Marilyn Monroe

by Barbara Leaming

  Suddenly, Marilyn was desperate to be cast in Guys and Dolls. Marlon Brando, who’d been filming Désirée on the Fox lot, had visited Marilyn on the set of There’s No Business Like Show Business. He told her he’d agreed to star in Joe Mankiewicz’s film version of the Broadway musical.

  “Maybe I’ll do it too,” Marilyn suggested. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  “Be nice,” said Brando.

  So Marilyn urged Feldman to persuade Samuel Goldwyn to request her on a loanout from Twentieth. Feldman perceived, and Marilyn appeared to understand, that if Goldwyn did ask for her, she’d have to sign with Twentieth before Darryl Zanuck even considered loaning her out. He promptly arranged for Marilyn to talk to Goldwyn on the phone about Guys and Dolls.

  “I’d rather do it than breathe!” she told Goldwyn.

  On September 8, 1954, a loud television set could be heard throughout the cottage where Joe and Marilyn lived. Upstairs, in the master bedroom, two assistants were preparing Marilyn for a 9 p.m. flight. They’d been at it for hours. A limousine was coming in a few minutes. Hugh French was supposed to meet her at the airport.

  Her bags were already packed with clothing which Twentieth had lent her for New York. Marilyn’s own closets were surprisingly bare. Her personal wardrobe consisted of little besides some snug sweaters and numerous pairs of tight, tapered Jax slacks with ankle-baring cuffs and a rear zipper—and, of course, the mink coat Joe had given her for Christmas. The other clothes Marilyn wore in public were largely borrowed from the studio.

  Much of the day, a Wednesday, had been devoted to clothing. Marilyn had rushed through last-minute costume fittings for The Seven Year Itch. At the moment, she was being outfitted in a travel costume that was supposed to cling to her like a second skin. It consisted of a sheer wool beige dress, the top wrapped snugly around her chest and tied in a bow. It was exceedingly uncomfortable.

  After hours of nips and tucks the effect was nearly perfect. No ordinary person would possibly wear such an outfit on a cross-country flight. Marilyn intended to undress as soon as she had run the gauntlet of photographers to the privacy of her sleeper. Before the plane landed, assistants would dress her and do her hair and makeup all over again.

  Finally, Marilyn slipped into a matching beige coat with a beige fur collar and trim. Then she rushed downstairs in high heels, having neglected to put on stockings, telling herself that since she’d probably remove her stockings on the plane anyway, there was no reason to wear them in the first place. She approached the dark, noisy room where Joe and a friend were staring into the dull gray glow of a TV set. The sight was painfully familiar to her by now. Next to Joe’s chair was the small, wooden folding tray on which he liked to eat dinner.

  After eight months, this is what her marriage had come to. Joe watched TV. He played golf. He went to the track. He played poker. He complained to Jimmy Cannon that life in Los Angeles was dull. Soon after they were married, he’d asked Marilyn to abandon her career and move with him to San Francisco. She promised to think about it. Meanwhile, he was unhappy that she had turned their home into a sort of Grand Central Station. The phone and doorbell rang at all hours. His ulcer acted up. Filled with resentment, he’d retreat behind a wall of silence. Sometimes he didn’t utter a word to Marilyn for days at a time. He grew particularly upset when studio personnel invaded the house.

  Marilyn lingered in the doorway. When Joe didn’t say anything, she asked how she looked.

  “Nice,” Joe snapped.

  Tension hovered in the smoky air. Marilyn’s assistants had just gone home in anticipation of joining her at the airport, and Joe often made a scene after her visitors left. This evening, to make matters worse, Marilyn had asked Joe to accompany her in the limousine. Marilyn wanted him to put in an appearance at the airport to counter rumors that her marriage was disintegrating.

  Joe and Marilyn were almost never seen in public together. Joe, who despised Hollywood publicity, refused to attend industry events. Off the baseball field, he didn’t like to be photographed; he preferred not to be observed. On the rare occasions when the couple dined out, they ate in grim silence. Marilyn might as well have been George Solotaire.

