Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  On September 8, Joe bade farewell to Marilyn, who boarded the night flight for New York and arrived at eight-fifteen next morning. Harry Brand’s publicity department had assured that five hundred airport employees were informed of her arrival. In defiance of the fashionable new flat-chested, loose-fitting dress mode from Dior that season, Marilyn exited the airplane in a form-fitting sheer woolen dress. She posed on a platform and chatted happily with reporters until police pushed back the throng and escorted her to a limousine. Then she was whisked off to six morning interviews, a luncheon with magazine reporters and a press conference at the Daily News Building.

  The media were kept duly alerted throughout the week. On September 13, a thousand spectators attended the first of two outdoor New York scenes. These could have been easily photographed on the Fox lot, but that would have sacrificed fantastic publicity (which was the entire point of this journey to New York). Every newspaper and magazine carried feature stories and interviews, and the accountants at Fox were already guessing the extent of the forthcoming profits on The Seven Year Itch.

  And so as crowds cheered and were then asked to keep silence, Marilyn leaned out a window of 164 East Sixty-first Street, shouted “Hey!” and tossed a pair of shoes to Ewell. “Hi!” she cried gaily. “I just washed my hair!” Cut. Retake. Retake. Print. And that was that. It seemed too easy. But according to George Axelrod, who was present during production, Marilyn was as usual terrified when the moment of filming arrived. This was the moment when her image would be captured forever; this was the means by which she would be seen, assessed, accepted and appreciated (or not), and therefore loved and remembered (or not). Unlike photographs she could review and over which she always demanded the right of approval, Marilyn had to beg directors for take after multiple retake in order to reassure herself, which she never could. She was bright and witty, Axelrod recalled, and she had a natural intelligence and sense of humor, none of which she trusted. “But although she was full of aspirations and frantic to succeed, she had no technical vocabulary about acting or filmmaking, and that gave her ‘protectors’ the advantage over her. They taught and encouraged her—although not too much, or they’d have been out of work.”

  But Marilyn also adored the attention of the crowds, and when she was adored, the exhibitionist came to life—and perhaps never more vividly than from one to four o’clock on the chilly morning of September 15. The famous skirt-blowing scene was to be filmed outside the Trans-Lux Theater, on Lexington Avenue at Fifty-second Street, and the press and public were again put on notice. Several hundred professional and amateur photographers had gathered, and by midnight they were joined by almost two thousand bystanders eager for as much of Marilyn as they could glimpse. Wilder’s assistant announced the procedure: if everyone would cooperate by remaining behind barricades so the scene could be shot, the camera would then be pulled away and every photographer could snap away to his heart’s content.

  What ensued was promptly dubbed by columnist Irving Hoffman “the shot seen round the world.” Marilyn stood over the grating, special effects chief Paul Wurtzel controlled a huge fan below the street, and Marilyn’s white dress flew up, revealing (as planned) white panties but no underskirt or half-slip. The photographs appeared worldwide. For two hours, the crowd roared, she smiled, she giggled, she waved, she cooperated with everyone. Twice she requested a brief break, stepping into the theater to warm herself with a cup of coffee, for the strong wind machine and the cool night air gave her a chill. “She was shaking like hell that night and caught a virus,” recalled Tom Ewell. But like Jean Harlow, Marilyn was never remote from her public and never affected the glamorous aura of an otherworldly visitor.

  The event was the canny idea of photographer Sam Shaw, who had been friendly with Marilyn since 1951 and was working on assignment from co-producer Charles Feldman to document the making of Itch. From the time of pre-production he had in mind the skirt-blowing scene as the logo for the entire picture. “The location work on Lexington Avenue,” he said years later, “was of course for the sake of publicity. Everyone knew it would have to be photographed again back in the studio.” Wilder and Wurtzel confirmed this plan in advance, aware that the closeups would have to be reworked later simply because there was too much ambient noise to record dialogue. In fact most of the still photographs from that night reveal more than the finished film of The Seven Year Itch: in the final scene as completed at Fox, Marilyn steps over a grating, a blast of air lifts her skirt just to knee level, and the camera discreetly cuts to her face as she looks around, grateful for the cool breeze. Disney could not have supervised it more delicately.8

  But there was nothing amusing in what followed.

