Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  A few weeks later, in front of Sidney Skolsky, Marilyn bubbled on for a while about her visit to sing for the troops, then turned to DiMaggio. ‘Joe,’ she said, ‘do you have any idea what that’s like? Did you ever have ten thousand people stand up and applaud you?’

  Skolsky recalled later: ‘Joe’s voice was as unemotional as a pair of discarded spikes, underplaying his reply just as he had always underplayed his incredible feats in Yankee Stadium. “Seventy-five thousand,” he answered quietly. Marilyn looked as embarrassed as a pinch runner picked off first base in the World Series.’

  Marilyn came back to Tokyo to a mild case of pneumonia and an uneasy reunion with her husband. Accounts conflict as to how Marilyn originally decided to interrupt her honeymoon for the benefit of the U.S. Armed Forces. By her account an American general approached her with the idea during the flight from Hawaii to Tokyo. DiMaggio, she claimed, did not object at all. According to Sidney Skolsky, however, Marilyn planned the visit even before leaving the United States. Joe DiMaggio did not approve, but Marilyn went ahead against his wishes.

  There had been one odd detail among the crass honeymoon headlines. The Los Angeles Times reported that Marilyn left for Tokyo ‘with her right thumb in a splint, hidden most of the time under her mink coat. “I just bumped it,” she said. “I have a witness. Joe was there. He heard it crack.” She declined to go into details about the injured thumb.’ The thumb was shown in its splint in an accompanying photograph.

  Marilyn’s story in private — and like all her stories it must be treated with great caution — was that the thumb was injured by Joe DiMaggio in a moment of irritation. She told this to several friends, including Amy Greene. As Greene recalled the story, ‘Marilyn went to put her arms around him. He was talking to George Solotaire, and it annoyed him. Joe had such huge hands. All he did was fling her arms away, and the impact of the flinging of her arm injured her thumb in mid-air. …’

  Amy Greene’s account suggests the injury was the accidental result of DiMaggio not knowing his own strength. It prefaces, however a series of reports that later in the brief marriage DiMaggio physically mistreated his wife.

  Lois Weber, Marilyn’s press agent in the mid-fifties, has said, ‘I’m sure Marilyn was afraid of him, physically afraid. She said Joe had a bad temper. He was obviously rigid in his beliefs.’ Sources agree that DiMaggio was possessive and jealous.

  Henry Rosenfeld, Marilyn’s New York confidant, quoted her as saying that even on the honeymoon ‘he started accusing her of going to bed with everybody.’ Marilyn told hairdresser Gladys Whitten, for whom she had brought a gift from the Far East, that DiMaggio was enraged by the hoopla over her visit to Korea. ‘She went over so big,’ said Whitten, ‘that he got angry. Marilyn said, “He threatened to divorce me on our honeymoon!”’

  After the marriage was over, Marilyn sat looking through old photographs with actress Maureen Stapleton. She held up a picture and said, ‘Look, this was right after the wedding. And see my hands — I was really pushing him away. Really, deep down, I didn’t want to marry him.’

  Astonishingly, even when the ink on the marriage certificate was barely dry, Marilyn was already talking about marrying someone else. Immediately after the honeymoon, Sidney Skolsky was invited to visit the DiMaggios in their suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. After a while Joe DiMaggio left the room and then, as Skolsky recalled years later, Marilyn ‘dropped a bombshell.’

  ‘Sidney?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know who I’m going to marry?’

  ‘Marry? What’re you talking about?’

  ‘I’m going to marry Arthur Miller,’ Marilyn said.

  Skolsky, dumbfounded, told Marilyn he did not understand.

  ‘You wait,’ said Marilyn. ‘You’ll see.’

  Little more than a year after Marilyn’s remarks to Skolsky, she and the playwright would begin courting in earnest. The year after that, she would fulfil her prophecy and marry Miller.

  The marriage to Joe DiMaggio, launched in discord, would last less than nine months.

  *As her wedding gift, Marilyn gave DiMaggio nude photographs of herself, pictures from the famous calendar series that had been considered too suggestive for publication. This was not revealed until years later.

  15

  AFTER THE DEBACLE IN Asia, DiMaggio brought his wife home to his quiet house in San Francisco. There, for a month or so in early 1954, the couple were away from the intrusions of the press.

