Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  In fact her performance never falters. Everything in her gaze at Widmark, who she insists is her lamented fiancé, conveys a fierce but tender plea for refuge, and in finely modulated phrasing her long speech becomes affectingly piteous. “I’ll be any way you want me,” she says in a hoarse whisper, her voice almost breaking, “because I belong to you. Didn’t you ever have the feeling that if you let somebody walk away from you, you’d be lost—you wouldn’t know which way to turn, or have anybody to take their place?”

  Marilyn made of Nell not a stereotypical madwoman but the recognizable casualty of a wider urban madness, a kind of representative personality for all the fragmented characters seen elsewhere in the hotel. As she said her lines that winter (“When I was in high school, I never had a pretty dress of my own”), she may well have thought of her own girlhood; when she spoke of the character’s loneliness in an Oregon asylum, the memory of her Portland visit with Gladys may have come to mind. Her performance had extraordinary density and subtlety, and the result is a fully realized portrait: a woman psychologically wounded by war, emotionally broken by loss—one who has attempted suicide but longs deeply for a reason to live. In her last scene, surrounded by a crowd of staring hotel guests, she seems a frightened animal; led away, she glances wistfully at Widmark, reconciled to estranged girlfriend Anne Bancroft. “People ought to love one another,” she says, giving the line the reverence of a prayer. Of her talent for nuanced dramatic acting there could no longer be any doubt. When the film was released the following summer, the trade journal Motion Picture Herald hailed her as “the kind of big new star for which exhibitors are always asking,” and Variety declared Marilyn a “surefire money attraction.” She was, added the New York Daily Mirror, “completely in charge of her role.”

  “We had a hell of a time getting her out of the dressing room and onto the set,” as Richard Widmark put it years later. “At first we thought she’d never get anything right, and we’d mutter, ‘Oh, this is impossible—you can’t print this!’ But something happened between the lens and the film, and when we looked at the rushes she had the rest of us knocked off the screen!” Anne Bancroft, Jim Backus and others were equally enthusiastic about Marilyn’s acting.

  Marilyn’s reaction to the praise of her colleagues was a bemused and sincere modesty: so far as she was concerned, the performance could have been much better. Congratulated and comforted by Aline Mosby, a United Press correspondent she trusted, Marilyn simply said: “I’m trying to find myself now, to be a good actress and a good person. Sometimes I feel strong inside but I have to reach in and pull it up. It isn’t easy. Nothing’s easy. But you go on.” And then she added: “I don’t like to talk about my own past, it’s an unpleasant experience I’m trying to forget.” Studying with Chekhov and Lytess, creating a new image for herself, playing difficult and demanding roles like Nell Forbes—these were mechanisms by which she could escape those unhappy experiences. To become “a good person” meant, however, that Marilyn longed to be a new and different person, and in 1952 this goal became virtually an obsession with which studio publicists were only too happy to cooperate.

  Secretive about her past though she was, Marilyn could never forget its most poignant facts—her unknown father and unfamiliar mother. As 1952 began, she set up a plan for a woman named Inez Melson to act as her business manager and to act as Gladys’s conservator. From Marilyn’s income a regular contribution was made toward the care of her mother, whom Inez visited several times each month in the various state hospitals where she dwelled. Mother and daughter had not met in five years, nor had there been any exchange of telephone calls or letters. More to the point, Gladys was never discussed, for Fox’s publicists had long followed Marilyn’s lead and declared the actress an orphan. And so for the present Gladys Monroe remained a woman on the fringes of her daughter’s memory, a shadowy figure who was a potential cause of shame, someone Marilyn assisted only privately.

  In 1952, she had no less than three addresses—furnished apartments on Hilldale Avenue in West Hollywood and, two blocks from that, on Doheny Drive; and then a comfortable suite at the Bel-Air Hotel in the rustic, secluded setting of Stone Canyon. Then as ever, Marilyn seemed a rootless soul who felt she belonged to no one; it was her unstated (and perhaps unacknowledged) aim, therefore, to belong to everyone.

