It was a rather open-ended question that seemed to be addressed to both of them, but it was Joe who took the bait first and replied to the general, “I’d like to, but I don’t think I’ll have time this trip.” And then in a classically awkward moment, the general smiled as he corrected the former baseball star, “I don’t mean you, Mr. DiMaggio. My inquiry was directed at your wife.”
You can only imagine the look on DiMaggio’s face, as his ego completely deflates and he realizes that he has to play second fiddle to the star power of his wife. Marilyn accepted the general’s request, and Joe would have to—grudgingly—accept as well. This one scene seems to be emblematic of their entire marriage.
As soon as the power-couple landed in Asia, they were mobbed by fans and photographers wherever they went. It’s said that Monroe was followed around by the Japanese press as if she were some sort of visiting head of state. And to make matters even worse for DiMaggio, in more than one publication he was referred to as Mr. Marilyn Monroe. It was all a bit too much for him to take from the very beginning, and on February 16, when Marilyn boarded a helicopter bound for her gig with the USO in South Korea, DiMaggio was almost relieved.
Marilyn’s first stop during her visit was to a field hospital where she visited wounded veterans of the war. Everyone was very grateful to see her, and she proved to be a welcome distraction from some of the misery they had suffered during the brutal conflict fought over North and South Korea. Over the next four days, Monroe performed on ten different occasions to about 60,000 troops of all different ranks and branches of service.
It was here that Marilyn Monroe’s stage persona truly became larger than life, and seemed to take her over completely. She would later recall that when she entertained those adoring soldiers, it was the first time in her life that she really felt appreciated, that she felt wanted and loved. Like a drug, she couldn’t quite get enough of it. When she made her exit from the stage during her last performance, she announced to the crowd as they gave her a standing ovation, “This is the best thing that ever happened to me.” Referencing the new home that awaited her with DiMaggio in California, she requested of her fans, “Come see me in San Francisco!”
Chapter Five
The Scene with the White Dress
“I have too many fantasies to be a housewife; I guess I am a fantasy.”
—Marilyn Monroe
Not long after their return to the United States from their honeymoon, DiMaggio suddenly announced he had to make a business trip to New York. Left by herself, Marilyn took the opportunity to catch up with an old friend of hers by the name of Lotte Goslar who happened to be in the San Francisco Bay area upon their arrival. Marilyn and her friend hung out around downtown San Francisco and over dinner together she related what she had experienced on her honeymoon.
Monroe was especially excited to relay what had happened to her in Korea. She told her friend, “Before I went over there, I never really felt like a star. Not really, not in my heart. I felt like one in Korea. It was so great to look down from the stage and see all those young fellows smiling up at me. It made me feel wanted.” Marilyn felt that she had finally come into her own, and on April 14, 1954, when Lloyd Wright and company came calling again, Marilyn took this new-found confidence and used it to renegotiate her contract altogether.
She managed to gain a substantial salary increase, and after 20th Century Fox informed her that they were foregoing any future production of The Girl in Pink Tights, she landed a lead role in the musical There’s No Business Like Show Business instead. In this film, Monroe starred as a showgirl who loved the limelight, a role not too far off the mark for Marilyn. But her husband Joe DiMaggio was at the same time showing how much of an utter disdain he had for the business. DiMaggio had never been a fan of the Hollywood lifestyle, and despite his penchant for heavy drinking, Joe was actually a relatively conservative character. He never felt like he mixed well with the “Hollywood types,” so much so, that whenever Marilyn had to attend an award show or any other get-together of the Hollywood elite, he would insist on waiting in the lobby, making Marilyn go to the event by herself.
Nevertheless, one of those Hollywood types that DiMaggio shunned, widely acclaimed producer and screenwriter Billy Wilder, would keep DiMaggio’s wife busy during the fall of 1954 with his new romantic comedy The Seven Year Itch. Marilyn began work on this project starting on August 10, filming on-site in Los Angeles. In this movie, she was cast in the role of the romantic interest of the main protagonist Richard Sherman, who has second thoughts after seven years of marriage.
Strangely, even though Marilyn is playing a leading role in the film, she is only credited as “the Girl.” But despite her anonymity in the role, she easily steals the show, and in this movie manages to create one of the most iconic scenes of the twentieth century. Even though most of the film was produced in California, on September 15, Marilyn was sent to shoot the scene on Lexington Avenue in New York City. In this iconic setting, right around two o’clock in the morning just as the bars were beginning to close, she was placed standing on a subway grate in a white dress as an updraft in the vent blows her skirt up in the air for all to see. A crowd of thousands of men, some of them photographers from the press gathered to watch this live-action scene, all of them amassing around Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street in lustful anticipation.
Joe DiMaggio was at a nearby bar called St. Regis’s King Cole Bar, drinking with his usual entourage and blithely unaware of his wife’s antics until a friend tipped him off to what was going on. DiMaggio was finally dragged out to the site of Marilyn’s shoot and found himself staring in disbelief as his wife did take after take with her skirt blowing up into the air exposing her panties to the leering crowd of men.