  Several days previously, an attempt to permit photographers to get an affectionate shot of Joe and Marilyn together had backfired. As it had been noted in the press that Joe never visited the set of There’s No Business Like Show Business, Marilyn invited him to watch her shoot the big musical number “Heat Wave.” A sullen, sweaty DiMaggio, in a dark blue suit, watched from the shadows as his wife strutted about in a plumed headdress and a tight, skimpy two-piece outfit that left her midriff exposed. As she sang and danced, Marilyn’s eyes darted nervously in Joe’s direction. Sensing his disapproval and disgust, Marilyn stumbled and fell. Afterward, photographers asked Joe to pose with his wife. He refused, insisting he wasn’t dressed properly. Marilyn tried to conceal her hurt when Joe later agreed to be photographed with Ethel Merman.

  Marilyn was relieved that Joe had agreed to ride with her to the airport, though she worried how he’d react to the news that they were to stop at Hedda Hopper’s house. The gossip columnist was so powerful that Twentieth could hardly refuse her an interview with Marilyn before she left for New York. Joe declined to go inside. “I’ll knock on the door when it’s time to go,” he said, obviously brooding about the fact that he was to be the principal topic of conversation.

  Indeed, hardly was Marilyn through the door when Hedda Hopper asked, “What’s this about you and Joe not getting on?”

  At the airport, Joe, eager to put the question to rest, was photographed giving Marilyn a farewell kiss. As Hugh French escorted Marilyn onto the plane, much in her life remained unsettled. Marilyn was playing Feldman and Greene against one another. She was waiting to see what each could do for her. One man had to lose, but either way Marilyn won.

  In the past few days, she’d talked a lot to Feldman about Guys and Dolls. Marilyn had even mentioned it to Hedda Hopper, at the risk of being embarrassed later if she didn’t get the part. At Marilyn’s behest, Feldman had dined with Goldwyn. He’d called six times to reiterate Marilyn’s interest. Finally, he’d arranged for her to meet Goldwyn after work one evening. Just before she went to New York, Feldman had reported that Goldwyn was one hundred per cent enthusiastic. But she also needed the director’s approval. While Marilyn was in the east, she hoped to plead her case to Mankiewicz. She had not seen him since All About Eve and she wanted to show him how much she had changed in four years. If, as Feldman anticipated, Goldwyn made an offer, Marilyn would have no choice but to sign her new contract at Twentieth immediately. That would put Greene out of the running before he’d even started.

  While Marilyn waited to be cast in Guys and Dolls, she was secretly talking to Greene to see what he came up with. In New York, she expected to hear from him about his progress. Guys and Dolls was Marilyn’s priority; but if Goldwyn failed to make an offer, as soon as Marilyn completed The Seven Year Itch she hoped to jump ship—both from Twentieth and from Famous Artists. In other words, though no one but Marilyn knew it yet, everybody’s fate depended on whether Feldman could get her Guys and Dolls.

  In New York, more than sixty photographers and cameramen, tipped off by the studio, were waiting at Idlewild Airport when Marilyn emerged from the plane. She posed on the ramp for nearly forty-five minutes as airport employees whistled and cheered. When fans broke through the gray wooden barricades, police ushered Marilyn into the terminal building.

  Her arrival made headlines. “MARILYN WIGGLES IN,” declared the front page of the New York World Telegram. Crowds gathered outside the St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue, where more police barricades had been set up. In an eleventh-floor suite, Marilyn sipped tea laced with vodka. Excited by her reception, she pressed Hugh French to set up a meeting with Mankiewicz. When she discovered that the director had flown to Los Angeles for a few days, Marilyn insisted on calling him there.

  “You see, I’ve become a star,”
Marilyn proudly told Mankiewicz.

  The director was unimpressed. He talked to her, she thought, as though she were a piece of trash. “Put on some more clothes, Marilyn, and stop moving your ass so much,” he replied.

  Despite the insult, Marilyn struggled to win him over. Finally, Mankiewicz cut off the conversation with the news that the part of Miss Adelaide had already been cast. Refusing to give up, Marilyn instructed Feldman to keep after Goldwyn and get her the role.

  Mankiewicz’s unkind words were a brutal reminder of why Marilyn hated Hollywood. By contrast, Milton Greene saw Marilyn as she wished to be seen. On Friday, September 10, at his cavernous studio on Lexington Avenue, he photographed her as a ballerina. Sensing Marilyn’s discomfort, he loosened her up with Dom Perignon. When her snowy white Anne Klein costume didn’t fit, he refused to panic, telling her simply to hold it up against herself. In a series of images that brilliantly captured the conflict in Marilyn’s personality between the innocent and the lurid, she posed on a wicker chair before a vast black backdrop, a partly-naked ballerina with incongruous red lipstick and toe-nail polish.

