Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  During the week in New York, Marilyn had dinner with Amy and Milton to discuss her production company. Many stars were forming such companies to gain control over their careers. Why not Marilyn? Joe DiMaggio, who had come to New York, was at the dinner. He was suspicious of Milton, who seemed to be taking over his wife, but he didn’t object to the company. Amy, a baseball fan, adored Joe: he was one of her “gods.” With her knowledge of the sport, she may have charmed Joe enough to keep him quiet.

  Joe also attended the famed photo shoot on September 15, when Marilyn stood over the subway grate and attracted a host of photographers and fans. As Joe entered the street, the crowd roared for him: he was a national hero, beloved by all. Then as he saw Marilyn’s skirt flying up, he became incensed and stalked off. Several hundred men were looking at her crotch, and he felt cuckolded by them. Back in their hotel room after the shoot, Marilyn and he had a ferocious quarrel, and he hit her. Whitey Snyder covered up the bruises with makeup. After Marilyn returned to Hollywood she was seen walking the streets of Beverly Hills, crying.53

  Once again, as before, she used her relationship with Joe for maximum press exposure. She called Harry Brand to tell him she was leaving Joe, and she hired a wellknown Hollywood lawyer, Jerry Geisler, to represent her. Geisler held a press conference outside her house before he filed the separation papers in court on October 5. Reporters and photographers were camped out in front of her house. Geisler had prepped Marilyn for the conference the previous evening. Sidney Skolsky was present. Geisler told Marilyn how to act, and he included Skolsky in the staged drama. It was to look as though Marilyn, holding onto Geisler’s arm as they walked to his car, was faltering; then Sidney was to race over to her to give her support. The press conference was held as planned, and Marilyn was brilliant. She looks devastated in the photos taken of her. A cynical AP reporter wrote that she should receive an Oscar for her performance.54

  On October 27 the divorce hearing occurred. Marilyn charged Joe only with emotional desertion by refusing to speak to her for days on end. She said nothing about his physical cruelty. Inez Melson was her sole witness; her only criticism of Joe was that he once had refused to take Marilyn to the racetrack with him because she attracted such crowds that he couldn’t get through them to place bets. Joe didn’t contest the divorce, and he didn’t attend the hearing. Marilyn was granted an interlocutory divorce; the final divorce would be granted in a year.55

  Coincidentally, the six-month lease on the house in Beverly Hills was running out, and Marilyn moved into the Hotel Bel-Air. Even in its secluded location, however, the crowds were too great to allow her privacy. She then stayed in her studio dressing room suite for a time before moving into the home of Anne Karger, who remained her close friend. Finally, she leased a new apartment, which suggests she wasn’t entirely certain about leaving Hollywood. Throughout her saga, she kept lines of communication open to Joe. He stayed with her physician Leon Krohn, and Marilyn called Joe every night. In typical Marilyn fashion, she worried about him, even though she was divorcing him.

  Some have incorrectly speculated she had an affair with Sinatra during this period and moved into his house. She certainly knew him; they had been at parties together. But Frank and Joe were close friends. As Amy Greene maintained, Sinatra would not have romanced Marilyn until the divorce from Joe was final. Both these men respected Sicilian codes of honor, under which a friend’s spouse was off-limits. Reporters observed her dining with Joe; the speculation was they would reconcile.56

  On the night of November 5, Frank joined Joe in an attempt to catch Marilyn with Hal Schaefer. The motive was probably to assert Joe’s masculinity by roughing up Hal, who thought Joe intended to break his fingers so that he couldn’t play the piano again. Bernard (Bernie) Spindel, a private detective employed by Joe, traced Marilyn to the apartment of Sheila Stewart, a friend of Schaefer’s. (Spindel, like others, suspected that Marilyn was involved with Sheila, not Hal.) Joe and Frank had been drinking together and, enlivened by alcohol, they decided to break in. Spindel and several associates went with them—and they broke into the wrong apartment. Spindel, worried about what Joe might do, sent them to the wrong apartment on purpose. The noise of the breakin was deafening; Hal and Marilyn, hearing it from Stewart’s apartment, were terrified. They climbed through a back window and ran to their cars. Tearful and disheveled, Marilyn went home.57 The episode was hushed up; the full story didn’t reach the newspapers until it surfaced in an investigation of private detective firms by the California state legisture several years later. It has gone down in history as the “wrong-door raid.”