Billy Wilder managed to spot DiMaggio in the crowd and felt a little bad for him, claiming that he “had the look of death on his face.” This death mask only worsened as the increasingly out-of-control crowd of men ogling his wife’s undergarments began to boisterously shout things like “Take it off!” and “Let’s see more!” At this point, Wilder had Marilyn stop what she was doing and ordered her to go back to her trailer and put on a less revealing pair of panties.
The pair that she was wearing was apparently far too revealing than the movie censors of the day would have allowed. But this small measure of decency wouldn’t be enough for the humiliated DiMaggio who angrily marched off before his wife returned to renew the shoot. He later went back to his friends to drown his angst in more alcohol as he lamented to them that he had just bore witness to his wife “performing a striptease act on Lexington Avenue.”
His disgust and rancor would reach a boiling point by the time he was reunited with Marilyn the next day, and although it is unclear exactly what occurred, she arrived on set afterward appearing as if she had been beaten. There had been previous rumors that Joe had gotten physical with her, but she had always denied such charges.
This time, however, she was forthright with her cast mates and told them that Joe had hit her several times during the evening. The very next month on October 5, the two were legally separated. A few weeks later on October 27, 1954, Marilyn arrived at the Santa Monica Superior Court and received an uncontested divorce of her not even one-year-old marriage to Joe DiMaggio.
Chapter Six
Marilyn the Jew
“I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.”
—Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was only 28 years old, and she already had a pair divorces under her belt. But as upsetting as divorce universally is, Marilyn had other things to distract her at the time, and one of them was the box office returns for The Seven Year Itch which was accumulating over four million dollars at the box office by 1955. Inspired by her success and wishing for more artistic control, Marilyn left Hollywood for the East Coast with the intention of perfecting her craft.
Back in New York, she began to
study under the tutelage of the director of the prestigious Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg, and his wife Paula. The Strasbergs stressed that an actor needed to be able to relax, be natural, and get themselves to the point to where inspiration could spontaneously occur. Marilyn absorbed herself into these acting classes, taking in every detail.
As well as honing her craft she also developed a close relationship with Lee and Paula Strasberg, considering them akin to an adopted family. For Lee Strasburg, in particular, she would later glowingly recall, “He became my coach, friend, advisor, mentor, hero, champion, and savior.” For his part, her savior saw Marilyn as an actress with a tremendous amount of untapped potential.
Lee believed that the comic and ditzy character that she portrayed on the big screen was not who Marilyn really was, and once he could get her to release her inner self and utilize her true emotions and feelings, she could become a formidable actress. Lee used an interesting approach with his students, using coaching techniques that bordered on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, in which he allowed the actor to analyze their deep reservoir of what he termed “sense memory.”
He encouraged artists to feel and sense their way to a more realistic portrayal of who they are. In order to break away from the cartoon character that the persona of Marilyn Monroe had become, Marilyn felt that this was just the kind of reflective process that she needed. Soon after she found a home for herself among the Strasbergs, another New York denizen of the production world that Marilyn would ingratiate herself with was Arthur Miller, the author of Death of a Salesman.
She developed a fast friendship with Miller, and soon enough the two became romantically involved. Miller was still living with his wife and children at the time in Brooklyn Heights, New York, but that didn’t stop the two from having a thrilling affair. Marilyn and Arthur were going everywhere together, and Marilyn had nothing but praise for the man, maintaining, “I felt alone when I arrived in New York. Now finally, I have Arthur. He’s going to make my life better, a lot better.”
But unfortunately for Monroe, Arthur had some baggage she didn’t quite foresee. Due to the long-held suspicion of Arthur Miller having communist sympathies, he had been under FBI surveillance. And the more she involved herself with him, the more the FBI involved themselves with her.
Even if Marilyn was aware of the bad attention she was gaining, she could have cared less; she was finally in control of her life and career. A fact that was evident when she returned to Los Angeles in February 1956 to begin her new project, a film called The Bus Stop. In full accord with her renegotiated contract with 20th Century Fox, Marilyn made sure that she had the final say in who would end up in the cast, as well as who would be the director, screenwriter, and cinematographer.
In this film, she played a saloon girl named Cherie who becomes enamored with the local ranch hand who kidnaps her. Leaving the glitz and glamour behind, Monroe attempted to go for a grittier realism, foregoing makeup and purposely trying to appear a bit rough around the edges. The move seemed to work, and she received rave reviews for her performance and was even nominated for a Golden Globe.
The only thing to dampen her moment of triumph was the ever-increasing government scrutiny on her love interest Arthur Miller. Miller had been a target of Cold War anti-communist hysteria ever since his production of The Crucible gained him the attention of the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Since The Crucible was believed to be a satire against the Cold War, the HUAC was determined to shut Miller down.
After having had his passport denied, Miller was forced to appear before the HUAC to testify. Just prior to his attendance, Miller had specifically asked the committee not to make him identify any of his associates who were under suspicion of communist connections. House Chairman Francis E. Walter had initially agreed, but once Miller was before them, went back on this pledge and began to demand that Miller divulge information about his colleagues anyway.
