Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book)

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  And after that, Marilyn would gulp down pills to get some sleep before her early call. Show Business was the first film on which colleagues reported that Marilyn was “dazed,” unable to remember lines, or speak them clearly. Sometimes, in the mornings, Natasha, Hal Schaefer, or her makeup man, Whitey Snyder, would have to march her around her dressing room—walking her, like an overheated horse—for an hour, or two, until her head cleared. Even then, it was anybody’s guess whether she could make a scene work on film. The delays made everybody else half-crazy—and Marilyn was so apologetic, she pressed harder. By late June, she had collapsed on the set.

  The studio publicity mill covered with the tired tale of Far East Pneumonia (Miss Monroe, the press releases now claimed, had never quite recovered) . . . but the sickness that beset Marilyn had less to do with her lungs than her heart. She felt trapped in her marriage, at that studio, and in that stupid movie. (No, she wouldn’t sign her contract—not even if she had to sit idle for four years.)

  She found solace in the coaching and company of Hal Schaefer—who was gentle with her, and thought she was wonderful. (Now he was helping not only with her movie songs but also songs she was recording for RCA.) . . . In the course of that summer, by Schaefer’s account, she sought solace in his bed, too. DiMaggio’s jealousy was so apparent it made the papers—as did Schaefer’s awkward protest (which was, alas, not much of a denial): “It’s ridiculous,” said Schaefer, “that Mr. DiMaggio could be any more jealous of me than he is of other people working with Marilyn.” That only fueled Joe’s other suspicions.

  He seemed to resent anybody she was with. Even with girlfriends, Marilyn conspired to meet them away from home, or get them in and out of the house while Joe was away, so he wouldn’t get mad. Sometimes, it seemed to her, weeks would pass and she wouldn’t see anyone. But Joe would still be mad about something, and he wouldn’t talk to her either. One time, she invited an old friend, Brad Dexter, to come to the house for dinner—maybe she and Joe could have a friend together. She’d met Dexter years before, on her first good movie, The Asphalt Jungle. He was a man’s man—a poker player, a racetrack fan, a friend of Sinatra’s—she thought Joe and Brad might get along. But as Dexter remembered, he was in the house with Marilyn when Joe walked in, and it was obvious DiMaggio only wanted to know what the hell Brad was doing with his wife. As Dexter said, the whole house went creepy with DiMaggio’s suspicion. “So I pretended to have another appointment, and I didn’t stay to dinner.”

  Marilyn kept herself going with the thought that soon she would fly to New York, for location shooting on her next picture, The Seven Year Itch. Strange to say, it was New York (Joe’s town) that came to stand in her mind for freedom—escape. She was working, secretly, on a plan to get away to New York for good, and leave all her troubles behind: this picture, this studio, and Hollywood itself—with the house on Palm Drive, and the prison of her marriage. New York was where her new friend, Milton Greene, a still photographer, wanted to help her set up her own company—Marilyn Monroe Productions. (That was the only way she’d have real control.) . . . New York was where Lee Strasberg coached the nation’s great actors, at the legendary Actors Studio. (His wife, Paula, had stopped by the set of Show Business—and told Marilyn that she’d be welcome to come and study anytime.) . . . And New York (this was the most secret part) was also home to a man Marilyn had met more than four years before, but had never forgotten—America’s most celebrated playwright, Arthur Miller.

  She couldn’t let anybody know what she was dreaming up. (Skolsky was the one exception—he wanted to produce The Life of Jean Harlow as the first film for Marilyn Monroe Productions.) . . . On the set at Twentieth Century Fox, Marilyn had to act like the only thing she cared about was finishing her picture. (So she could get on to the next one, The Seven Year Itch.) . . . With Feldman, she couldn’t have been friendlier—they never talked anymore about her contract. (She sent him on a fool’s errand to get her loaned out to Samuel Goldwyn, to star with Marlon Brando in the film version of Guys and Dolls.) . . . And with Joe, if she talked about the future at all, it was just looking forward to the next vacation. (It was always “when this picture’s done” or “after the next picture.”)