  As usual, Marilyn recovered quickly from what must have been a difficult experience. The next night, November 6, she appeared at a party in her honor at Romanoff’s to celebrate the completion of The Seven Year Itch. She was ebullient as she received the encomiums of members of Hollywood’s elite circle, people who had often shunned her. She met Clark Gable, her make-believe father. Life magazine published an article on the party, calling Gable the king of Hollywood and Marilyn its princess.58 Reporters, never daunted, even manufactured a romance between them. Two days after the party she entered the hospital for another gynecological operation. She remained there for five days, the hospital time then allotted to recover from major surgery. She probably had her abdomen opened and her endometriosis cleaned out. Joe was present as she recovered. Throughout the years Joe often visited her in hospitals.

  After she and Joe were officially separated, Marilyn spent time with other men. Sex was often not involved. Deciding that she was lonely, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis took her out to dinner. They had made friends with her after the Photoplay awards celebration, and they loved her sense of humor, what Lewis called her “delicious” ability to see the absurdity of life. She also went out on the town with Milton Greene and Sammy Davis Jr., who had become close through a mutual interest in photography. Sammy considered Marilyn to be like a sister.59 Milton had traveled to Hollywood to make certain that she would follow through on the production company.

  Through Sammy Marilyn reconnected with singer Mel Tormé, whom she had met during her Monkey Business tour. Milton, Sammy, and Marilyn went to a Tormé show in Los Angeles. The next day she phoned him, calling herself Sadie. They went for hamburgers to Dolores Drive-in, a favorite hangout of hers when she was a teenager. He cheered her up. He found her opinionated and bright, and he enjoyed her boldness; like Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor, she swore like a trooper.60

  In early December Sidney Skolsky took her to hear Ella Fitzgerald at a small club where she was singing. Marilyn was enthusiastic; she had long studied Fitzgerald’s singing. She decided to boost Ella’s career. She contacted the owners of the Mocambo, a top Sunset Strip nightclub, and persuaded them to hire Fitzgerald for a week. Marilyn promised to be in the front row every night and to take friends with her. According to Dorothy Dandridge, however, the real problem with Fitzgerald at that time was not that she was African-American but that she was overweight, without much sex appeal. Singing at the Mocambo was a turning point in Fitzgerald’s career. With a major nightclub on her resumé, she was no longer relegated to small clubs. She was grateful to Marilyn, although she held back from close friendship because of Marilyn’s drug habit.61

  Then several blows struck Marilyn at once, reigniting her desire to move to New York. The reviews of There’s No Business Like Show Business were negative. Critics disparaged her for sluttish behavior in the production numbers, especially in “Tropical Heat Wave.” Then Zanuck turned her down for dramatic roles at Fox and also refused to lend her out to the Samuel Goldwyn studio to play Adelaide in Guys and Dolls with Marlon Brando. Zanuck considered her too valuable to Fox as a blonde bombshell to allow another studio to feature her, no matter what Fox was paid.

  Ginger Rogers, Shelley Winters, and Doris Day had begun their careers as flighty blondes and moved on to dramatic roles, but Zanuck had drawn a line in the sand with regard to Marilyn. He told her to report for How to Be Very,
Very Popular, a film about a showgirl fleeing the police who hides out in a college dormitory and is hypnotized so that she acts as though she is “under water.” Marilyn refused to do it. Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the film, had based the character on Marilyn. Sheree North, who replaced her in it, was appalled by the way Fox executives treated Marilyn, constantly belittling her behind her back, calling her a dumb blonde and worse. Watching the insulting way they handled Marilyn, Sheree said, was “an eye-opener that dissolved any illusions [I had] about the nature of stardom. She had her own ideas. She was going against the formula that the studio people had. There would be all this terrible talk about her, which frightened me. I thought, if I have any individual ideas, they’ll treat me like that, too.” Marilyn was kind to Sheree, and she took her to her Christian Science church, which she still occasionally attended.62

