Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  In their sessions together in the fall of 1953 she nestled in a gnarled tree, wearing an ordinary dress; in another photo she wears a long black sweater covering her naked body; in another she cradles a balalaika. That last photo tells a complex story. A woman playing a stringed instrument such as a lute is a standard theme in Western art, denoting a domestic woman soothing a household, a muse for a male artist, or a woman artist herself. Dressed in a long satin shift but with bare feet, Marilyn looks like a goddess of art. The balalaika is the major instrument of Russian folk music. The photograph suggested that Marilyn could play Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. The movie was still on the drawing board in 1953; it hadn’t been cast yet.

  Milton, like Marilyn, was shy and introspective. He was also a stutterer who sometimes spoke in non sequiturs. Always agreeable, he could be a little boy lost. He charmed his models, and they adored him: he had a soft, seductive voice. He liked everyone, had a knack at solving problems, and avoided controversy. After posing for him, Gloria Vanderbilt said, “He communicated his vision so subtly that I absorbed it zen-like.” Marilyn would become his muse, like Dorian Leigh with Richard Avedon. Marilyn commented: “I’ve never really liked the way I was photographed until I saw Milton’s pictures. He’s an artist. Even when he does fashions which are boring he can make something so beautiful.”36

  Marilyn told Milton about her career issues—her low salary, Darryl Zanuck’s refusal to cast her in serious films, how producers and directors ordered her around. Greene told her he wanted to form a film production company. They were attracted to each other, but he was due to return to New York to marry Amy Franco, a former model for Richard Avedon. Amy was a determined woman with great organizational skills, and she inspired confidence and brought order to disordered lives. She performed that service for Milton. She later did the same for Marilyn for a time.

  Once married to Amy, Milton returned to Hollywood with her to do another shoot for Look, and they socialized with Marilyn, taking her to Hollywood parties and ending her “Greta Garbo” period. Amy loved to go to Gene Kelly’s Saturday night charades parties, since she was a whiz at the game. Milton and Marilyn were hopeless, and they sat in a corner and talked. When Amy and Joe DiMaggio were both out of town one week, Milton and Marilyn may have had an affair, although Amy always denied it had happened.37 But Milton wouldn’t leave Amy, and Marilyn had decided to marry Joe after his kindness to her in Canada.

  She was now a great star. Jean Negulesco described the extraordinary premiere of How to Marry a Millionaire, held at the Wilshire Theater in late November. The theater was packed and a large crowd stood outside when suddenly there was a growing roar, “like an approaching earthquake.” “Marilyn! Marilyn!” was the cry. She was wearing a dress with platinum and white beads shimmering on white silk, emphasizing every curve of her body. Four policemen carried her over the heads of the crowd and into the theater, where the audience was standing to see her. Some people climbed on their seats to see better—even the legendary Cecil B. DeMille did so. Negulesco concluded, “I witnessed beyond any expectation the luxury of her fame.”38

  But her life was in a muddle. In December her nude photo “Golden Dreams” appeared as the first centerfold in the new Playboy magazine. It was an unexpected return of the smutty Marilyn. The fan magazines were now hinting that she and Natasha were lovers.39 Marilyn needed to stop those speculations, even though in her paradoxical way at the end of December she began including her sexual adventures in an autobiography she was dictating to Ben Hecht, who was to ghostwrite it. Then, despite all her lobbying—and that of Charles Feldman, still her agent—Zanuck refused to cast her in a serious role. It’s rumored that he offered her The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing and The Revolt of Mamie Stover, but she turned down the former because the role she was to play was insipid and the latter because Mamie Stover was an obvious prostitute, and Marilyn didn’t want to play such a role.40 In late 1953 he enraged her further by casting her as a showgirl in a remake of Betty Grable’s Pink Tights.

