Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  Before meeting Joe in San Francisco, Marilyn arrived in Los Angeles for an appointment with Charles Feldman and Loyd Wright to discuss her career options. While in town, she saw Joe Jr. and took him to dinner at Romanoff’s, in Beverly Hills. She also saw Sidney Skolsky and told him, rather matter-of-factly—and her recent love letter to Joe notwithstanding—that she had every intention of marrying Arthur Miller. Taken aback by her proclamation, Skolsky reminded her that she’d just returned from her honeymoon with DiMaggio. How, he asked, had she come up with this latest bombshell? She explained that before marrying Joe, she’d obtained a post office box so she and Miller could correspond.

  During her trip to Japan, Miller had sent her a note suggesting that in the near future he anticipated leaving his wife. Marilyn assured Skolsky she had far more in common with the playwright than she did with the ballplayer. Joe didn’t want her to be a movie star. He wanted her with him at all times. He didn’t approve of the women she portrayed on film. He didn’t like it when she had to perform a romantic scene and kiss the leading man. He didn’t like anything about Hollywood or the studio system. “Show business isn’t any business for a girl like you,” he’d maintained. How could she possibly stay with Joe? Skolsky listened in semidisbelief. Hadn’t Marilyn known all this when she married DiMaggio?

  Although at this point Joe knew nothing of Arthur Miller, he couldn’t help but sense Marilyn’s urgent desire to resume her film career. He took it as a personal rejection. When she rejoined him in San Francisco, he accorded her the same “silent treatment” he’d so often bestowed upon Dorothy Arnold. He’d done it before with Marilyn, but on this occasion, he carried it a step further. He began sleeping in a separate bedroom at the Beach Street house. Marilyn rebelled, telling her husband she knew it was chic for a husband and wife to maintain separate sleeping quarters, but she was an “old-fashioned” girl—she believed a married couple should share the same bedroom and bed. When DiMaggio offered the lame excuse that his present bed was too confining and that he had trouble sleeping, she hired a carpenter to construct a bed seven feet wide and eight feet in length. He resumed sleeping by her side.

  In fact, it was Marilyn, much more than Joe, who had trouble sleeping. When she’d torn a ligament in her leg during the production of River of No Return, a Canadian physician placed her on Demerol to help relieve the pain. The pain had long subsided, but she’d become addicted to the drug. To combat her insomnia, she procured a prescription for Nembutal. She was currently addicted to both medications, giving DiMaggio something new to vent about. If her profession caused her such pain and anxiety, perhaps she ought to consider doing something else. After all, he reasoned, he’d quit baseball when his injuries became too acute to continue. Marilyn’s solution was simply to get hold of more pills. Sidney Skolsky visited from Los Angeles and brought along a satchel of pharmaceuticals. Marilyn dubbed Sidney her “pill pal.”

  Possibly to appease Joe, if for no other reason, Marilyn told him she’d been thinking of going to school in New York to study history and literature. “I’d love to learn how things get to be the way they are,” she said. They could move to Manhattan and start a family while she pursued adult extension courses at Columbia University or NYU. But later that month, Modern Screen magazine named her one of Hollywood’s five most popular actresses—along with Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly—and Photoplay presented her with a Best Actress award for work she’d done in 1953. She and DiMaggio turned up in Los Angeles in March to collect the latter prize, and while there, they sat down with Charles Feldman to discuss further the ongoing negotiations with Fox.

  DiMaggio advised Feldman to insist on a partial “creative control” clause in Marilyn’s next contract. Such a clause, not uncommon in the case of leading box office names, would at least entitle her to exercise a certain degree of control in the selection and scripting of future films. Although Marilyn’s existing seven-year contract could not be completely overturned, it could at least be altered to include raises in salary and a modification of certain individual clauses.

  True to his word, Joe supported his wife financially during the period she remained out of work, deciding what to do next. One of the obstacles he encountered, as he told George Solotaire, was that Marilyn was a “bog of contradictions.” It was nearly impossible to make concrete plans with her because she constantly shifted directions. She was prepared to go back to school one minute, and the next she had an entirely different idea, one of which entailed starting her own film production company. She and Joe explored the possibility.