  Marilyn got wind that Confidential magazine was planning a story on her affair with Hal Schaefer. Launched in 1951, Confidential had a yearly circulation of over a million by 1954, making it the magazine with the highest circulation in the nation. Its editor paid no attention to the studio embargo on writing about Hollywood sex; he got his material by paying reporters under the table. By 1953 Marilyn, along with Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, was the favorite subject of the magazine, which presented the three of them as an “unholy trinity” of bold and free women, who did whatever they wanted.63 Marilyn disliked that image of herself as well as the revelations that went along with it. So far she had managed them, but that was soon to change, as Confidential published details about her affair with director Nicholas Ray and her supposed affair with Robert Slatzer, a story that Slatzer, a Hollywood hanger-on, made up. She feared that the autobiography she had dictated to Ben Hecht, which had been published in a bootleg version in a Manchester tabloid, might be published in the United States—or might appear in Confidential. The National Police Gazette, a U.S. tabloid in circulation since 1845, published a story on the bootleg autobiography, contending that Fox executives had excoriated her for it. There was also the problem that Confidential specialized in outing homosexual Hollywood actors.64

  She’d had enough: she erupted in fury against the studio executives for typecasting her in sexy-blonde roles. She vented to a reporter, “I was put into these movies [River of No Return and There’s No Business Like Show Business] without being consulted at all, much against my wishes. I had no choice in the matter. Is that fair? I work hard, I take pride in my work, and I’m a human being like the rest of them. If I keep on with parts like the ones Fox has been giving me, the public will soon tire of me.” Stanley Rubin, the producer of River of No Return, remembered walking past the Fox executive building with Marilyn, as she stopped and shook her fists. “I’m not just a face in a body. Listen to me, you bastards. I want you to watch me. I’m going to get better and better.” She told another reporter, “I’m really eager to do something else. Squeezing yourself to ooze out the last ounce of sex allure is terribly hard. I’d like to do roles like Julia in Bury the Dead, Gretchen in Faust, and Teresa in The Cradle Song.”65

  She was fed up with playing Marilyn Monroe, the sexy glamour queen. For the past three years she had repeatedly stated she wanted dramatic roles, and no one seemed to listen. In early December 1954, she fired Charles Feldman as her agent and signed up with Lew Wasserman of the Music Corporation of America. How to Be Very, Very Popular was the last straw. She decided to form the production company with Milton Greene and, defying Zanuck and Twentieth Century–Fox, move to New York. It was a bold and daring action, as she defied Zanuck and waited to see what he would do.

  Marilyn’s autobiography, which she dictated to Ben Hecht in December 1953 and during the early spring of 1954, deserves special attention, because some Marilyn biographers have dismissed it as a fraud. My reading of the documents about the project in the Hecht Papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago has convinced me it is valid.66

  Marilyn began considering doing an autobiography when Joe Schenck, who had repeatedly heard her stories about her childhood, suggested that she put them into published form. A well-written memoir, especially if she wrote some of it herself, could help to end the belief that she was a dumb blonde. Schenck contacted Ben Hecht. Able to produce scripts in eight weeks, with a long career as a journalist and writer, Hecht was considered the best screenwriter in the business.67 Marilyn knew him from Monkey Business, for which he had written much of the script.