  On Sunday morning, the day before Marilyn was to begin The Seven Year Itch, the phone rang in Greene’s converted barn in Weston, Connecticut. It was DiMaggio. He had flown to New York and wanted the photographer and his wife to have dinner with him. Marilyn, after all, was considering turning over the responsibility for her business and professional dealings to a man she hardly knew. Any husband, not least one as innately distrustful as Joe, would want to check the guy out.

  That night, as many as a thousand fans waited on East 55th Street. When Marilyn left the hotel, she was wearing a fitted, black wool suit with a large fabric rose stuffed into the plunging neckline, presumably in deference to her husband. The crowd on the sidewalk was huge, and Joe seemed to be wondering how he was going to get from the top of the steps to the car. A great many people wanted something from Marilyn—an autograph, a photo, whatever. That’s why Joe felt compelled to protect her. And that’s why he and Greene spent an ostensibly innocuous social evening together in the back room at El Morocco. Joe needed to see exactly what he was dealing with.

  When Joe married Marilyn, a bookie at Toots Shor’s laid eight-to-five odds that they’d separate before their first anniversary. No one dared mention that to Joe, yet the crowd at Shor’s seemed to be watching and waiting. The marriage simply did not seem meant to last. One evening, the DiMaggios were to have to dinner at Shor’s with Sam Shaw and his wife. But when Marilyn arrived from the set, Joe became enraged at the very sight of her. It was obvious that she wasn’t wearing panties beneath her form-fitting skirt. Joe was fiercely determined to put a stop to this habit of hers, so Marilyn was sent off to the ladies room with Ann Shaw. At length, a pair of panties was delivered and Marilyn dutifully put them on before rejoining Joe and Sam at the table.

  Shaw had become friendly with Joe when he and Jimmy Cannon collaborated on a DiMaggio documentary. Currently, he was doing the still photographs for The Seven Year Itch. Knowledgeable, well-read, up on all the latest cultural phenomena, he had a reputation as a man with good ideas. When he talked, Feldman, Skouras, and many others in Hollywood listened intently. When Shaw first read the script of The Seven Year Itch, Feldman’s ears had perked up at something he said. In 1941, Shaw had photographed some sailors with their girls at the Steeplechase in Coney Island for Friday magazine; the cover showed one of the girls, her skirt caught in a gust of wind. Shaw suggested replicating the image in The Seven Year Itch. No one could have suspected that the picture of Marilyn cooling herself over a subway grating would become famous long before the movie opened. Even less could they have suspected that filming it would trigger the breakup of her marriage.

  Joe was at Shor’s with George Solotaire and Jimmy Cannon when the columnist Walter Winchell came up to Table One and announced that he was going over to Lexington Avenue to watch Billy Wilder shoot. Tongue in cheek, Winchell said he’d heard there was this girl named Marilyn Monroe in the picture. Did Joe want to tag along?

  Pictures and stories about Marilyn had dominated the New York papers for days. On Monday, midtown traffic had been held up for hours as the actress, wearing a scanty slip, filmed a street scene at an East 61st Street townhouse. The Daily News dubbed her “a roadblock named Marilyn Monroe.” The Journal-American announced that Marilyn would be filming late on Wednesday night outside the Trans-Lux, 52nd Street Theater: “There won’t be any admission charge when Marilyn appears for the shooting of street sequences for her new film The Seven Year Itch. Miss Monroe’s costume is expected to be more revealing than the one she wore yesterday to stop the traffic.”

  About fifteen hundred fans filled klieg-lit Lexington Avenue at an hour when it was usually deserted. Others watched from rooftops. There were police barricades everywhere. DiMaggio, unable to see his wife, was about to turn back, but Winchell insisted on asking a policeman for help. No sooner did the cop spot DiMaggio than a contingent of police cleared a path for the baseball god. “Higher! Higher!” the crowd roared. The cops led DiMaggio to the front, where flashbulbs popped incessantly as photographers took stills of Marilyn. She wore a sheer white, billowy, sleeveless, backless dress and stood over a grating. The actor Tom Ewell was nearby.

