Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  The school taught the Method approach to acting, and it had earned a reputation as the country’s leading training ground for both novice and experienced performers. The school would be an ideal place for Marilyn, insisted Kazan, since it represented an extension of the acting style she’d previously studied with Michael Chekhov. While still in Los Angeles, Marilyn Monroe met with Paula Strasberg, Lee’s wife, and she, too, offered encouragement, suggesting Monroe could refine her acting skills by taking courses at the Actors Studio at the same time as she launched her film production company.

  To expedite Marilyn’s move to New York, Milton Greene flew to Los Angeles and helped her pack. On her last night in Hollywood, she and Greene went nightclubbing with Sammy Davis Jr., Mel Tormé, and Shelley Winters, who’d studied at the Actors Studio and gave it high marks. The entire group, including Greene, assured Marilyn she’d made the right decision. The next day, escorted by Milton Greene, she flew to New York.

  In early January 1955, having checked into a sixth-floor suite at the Gladstone, an apartment-hotel on Fifty-Second Street, off Park Avenue, Marilyn held a press conference announcing the establishment of Marilyn Monroe Productions, Incorporated (MMP). Not surprisingly, she named Milton Greene as the other major partner in the corporation. Marilyn, as president, controlled fifty-one percent of MMP’s 1,012 shares, which went public that spring. Greene quit his $50,000-a-year job at Look in order to devote more time to the new project.

  Fox executives were outraged by what they regarded as Marilyn Monroe’s blatant refusal to live up to her existing contractual obligations. They threatened to sue and vowed that she would never again appear in a Hollywood film, depicting her in the press as a talentless floozy who dared to make preposterous artistic demands on the greatest and noblest of Hollywood’s film studios. “It was as though,” wrote one film critic, “Cinderella had betrayed her fairy godmother.”

  Marilyn’s bold step pleased Joe DiMaggio. He congratulated his former wife and complimented Milton Greene for having liberated Marilyn from the Fox “salt-mine,” a feat even he had not been able to accomplish. He did, however, take some satisfaction in the knowledge that his constant badgering had evidently played some role in Marilyn’s decision to part company with the studio. It must also have occurred to him that if Marilyn were to remain in New York, he might stand a reasonable chance of getting her back. Lest one forget, New York belonged to Joe DiMaggio.

  Retaining her suite at the Gladstone, Marilyn began spending time at the Greene residence on Fanton Hill Road in Weston, Connecticut, an hour from Midtown. For her part, Amy Greene seemed blithely unaware—or unwilling to concede—that her husband and Marilyn had been sexually involved. Even harder for her to believe was the possibility that they were still lovers, though years later she would describe Marilyn to author Donald Spoto as a “home wrecker” and her husband as a cagey, elusive man, “given to excesses and indulgences he seemed unable to control,” one of which was evidently a long-term addiction to pharmaceuticals. In fact, he soon replaced Sidney Skolsky as Marilyn’s “candy man,” regularly supplying her with pain pills and barbiturates. He had no problem getting prescriptions, as several members of his family were physicians.

  Despite her ongoing affair with Milton, which ended only that spring, Marilyn managed to establish a close friendship with Amy. They often drove into New York together to shop for clothes at Saks and Bonwit Teller, Marilyn hidden under her usual disguise of sunglasses and a black wig. With her background in fashion, Amy helped Marilyn put together a “proper” New York wardrobe, a collection of outfits of which even Joe DiMaggio would have approved.

  Marilyn became very much a member of the Greene household, claimed Amy. The Greenes had an infant son, Joshua, for whom Marilyn often babysat. She enjoyed bathing and feeding the young child, and she frequently bought him presents, including a large stuffed bear named Socko. She told Amy that more than anything she wanted to have children of her own but feared that she couldn’t, having undergone a number of early “two-dollar” abortions.

  As Marilyn’s latest confidante, Amy heard stories about the failed marriage to Joe DiMaggio, a marriage that might have succeeded had he permitted her to get on with her career. “I don’t know whom he thought he was marrying when he married me,” she told Amy.

  Marilyn characterized her marriage to DiMaggio as “a sort of crazy, difficult friendship with sexual privileges.” Later in life, it occurred to her that that’s what marriages often turn out to be. At another point, she maintained that she never should have married Joe—she never could have been the Italian housewife he wanted her to be. She’d married him, she said, because she’d felt sorry for him; he seemed so lonely and sad. A number of years later, she would describe her marriage to Arthur Miller in much the same way.