  The previous afternoon in Beverly Hills, Joe had received a call from his old friend, the columnist Walter Winchell, who advised that quite a spectacle was about to occur on Lexington Avenue. Joe caught a plane for New York that night. But by the next evening he was exhausted and, indifferent as always to moviemaking, he decided to await Marilyn’s return at the St. Regis Hotel bar. Winchell arrived, and, taking a cue from Othello’s Iago, tried to create a good story for his column by urging Joe to join him on Lexington Avenue. But Joe refused: “It would make her nervous, and it would make me nervous, too.”

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

  “No, you go, Walter.”

  But Winchell prevailed, and the two men arrived to see what Winchell expected and Joe feared most of all. As his wife’s skirt flew up again and again and the crowd shouted approval, he turned furiously to Winchell: “What the hell’s going on around here?” Billy Wilder recalled “the look of death” on Joe’s face as he and Winchell hurried back to the hotel bar. One might reasonably ask why it had not occurred to Joe that many people on Lexington Avenue that night (not to say countless others) had certainly seen much more of her on the calendar.

  Later, shouts and screams were heard from the DiMaggios’ suite. Natasha, in the adjacent room, went to investigate but was turned away by Joe. Next morning, she and Gladys Whitten, Marilyn’s hairdresser on the picture, confronted an appalling sight: “Joe was very, very mad with her,” Gladys recalled, “and he beat her up a little bit. There were bruises on her shoulders, but we covered them with makeup.”

  That afternoon, September 16, the DiMaggios returned to California. Two weeks later, Marilyn filed a petition for divorce.

  1. Similar studio wars were ignited by feisty, determined performers such as Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Olivia de Havilland.

  2. Among cities worldwide, London was pre-eminently excited by the wedding. “Marilyn weds,” announced the Daily Express in a banner headline. “Oh, what a housewife!” exclaimed the Daily Sketch. “I’m yours for keeps, Joesey boy,” the Daily Mirror improvised.

  3. The premiere issue of Playboy magazine in December 1953, which featured Marilyn on the cover and at the centerfold, was not easy to obtain and was unavailable on newsstands. It remained a valuable collector’s item, more reported on than owned or even seen.

  4. Skolsky told the story somewhat differently. “Joe, did you ever have ten thousand people stand up and applaud you?” Joe’s voice was “as unemotional as a pair of discarded spikes. ‘Seventy-five thousand,’ he answered quietly” (Skolsky, p. 213).

  5. Speed was one of the qualities that made Hecht so attractive to Hollywood, although even a partial list of his achievements indicates that quality did not suffer for it. After receiving the Oscar for Underworld in 1929, he wrote (or doctored, without credit) more than two hundred screenplays, among them The Front Page (with co-author Charles MacArthur), Queen Christina, Twentieth Century, Nothing Sacred, Wuthering Heights and Whirlpool. He was also, although uncredited, a major contributor to the final script for Gone With the Wind and he wrote or rewrote many Alfred Hitchcock films, among them Foreign Correspondent, Spellbound, Notorious, The Paradine Case, Rope and Strangers on a Train.

  6. That year, Henry Hathaway had hope
d to direct a film of Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage, which would feature James Dean with Marilyn. Zanuck would not even discuss so serious a project for her.

  7. While romancing Elia Kazan during the filming of Viva Zapata!, Marilyn had met and socialized with the star, Kazan’s protégé Marlon Brando. He had studied with Strasberg and held him in high regard. In 1954, Brando was also working at Fox (on Désirée), and one day at lunch he again recommended Strasberg and the Studio to her.

  8. Disney would not, however, have approved of a line in this scene that had to be cut because of censors’ objections. “Don’t you wish you could wear skirts?” Marilyn asks Ewell as the breeze refreshes her. “I feel sorry for you men in your hot pants.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  OCTOBER 1954–JANUARY 1955

  MARILYN MONROE’S chronic inability to arrive on time for work was usually due to a variety of fears: that she was insufficiently prepared or that her appearance was unworthy of the camera. But most of all she was afraid that she would be rejected for a poor performance, that once again (as in her childhood) she would be sent away, unwanted, disapproved, unloved. Thus too, if corrections or suggestions were offered by a director, he had to speak with the utmost delicacy and gentleness to avoid Marilyn’s breaking down in sobs of remorse for her mistake; many shooting days were so lost during her career.