  The world did get glimpses of them: Mr and Mrs DiMaggio boarding Joe’s boat, the Yankee Clipper, with Marilyn, in jeans and moccasins, toting a paper bag containing the day’s lunch. In San Francisco she could venture out more easily. She went shopping at Magnin’s, and once startled bystanders by helping a brakeman turn one of the cable cars at the bottom of a hill.

  The gossip columns burbled about a possible pregnancy, but neighbors and fishermen on the wharf saw more than any reporter. They wondered when they saw Marilyn standing alone on the back patio in the late evening, a coat thrown over her shoulders. One night she was seen running along the road away from the pier, weeping hysterically, with DiMaggio in pursuit. The fishermen looked away.

  Hollywood was waiting. In March 1954 Marilyn was back in Los Angeles, signing in at her hotel with a wry joke about leaving blank the space in the register for children. She was in Hollywood to receive an award as ‘Most Popular Actress,’ a ceremony that turned into a tumultuous welcome home, one from which DiMaggio was absent. He said he would accompany Marilyn only when she won an Oscar — and that honor never would be hers.

  Behind the scenes, and calling the contractual tune more than ever before, Marilyn now patched up her differences with Twentieth Century-Fox. She agreed to make There’s No Business Like Show Business, a frothy musical tribute to composer Irving Berlin. For Marilyn the challenge was in the song-and-dance routines, one of them called, perhaps aptly, ‘After You Get What You Want You Don’t Want It.’ DiMaggio, certainly, did not want the instant change caused by Marilyn’s return to Hollywood.

  Earlier in the year Marilyn had cooed, ‘Joe’s the head of our household, and I’ll live wherever he decides.’ Now DiMaggio was pressganged into living for a while in Los Angeles, the town he most despised. The couple moved into a rented house on North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills. It had eight rooms — one for Joe’s young son to use on visits — and a swimming pool. Twin black Cadillacs stood parked outside. It was also one of the least secluded houses in town, for its front door virtually opened to the sidewalk.

  Writer Sidney Skolsky, sitting in on one of Marilyn’s music rehearsals at the studio, noticed the phone calls coming in from Joe DiMaggio, and assumed all was well. Marilyn seemed genuinely concerned that Joe, not she, was doing most of the moving in. She hurried home, with Skolsky in tow as the trusted chronicler, to observe the domestic scene.

  Soon an avid public learned that Marilyn had the television set placed next to the fireplace so that her husband could watch sports events from his favorite armchair. She confided that he was addicted to baseball, big-time boxing, and sometimes Western movies, and that she served him his dinner in his chair.

  ‘Joe doesn’t have to move a muscle,’ she told the press. ‘Treat a husband this way and he’ll enjoy you twice as much. I like to iron Joe’s shirts, but often I haven’t the time. I like to look at Joe in a shirt I ironed. A man should never have to think about his clothes. A wife should see to it that his shoes and suits are sent out to be cleaned.’ All this, of course, was made easier by the trio of servants Marilyn had hired.

  Sidney Skolsky duly published her cozy chatter, and allowed one fragment of reality to see the light of day. ‘Joe and I have our quarrels,’ he quoted Marilyn as saying. ‘You can’t outlaw human nature. Marriage is something you learn more about while you live it.’ In fact the couple had quickly discovered they were hopeless at living together.

  Marilyn’s discourse on housekeeping was fantasy. Writer Sheilah Gr
aham, who talked to Marilyn once the marriage was over, reported, ‘They were equal in fame but not in habits. Joe was obsessively neat. Everything on his dressing table was arranged in alphabetical order: A, aspirin; B, brush; C, comb, etc. You could find Marilyn by following the trail of her stockings, her bra, her handkerchief, and her handbag, all dropped as she went. He was always trying to train her. And he could not. They reached a point where they could not speak without screaming.’

  Sex was not the problem. By most accounts, including her own comments to friends and doctors, the world’s sex symbol found little satisfaction in the many beds she shared. With her baseball champion, that at least was different. ‘Joe’s biggest bat,’ Marilyn delighted in telling Jet Fore, a friend at the studio, ‘is not the one he uses on the field.’ She would later tell Truman Capote, ‘If that’s all it takes, we’d still be married.’