  “Roll ’em!” called Billy Wilder. As a train passed beneath—actually a wind-blowing machine manned by special effects people—Marilyn’s skirts flew up to her shoulders. She wore no stockings. A dark patch of pubic hair was visible through two pairs of sheer white nylon panties. “More, more, Marilyn!” onlookers shouted. “Let’s see more!” There was oddly little pretense of keeping people quiet. On the contrary, the numerous takes seemed calculated to work up the crowd and to guarantee that magazines and newspapers would print a great many pictures of Marilyn in her panties. The entire evening was a spectacular publicity stunt. At length, the sequence would be reshot in the studio.

  For DiMaggio, the night was intensely real. He’d never expected anything like this. The gift of anticipation, apparently, had abandoned him. He saw Marilyn’s skirt fly up again and again. He listened to men hoot and whistle at his wife. He watched the camera seem to focus on her crotch. He heard one wag exclaim that he thought she was a real blonde. Finally Dead Pan Joe could hide his feelings no more. Turbulent emotions overcame his ever-present fear of embarrassing himself. “I’ve had it!” Joe hollered as he turned on his heel and walked off. Winchell followed.

  Marilyn, no doubt anticipating a terrible scene later, was frantic. She confronted Wilder. “I hope all these extra takes are not for your Hollywood friends to enjoy at a private party.”

  The filming went on for five hours.

  Jimmy Cannon once observed that Toots Shor always seemed to be a customer in his own store; he guzzled more booze, had more laughs, and stayed up later than any regular. Toots was still there when DiMaggio came in. The gargantuan proprietor trudged across the saloon to Table One and ordered a round. His voice was loud and obnoxious. Unfortunately, when Joe disclosed what had happened, Toots said exactly the wrong thing. “Aww, Joe,” he growled affectionately. “What can you expect when you marry a whore?”

  That remark ended the close friendship of Joe DiMaggio and Toots Shor. Joe, seething, marched back to the St. Regis. In the pre-dawn hours, angry shouts issued from Suite 1105–1106. Other guests on the floor were prevented from sleeping. Marilyn knew that her marriage had ended that night.

  Scheduled to return to the studio on Friday, Marilyn flew home with Joe immediately. Dressed in black, her hair tousled, she slept most of the way. At Los Angeles International Airport, she refused photographers’ requests to remove her sunglasses. Marilyn put up a good front in public, but when she and Joe reached the cottage, she exiled him from the upstairs bedroom. Joe sheepishly took up residence on the ground floor.

  Hardly was Marilyn back when the telephone rang. Feldman was desperate to talk to her before she saw a news item announcing that Mankiewicz had cast Vivian Blaine in Guys and D
olls; Blaine had played Miss Adelaide on Broadway. Feldman assured Marilyn he’d done everything to get her the part. He promised there would be other terrific roles. He’d heard great things from Billy Wilder and knew The Seven Year Itch was going to be a triumph for her.

  Marilyn wasn’t really listening anymore. The conversation had spelled Feldman’s doom. The moment he said he’d lost Guys and Dolls, he was finished. Marilyn was ready to clean house. As far as she was concerned, Feldman, like DiMaggio, was on his way out of her life. The only difference was that Marilyn needed to maintain the semblance of a cordial relationship with Feldman, who, after all, was the producer of her current film.

  Eleven days later, Joe was due back in New York for the World Series. He didn’t want to lose Marilyn. Struggling to patch things up, he admitted he was wrong to be the way he was. “I regret it but I cannot help it,” said Joe, stiffly. He was devastated when Marilyn told him she wanted a divorce. She had made up her mind and that was that. She planned to see a lawyer while he was away.

  In New York, Joe stayed with George Solotaire at the Hotel Madison. Covering the World Series, he gave no hint that he was in turmoil. Now and then an associate would ask about the missus, and Joe matter-of-factly indicated that she was fine. He was no more curt or taciturn than usual. Jimmy Cannon did, however, notice that when the Series moved to Cleveland, Joe seemed in a hurry to get home. Frantic to talk to Marilyn, he caught the first flight out.

  As DiMaggio came up the driveway on the morning of October 2, only the messy black Cadillac convertible was outside. But when he let himself in, he discovered little Sidney Skolsky having breakfast with Marilyn in the dining room. The hypochondriacal newspaper columnist, who claimed to know every doctor in town, shared her passion for pills. At Schwab’s, Marilyn was notorious for the number of doctors who, apparently unaware of each other, signed her prescriptions. At the moment, however, endometriosis was causing her pain so severe that no quantity of pills seemed to help.