  From DiMaggio’s perspective, it wasn’t an ideal solution, but it seemed preferable to being an indentured slave at Fox and having to comply with the whims and fancies of various studio bosses. The main problem with such an undertaking was that it demanded far more knowledge of the film industry than either DiMaggio or Monroe possessed. It might also call for the investment of large sums of private capital, an eventuality that almost certainly didn’t appeal to DiMaggio. Moreover, if Marilyn attempted to start her own film production company, she would no doubt face legal action on the part of Fox, which would attempt to invoke the seven-year contract she’d signed with them long before she emerged as a full-blown star.

  The couple spent much of the spring in San Francisco, Marilyn seated in a back booth of the DiMaggio restaurant while Joe stood in front greeting customers, many of whom came in with the hope of spotting Marilyn. “She used to sit back there and read, waiting for Joe to finish up,” said Dom DiMaggio. “She was reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She told me she’d started it months earlier but couldn’t get a handle on it. She always had a notebook with her as well, which she filled with lists. She had a list of actors, a list of foods, a list of cities around the world she planned on visiting, and a list of movies and plays she wanted to see. I recall her making a list of composers and their best-known pieces of music: Bach, Bartok, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mozart, Ravel, Stravinsky. She asked me to name my favorite composer. I told her I wasn’t up on composers. ‘I thought all Italians loved music,’ she said. ‘You know—wine, women and song. Or is that a myth? I’m beginning to think Italian men are all cranky and overpossessive, like Joe, and the rest is just a lot of self-promotion.’ I’m not sure what I said in response. I didn’t tell Joe what she’d said. I didn’t want to upset him any more than he already was.”

  Over spring break, Joe Jr. visited Marilyn and his father in San Francisco. As usual, Joe DiMaggio had little to do with his son, leaving him in Marilyn’s care. “Marilyn and I went on long walks together,” recalled Joey. “She wore dark glasses that fooled no one. On a few occasions we were followed. One evening we walked to Coit Tower, a well-known tourist site shrouded in fog and mist, and some weird-looking homeless character trailed after us. We visited the San Francisco Zoo, and this creepy guy shadowed us until we managed to lose him in the House of Reptiles. Another day we drove to San Mateo and walked to Seal Point, which is in a park with miles of hiking and biking trails. She took me to the Cliff House for lunch, a landmark eatery in an old chateau, and made me promise not to tell my father because he’d be insulted we hadn’t dined in the family restaurant.”

  At least one harrowing episode took place during Joey’s stay in San Francisco. Late one night he heard a loud argument coming from the top floor of the house. “I was asleep downstairs,” he said, “and I woke up to the sound of my father and Marilyn screaming at each other. I couldn’t make out the words, but it had all the makings of a violent argument. After a few minutes I heard Marilyn race down the stairs and out the front door and my father running after her. I looked out the window, and I could see Marilyn, in a bathrobe, heading away from the house. My father caught up to her and grabbed her by the hair and sort of half-dragged her back to the house. She was trying to fight him off but couldn’t. The next morning Marilyn looked ragged. Her eyes were all red and her face swollen. My father wasn’t around. I don’t think Marilyn realized I’d witnessed the episode. I asked her what hap
pened. ‘Nothing happened, Joey,’ she said. ‘Everything’s fine, just fine.’ ”

  On April 14 Twentieth Century–Fox notified Loyd Wright and Charles Feldman that they were once again lifting Marilyn Monroe’s suspension. They indicated they would be sending a new version of the contract for Marilyn to sign, with a sizable increase in salary. The studio had canceled plans to go forward with The Girl in Pink Tights, and instead would dispatch a script for a musical, There’s No Business Like Show Business. Feldman passed on the news to Marilyn in San Francisco. She considered the offer a concession on the part of Fox’s executives, a victory of sorts, for which she had Joe DiMaggio to thank.