  In a more serious vein, Marilyn had praise for DiMaggio’s bedroom prowess when she went to live with her New York friend, Amy Greene, a few months later. ‘She said nobody in her life was as good in bed as Joe,’ Greene said, ‘but at some point you had to get out of bed and start talking. And they couldn’t do it.’

  One night that year the phone rang in the home of Brad Dexter, an actor who had met Marilyn much earlier, during the shooting of Asphalt Jungle. They had not spoken since, and Dexter could hardly believe the caller was Marilyn Monroe. ‘I’d like you to meet Joe,’ she said. ‘Can you come over to dinner? And come a little early, before Joe gets home, so we can talk.’

  Dexter arrived at the appointed time, and Marilyn at once poured out her troubles. ‘I have a very serious problem in my marriage,’ she said. ‘Joe has isolated me; he doesn’t want me to associate with anybody in the movie industry. He has a terrible insecurity. He has estranged me even from my actress friends, and I don’t know who to turn to. I thought maybe you could be a bridge between us. You’re a tough guy, you play poker, and you like sports, and I thought you and Joe could become friends. Then, when we’re together, you and I could talk about what we did at the studio all day.’

  Somewhat apprehensively, Dexter said he would try to help. When DiMaggio arrived, though, the effort seemed pointless. ‘Boy, was he stiff and unbending!’ Dexter recalled. ‘Joe just sat there and I could see all these things going through his mind — like, had I been to bed with her? Why was I there? We could all see it wasn’t going to work. I pretended to have another appointment, and I didn’t stay to dinner.’

  When things finally fell apart, Marilyn was to tell the divorce judge: ‘Your honor, my husband would get in moods where he wouldn’t speak to me for five to seven days at a time. Sometimes longer. I would ask him what was wrong. He wouldn’t answer. … I was permitted to have no visitors, no more than three times in the nine months we were married. … The relationship was mostly one of coldness and indifference.’

  DiMaggio’s duodenal ulcer, an old torment, started bleeding again. At the studio, still working on There’s No Business Like Show Business, Marilyn began to break. Billy Travilla, her dress designer, remembered a day when, for technical reasons, it was essential to shoot three pages of script without cutting. ‘Marilyn had just one line on the third page,’ Travilla said, ‘and she kept fluffing it. They told her they had to wrap the scene, and she started crying. She ran to her dressing room, then apologized like a little girl. Afterwards she told me, “You know, I’m losing a piece of my mind each day. My brains are leaving me. I think I’m going crazy, and I don’t want to be seen this way. If I go crazy, please take me away and hide me.”’

  ‘She was talking herself into the idea that she was going mad,’ Travilla said. Marilyn’s fear of inheriting mental illness, prompted by her family history, was now a perennial worry.

  DiMaggio, the traditional Italian husband, was more than ever affronted by his wife’s display of her body, not only in her work but — against his wishes — at home. Marriage had tempered Marilyn the exhibitionist to the extent that she wandered around the house nude only in front of females. One woman guest, sitting with DiMaggio on such an occasion, jokingly suggested that Marilyn was trying to lure him to the bedroom. DiMaggio was not amused.

  When Marilyn had married DiMaggio, her bosses at Fox dreamed that their publicity cup would now overflow, with regular appearances by a tame baseball hero. One executive boasted, ‘We haven’t lost a star; we’ve gained a center fielder.’ DiMaggio disappointed them. He showed up on the set only once during the filming of There’s No Business Like Show Business, and then objected to posing for pictures with his wife dressed in a revealing costume.

  In August 1954, without even one day off, Marilyn moved from the Show Business set into production of The Seven Year Itch, directed by Billy Wilder. For her this movie was the payoff for having done Show Business at all, a chance to play a sustained role opposite one other lead actor. The distinction must have been lost on DiMaggio. Itch was the story of a fortyish married man, Tom Ewell, tempted by the girl upstairs, Marilyn, while his wife and children are away. It was an exercise in titillation and sexual double-entendre.

  Wilder was still chuckling years later about the shooting of a scene in which Marilyn had to sneak down a back staircase to see the married man living below. ‘She was wearing a nightdress,’ he said, ‘and I could see she was wearing a bra. “People don’t wear bras under nightclothes,” I told her, “and they will notice your breasts simply because you are wearing one.” Marilyn replied “What bra?” and put my hand on her breast. She was not wearing a bra. Her bosom was a miracle of shape, density, and an apparent lack of gravity.’