  Throughout her problems with Zanuck, Marilyn overlooked the memo he issued in March 1953 in which he canceled all serious films, even those already in production. Fox would make only entertainment films, mostly shot in Cinemascope—which Fox owned. A number of Fox dramas had failed at the box office, including Viva Zapata!—even though it starred Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn. He even canceled production of On the Waterfront, which Harry Cohn took over. Spyros Skouras had dictated that Zanuck needed to make money for Fox. Letters in the Spyros Skouras Papers suggest that Zanuck didn’t want to give up making serious films; he was acting under Skouras’s orders. Marilyn was regarded as a great moneymaker, so long as she played a blonde sexpot. Zanuck could make a lot of money casting her in Fox musicals.41

  Marilyn had to do something to gain the upper hand. Cutting her Gordian knot with one blow, she married Joe DiMaggio. Partnered with the reigning king of America’s most popular sport, she now became American royalty: she was the homecoming queen married to the star athlete, the dream of all Americans writ large. She had captured a local athlete when she married Jim Dougherty, but this combination with Joe DiMaggio was epic, a national romance, not a small-town liaison. She increased her large fan base by absorbing Joe’s, which included not only male sports fans but also women attracted by his heroic stature.42 Whatever sins Marilyn had committed, Joe’s reputation for virtue canceled them. Marilyn had checkmated Zanuck. He suspended her when she didn’t show up for Pink Tights, but it was inevitable that he would reinstate her after she married Joe.

  The wedding took place in San Francisco on January 14, 1954, in a judge’s chambers in the San Francisco city hall, a last-minute affair. Acceding to Joe’s wishes, Marilyn dressed in a tailored dark suit with a white collar. Her body was covered; the suit didn’t even have a plunging neckline. Nearly five hundred reporters, photographers, and fans jammed the area but they weren’t there by accident. When she and Joe decided to go ahead, Marilyn called Fox publicity director Harry Brand and gave him the details, generating the publicity that was never far from her mind.

  Yet Zanuck wouldn’t compromise on Marilyn’s new contract; he still refused to give her creative input into her films. Instead, he offered her the lead in the film version of The Seven Year Itch, a hit on Broadway, to be directed by Billy Wilder. Marilyn very much wanted to do the film, although Zanuck demanded as a precondition that she make There’s No Business Like Show Business. Marilyn gave in, although she didn’t like the musical’s plot or songs. She was frightened at being cast with some of Broadway’s best dancers and singers : Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Donald O’Connor, and Mitzi Gaynor. Yet she agreed to do it, hoping it would work out. Under her contract the studio still had control over what films she made.

  In early February Joe and Marilyn went on a honeymoon to Japan, where Joe was to hold baseball clinics and coach local teams. Baseball was popular in Japan; Joe had been on such a mission before. During their plane trip to Honolulu, a stop on the way to Tokyo, Joe broke Marilyn’s finger when she touched him on the back. Not liking to be touched in public, he spun around, startled, and caught her finger in his huge hand, fracturing a bone. It may have been an accident, but it was a portent of the future. When journalists noted her taped finger and asked what had happened, she replied, “I bumped it against a door.”43

  Joe was supposed to be the star in Japan, but crowds screamed for Marilyn. They called her “monchan,” which meant little girl. Or they screamed the Japanese phrase for “swinging buttocks.” If he hadn’t known before, Joe now realized that people wanted to see Marilyn, not him. A week after they arrived in Japan, Marilyn went to Korea to entertain the troops. An American general issued the invitation, but she had wanted to go there for some time to thank the men whose fan letters had made her a star. In the fall of 1953, when William Holden had toured military bases in Korea, he had seen her nude photo everywhere.44 Zanuck had refused her request to go there, but she now had the upper hand and she defied
him. Joe may have tried to stop her from going, but she didn’t listen to him. Her career was uppermost in her mind.

  The tour was a triumph. Wearing a plum-colored sequined dress, she performed “Let’s Do It Again!” in a typically suggestive Marilyn manner. The ten thousand men at each of the ten military bases she visited went wild. At one stop the crowd surged over the stage, “like bobbysoxers in Times Square,” according to the Los Angeles Times. At another, the army brass became drunk at a party and made inappropriate remarks. There was talk of a congressional investigation. The Stars and Stripes reporter covering it stated that “the week progressed from one form of riot to another.” Marilyn brushed it off and always stated that it had been a high point in her career.45

  The performances she did in Korea that Joe saw on Japanese television enraged him. After she returned to Japan, he threatened to divorce her if she didn’t clean up her act.46 He did that frequently—“crying wolf” in an impossible situation. He should have realized that under her sweetness, Marilyn was stubborn. She had no intention of changing her behavior. For her part, Marilyn had once again violated Elia Kazan’s advice in his 1951 letter to her that she should avoid domineering men. Her attraction to male power, which was strong, always carried with it the risk of male domination.