  • • •

  Resigned to the fact that Marilyn could not and would not give up her career, Joe returned to Los Angeles with her in late April. In search of a more spacious residence than the apartment on North Doheny, they rented an Elizabethan cottage for $700 a month at 508 North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills, several blocks from the house she’d shared with Johnny Hyde in 1950. Soon after moving in, Joe and Marilyn drove an hour to visit Vic Masi and his wife at their vacation home in the San Fernando Valley. Vic, a radio sports broadcaster, had known Joe since the late 1940s. The two couples went to a dinner club near Toluca Lake, and, to Joe’s amazement, the performer at the club that evening was Dorothy Arnold. Following her set, Dorothy stopped by Joe and Marilyn’s table and had a drink with them. It marked the first and only time she and Monroe ever came face-to-face.

  On April 30 Joe squired Marilyn to the Hollywood opening of River of No Return. Confronted by reporters on leaving the theater, Marilyn sputtered, “Joe and I want many little DiMaggios.” DiMaggio turned away. He’d become little more than an appendage to his wife’s fame. As one of his biographers saw it, “She’d broken through his wall of invincibility, that aloofness of the Yankee Clipper.” She’d bewitched him. She’d obliterated his spirit. The Great DiMaggio had become subservient to his wife’s overbearing psychological needs. He must have known by this point in time that there would be no “little DiMaggios,” at least not with Marilyn. He must also have realized, without wanting to admit it, that though he maintained a brave front, his future with Marilyn was very much in doubt.

  The new contract and the script for There’s No Business Like Show Business, by husband-and-wife screenwriting team Henry and Phoebe Ephron, arrived by messenger at Famous Artists, Charles Feldman’s agency. He sent them over to North Palm Drive. Marilyn grabbed the packet and started reading the contract. The increase in salary guarantee was clearly notated, but as Marilyn rifled through the document, she noticed that there was no creative-control provision. Not a word. Nothing. Once again the studio had stiffed her, reduced her to what she’d always been to them: a sexy body and a beautiful head of sugar-candy blond hair.

  Marilyn turned her attention to the Show Business script. It reeked of the same exploitive vapidity as Pink Tights. Taking advantage of her status as “the hottest property in Hollywood,” Fox had fashioned an all-glitter, no-substance production that called for Marilyn to do little more than torch the screen with a song or two and otherwise wriggle around in a selection of all-too revealing show costumes.

  Outraged by both script and contract, Marilyn informed Charles Feldman that she had no intention of going back to work, not under these paltry circumstances. Show Business had fewer production values than Pink Tights; the script was beyond insipid. And the contract constituted an affront, a slap in the face—it was an attack on her very being. Marilyn had no interest in abstract, impersonal concepts. For her, everything was either completely meaningless or completely personal. This was personal.

  In her memoir, Marilyn wrote: “I wanted to be treated as a human being who had earned a few rights since my orphanage days . . . When the rest of the world was looking at someone called Marilyn Monroe, Mr. Zanuck, in whose hands my future rested, was able to see only Norma Jeane—and treat me as Norma Jeane had always been treated.”

  Feldman called Zanuck and conveyed some of his star client’s grievances. The following day, he contacted Monroe. Zanuck, he said, had sweetened the pot. If she agreed to do Show Business, he promised to give her the hit Broadway comedy, The Seven Year Itch, as her next picture. As for the contract—according to Zanuck, it wasn’t negotiable. Take it or leave it. They’d bent over backward to appease her, but they weren’t going to bend any further. Marilyn must sign, or the studio would place her back on suspension—and if she went back on suspension, the studio would have to consider taking legal action against her. The cost of a legal defense team could be prohibitive, and there was no guarantee that in the end she would prevail.

  Feldman felt she should sign. And Joe? Joe surprised everyone. He, too, recommended she append her signature. They’d allotted her a substantial raise. That counted for something. To continue to hold out would only result in a hardening of positions. What was the point of that? DiMaggio told George Solotaire he couldn’t take it any longer. Not now, at any rate. He’d lost the battle but not necessarily the war. He still felt he could one day convince Marilyn to stop making films and start making babies.

  Chapter 9

  WHAT JOE IS TO ME is a man whose looks, and character, I love with all my heart.” Marilyn Monroe’s words, as recorded in the pages of her personal memoir, were countered by a more cautionary reflection in the same document. “We knew,” she wrote, “it wouldn’t be an easy marriage.” It wasn’t.

