Marilyn Monroe

by Barbara Leaming

  In an effort to control any damage to her career, Marilyn released a written statement to the press: “My close friends know that my mother is alive. Unbeknown to me as a child, my mother spent many years as an invalid in a state hospital. I was raised in a series of foster homes arranged by a guardian through the County of Los Angeles and I spent more than a year in the Los Angeles Orphans Home. I haven’t known my mother intimately, but since I have become grown and able to help her I have contacted her. I am helping her and want to continue to help her when she needs me.”

  The public seemed to accept Marilyn’s explanation, which appeared in newspapers on May 3. Soon afterward, Marilyn, having saved herself yet again, began preparations for Niagara.

  Marilyn reported to the studio on May 21, 1952, for color and wardrobe tests. When she finished, instead of going directly to the location with Henry Hathaway, her co-star Joseph Cotten, and the rest of the cast and crew, Marilyn flew to New York to spend a few days with Joe DiMaggio. Much of that time was devoted to hanging out with Joe and his entourage at Toots Shor’s saloon on West 51st Street. It was Marilyn’s initiation into a world unlike any she had ever known.

  The sportswriter Red Smith called Toots Shor’s “the mother lodge.” Others described it as “a boys’ club” or “a gymnasium with room service.” Jimmy Cannon called it “a joint where men come to brag when they’re proud and to fight the sorrow when it’s bad.” Shor himself, a fat, garrulous, pink-faced, crinkly-eyed former speakeasy doorman and bouncer, referred to his establishment as “the store.” He and DiMaggio were so close that one regular customer compared them to a pair of “lopsided Siamese twins.”

  On entering Toots Shor’s, the first thing one noticed amid the stifling swirl of cigarette and cigar smoke was the immense circular bar where patrons stood six deep. They were a hard-drinking, boisterous, argumentative, sports-obsessed group. The noise was often deafening. They debated and pontificated, they waved their hands about grandly, they mimicked sports plays, they knocked over a good many high-priced drinks. They engaged in bottle bouts, raucous contests to determine who could guzzle the most booze. In the distance, one caught a glimpse of the large, clamorous, brightly-lit dining room. Sports paintings adorned brick walls. Waiters ferried huge platters of food that almost everyone admitted was terrible. On one occasion, Jackie Gleason actually sent out for several pizzas.

  “Had to do it,” said Gleason as a delivery boy brought the white boxes to his table. “Can’t stand the food here.”

  You didn’t come to Toots Shor’s for the food. You came to soak in the atmosphere. You came to talk sports. You came to rub elbows with Ernest Hemingway at the bar. You came to be affectionately insulted by the proprietor: “Get outa my joint, you lousy, creepy, filthy bum!” For certain people in the sports and newspaper crowd, such abuse was a sign of recognition, a badge of honor. A young sportswriter knew he was on the way up when Shor growled that he was nothing but “a piece of raisin cake.”

  You came to Toots Shor’s to watch DiMaggio and his entourage at Table One, the first to the left of the bar. You didn’t dare approach, however. If you did, Toots really would kick you out. An invisible wall protected Table One from the rest of the dining room. Everyone knew the rules: Look, listen in if you can, but don’t bother the Yankee Clipper. When DiMaggio’s first wife, Dorothy Arnold, divorced him in 1944, one of the problems she cited was that instead of coming home to his West Side penthouse, he spent too many evenings with his pals at Toots Shor’s.

  DiMaggio did like to hang out with the boys. Yet even with close friends, he never said much. Jimmy Cannon, who always sat at Table One, noted that DiMaggio was “more a spectator than a participant in any group.” He was “concealed and withdrawn.” He watched, he listened, sometimes he cleared his throat. When Jackie Gleason, who called him Fungo, joined the group, perhaps he even laughed. Though DiMaggio tried not to show it, his shyness caused him considerable pain. Once, as the Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez regaled the table with funny stories, DiMaggio sadly remarked to Toots, “I wish I could be like Lefty, but I can’t.”