  When she finished her tour of Japan, Marilyn went with Joe to San Francisco, to be with his family. He now hoped she would stay put and become a dutiful wife. But she turned her attention to Hollywood. On March 9, she returned there to receive the Photoplay award as the year’s best actress for her roles in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire; Sidney Skolsky was her escort to the ceremony. On March 21 she fired the William Morris agency, which had done nothing for her for some time, and signed with Charles Feldman’s Famous Artists Agency. Feldman had been representing her since 1951 in her contract negotiations with Darryl Zanuck.

  On May 2 she moved to Hollywood to begin filming There’s No Business Like Show Business. Joe went along. She had to fulfill her contract with Fox, she told him. He hoped they might have a marriage like that of baseball manager Leo Durocher and film actress Laraine Day, in which she focused on their marriage and did only a few films. This vision was no more than a pipe dream; Marilyn would not be held back.

  Marilyn’s ambivalence about Joe became evident in the spring of 1954 when she told Sidney Skolsky that she intended to marry Arthur Miller. Was she teasing Skolsky or expressing her real desire? She wrote about her admiration for Miller in an article in Pageant magazine in April and revealed that she had read most of his works. In any event Marilyn didn’t remain faithful to Joe for long after she married him. That spring she began an affair with Hal Schaefer, the jazz musician who had been her singing coach for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and who was coaching her again for There’s No Business Like Show Business. He was, she said, the gentlest man she had ever known. Joe continued traveling to New York, doing his TV shows and following the Yankees on the road. His years of traveling as a baseball player had made him into a nomad, in many ways happiest on the road.47

  Her affair with Schaefer had overtones of her earlier affair with Fred Karger, her voice coach at Columbia in 1948, but unlike Karger, Schaefer wanted her to divorce Joe and marry him. Marilyn agreed to it, but she sometimes agreed to contradictory propositions at the same time. She told Schaefer she would convert to Judaism for him, and she disguised herself with a wig and a shapeless dress to go out with him incognito. She met his parents and spent hours listening to him play the piano. “She liked the company of musicians,” Jean Negulesco wrote. “She liked their talk, their jokes. They adored her. I always thought that a music man would have been her right marriage.”48 For a long time Joe overlooked the involvement with Hal, who was said to be gay.

  Now that they were married Joe expected Marilyn to obey him, but she didn’t. She had been living for a year in an apartment on Doheny Drive, in Beverly Hills. It was centrally located, close to Inez Melson’s office, and not far from Hollywood. Many stars had lived there at one time or another; a tall cinderblock wall surrounded it, effectively keeping journalists and fans out. Marilyn loved that apartment, but Joe wanted a place that could also accommodate his son, and the Doheny Drive apartment had only one bedroom. Inez found them a house in the elite section of Beverly Hills to lease for six months. They moved in, but Joe spent much of his time there playing poker and watching television. There were quarrels, and he became physically violent. She may have been afraid of him, but it didn’t stop her from doing what she wanted, including continuing the affair with Hal Schaefer.

  Obsessed with Marilyn now that he faced losing her, Joe had private detectives follow her. In early July, overwhelmed by threats from Joe’s henchmen, Hal attempted suicide. He recovered, and Marilyn nursed him for weeks. One assumes that she and Joe were estranged, although he showed up on the set of There’s No Business Like Show Business when the “Tropical Heat Wave” number was being filmed. Why Marilyn invited him to the set that day is perplexing, since the number is highly sexual. Dressed in an abbreviated top and a full split skirt, with a Carmen Miranda headdress on her head, she sashays through a sexy rendition of one of Jack Cole’s over-the-top numbers. DiMaggio must have realized full force that he was losing his battle to persuade her to be more discreet. He stormed off the set.