  But her four-day absence from the Fox lot during the last two weeks of September 1954 had a quite different cause. The fateful night on Lexington Avenue and at the hotel, followed by the long flight to Los Angeles next day, left her weary to the point of illness, and in fact she was put to bed with a heavy cold that verged on pneumonia. The thirty-five-day schedule for The Seven Year Itch ran to forty-eight, and the film was not completed until November. Tom Ewell recalled that Marilyn repeatedly apologized during their kissing scenes: “I hope you don’t mind the smell of the medicine I’ve taken today.”

  Against doctor’s advice but to Billy Wilder’s delight, she did manage a few days at the studio between September 18 and October 1. “I knew she was trying,” said her co-star, Tom Ewell, “and I liked her for that alone.” Like everyone on the production, he was sympathetic to the problems in her private life; and like Fox’s chief executives, he knew that Marilyn alone would make or ruin the picture’s chances for success. “Others could give you a good, funny performance,” Zanuck wrote to Wilder on September 20, “but nothing could make up for Marilyn’s personality in this film.” This was more warning than instruction, as Wilder well understood.

  Not unexpectedly, there were problems: she had, after all, to render a completely rounded comic performance at a sad and painful time in her own life. If she was to be on the set in the morning, Marilyn required regular doses of sleeping pills from the studio physician, Lee Seigel; these she supplemented with handouts from Skolsky. “I have to sleep,” she told Sam Shaw. “My fans want me to be glamorous. I won’t let them down.”

  On the other hand, her marriage was in utter disarray and for it the untidy, shabby house on Palm Drive was a metaphor: the kitchen and laundry were left untended, beds unmade, food left unfinished and undisposed. This neglect of basic tidiness was inevitable for a woman so busy, preoccupied, unhappy and habitually disorganized as Marilyn, although it is intriguing to speculate why no one ever thought to engage a housekeeper. Cleanliness was next to godliness for Joe but nearly impossible for Marilyn.

  “When you got her to the studio on a good day, she was remarkable,” Wilder recalled, “even though that creature Lytess was still lurking and Marilyn depended on her approval for everything. I didn’t like it, but I went through anything to get the scenes right.” And so he did, against terrific odds. The Seven Year Itch, forced to comply with the moral requirements of the Code and the Legion of Decency, ended by being a static movie, enlivened only when Marilyn is onscreen—especially in the hilarious satiric sendup of television commercials. The story, alas, lacks any payoff, and its treatment of a married man’s moral dilemma often sounds just plain silly instead of being credibly comic.

  The pleasant gloss of the film owed much to what Wilder has called Marilyn’s

  flesh impact—she looks on the screen as if you could reach out and touch her, she’s a kind of real image, beyond mere photography. But there’s something else, too. She had a natural instinct for how to read a comic line and how to give it something extra, something special. She was never vulgar in a role that could have become vulgar, and somehow you felt good when you saw her on the screen. To put it briefly, she had a quality no one else ever had on the screen except Garbo. No one.

  “I wanted so much to do something right in my art when so much in my life was going bad,” she said soon after. And so she did, although she of all people never appreciated the result. Marilyn astonished the crew of Itch one day late that September. Accustomed to long delays because normally she stuttered for the first word or two of a line and retakes were required, the crew dreaded filming a scene near the end of the film, a long and difficult sequence in which Marilyn had to explain to Ewell why she finds so ordinary and unromantic a man exciting and why his wife should be jealous. Axelrod and Wilder fully expected Marilyn to need several days to get the lines down. To their astonishment, she did it perfectly in three minutes and a single take, “letter perfect [thus Axelrod] and with an impact that made everyone on the set applaud.” Marilyn explained to her writer and director that the scene worked for her simply because she believed every word of it, and because it seemed so close to her own experience. Heard years later, it has a touching simplicity and sweetness of spirit:

  EWELL: Let’s face it. No pretty girl in her right mind wants me. She wants Gregory Peck . . .

