldn’t speak to me for days at a time,” she said later that year. “I asked him what was wrong, but he said, ‘Stop nagging me.’ I was permitted to have no visitors unless I was sick.” They were, after two years of romance, deeply bored with one another.

  “When I married him, I wasn’t sure of why I married him,” Marilyn confided later to friends. “I have too many fantasies to be a housewife.” Part of the reason for the legality seems to have been pity for Joe’s grief over the death of a brother, who had drowned in 1953. Joe had wept for days, turning to Marilyn for comfort, and this had given her a brief sense that she was of importance to him. For her part, she wanted the stability and protection of this strong, silent father figure.

  But she could not be satisfied by television, baseball games or variety shows, and when Joe ignored her for them she was thrown straight back to her condition of early childhood neglect. Joe was almost twelve years older, dominant, apparently serene, a man to take control—but he was also, ironically, the absent father of Norma Jeane’s youth, the fantasy man she loved and longed to win over.

  To please Joe, she had to be, from the beginning, a docile child playing at being a married woman—much as she had been with Jim Dougherty. She tried to conform to these expectations, but in so doing she was repeating the situation of her first marriage. Joe wanted Marilyn to be for him only, but this she resented: she also needed to please the crowd. Maybe Irving Berlin was right: “after you get what you want, you don’t want it.” She had wanted to be protected, not possessed.

  On the other hand, Joe may have had his fantasies. One might reasonably ask to what he was attracted if not the woman he had known? To whom did he wish to commit himself after a two-year affair if not the Marilyn Monroe who was by this time even more a public figure, less easy to control? He seemed at times to resent his wife because she was available to him. He distrusted what he could possess and worshiped what eluded him: thus his lifelong attraction (outside marriage) to transient showgirls and, even after their divorce, his unfailing interest in Marilyn. Happy in the pursuit of control, he may have felt he had found the ultimate fantasy in Marilyn, as she felt she had found one in him. But for him, too, Irving Berlin’s words were a fair description.

  Perhaps Joe also believed he could change her, could “retire” the mythic Marilyn as he had retired Joltin’ Joe. He, too, was victimized by fame; he, too, had little identity except as a star, and this he jealously guarded. There was, then, a fateful rivalry between husband and wife. A traditionalist, he resented her inco
me, fame and independence: Joe wanted his wife at home, nicely subordinate. And very near the core of their incompatibility was the fact that he looked to the past for his glory, for the public valuation of his image and compensation for it, while Marilyn looked to the immediate present and the future.

  But she could only do so with the emotional perceptions imposed by her past. Always attempting to be someone better than she believed herself to be, yearning ever to become the accepted, deeply and permanently loved one, Marilyn tried constantly to rise to others’ expectations. She learned to play billiards with Joe on their honeymoon, but her enthusiasm was feigned; she went fishing with him in San Francisco, but this she found painfully tiresome; she tried to learn the fine points of baseball and the details of a television western series, but none of this engaged her. She had been so accustomed to making herself over to please others—Grace Goddard, Jim Dougherty, Fred Karger, Johnny Hyde, Natasha Lytess—that she assumed the role of “Mrs. DiMaggio” automatically.

  Throughout 1954, Marilyn Monroe’s schedule might have seemed daunting to a marathon runner: everything was happening with breathless speed even as the tensions in her private life grew more unendurable. She completed There’s No Business Like Show Business at the end of August and at once began location shooting in New York on The Seven Year Itch. In the latter, Marilyn’s role was that of a nameless Manhattan girl, the unwitting temptress of a nervous married neighbor, played by Tom Ewell, whose wife is away for summer vacation. They flirt, they talk, he worries, but the filmscript ends with virtue preserved (unlike the play, which did not have to cater to the Motion Picture Production Code).

  Everyone connected to Itch was working with all dispatch: George Axelrod, finishing the adaptation of his play for the screen; Billy Wilder, meticulously planning the texture and mood of each scene; and designer William Travilla, completing sketches for all ten of Marilyn’s outfits in one weekend. One he designed for a scene of The Seven Year Itch is among the most famous costumes in movie history: a simple halter-front, écru-colored summer dress with sunburst pleats, whose skirt was to be blown high by a blast of cool air propelled through a sidewalk grating as a subway train roars below.