  DiMaggio may have been lonely, but he was rarely alone. Wherever he went, including the trip to Los Angeles to have dinner with Marilyn, he was accompanied by an overweight, stumpy, ill-mannered little man with eyeglasses. George Solotaire, proprietor of the Adelphi Theater Ticket Agency, was DiMaggio’s best friend, gofer, valet, dinner partner, and—though Solotaire had a wife and child in Bronxville—sometime roommate. When Joe was hungry, Solotaire fetched sandwiches from the Stage Delicatessen. When his suits were dirty, Solotaire took them to the cleaners. When he went on a trip, Solotaire packed the suitcase. Solotaire’s feelings were hurt when a newspaper article identified him as nothing more than “a coat hanger for Joe,” but there was truth in the characterization.

  Solotaire played the Little Guy to DiMaggio’s Big Guy. They were inseparable. Patrons of the Stage Delicatessen would watch in fascination as the pair ate dinner in uninterrupted silence. Solotaire arranged dates for DiMaggio and pried girls loose when Joe tired of them, usually after the second outing. Sometimes he even accompanied Joe on a date, pulling out a chair for Joe—not the lady—to sit down. At Table One, his tongue oiled by a few drinks with Toots, Solotaire became talkative.

  “J. P. Morgan once called for tickets to the same show for seven straight Saturday nights,” he would say.

  “How come?” asked Joe, though they all must have heard the story countless times.

  “It wasn’t the music. He had an eye for a broad in the chorus line.”

  Women, in Toots Shor’s world, were broads, or, if you happened to be married to one, the missus. Shor discouraged women from patronizing the store. The maître d’ gave women a chilly reception, but once inside they were treated respectfully. One night, Shor ejected his friend Ted Husing, a sportscaster, for uttering the words “damn” and “hell” in front of some women. A regular customer was permitted to bring the missus once or twice, but no more. To do so would be to lose face. DiMaggio, it was said, avoided bringing women to Shor’s. That is, until he met Marilyn.

  Toots believed a woman’s presence was inhibiting to “our kind of bum.” She spoiled the fun just by being there. But Marilyn was with Joe, so Toots, who fawned on the man, did everything in his power to accommodate her. He gave them a special table of their own, but the invisible wall he put up around it could hardly protect Marilyn from being stared at by other customers.

  DiMaggio was used to being stared at. He was used to having all the other customers at the Stage Delicatessen turn their chairs slightly to observe the baseball god maul a sandwich. He was used to people brushing past his table for no other reason than to get a closer look. Probably he liked the attention. DiMaggio, who, after a game, would scrutinize his own image in the locker-room mirror for as long as it took to get the parting in his pomaded hair just right, was not without a certain narcissism.

  Yet the idea of a bunch of other men looking at Marilyn—his girl—violated his sense of dignity. And dignity was very much what Joe DiMaggio was about. Fearful of embarrassing himself, DiMaggio tried never to display his feelings, but people sensed his carefully-concealed annoyance. Even when Marilyn accompanied him to Yankee Stadium, he was distressed when she chatted with team members in the stands before the game. It may have been the first indication of the fierce possessiveness that was to blight his relationship with Marilyn. Soon there were others.

  He didn’t think much of her movie career. He didn’t respect her ambitions. He didn’t believe she had any talent. He resented the time she devoted to her work. He thought her success was totally based on sex appeal. The moment the studio ceased to find her sexy, her career would be over. And what was she going to do then? He sincerely thought she’d be better off getting married and having kids.

  “I’ll take care of you,” he told her. “Show business isn’t any business for a girl like you.”

  Dorothy Arnold, a minor film actress, had left behind a fai
led career to become the first Mrs. DiMaggio, and Joe couldn’t understand why Marilyn refused to do the same.

  “She’s a plain kid. She’d give up the business if I asked her,” DiMaggio, full of pride, insisted to Jimmy Cannon. “She’d quit the movies in a minute. It means nothing to her.”

  DiMaggio, of all people, should have known what the movies meant to Marilyn. The man who once said, “A ballplayer’s got to be hungry to become a big leaguer, that’s why no boy from a rich family ever made the big leagues,” should have understood why Marilyn wanted so desperately to be a star.