  MARILYN: How do you know what a pretty girl wants? You think every pretty girl is a dope. You think that a girl goes to a party and there’s some guy—a great big hunk in a fancy striped vest, strutting around like a tiger—giving you that “I’m so handsome, you can’t resist me” look—and from this she is supposed to fall flat on her face. Well, she doesn’t fall flat on her face. But there’s another guy in the room—way over in the corner—maybe he’s kind of nervous and shy and perspiring a little. First you look past him, but then you sort of sense that he’s gentle and kind and worried, that he’ll be tender with you and nice and sweet—and that’s what’s really exciting! Oh, if I were your wife, I’d be jealous of you—I’d be very, very jealous.

  [She kisses him.]

  I think you’re—just—elegant!

  On September 27, not two weeks after the DiMaggios returned to Palm Drive, Joe departed for New York and Cleveland to broadcast the World Series. For the next several days, Marilyn was in constant contact with her old friend Mary Karger Short (Fred’s sister), the first to learn of the DiMaggios’ separation.

  When he returned to Beverly Hills on Saturday, October 2, Marilyn told Joe she had asked an attorney to draft divorce papers. In addition, she had informed Darryl Zanuck, who left instructions that Joe was to be barred from entering the Fox lot. Joe, believing that Marilyn could be calmed and a crisis averted, said nothing and simply moved from the upstairs bedroom to the downstairs den, maintaining a dignified, aloof silence.

  But that night, neighbors heard a terrific fight at 508 North Palm. Mrs. John C. Medley, concerned, was on the alert for violence: she was one of several neighbors who then saw Marilyn, disheveled and wrapped in a fur coat, exit the house and walk for hours along the street and through the service alley back of Palm Drive.

  Early Monday morning, Marilyn’s actions revealed that while her pain may have been acute, her stamina and survival instincts were stronger. Publicity-conscious as ever, and eager again to turn something potentially embarrassing into something positively beneficial to the image of Marilyn Monroe, she telephoned Billy Wilder to say she was ill and unable to report for work. Immediately thereafter—just as she had from San Francisco on January 14—she then called Harry Brand. Speaking quietly, as if in confidence, she said that she
had retained Jerry Giesler, the most public criminal lawyer in Hollywood, known especially for defending celebrities in delicate cases. Giesler would represent her in what she hoped would be a swift, uncomplicated and uncontested divorce. Remain calm, Brand told her; he would manage everything. Such was the position, power and presumption of studio press agents that they were told and then managed news of births, marriages, divorces, illnesses and deaths involving the more incandescent denizens of Hollywood.

  Crack ex-reporter that he was, Brand mustered the troops. He dashed off a quick announcement to the newswire services that the world-famous marriage was ending “because of incompatibility resulting from the conflicting demands of their careers,” which must have amused everyone who knew that Joe was all but fully retired from just about everything except during World Series time. Brand then mobilized his platoon—Roy Craft, Frank Neill, Chuck Panama, Mollie Merrick and Ray Metzler—and gave each a list of major newspapers, reporters and columnists. Within seven minutes, each of twenty Los Angeles news outlets was “the first” to know the story.

  The news was trumpeted worldwide next day, October 5, and that morning over a hundred reporters and photographers pitched camp on the lawn of 508 North Palm Drive. Inside, Giesler sat with Marilyn, who was in bed, sedated by Leon Krohn. She signed a page-and-a-half document pleading for divorce and alleging that in the eight months of her marriage she had suffered “grievous mental suffering and anguish, all of which acts and conduct on the part of the defendant were without fault of the plaintiff.”1 The complaint stated that the couple separated on September 27, when Joe went East, that there would be no request for alimony, that there was no community property to be divided. Giesler then descended to Joe and handed him the papers, informing him that he had ten days in which to contest the divorce before a default decree could be obtained. Joe said nothing, pocketed the papers and resumed watching television.