Despite the risk of guilt by association, Marilyn Monroe was there with Miller and stood by his side during the whole ordeal. Monroe would go on to marry Miller on June 29, 1956, and to further prove that she was fully devoted to her new husband she even officially converted to Judaism. Remarkably, this was a move that led the nation of Egypt, which was in a bitter struggle with Israel at the time, to make the impulsive move to ban all of Marilyn’s films from the country.
Although not as blatantly, Americans expressed their disdain for the marriage as well, a feeling that was perhaps encapsulated best by Walter Winchell’s remark that “America’s best-known blonde movie picture star is now the darling of the left-wing intelligentsia.” It has never been proven that Miller was in fact a communist, but he was most certainly left-leaning in his political ideology and a stark contrast to Marilyn’s previous husband’s conservatism. At least when it came to her choice in men, Marilyn Monroe was showing the world that variety is the spice of life.
Chapter Seven
Diagnosis of Paranoid Schizophrenia
“Nothing’s ever easy as long as you go on living.”
—Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn made what would be her only self-produced film, called The Prince and the Showgirl, in 1957. For this movie she would work with an entirely British cast and the leading man of the picture would be none other than famed actor Sir Laurence Olivier. Marilyn and Laurence seemed to get off on the wrong foot from the very beginning, however, and the chemistry was just not working for them from the outset of the production.
If the on-screen clash she had with Olivier wasn’t enough, Marilyn also had to deal with his wife. Olivier’s wife Vivien Leigh had filled the role of leading lady in the theatrical production of the piece; she resented Marilyn for taking her role and starring alongside her husband, and she wasn’t going to let her forget it. Vivien often launched into tirades against Marilyn whenever she had the opportunity to speak to the press.
On one occasion she issued the statement, dripping with venom, “That girl has the audacity to give herself top billing in the film, even over my husband, Lord Olivier. What hubris! What a laugh! I mean, what does that little tart think? She’s popular for two reasons, and it’s pretty obvious what they are.” The general audience wasn’t much kinder either, and the reviews were mixed at best, leading to a big letdown for the ambitious starlet.
During this time, Marilyn began to show the symptoms of a dangerous addiction to alcohol and sleeping pills. She suffered from terrible insomnia and would often take handfuls of pills chased with shots of vodka just to get some rest. According to Arthur Miller, it was none other than Paula Strasberg who he derided as the “walking apothecary” who often provided Marilyn with her drugs of choice.
Miller was highly critical of the Strasbergs—especially Paula—and didn’t understand why Marilyn continued to finance them as her coaches and mentors. He didn’t believe in their methodology and felt that it was a waste of time at best and a con-job perpetrated against Marilyn for financial gain at worst. Miller was already coming to regret his marriage to the increasingly erratic Marilyn Monroe.
And soon these doubts would be made known in an incredibly painful fashion, when by chance Miller had left an open notebook on a table that contained a passage written about her, voicing his concerns. In it, he vented his frustration over Marilyn’s behavior on set, and to Marilyn’s horror he sided with Laurence Olivier and stated that he had every right to have “anger and resentment.”
He also criticized Marilyn on a personal level referring to her as an “out of control child woman with endless emotional demands,” and furthermore was worried that the energy he had to expend to deal with her was killing his creativity as a writer. Instead of Marilyn being his muse, Miller was stating that she was his menace. Marilyn was crushed to read these passages and was immediately sent into a state of deep depression.
After a visit from her psychiatrist Margaret Hohenberg, even greater concern developed over Marilyn’s precarious mental state. So much so that Dr. Hohenberg made s
pecial arrangements for Marilyn to meet Anna Freud, who was none other than Sigmund Freud’s daughter. During this pivotal meeting with the heiress of the famed psychoanalysis, Marilyn would receive a rather stunning diagnosis. Anna Freud concluded that Marilyn was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.
Chapter Eight
Marilyn’s First Overdose
“Sometimes I feel my whole life has been one big rejection.”
—Marilyn Monroe
After growing up in the wreckage of her mother’s mental illness, Marilyn had always feared that she would suffer a similar fate. When Anna Freud first came to her conclusion about Marilyn Monroe’s mental state she kept it to herself, fearing to provoke more trauma in the patient. Instead, she notified Marilyn’s psychiatrist Hohenberg of her findings.
Monroe would find out soon enough, however, and she now experienced a genuine terror that she would end up just like her institutionalized mother. Nevertheless, through all of her recent trauma, Marilyn persevered, and she and her husband purchased a new home together during the latter half of 1957. Marilyn seemed to be preparing a refuge for her family, and shortly thereafter she discovered that she was pregnant.
This wasn’t the first time the actress was pregnant, she had been so before but miscarried. This time she was hoping she would be able to keep the pregnancy. She viewed having a baby as a form of glue that just might keep her marriage to Arthur Miller intact. Miller seemed to share some of this sentiment, hoping that having a child might slow down some of Marilyn’s more erratic behavior.
Marilyn Monroe- a Life From Beginning to End Page 2