  There would always be surrogate parents, and in 1952 those roles were neatly filled by Natasha Lytess and Michael Chekhov. In this regard, Marilyn’s renewed desire to play Grushenka in a film of The Brothers Karamazov had a pointed basis, for in so doing she could become the adopted Russian daughter of this exotic Russian “couple.” And because they were convinced it was possible, Chekhov and Lytess encouraged her—as did Arthur Miller, to whom she wrote. He had been “dazzled by the richness of The Brothers Karamazov,” he wrote, since his college days.

  But Marilyn could be recalcitrant and uncooperative, selfishly late for appointments and presumptuous of others’ generosity. When Michael Chekhov told Marilyn that her tardiness upset his schedule and that perhaps they should suspend tutorials, he received an irresistible letter:

  Dear Mr. Chekhov:

  Please don’t give me up yet—I know (painfully so) that I try your patience.

  I need the work and your friendship desperately. I shall call you soon.

  Love,

  Marilyn Monroe.

  Chekhov was won over on the spot.

  As for Natasha, she was left in a kind of emotional limbo with Marilyn, who wanted to be protégée, daughter and generally the most important person in Natasha’s life—but on her own terms, and without regard for the pain she must have known this caused. Such a situation Natasha sustained not only for the income and influence but also because she was still in love with her wounded but increasingly proficient student.

  Following Don’t Bother to Knock, Zanuck again put Marilyn in two undemanding and decorative roles. First she was a shapely, dumb-blonde secretary in the farce Monkey Business, in which scientist Cary Grant invents a youth potion. Then, in the anthology comedy We’re Not Married, she appeared for about five minutes as a wife and mother who wins a “Mrs. Mississippi” beauty contest only to learn that her marriage was technically illegal and she can after all bill herself as “Miss.” The role was created, according to the film’s writer Nunnally Johnson, only to present Marilyn in two bathing suits.

  Allan Snyder, as usual making up Marilyn for Monkey Business, agreed with director Howard Hawks that rarely had an actress seemed so frightened of coming to the set. But when she finally arrived, according to Hawks, the camera liked her; it was odd, he added: “The more important she became the more frightened she became. . . . She had no confidence in her own ability.” Snyder, who had by this time been working with her for almost six years, understood: Marilyn was simply terrified that she didn’t look good enough.

  She knew every trick of the makeup trade—how to line her eyes, what oils and color bases to use, how to create the right color for her lips. She looked fantastic, of course, but it was all an illusion: in person, out of makeup, she was very pretty but in a plain way, and she knew it.

  A crisis interrupted the filming of Monkey Business and preproduction of We’re Not Married. On March 1, 1952, Marilyn’s persistent abdominal pain and fever were diagnosed by Dr. Eliot Corday as appendicitis. She begged him to delay an operation, and for several days she lay in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital while antibiotics allayed the infection. After a week, Marilyn returned to work without surgery.

  Her request did not signify any dedication to the two films, which she would happily have forsaken; on the contrary, she had a very personal concern. In early February, Marilyn had been introduced to a world-famous baseball player, and by the end of the month they were dating steadily. “But we’re not married!” she told an inquiring reporter who suspected monkey business.

  1. In his memoirs (pp. 220–222), Sidney Skolsky described an identical outing with Marilyn.

  2. Three years were nece
ssary to resolve the matter of Marilyn’s agreement with the Morris office. She was not formally represented by Famous Artists until March 12, 1953, and did not sign a contract with them until March 1954—not long before that relationship, too, was terminated.

  3. For decades it was erroneously reported that Marilyn’s Fox salary was contracted to peak at $1,500 weekly. In fact that was her salary when she walked out on her contract in 1955; had she remained, the increments would have been as scheduled here.

  4. According to Kazan (p. 408), Miller’s first meeting with Marilyn occurred when Charles Feldman tendered the playwright a dinner party some time later that winter. But Sam Shaw and Rupert Allan, among others, endorse Miller’s account of the earlier introduction. Kazan’s entertaining and sumptuously self-revealing autobiography often synthesizes, rearranges and wholly confuses dates and facts: he states, for example, that Marilyn was under contract to Harry Cohn when he and Miller took her along to Columbia Studios next day.