  But it may be that she told the truth to Hal Schaefer. (If she escaped to New York, she would leave him behind, too.) Or Schaefer may have sensed her slipping away. Or maybe it was true (as it was later reported) that Schaefer was being followed, and threatened in anonymous telephone calls . . . anyway, something made him desperate. On July 27, Hal Schaefer was found unconscious on the floor of his bungalow at Fox, with his stomach full of sleeping pills and Benzedrine (all washed down with a draught of typewriter cleaning fluid). He would barely survive—he would never regain his health entirely—and while he lingered in the hospital, his most frequent visitor was Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t make any secret of that. Joe’s impotent jealousy was discussed around Hollywood—and richly enjoyed.

  That was another strange twist: just as Marilyn was plotting to leave Hollywood in her dust, the luminaries and powers of the town had decided that she was one of their own—a sweet girl and a great star . . . and the only thing wrong with her was her husband. Joe’s contempt for the movie folk was well known; and now it was matched by theirs for him. By August, several industry columnists had mentioned Marilyn’s hospital visits to Hal Schaefer—and some pointed out that Joe DiMaggio had never even paid one visit to his wife on the set during the entire production of There’s No Business Like Show Business.

  So, just before the film was wrapped up, on August 27, Joe paid a visit to the soundstage. He said Marilyn wanted him to come and watch. (And of course, Georgie Solotaire had to come with him.) That was the day for shooting Marilyn’s big production number, “Heat Wave”—and if she had asked Joe to watch, that was an uncharacteristic miscalculation. Over and over, Marilyn writhed through the number, in her plumed headdress and a costume that was so elaborately skimpy that even her fans would be embarrassed for her when the film came out. DiMaggio wouldn’t have to wait. He was embarrassed right away—standing in the shadows, sweating in his perfect blue suit . . . and muttering audibly about the assholes who made his wife look like a slut. When Marilyn saw him there, she seized up, forgot her lyrics, got her feet tangled, and fell on the floor. Technicians rushed in to pick her up, and make sure she wasn’t hurt. Assistants fretted over her, patching her makeup, fixing her hair . . . and then, at the urging of publicity men, they led her over to Joe—Could we get a photo? But DiMaggio refused to be photographed with her. She wasn’t properly dressed. (Later he was glad to pose with her co-star, Ethel Merman. That was different. The Merm was a friend of Georgie’s. And anyway, she was a great star.)

  When Show Business was finally finished, at the end of August, it turned out Marilyn wouldn’t have any time for vacation between films. She had to fly to New York, right away, to begin The Seven Year Itch. Maybe that’s the way she wanted it. She was flying toward a future that only she knew about—her great escape. Alas, four days later, DiMaggio would follow her across the country. And that was another mistake.

  WHY DID HE COME? He had to see her—to be with her. Simple as that. . . . Well, it wasn’t simple, but always the same: every time they’d have a fight, he’d blow up—she was driving him crazy—until she went away from him. And then he had to come. He told her he loved her. He always loved her. He’d promise to be better, to make it better. Maybe he’d go see the head-shrinkers, like she did. (Marilyn had started therapy that summer.) Maybe they could tell him why he got so mad. Joe would say, he knew it could be better—he could be better—if she just wasn’t working. They could live together quietly. How could he be calm in the middle of . . . all this?

  Marilyn was the news in New York—wherever she went, the town stopped around her—the studio saw to that. In fact, the trip was only for publicity. (All the scenes shot on location in New York could have been filmed more easily in Hollywood—and most of them later were.) It worked out bett
er than the studio had dreamed. As one Fox publicist was pleased to recall: “The Russians could have invaded Manhattan, and nobody would have taken any notice.” (For drivers, her week in New York was a nightmare. The Daily News called her “a roadblock named Marilyn Monroe.”) Amid the columns of newsprint under the daily photographs of her, there were hints that her marriage with DiMaggio had fallen on hard times, a victim of her career. Marilyn’s standard rejoinder—“No, everything’s fine. A happy marriage comes before anything!”—never put the rumor to rest.

  So, when Joe arrived, he had to tell Jimmy Cannon about life in Hollywood. “My life is dull. I never interfere with Marilyn’s work. . . . I don’t resent her fame. She was working long before she met me. And for what? What has she got after all those years? She works like a dog. When she’s working, she’s up at five or six in the morning and doesn’t get through until seven at night. We eat dinner, watch a little television, and go to bed.”