  As Amy Greene saw the marriage to DiMaggio, “Joe never fit into her life, and she never fit into his. They were in love, but unmatched, except sexually. They fucked like bunny rabbits.”

  Joe and Marilyn’s friendship had not ended. In late January, Milton Greene and Marilyn traveled to Boston to meet with Henry Rosenfeld, the wealthy dress manufacturer who’d once had a brief interlude with the actress. Presently in Boston to open an apparel factory, he’d contacted Marilyn and invited her to join him to discuss the possibility of his investing a large sum in MMP. He hadn’t counted on her bringing along her business partner. Nor did he realize that Marilyn was still involved with Joe DiMaggio.

  The ballplayer happened to be visiting his brother Dom and Dom’s wife at their home in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Marilyn called DiMaggio at his brother’s and said she wanted to see him. He picked her up at her hotel, and they spent the next five days together at Dom’s house.

  “The instant the press got wind that Joe and Marilyn were staying together, they were on top of us,” recalled Dom DiMaggio. “We couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without the press coming along. One evening we drove to Boston and went out to dinner. As we were finishing our meal, a journalist came over to the table. He wanted to know if Joe and Marilyn were reconciling. Joe looked at Marilyn. ‘Are we, darling?’ he asked. Marilyn paused, then said, ‘Let’s just call it a visit.’ ”

  Several days later, a half dozen press cars sat across the street from Dom DiMaggio’s house. They’d been there for hours waiting for Joe and Marilyn to emerge. One by one they began to leave. Ed Corsetti, a reporter for the Boston Herald American, sat behind the wheel of a brand-new, black-and-white Ford with photographer Carroll Myett. They, too, were about to leave when the door to Dom’s house opened, and out walked the celebrated couple. Marilyn wore a big floppy hat and sunglasses. Without a word, they climbed into a Cadillac convertible and drove off. Corsetti and Myett followed them.

  “DiMaggio must have driven five miles before he realized we were behind him,” said Corsetti. “We were on Route 9, headed west. I didn’t know where he was going. Maybe he was going back to New York. Carroll had his camera, one of those big old cameras, up by the windshield. I didn’t know for sure if DiMaggio, looking through the rearview mirror, saw this car following him with this guy with a camera. But he put on the gas. And I mean, he took off. We were following him and he had to be doing eighty miles per hour! Carroll kept saying, ‘You’re going to get us killed!’ I was hoping like hell the state troopers would show up and stop him. As I was trying to pull alongside him so Carroll could get his shot, he pulled his car to the left. I had to brake and back down. We must have chased him for fifteen or twenty miles. He put it in overdrive. He had to be going a hundred miles per hour. I said, ‘This is crazy. We’re driving a Ford, and he’s driving a Cadillac.’ We let him go. I’ll give him credit—he was a hell of a driver. And the two of them were as big as anything in the country at the time.”

  Ed Corsetti had been correct. Joe and Marilyn were indeed en route to New York. He dropped her at the Gladstone Hotel and headed straight to Toots Shor’s, where he bumped into Red Smith and Lou Effrat, a sportswriter for the New Yo
rk Times. Elated by the five days he’d just spent with his former wife, Joe intimated that he and Marilyn might soon embark on a second honeymoon.

  That DiMaggio remained hopeful regarding a possible second marriage is evidenced by entries he made at this juncture in an ongoing series of notebooks he had begun keeping in the late 1940s, a kind of chronological journal of his comings and goings. A second set of notebooks—twenty-nine of them—covering the years 1962 to 1999, were even more impersonal than the first set and made no mention at all of Marilyn. Both sets served primarily as a daily reminder of appointments as well as a detailed record of DiMaggio’s expenditures—how much he’d spent and where. Yet buried within his first set of jottings are two pages devoted to Marilyn.

  The first page presents a list of guidelines for what to do and what not to do in Marilyn’s presence: reminders to himself to avoid being critical, to be humbler and to share his true feelings and show affection, to practice patience, and to refrain from jealousy.