  5. According to reporter Louella Parsons, Marilyn vomited just before airtime on the several occasions she was a guest on Parsons’s radio program—a reaction surely betokening nervousness and not her reaction to Parson’s show (cf. Louella O. Parsons, Tell It To Louella [New York: Putnam’s, 1961], p. 225).

  6. This was of course true, but it was also virtually an indictment of Zanuck’s low estimate of Marilyn.

  7. Marilyn was the cover story for Quick magazine (November 19, 1951), which designated her “The New Jean Harlow”—as did Focus for that December, also designating her fair competition for Turner, Grable and Hay worth.

  8. Ladies of the Chorus was a so-called B-picture, a second feature; by 1951, it was also a forgotten film.

  Chapter Eleven

  MARCH–DECEMBER 1952

  WHEN MARILYN MONROE met Joe DiMaggio in early 1952, she was twenty-five, he was thirty-seven. Inner conflicts and constant fears notwithstanding, she was becoming the most famous star in Hollywood history. He had recently retired.

  Joseph Paul DiMaggio was the eighth of nine children and the fourth of five sons, born to Sicilian immigrants on November 25, 1914 in Martinez, a small town in Northern California. A year later, the family moved to San Francisco, where Giuseppe DiMaggio had better prospects for the crab fishing that supported his family; his boat, the Rosalie (named for his wife) was docked at North Beach.

  Young Joe was raised in a strict Catholic household where discipline, modesty and sacrifice were taken for granted, and where family devotion, schoolwork and attendance at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul circumscribed the DiMaggio children’s activities. Joe’s parents constantly enjoined on him the importance of good manners and honest work; they also warned against allowing anyone to take advantage of him. No one must think the DiMaggios unworthy as they worked into the American mainstream.

  From the age of six to eight, Joe had to wear awkward, heavy leg braces to correct a mysterious congenital ankle weakness. This period reinforced his personality as a somewhat withdrawn boy as well as his determination to excel at something physical. Free of the braces, he was soon playing baseball with his brothers Vincent and Dominic; born just before and after him, they were already talking about becoming professional ballplayers and eventually realized their goal.

  Like many children of immigrants, Joe was raised to be proud of his Sicilian heritage, but he was also somewhat embarrassed by it and longed to be thoroughly, successfully American. Marilyn Monroe, too, had been discomfited by her early history and worked to overcome its effects, and this became one of the bonds between them. They were both shy but attractive teenagers, reserved with the opposite sex but clearly appreciative of stares and compliments. Joe preferred baseball, and at fourteen helped a Boys Club team win a championship.

  By sixteen, Joe had reached his full height of an inch over six feet, and although wiry thin (his adult weight never topped 190), he was strong and naturally graceful. Like Marilyn, he quit high school in tenth grade—not to marry, however, but to work in an orange-juice bottling plant to help support his large family. On weekends and during every free daylight hour, he was in a park playing baseball. Before his eighteenth birthday, he was being paid to do just that as a shortstop with the San Francisco Seals, and by 1935, at the age of twenty-one, he was batting .398 under the guidance of his manager and friend Lefty O’Doul.

  The following year Joe signed a contract with the New York Yankees, for whom he was very soon the all-star right-fielder and the most publicized rookie in twenty-five years. His salary was the very princely sum of $15,000, most of which he spent to move his family to a comfortable house on Beach Street. He also invested in a seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf (“Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto”), began to wear expensive suits, drove a Cadillac and was seen in San Francisco and New York in the company of pretty showgirls. By the time he was twenty-two, Joe DiMaggio was a folk hero—at a time when America, deep in a Great Depression, desperately needed idols and paragons. Admired by men, worshiped by schoolboys, desired by women, he was a powerful, smooth man whose impassive expression on and off the field made him all the more attractive and intriguing.

  Like Marilyn at work, Joe was a serious, decent and respectful colleague; like her, too, he relished the results but not, it seemed, the effort. As friends and teammates found, Joe never seemed to play baseball for the joy it gave him: it was a matter of achievement, of pride, and (unlike Marilyn’s motivation) he played for the money. In 1938, for example, he began the season late after holding out for a higher salary than the $25,000 he had been offered (and which he finally accepted). Similarly, on August 2, 1939, in the ninth inning of a Yankee game against Detroit, he caught a fly ball almost five hundred feet from home plate, so remarkable a feat that reporters celebrated it and virtually ignored the fact that the Yankees lost the game. “I didn’t let myself get excited,” was Joe’s typical comment. Indeed, he never seemed to rejoice in his good fortune, even when he was hailed Most Valuable Player in the American League—a thrice-won distinction. Remote and (some reporters said) aristocratic, Joe DiMaggio at twenty-five physically rather resembled the new pope, Pius XII.