  Marilyn seemed to be nude in another scene, in which she leaned over a balcony, in the New York summer heat, to inform a male neighbor that she kept her underwear in the refrigerator. This was strong meat for the early fifties, but Wilder had to disabuse Marilyn of the idea that she could play one of her love scenes in the nude. No persuasion would be needed to get her to do the famous ‘skirt’ scene, which the press would call ‘the most interesting dramatic display since Lady Godiva,’ and which would leave DiMaggio beside himself with rage.

  Late that summer Marilyn visited Marlon Brando, then playing Napoleon on the set of Désirée. He noticed, as had others that day, that Marilyn’s right arm was black and blue. When he asked why, Marilyn replied that she had bitten herself in her sleep. A few weeks later, after the skirt scene, friends would see other bruises, and she would claim DiMaggio had beaten her.

  Marilyn flew into New York for the Itch location shooting on September 9, 1954. The scenes that followed were such that Roy Craft, Marilyn’s publicity man, recalled, ‘The Russians could have invaded Manhattan, and nobody would have taken any notice.’ When Marilyn had left Hollywood, the town was awash with rumors that her marriage to DiMaggio was ending. She arrived in New York without him, but assured the press, ‘Everything’s fine with us. A happy marriage comes before anything.’

  Five nights later, outside the Trans-Lux Theater, she arrived to shoot a sequence with her co-star, Tom Ewell. The scene called for Marilyn to stand with a grinning Ewell as the draft from a subway grating blew her skirt high in the air.

  Studio publicity men did not fail to inform the press exactly where the scene would be shot — at 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue — and that Marilyn’s revealing costume would ‘stop the traffic.’ It was after midnight, but thousands of people stood ogling behind wooden police barriers as huge wind machines sent Marilyn’s skirt billowing to her shoulders. Ironically, Wilder says, the shots of the lower half of Marilyn’s body would eventually be shot in the studio — quite modestly. What New Yorkers saw that night, in take after take, was a bottom encased in panties thin enough to show a blur of pubic hair. Then Marilyn’s husband arrived.

  Joe DiMaggio, who had followed his wife to New York, had not intended to watch the filming. He remained a few blocks away, drinking with Broadway ticket broker George Solotaire. Then, persuaded by columnist Walter Winchell, an old acquaintance, he made his way thr
ough the police lines to watch the filming. DiMaggio stood briefly beside Camera 1, watching as his wife teetered on the grating, listening as the roar of the mob rose and fell in time with her skirt. Winchell heard him mutter, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ then, ‘I told you I never did this. Let’s get out of here.’

  When filming was over Winchell went with DiMaggio to Marilyn’s dressing room. He watched the forced gaiety of Marilyn’s ‘Hi, Giuseppe!’ — one of her pet names for her husband — as she slumped exhausted in a chair. He listened as they quarreled about DiMaggio’s baseball commitments and then bickered their way through dinner. Embarrassed, in spite of his profession, Winchell left them to it.

  That night at the St Regis Hotel, crew members in rooms near the DiMaggio suite got little sleep. The cameraman on Itch, Milton Krasner, heard shouts of anger through the wall. Though one must ever be alert for fantasizing on Marilyn’s part, the accounts that follow are hard to dismiss.

  Hairdresser Gladys Whitten and the unit wardrobe mistress did not hear the rumpus during the night, but Marilyn came to them in the morning. ‘She said she had screamed and yelled for us,’ Whitten recalled. ‘… Her husband had got very, very mad with her, and he beat her up a little bit. … It was on her shoulders, but we covered it up, you know … a little makeup, and she went ahead and worked.’

  Amy Greene, Marilyn’s New York friend, also saw bruises. She was in the suite at the St Regis to fulfil the fantasy of trying on a mink coat. ‘I was sitting on the bed with her mink around me,’ Greene said, ‘and Marilyn started to get undressed. She forgot I was sitting there and that she was taking off her blouse. … Her back was black and blue — I couldn’t believe it. … She didn’t know what to say, and she wasn’t a liar, so she just said, “Yes. …”’