  It was the need of the columnists that brought Joe out to watch Marilyn work. Walter Winchell (as he would later recall) knew it would make a good story. The studio had publicized a night scene with Marilyn, the papers trumpeted the news: “Miss Monroe’s costume,” Hearst’s Journal-American announced, “is expected to be more revealing than the one she wore yesterday to stop the traffic.” On a Wednesday at midnight, about fifteen hundred newsmen and fans, pro photographers and snapshot amateurs, turned out on Lexington Avenue, at 52nd Street, in front of the Trans-Lux Theater. But Winchell needed more than a street scene. (Everyone would have that.) That’s why he hunted up Joe, who was having a couple of quiet belts with Georgie Solotaire, in the bar of the St. Regis Hotel. Winchell wanted Joe to come with him to watch Marilyn strut her stuff.

  Joe didn’t think it was a good idea. “It would make her nervous, and it would make me nervous, too.”

  But Winchell insisted. “Oh, come on, Joe. I have to be there. It might make some copy for me.”

  The scene they went to witness would produce one of the most famous screen images in history—Marilyn Monroe, in simple summer white, standing on a subway grating, cooling herself with the wind from a train below. But what sent Joe DiMaggio into a fury was the scene around the scene. Fans were yelling and shoving at police barricades as the train (actually a wind machine manned beneath the street by the special effects crew) blew Marilyn’s skirt around her ears. Each time it blew, the crowd would yell, “Higher!” “More!” Her legs were bare from her high heels to her thin white panties. Photographers were stretched out on the pavement, with their lenses pointed up at his wife’s crotch, the glare of their flashbulbs clearly outlining the shadow of her pubic hair. “What the hell is going on here?” Joe growled. The director, Billy Wilder, would recall “the look of death” on DiMaggio’s face. Joe turned and bulled his way through the crowd—on his way back to the bar—with the delighted Winchell trotting at his heels.

  That night, there was a famous fight in Marilyn and Joe’s suite on the eleventh floor of the St. Regis. It was famous because none of the guests on that floor could sleep. And famous because Natasha Lytess was so alarmed by Marilyn’s cries that she went next door to intervene. (Joe answered the door, and told her to get lost.) It was famous because the following morning Marilyn told her hairdresser and wardrobe mistress that she had screamed for them in the night. (“Her husband got very, very mad with her, and he beat her up a little bit,” said the hairdresser, Gladys Whitten. “It was on her shoulders, but we covered it up, you know.”) And famous because Milton Greene’s wife, Amy, came to visit at the suite the following day (to try on Marilyn’s mink), and was appalled to see bruises all over her friend’s back.

  And that fight would stay famous—as the end of Joe and Marilyn’s famous marriage.

  Years later, Marilyn would tell another hairdresser, Sidney Guilaroff, that she’d warned Joe clearly the first time he beat her up. “Don’t ever do that again. I was abused as a child, and I’m not going to stand for it.” But, as Guilaroff would write in his memoir:

  “Nevertheless, after watching her film a sexy scene for Seven Year Itch, Marilyn said, ‘Joe slapped me around the hotel room until I screamed, “That’s it!” You know, Sidney, the first time a man beats you up, it makes you angry. When it happens a second time you have to be crazy to stay. So I left him.’ ”

  She would file for divorce in Los Angeles, three weeks later.

  AND EVEN THEN, the pattern held. Joe was so sorry after that fight, he pleaded with her for another chance. He would go with her to Los Angeles. He would read those psychology books she had offered. He would never say another mean thing about her work . . . if she’d just stay—let him stay—together, married, at home. But even before she went to court, Joe’s new home was the living room couch. He was not to come upstairs and try to see her.

  When Joe went back east for the World Series (he had a broadcasting contract), she called Jerry Giesler, L.A.’s Attorney to the Stars, who was famous for stage-managing dramas of this sort like a veteran film director. When Joe came back early (he kissed off the last game—he had to see Marilyn), she called Billy Wilder and told him she couldn’t come in to work. She was too upset—she was divorcing Joe. Then, the studio cavalry rode onto the scene. They would make accommodations for Miss Monroe to sleep on the lot. DiMaggio was quietly barred from the Fox property. (The studio was alert to the rumors that Joe had been slugging Fox’s number one asset.) Meanwhile, the publicity troops were calling scores of columnists, reporters, and editors to announce that Joe and Marilyn had decided their marriage could not continue, “because of the conflicting demands of their careers.” And hairdressers, makeup, and wardrobe assistants were scrambled to North Palm Drive. This would be—for Miss Monroe, for the studio, and the industry—a crucial scene. Joe DiMaggio was still a hero. One wrong move could gravely injure Miss Monroe’s career.