  DiMaggio had once been the most graceful of players. Toots Shor used to say that Joe even looked good when he struck out. DiMaggio’s movements, wrote Jimmy Cannon, seemed to have been “plotted by a choreographer concerned only with the defeat of awkwardness.” But now, in his new job doing pre-and post-game television interviews for the Yankees, the “deft serenity” which he had projected on the baseball field deserted him. As an interviewer, he was rigid and unnatural. His stage fright was painfully obvious, and it was clear that he didn’t like to talk on camera any more than he did off. He read scripted lines clumsily and, though the show went out live, he couldn’t improvise. On one occasion he refused to go on unless the opening cue card, which had been lost, was found. It read, “Hi, I’m Joe DiMaggio. Welcome to the Joe DiMaggio Show.”

  DiMaggio, Toots Shor once said, liked to do things well or not at all. That’s why he quit baseball when his body started to wear out. That’s why his television show was so embarrassing; it felt like a fall from grace. And that, probably, is why his relationship with Marilyn was so painful. He couldn’t seem to understand why it failed to live up to his ideal. DiMaggio had difficulty accepting that in life he might never achieve the perfection he had known in baseball.

  Even when DiMaggio was still playing ball, his “deft serenity” on the field did not necessarily carry over into human relations. DiMaggio had a poor boy’s rage which never left him. He was tormented by fears that he was being taken advantage of. He was constantly testing everyone’s loyalty. He was always on the lookout for what a person or an organization wanted from him. He hated the feeling that he was being used. It was a feeling he seemed to have often. DiMaggio engaged in messy, acrimonious contract disputes that led some journalists to call him arrogant. He was acutely sensitive to what other people thought of him—“I know people who meet me go away saying to themselves that I’m a swell-headed Dago,” Joe once told Toots Shor—but he persisted. Salary was not really the issue. Toots Shor, who knew DiMaggio better than most, put it best: “It wasn’t just the money, it was pride.”

  DiMaggio’s attitude would begin to show itself in Marilyn’s, and be reflected in her actions. They shared a thick streak of suspiciousness, and because Joe was an outsider in Hollywood who wanted nothing from her but love, Marilyn believed she could trust him. DiMaggio may have had little regard for Marilyn’s work, but more and more he would have a significant impact on how she handled her career.

  In June, Marilyn crossed the New York border to Canada for several weeks of location shooting. Before she even had a chance to get started, however, there was concern back at the studio that casting her in Niagara might have been a mistake after all. Zanuck’s upset had nothing to do with whether she could handle the role of Rose Loomis, a faithless wife who plans to kill her husband. Instead, he was puzzled by the disappointing box-office receipts of Don’t Bother to Knock. At Twentieth, Marilyn continued to receive an enormous volume of fan mail, but many of the people who had been drawn to Marilyn’s publicity clearly were not going to see her films. Considering her popularity, she just wasn’t drawing the audiences she should. As a businessman, Zanuck knew that something was very wrong. He decided to discuss the problem with Howard Hawks, who had previously expressed reservations about the kind of roles in which Marilyn was being cast.

  “Howard, we ought to have a great big star here and we’re losing money,” said Zanuck. “What the hell is happening?”

  “Darryl,” Hawks replied, “you’re making realism with a very unreal girl. She’s a completely storybook character. And you’re trying to make real movies.”

  “What should she do?”

  Hawks suggested that Marilyn would be much more effective in musical comedy than in gritty melodramas like Don’t Bother to Knock and Niagara. Specifically, he mentioned a property that Twentieth already owned. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, based on a novel by Anita Loos, had been a big hit on Broadway starring Carol Channing. Twentieth had originally purchased the property as a potential Betty Grable vehicle. Hawks insisted that Marilyn would be perfect as the gold-digger Lorelei Lee.

  “She couldn’t do that,” said Zanuck, referring to a role that required singing and dancing.

  “The hell she can’t,” Hawks replied.

  Zanuck, unconvinced, asked who Hawks would use for the other girl in the story. Hawks said it wouldn’t be a problem to borrow his friend Jane Russell from Howard Hughes. If Marilyn Monroe’s name on a marquee didn’t bring in audiences, Russell’s certainly would. Zanuck, his fears somewhat put to rest, asked Hawks to direct Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Yet he remained nervous that Marilyn wouldn’t be able to carry it off.