  But with obvious differences. In 1937, voted one of the best-dressed men in the country, Joe had a bit part in the movie Manhattan Merry-Go-Round. Also in the cast was a good-humored blond showgirl named Dorothy Arnoldine Olsen. On November 19, 1939, they were married.

  Joe told the press they would live in San Francisco in the winter, on the road with the Yankees during the ball season; Dorothy said she preferred Los Angeles and New York. He wanted a family woman like his devoted mother and his doting sisters; Dorothy wanted a career. From the start, then, compromises had to be negotiated. During the 1940 ball season, the DiMaggios rented a Manhattan penthouse on West End Avenue. Very soon thereafter, she began to complain to friends that he was out most evenings at sports clubs and restaurants with his cronies, a habit he saw no need to modify when Dorothy became pregnant in early 1941, nor when their son, Joe Jr., was born October 23. The marriage was a rocky business by 1942, although such matters were not typically found in the press, which had far more important world issues to report.

  When his batting average sank in 1942, Joe’s fans became confused and his wife more dissatisfied, and he abandoned his $43,500 salary. In February 1943, Joe enlisted in the Army Air Force. Assigned to supervise physical-training units, he served on the baseball battlefields of California, New Jersey and Hawaii—and spent much of the time hospitalized for stomach ulcers.

  By the time of his discharge in September 1945, his wife had won an uncontested divorce; she married a New York stockbroker the following year. Although Joe made some attempts at reconciliation with Dorothy after her second divorce in 1950, he continued to live offseason in his family’s San Francisco home, where his spinster sister Marie cooked, cleaned, sewed and attended his every household need; otherwise, he lived in New York hotels. “Joltin’ Joe” DiMaggio, returning to the Yankees, was a lonely, melancholy figure, apparentl
y not much cheered by the historic $100,000 salary he was paid. He was, however, a steadying and influential presence on the team, often playing against doctor’s orders.

  But some part of his personality seems to have become fixed in a kind of quiet, adolescent stasis, for his friendships with women were mostly transient, cool and uncomfortable after his divorce. Almost paranoid that people wanted to exploit his fame, Joe frequently complained that “everybody who calls me wants something.” As Allan Snyder recalled, Joe could be very difficult in social situations—especially those involving Marilyn—and surly and suspicious of everyone’s words and deeds.

  Joe’s favorite New York hangout was Toots Shor’s restaurant, a clubby male preserve one woman called a gymnasium with room service. There, an atmosphere of jokey machismo prevailed; most conversations involved sports, girls and the comic pages. Over the years, regulars included Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey, Damon Runyon and Ernest Hemingway, the columnist Bob Considine and George Solotaire, a rotund, loquacious fellow who ran the Adelphi Theater Ticket Agency. He could procure for Joe a choice show ticket and could broker a date with an attractive showgirl. George is credited with coining the word “dullsville” to describe a boring play and “splitsville” for divorce; it is tempting to believe that this talent sprang from his success, for he moved up from Brownsville (a poor section of Brooklyn) to Bronxville (a wealthy part of Westchester). Lefty O’Doul and George Solotaire were among Joe’s lifelong buddies.

  In 1949, after heel surgery, Joe DiMaggio fell into a deeply depressive anxiety that made him, as he said, “almost a mental case,” and from which he emerged more taciturn and antisocial than ever—and more determined to prove himself valuable. Playing against the Boston Red Sox (who had won ten of their previous eleven games), DiMaggio hit four home runs in three games. “One of the most heart-warming comebacks in all sports history,” as Life magazine put it, made him “suddenly a national hero . . . even among people who never saw a game in their lives.” He played in one hundred thirty-nine games in 1950, hit .370 in the final six weeks, scored one hundred fourteen runs and hit three home runs in a single game.