  The other journal page devoted to Monroe recounts details of a conversation between Joe and Marilyn, where, in making a date to see each other, Marilyn requested time to apply makeup because, she averred, “You like me in makeup.” He says he told her, “You look good anytime, made up or not. You have natural beauty.”

  Their late-evening date took place on February 9. Joe stayed overnight with Marilyn at the Gladstone, where their room service breakfast consisted of champagne and caviar. They met again a few weeks later, when he invited her to accompany him to a private birthday party for Jackie Gleason at Toots Shor’s.

  Jane Duffy, a guest at the Gleason party with her husband, remembered being introduced to Marilyn. “Mike Duffy, my husband, was a good friend of George Solotaire,” said Jane. “Joe DiMaggio and George were staying in a two-bedroom suite at the Hotel Madison. Later they moved into the Mayflower. At any rate, the four of us went to dinner quite often, usually at ‘21.’ You couldn’t get through a meal without a dozen strangers approaching the table to ask DiMaggio for an autograph, including the waiters and busboys. He wasn’t a rocket scientist, and he didn’t strike me as terribly deep, but there was definitely something special about him. Let’s face it: he was as renowned as they come. I mean, here’s a guy who partied with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Truman, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Dietrich, Sinatra, Orson Welles, and the Rockefellers. Yet, for all his fame, he exuded a real shyness. He wasn’t aloof or stuck up, but he was exceedingly private. He almost never mentioned Marilyn.

  “So anyway, we were at Jackie Gleason’s birthday party and Joe introduced me to Marilyn. She had a voluptuous figure, naturally, but she was small boned, which added to her beauty. She was smaller in person than she looked on-screen, which I suppose is true of most movie stars. I could understand what DiMaggio saw in her. She had what Billy Wilder once called a kind of ‘elegant vulgarity.’ On a personal level, she seemed polite but distant. She didn’t say much. I asked if I could bring her a glass of Piper-Heidsieck, which is the champagne they were serving, and she said, ‘No thanks, I don’t drink.’ An hour later she had a glass of champagne in her hand and looked half-crocked. The next time my husband and I dined with George and Joe, I asked DiMaggio whether Marilyn drank alcohol. ‘Does a bear shit in the woods?’ he answered. Coming from Joe DiMaggio, that made for quite a statement.”

  • • •

  For reasons that Joe DiMaggio could never understand, Marilyn suddenly disappeared from his life. She took his phone calls and continued to seek his advice, but she was always too busy to see him in person. For one thing, she found herself enmeshed in legal discussions with Twentieth Century–Fox.

  To avoid a costly legal battle with the studio, Marilyn Monroe and Milton Greene agreed to let her attorney Loyd Wright work out a compromise with Fox. The renegotiated agreement called for Marilyn to star in four Fox films over the next seven years. However, she would have director approval and the right to veto “substandard” screenplays. She would receive $100,000 per film and a percentage of the profits. Most important, she retained the right to make one film each year for a studio other than Fox, which cleared the way for the operation of Marilyn Monroe Productions. Milton Greene estimated that, with any degree of luck, MMP stood to make a minimum of $1 million a year for the next seven years and far more thereafter. With this figure in mind, he agreed that the production company would underwrite all of Marilyn’s living expenses.

  In addition to her involvement with MMP, Marilyn had begun taking acting lessons with Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio. Born in Budaniv, in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1901, Strasberg rapidly emerged as one more in her never-ending list of surrogate fathers. “He became my coach, friend, advisor, mentor, hero, champion, and savior,” said Marilyn. Strasberg compared Marilyn’s talents favorably to those of Marlon Brando, the most esteemed of his acting students. “I saw that what Marilyn looked like was not what she really was,” noted Strasberg. “And what was going on inside was not what was going on outside, and that always means there may be something there to work with. It was almost as if she had been waiting for a button to be pushed, and when it was pushed, a door opened, and you saw a residue of gold and jewels.”

  One of Lee Strasberg’s standard suggestions—practically a requirement—was that students enhance their reservoir of primal memories and emotions (what he called “sense memory”) by entering psychoanalysis. He and Paula were undergoing analysis, and both felt, among its other advantages, that it had strengthened their marriage. Turning to Milton Greene for advice on the subject, Marilyn was soon given a referral. Greene himself had been in therapy for several years with Dr. Margaret Herz Hohenberg, who, like Lee Strasberg, had come to the United States from Hungary to escape the concentration camps of the Third Reich.