  There’s No Business Like Show Business went considerably over schedule, since Marilyn frequently called in sick. She felt outclassed by the dancers she was cast with, and she felt ridiculous playing opposite Donald O’Connor, who was much shorter than she. Aside from the musical numbers, which she delivers with verve, she seems bored in her role as a showgirl—although she doesn’t play her character as a dumb blonde. She is a working woman trying to make it as an entertainer. It was rumored that she was drinking heavily and taking drugs throughout the filming, but Hal Schaefer, who spent a lot of time with her, told me that she did neither when she was with him. He had to encourage her to drink a glass of wine. She probably suffered from menstrual pain caused by endometriosis that spring; she had a major gynecological operation in November, one in which the endometriosis inside her was probably removed.

  In the spring of 1954, as was not unusual for her, Marilyn was leading a number of lives. She was married to Joe DiMaggio, involved with Hal Schaefer, and struggling to complete There’s No Business Like Show Business. She continued dictating her autobiography to Ben Hecht, although by this point Joe DiMaggio, now her husband, demanded that she take her sexual adventures out of it, while a draft of it suddenly appeared in a tabloid in Manchester, England, without her permission. Milton Greene was still in her life, and they were discussing forming a production company.

  Milton visited Hollywood that spring and photographed her on the Fox back lot. In the wardrobe department they found Jennifer Jones’s costumes from The Song of Bernadette, a movie about a peasant girl who becomes a saint, and Milton photographed Marilyn in Bernadette’s peasant clothes on the original set of the film. It was, according to Amy Greene, the “ultimate in-joke, to put the world’s leading sex symbol in Saint Bernadette’s clothes.” Marilyn knew about the financial problems of Hilda, the wardrobe mistress, and after they finished shooting Marilyn slipped a hundred-dollar bill into her pocket. It was a typical Marilyn gesture.49

  By 1954, elegance was becoming a mantra for Marilyn. Influenced by Amy Greene, that’s what she now wanted. She talked about Amy all the time with Gloria Romanoff: how Amy dressed, how she acted, what her friends were like. Sam Shaw stated that she was now ambitious to appear in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She wanted to be sleek and fashionable, like the high-fashion models, like Amy. Movie magazines were suggesting that Audrey Hepburn, tall, thin, and small-breasted, the epitome of a high-fashion model, was replacing the voluptuous Marilyn as the female beauty ideal. Marilyn was doubly worried about continuing as a “blonde bombshell.”50

  She was already thinking about moving to New York, where Milton had his studio. Marilyn had dreamed of New York sin
ce her days at the Actors’ Lab, when her teachers had glorified Broadway. Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan were both New Yorkers. To a naive girl from Los Angeles, a provincial place in the 1950s, New York was the glittering, sophisticated center of book publishing, finance, and fashion, set apart from the rest of the nation.

  In 1950 she had picked up a copy of a new magazine, Flair, in a bookstore. It had mesmerized her. A combination of Vanity Fair and the Atlantic Monthly, it was geared to postwar sophisticates and avant garde intellectuals, and it glorified their doings in New York. It was designed and edited by Fleur Cowles, then an editor at Look. Expensive to produce, it lasted only a year, with a “yearbook” issued for several years after.

  The articles in Flair covered subjects as varied as Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, Rudolph Bing and the Metropolitan Opera, Walker Evans and Salvador Dalí, and the new “cool” that was spreading to the broader culture from beboopers, hipsters, and Parisian students in existentialist cafes. Cowles included articles on roses, which Marilyn loved, and on Shelley Winters as the new Jean Harlow. One wonders what Marilyn thought of that comparison. Flair seemed like an Aladdin’s lamp to Marilyn, a touchstone to a fantasy world.51

  She may have dreamed about New York, but in June and July 1954 she was still filming There’s No Business Like Show Business. She finished the movie in mid-August. The next day, with no time off, she began filming The Seven Year Itch. Three weeks later, on September 9, she flew to New York to shoot location scenes for the film. She was greeted like royalty. Fans clogged the streets on which she was shooting, while the New York newspapers continually carried photos of her and stories about her. Sam Shaw introduced her to Richard Avedon, who shot her for Harper’s Bazaar. Amy and Milton Greene were there, and Amy took her shopping at Bergdorf Goodman, New York’s swankiest clothing store. But she attracted such crowds that Amy persuaded Norman Norell, New York’s leading dress designer, to go to Marilyn’s hotel suite to discuss designing clothes for her. Amy knew Norell from her modeling days.52