  The first public rumblings of trouble in the DiMaggio-Monroe union coincided with the start of rehearsals for There’s No Business Like Show Business in mid-May 1954. Earl Wilson ran an item in his newspaper column suggesting that all was not what it should be at 508 North Palm Drive. Louella Parsons followed with a similarly ominous item.

  Jimmy Cannon, Joe’s sportswriter pal in New York, called the ballplayer to get his side of the story. DiMaggio denied that he and Marilyn were having marital problems, yet he described his life in Hollywood as “dull.” He claimed he tried not to interfere with his wife’s work. “I don’t resent her fame,” he insisted. “Marilyn was working long before she met me—and for what? What has she got after all these years? She works like a dog. She’s up at five or six in the morning and doesn’t get through until seven at night. We have a bite to eat, watch a little television, and go to bed.” Their meals, he hastened to add, consisted primarily of frozen dinners or take-out Italian.

  Whatever domestic fantasies DiMaggio might have entertained when he first married Marilyn had long been dashed. When he complained to her that they no longer spent a lot of time together, she reminded him that he’d been the one who pressured her to sign on for the film. She’d been willing to hold out and return with him to San Francisco, but he’d advised her to get on with it. It wasn’t her fault she had to spend the entire day in rehearsals. She also reminded him that Natasha Lytess was still coaching her, and since he detested Lytess, she felt compelled to work with her at the studio rather than to invite her back to their house.

  Technically speaking, Marilyn wasn’t incorrect. It wasn’t so much that DiMaggio wanted her to do the film, rather that he had simply given up hope of convincing his wife to walk away from the entire Hollywood scene. He felt lost, trapped by his own jealousy and insecurity. Marilyn had invaded his bloodstream like a virus. She wasn’t Dorothy Arnold, a woman willing to trade in her identity and personal aspirations to be supported and bolstered by her celebrity spouse. And then, too, DiMaggio could no longer claim title to be what he’d once been, the star center fielder for the New York Yankees. He could proclaim himself “the greatest living ballplayer,” but he no longer played ball. While Marilyn, for her part, had been unofficially crowned Hollywood’s reigning queen. Even if she had married “a commoner,” she had no intention of abdicating the throne.

  For the most part, DiMaggio passed his days at home, glued to the TV set, nervously smoking his way through one pack of cigarettes after another, waiting for Marilyn to come home. When she arrived after work, she a
nd Joe invariably argued. He demanded a minute-by-minute account of how she’d spent the day. What had she done? With whom had she spoken? DiMaggio wouldn’t stop. Weary as she was, he kept at her. When she didn’t respond the way he wanted her to, he became physical; on one occasion he ripped an earring from her lobe and scratched her face. The tension between them made Marilyn increasingly resort to sedatives. Yet despite the sedatives, she couldn’t sleep at night. The insomnia that had previously dogged her grew worse. To augment her sleeping pill regimen, she began drinking more heavily than usual—and not just champagne but straight, hard shots of vodka and gin. Still unable to sleep and in somewhat of a drunken stupor, she and DiMaggio kept at each other long into the night.

  Whitey Snyder recalled that once they started shooting Show Business, Marilyn would arrive at the studio half asleep because she hadn’t slept in days, and he would walk her around the dressing room for an hour or two to get her blood circulating and work the cobwebs out of her brain.

  “They assigned her Betty Grable’s old dressing room, and she’d come in all groggy and disoriented,” recalled Whitey. “She couldn’t remember her lines, or if she did she’d slur them. And because it took me time to get her going in the morning, she’d invariably be late on the set. She apologized, but it didn’t do much good. Walter Lang, the film’s director, wasn’t sympathetic. The worst criticisms came from some of the other cast members. Veterans like Ethel Merman and Mitzi Gaynor began picking on her. Merman, who could belt a song in her sleep, criticized her singing ability. And this made matters even worse. Marilyn collapsed on the set and then developed bronchitis and had to be hospitalized. The delays cost the studio a small fortune.”