  A follower of the Viennese school of psychoanalysis founded by Sigmund Freud, Hohenberg, at fifty-seven, was a tall, heavy woman with white hair that was often braided and wrapped around her head. She lived at 11 Riverside Drive and worked out of an office located at 155 East Ninety-Third Street, off Lexington.

  On Milton Greene’s recommendation, Marilyn met with the analyst. By March 1955, she was seeing Hohenberg five times a week. Monroe’s presence on the block did not go unnoticed; Hohenerg’s neighbors would frequently stop her on the street and inquire, “How is Miss Monroe doing today?”

  During their sessions, for which Marilyn invariably arrived late, they dealt with the traumas of Monroe’s chaotic childhood, her lack of self-esteem, her lust for approval, her dread of rejection, her obsessive search for a father figure, her need to satisfy “everybody,” and her fear of abandonment.

  To facilitate the analytic process, the actress recorded her thoughts and dreams in a series of binders that, in 2010, were posthumously published as a single volume called Fragments, which seemed an appropriate title considering Hohenberg’s pronouncement, made soon after she met Marilyn, that the actress possessed “a fragmented mind.”

  Typical of Marilyn’s nightmarish notations in Fragments is one that reads: “For Dr. H—Tell her about that dream of the horrible, repulsive man—who is trying to lean too close to me in the elevator—and my panic and then my thought despising him—does that mean I’m attached to him? He even looks like he has a venereal disease.”

  After six months of treatment, Hohenberg diagnosed Monroe as suffering from borderline personality disorder, a psychological condition characterized by intense turmoil and instability in relationships and behavior. Marilyn demonstrated two of the conditions commonly associated with BPD: dissociation and depersonalization. Under stress, her mind and body would literally shut down, which helped explain (at least to Hohenberg) why Marilyn was always late for appointments and had difficulty remembering her lines when appearing in films.

  Strangely enough, Hohenberg also determined that Marilyn had a hearing dysfunction in her right ear. She sent her to Dr. Eugen Grabscheid, an audiologist, who confirmed that she had a mild case of Ménière�
��s disease, a permanent buildup of fluids in the inner ear, a potentially dangerous, difficult-to-treat ailment that led to hearing loss and bouts of dizziness.

  “Marilyn took it as a sign of aging,” Hohenberg told Iselin Simon, a bridge partner and sometime companion, one of the few people the therapist spoke to about her famous patient. “She was panicky about growing old. She took two bubble baths a day and lathered herself with all sorts of lotions. My office was located a few doors down from a Whelan’s Drug Store, and she spent hours walking the aisles searching for beauty ointments and creams, anything and everything to help stave off the inevitable aging process. She could never have grown old. Never!”

  Confirming Dr. Hohenberg’s summation, Amy Greene remembered Marilyn’s telling her, “I’m going to die young like Jean Harlow.” Marilyn, said Greene, yearned to be Harlow. “All of Marilyn’s men were disasters—like Harlow’s. She based her life on Jean Harlow and often spoke of playing Harlow in a biographical film. In later years, I believe she even went to visit Jean Harlow’s mother.” Amy went on to say that though Marilyn claimed she needed to master her craft and become a serious actress, “I never bought it.” Marilyn, she asserted, “loved being all tits and ass. She invented tits and ass. She wanted to be a movie star, not an actress. Tits and ass were at her very core.”

  Amy Greene grossly underestimated Marilyn’s resolve to improve her acting skills and perform in films she deemed worthy of those skills. “I’m tired of being a symbol,” she told Dr. Hohenberg.

  Under Lee and Paula Strasberg’s influence, she became an earnest devotee not just of Method acting but also of Freudian analysis. She took an interest in all things Freud. She delighted in learning that Dr. Grabscheid, the audiologist, had once been Sigmund Freud’s physician. Through Grabscheid, she became acquainted with Harry Freud, a New York cousin of Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter, at the time living and practicing psychiatry in England. After meeting with Monroe, Harry Freud wrote to Anna: “I was surprised that today’s most glamorous and sexy film star has the intellectual capacity to be interested in Freud.” Harry’s evaluation of Monroe stood in stark contrast to the tongue-in-cheek self-appraisal put forth in Marilyn’s personal memoir: “I try to hide it, but I’m quite dumb.”