  As it happened, by the time Marilyn received her next assignment she was already instinctively moving her performance in Niagara away from the “realism” that Hawks thought all wrong for her. From the moment she began her first scenes with Joseph Cotten and Jean Peters, it was obvious that Marilyn was over-playing, making her murderess anything but real. Her role in Niagara was bigger, flashier, and more glamorous than anything Marilyn had done before, affording her an opportunity to push her sexuality to the extreme. Again and again, Marilyn seemed to calculate just how far she could go; then she went several steps further. Her Rose Loomis is larger than life, almost a cartoon of a woman. Everything about Rose—her walk, her husky voice, the tightness of her scarlet dress—is exaggerated. She is a figure in a nightmare. Marilyn might have been demolished playing opposite the skilled, experienced Joseph Cotten; instead, her gaudy, over-the-top performance blasted him off the screen. Henry Hathaway, studying the rushes, realized that it was impossible to take one’s eyes off her.

  Hathaway, notorious for shouting and cursing at actors on the set, became a teddy bear with Marilyn. He worried that she was driving herself too hard. In addition to her work on the film, she accepted a great many requests for interviews and publicity photographs. It seemed never to occur to her to say no to the studio publicity office, though the long hours she spent on these assignments devoured the very minimal time she had to rest. Hathaway was horrified by how much was being demanded of her, and by how oddly alone and unprotected she seemed.

  Finally, Hathaway asked Marilyn where her agent was. Didn’t she have someone to tell these guys to lay off while she was working? Marilyn explained that since Johnny Hyde’s death, no one at William Morris, where she remained under contract, seemed to remember that she was alive. Hathaway, in a stern but fatherly way, advised Marilyn that she had better understand that after Niagara, all this was going to get much worse. He told her how she was coming across in the rushes. Predicting that the film was going to be a very big hit for her, Hathaway advised Marilyn to get some help, and he urged her to do it before the roller-coaster ride began. The kind of success that awaited her was not something she was going to be able to handle on her own.

  When the company moved back to Los Angeles, Marilyn took a six-month lease on a little house in the Hollywood Hills, not far from the place where Gladys had once tried to make her fantasy of creating a home for herself and her little girl come true. Now, like her mother, Marilyn seemed to find the responsibility of even a rented house an unbearable psychological burden. Insisting that she wasn’t ready for it at a moment when she had so much work to do, she moved to a suite at the Bel Air Hotel.

  By this time, as Jimmy Cannon wrote, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio had become the “whole country’s pets,”
endlessly photographed and written about. But as Marilyn was beginning to recognize, the truth of their relationship was considerably more complex than the idealized version in the press. While it was wonderful finally to have a strong, dependable figure like Joe in her corner, the fact remained that he resented her work. And while in the beginning Marilyn had brought Joe into her life as the man who was going to tell the world that she was a good girl, lately he’d also been sending out a very different message. Much as Joe loved Marilyn and wanted to marry her, part of him remained very critical and disapproving. At times, he seemed to disparage almost everything she did. He was determined to change her. He complained that her clothes were immodest. He complained that the parts she played were vulgar. When Marilyn flew to Atlantic City for the premiere of Monkey Business, Joe exploded over a particularly revealing publicity photograph of her in a low-cut dress. Unwittingly, Joe activated Marilyn’s most deeply-rooted fears and insecurities. Since childhood she’d been intent on proving that she wasn’t bad, yet here was Joe, apparently with the best will in the world, constantly suggesting the very opposite.

  Marilyn began to pull back from the relationship, but Joe wasn’t about to give up. He was in California with her every chance he had. His ten-year-old son, Joe, Jr., whom he adored, attended the Black Rock Military Academy in Los Angeles, and he wanted Marilyn to get to know the boy. That made Marilyn think that perhaps she’d been wrong; if a man wants you to spend time with his children, he must respect you. So Marilyn happily spent several hours at the hotel pool with Joe, Jr., who found her irresistible. Children always loved Marilyn, because she spoke to them as equals. But the day had an unhappy ending. When Joe, Jr.’s mother read a newspaper account of the visit, she went wild.