  By early morning, October 6, 1954, a hundred reporters and cameramen had staked out the lawn on North Palm Drive. At the curb, there were a couple of idling tour buses (“See the Homes of the Stars!”): they’d changed their itineraries so their patrons could witness this important scene, too. Upstairs, Marilyn’s makeup man, her hairdresser, and dress designer were fretting over her person, while Giesler rehearsed her. He didn’t want her to speak. She was to weep and, at one point, stumble—he would support her, and sweep her past the crowd to a car. Sidney Skolsky was recruited and schooled for his bit part. And although he didn’t know it—he was downstairs on his couch of exile—there was a part for Joe DiMaggio in this drama, too.

  Joe did his bit—or fell right into it—at ten A.M., when his pal from San Francisco, Reno Barsocchini, arrived to help the Clipper get his things out of the house. Reno loaded up Joe’s Cadillac: a couple of suitcases, a bag of golf clubs . . . and then the Great DiMag himself. “Where are you going?” the newsmen were shouting.

  Joe was trying to push through the crowd, without any rough stuff that would make news. “I’m going to San Francisco.”

  “Are you coming home again?”

  “San Francisco’s my home,” Joe said, and he darted for the car. “It’s always been my home. I’ll never come back here.”

  Reno gunned the Cadillac, and Joe was gone . . . . Inside the house, Giesler was well satisfied. It was important for Joe to leave first, and visibly—to walk out of his own accord.

  Forty-five minutes later, the star made her exit. (Why she had to exit was never explained—and never asked—it was strictly part of the scene.) The front door opened, the movie cameras on the lawn started whirring, and Marilyn’s tear-stained face emerged. She wore a black sweater (not too tight), black skirt, black pumps, black leather belt. Billy Travilla, her designer (still upstairs), had gone for the funereal effect. The print press rushed forward and then parted as Marilyn made her way, on Giesler’s arm, to a stand of microphones in front of the house . . . but she wept. Instantly, Sidney Skolsky emerged from the crowd, and ran to her side to comfort her. Then he turned, to announce: “There
is no other man.”

  Giesler shot him an angry look, and stepped in, to take over. “Miss Monroe will have nothing to say this morning. As her attorney I am speaking for her, and can only say that the conflict of careers has brought about this regrettable necessity.”

  Then he steered Marilyn through the shouting horde. “I can’t say anything,” she sniffled into her hankie. She stumbled—and if Giesler hadn’t been there, to catch her in her collapse . . . well, it was so sad. “I’m sorry,” Marilyn sobbed, and patted her eyes with the hankie. “I’m so sorry.” Then, she was driven away.

  She was back at the house within a couple of hours, and next morning, appeared (right on time, and quite cheerful) for a good day’s work on The Seven Year Itch.

  AND EVEN THEN, Joe was so sorry. He stayed in San Francisco long enough to have his picture taken (and sent out nationwide, on the wire) . . . then he sneaked back to Los Angeles. He had to talk to her, to change her mind. He couldn’t understand why she would divorce him. She couldn’t be dumping him for that singing coach—but if it wasn’t another man . . . then, why?

  He thought if he could just talk to her, she would give him another chance. They could try to start over. He tried to tell her, all he ever wanted to do was take care of her. She didn’t want to hear it. When reporters spotted Joe and asked about a reconciliation, Joe couldn’t hide his confusion. “I can’t understand what happened,” he said. “I hope she’ll see the light.” But he would never fight her in court. When the hearing on her petition was scheduled for October 27, Marilyn listed one witness, her business manager, Inez Melson. Joe told Inez he didn’t care what she said in court—Inez should say whatever Marilyn wanted. Joe didn’t hire a lawyer for himself. “If she wants the divorce,” he told the press, “she will get it.”