  Hecht was excited about ghostwriting Marilyn’s autobiography, since she was Hollywood’s biggest star. Marilyn suggested she write some of the book herself, and Hecht liked that idea. “The book under her name,” he wrote to Loyd Wright, Marilyn’s attorney, “would receive serious literary attention from the entire magazine world. It would bring her a high and widespread type of publicity superior to any she has received.” Even before he had final approval from Marilyn, he negotiated deals with Ladies’ Home Journal and several newspapers to publish portions of the finished memoir.68

  Hecht met Marilyn in San Francisco in December 1953 to begin the interviews. She was visiting Joe. But Joe had no input into the interviews, at least not then. Before she left Hollywood for San Francisco, Marilyn had called Lucille Ryman and told her she was going to tell Hecht everything. Ryman was taken aback, because she knew about Marilyn’s promiscuity. “How can you reveal everything that you have done?” she asked. Marilyn replied, “Perhaps the public should know everything about me.” The interviews in San Francisco lasted five days, and Marilyn’s celebrity was such that People Today announced that they were happening. “The deal will shock Hollywood and the rest of the nation.”69

  Marilyn married Joe in early January. By February, as Hecht put it, she had “vanished in a honeymoon.” Joe hadn’t intervened in their project in San Francisco but now that he and Marilyn were married, he did. A traditional Italian man, he felt that his wife should do what he said, and he didn’t want her revealing any of her sexual adventures. “When I first saw her for five days,” Hecht wrote his editor at Doubleday, “she was 100 percent clinging and cooperative. She got married and the picture changed … My next session with her may have to be in a ball park.” Hecht eliminated about thirty percent of a version he had written that might be seen as “damaging,” and he interviewed her again for a few days in Hollywood. He completed about two hundred pages of a new version. He read the manuscript aloud to her. She found it so compelling that she cried. He also gave it to her to edit, and she made only minor changes. In early June she told Hedda Hopper that she still had the copy she had corrected.70

  But by then the project had unraveled. Both Hecht and Marilyn were outraged when, without either’s permission, the memoir began appearing in a tabloid called the Empire News in Manchester, England. It turned out that Jacques Chambrun, Hecht’s agent, had sold it to the tabloid. Twentieth Century–Fox executives were appalled by what they read in the tabloid, since it exposed the “casting couch,” even though Marilyn stated that she had never experienced it. She also obliquely mentioned her participation in Joe Schenck’s poker parties and her work as an escort to visiting studio dignitaries, although she gave no names. The studios had kept the lid on sexuality since sex scandals involving film stars in the early 1920s had exposed its sexual underside, and had begun the process of self-censorship that resulted in the Production Code of 1934.

  According to the National Police Gazette, in its story about the Hecht interviews, “Marilyn Monroe ripped the mask off Hollywood like it had never been ripped off before. Many big names were deleted from the manuscript before it was published.” Erskine Johnson, writing in Motion Picture, stated that the studio bosses were so outraged by it that they had stopped the Empire News articles from being published in the United States. They called Marilyn into their offices and admonished her harshly, but she contended she had done nothing wrong. The publication didn’t arouse any outcry in the United States, although, according to Movieland, Marilyn was worried about the Empire News episode for a long time.71 />
  Furious at the situation, Hecht never completed the memoir’s final chapters, although his papers at the Newberry Library contain an outline of them. They were to include Marilyn’s reaction to Grace’s death, the backstory to the making of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, and why Marilyn’s career would be stalled if she remained a “dumb blonde” and didn’t do dramatic roles. The version published in 1974 ends with Marilyn’s marriage to DiMaggio and her joy during her visit to Korea. But the planned version was to end on a different note: she would discuss her intention to end her bitterness about her childhood by bringing a new “Norma Jeane” into the world—her child, whom she would raise like a princess in a fairy tale, and who would mature into a wise, happy adult. Having a child as a way of overcoming emotional distress was probably a recipe for disaster, as was her intention to indulge the child. But Marilyn never gave up the dream of creating a perfect Marilyn through the child she would have.72

  Neither Hecht nor Marilyn prosecuted the larcenous Jacques Chambrun. A brilliant fabulist, Chambrun posed as a member of the French nobility when he was actually a poor boy from the Bronx. He was the agent for Sherwood Anderson, H. G. Wells, and Somerset Maugham—from whom he also embezzled money. He had represented Hecht for more than twenty years. Angered by the situation with My Story, Hecht investigated his financial records to find that Chambrun had negotiated deals for his writing and then pocketed the payments. This was, however, his most outrageous scam.