Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  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 roun
d 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 d
irectors.

  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.