by James Spada
At a Hollywood party, late 1953. Little Norma Jeane Baker had achieved her dream—she knew what it was like to be beautiful, famous, glamorous, and loved. But it wasn’t all she had dreamed it would be. “It’s funny,” she said, “how success makes so many people hate you. I wish it wasn’t that way. It would be wonderful to enjoy success without seeing envy in the eyes of those around you.”
“The Marriage of the Decade.” January 14, 1954, Marilyn and Joe tie the knot in San Francisco. Marilyn promised to tell her friend, Fox publicist Harry Brand, when she was going to marry Joe. She did, and he let the word out. Reporters swarmed around the courthouse and the bedlam was so outrageous the judge forgot to kiss the bride. America was agog: the Los Angeles Herald and Express said: “It could only happen here in America, this storybook romance.... Both of them... had to fight their way to fame and fortune and to each other; one in a birthday suit, as a foundling and later as a calendar girl; the other in a... baseball suit.”
The couple traveled to Paso Robles and stayed one night at a motel. Joe, a TV addict, inquired whether the room had a television(!). The next day they left for a mountain hideaway fifty miles from Palm Springs. There was snow on the ground, and they were alone for two weeks. “There wasn’t a television set in the cabin,” Marilyn said. “Joe and I talked a lot. We really got to know each other.”
Arriving in Japan for a honeymoon trip, MM tells the press that her stole is fox—“not the Twentieth Century kind.” She had been suspended by the studio for refusing to do The Girl in Pink Tights, a film she thought unworthy of her. (She had heard it was unworthy of her—they wouldn’t show her the script.) She also wanted more money—because of her seven-year pact, actors without her box office impact were making much more per picture than she. Fox was determined not to give in to her “unreasonable demands”—but now that she was Mrs. Joe D., what was a studio to do? It lifted the suspension.
Marilyn meets the boys who helped make her a star—and the results are explosive: 100,000 servicemen in Korea cheer, stomp, catcall, and incessantly snap cameras as Marilyn sings for them in the bitter cold. She almost caused a riot; several men were nearly trampled in the attempt to get as close to her as possible. She was as coy and sexy as she could get away with. Typical of her repartee: “You fellas are always whistling at sweater girls. Well, take away their sweaters and what have you got?”
At subsequent stops, Monroe wore a skimpy jacket as some protection against the chill—she was developing a bad cold and laryngitis. But she continued, and the Army later figured she’d done more for the soldiers’ morale than anyone else could have. Back in Tokyo, she remembered the experience with a thrill. “It was so wonderful, Joe,” she told her husband. “You never heard such cheering.”
“Yes I have,” he replied. “Don’t let it go to your head. Just miss the ball once. You’ll see they can boo as loud as they can cheer.”
Marilyn, now suffering from pneumonia, arrives back in the States with a protective Joe, who refused to allow her to be interviewed by the waiting newsmen.
Two weeks later, in March 1954, a nicely recovered Marilyn accepts her second Photoplay award, this time as “Best Actress” for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire. “This award means a lot to me,” she said, “because it’s for my performance.” With her is Alan Ladd.
With Hedda Hopper, the other half of the gossipy dynamic duo who dominated Hollywood in the forties and fifties. Marilyn is in costume for her role in 1954’s There’s No Business Like Show Business, her first film after returning to the Twentieth Century-Fox fold. She accepted the part because Fox promised her the choicest comedy role then available, the “girl upstairs” in The Seven Year Itch.
Rehearsing the “There’s No Business Like Show Business” number with her costars Johnnie Ray, Mitzi Gaynor, Dan Dailey, Ethel Merman, and Donald O’Connor. Monroe must have felt a film based on Irving Berlin’s music and starring such talented performers would be preferable to The Girl in Pink Tights, but the choice was an unfortunate one. She played Donald O’Connor’s love interest, and his youthful, fresh appearance made her seem, with her heavy makeup, artificial and “old enough to be his mother,” as she put it.
Although she looks demure in this on-the-set candid, Marilyn’s musical numbers turned out vulgar and garish, and her performance was surprisingly stiff after the comic flair she had displayed in previous films. There was much condemnation of one of her numbers in particular, “Heat Wave.” The film itself contained little wit, style, or taste, and her embarrassment over the whole thing hardened her resolve not to let herself get talked into “Grade Z” movies anymore. After There’s No Business Like Show Business her films, with one exception, would all be of memorable excellence.
In New York for location shooting of The Seven Year Itch, in September 1954, Marilyn assumes an unusually somber mood. She was delighted to be making this film and grateful for the opportunity to star in Billy Wilder’s version of George Axelrod’s smash Broadway play, a proven vehicle with a well-written, witty female lead.
The celebrated “skirt-blowing scene,” filmed on September 15, 1954, became one of the most memorable scenes in Hollywood history. Marilyn stands over a New York subway grating, and the turbulence created by the train passing underneath (actually a huge electric fan) lifts her dress and millions of masculine spirits. The filming, witnessed by two thousand spectators, reporters, and photographers, caused traffic jams and lifted something else besides MM’s skirt—Joe DiMaggio’s ire. Infuriated by his wife’s “public spectacle,” he watched grim-faced and at one point muttered, “What the hell is going on here?” Director Wilder commented, “I shall never forget the look of death on Joe’s face.”
The DiMaggios return to California amid rumors that their marriage is in trouble.
The “storybook marriage” comes to an end. On October 5, 1954, attorney Jerry Geisler escorts Marilyn out of the house she and Joe shared in Beverly Hills and a crowd of a hundred newspeople push forward. The marriage had lasted less than nine months. Marilyn, near collapse and unable to talk coherently, would only say “I’m sorry” whenever she was thrown a question. Geisler asked the press boys to lay off. “She’s emotionally distraught. She and Joe couldn’t get along. All the information you want will be brought out at the proper time.”
Monroe reported to work on The Seven Year Itch later that day, but Billy Wilder sent her home. “She has a comedy part,” he explained, “and she couldn’t see much comedy in life today.”
Three weeks later, a more composed Marilyn signs the divorce decree. The official reason for the breakup was listed as “incompatibility.” Joe had wanted Marilyn to give up her career and be solely his wife. She couldn’t do it. He, according to Marilyn, “didn’t talk to me. He was cold. He was indifferent to me as a human being and an artist. He didn’t want me to have friends of my own. He didn’t want me to do my work. He watched television instead of talking to me.” Later she added, “Joe distrusted everybody in Hollywood except his buddy Frank Sinatra. We just lived in two different worlds. He spent all day in front of the TV set watching some game or another. He went for days without even speaking to me. He’s the moodiest man I ever met.”
After undergoing minor surgery in November 1954, Marilyn checks out of Cedars of Lebanon hospital and is appalled to discover photographers there to record the event. She had come to expect cameras everywhere she went publicly, but now she had to face a total lack of privacy—something which disturbed her greatly.
Bouncing back, Marilyn attends a performance by Ella Fitzgerald in Hollywood, escorted by columnist Sidney Skolsky, a friend. Throughout her life, Ella and Frank Sinatra would remain her two favorite vocalists. She in fact helped Ella greatly by attending every one of her performances for a week, which brought great attention to Ella’s show.
The unveiling of the “New Marilyn.” January 7, 1955, in New York, she calls a press conference to announce that she and Look magazine photographer Milton Gree
ne had formed Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc., “so I can play the better kind of roles I want to play. I didn’t like a lot of my pictures. I’m tired of sex roles. I want to broaden my scope. I want to do dramatic parts.” Asked if, as rumored, she wanted “to play The Brothers Karamazov,” she replied, “I don’t want to play the brothers. I want to play Grushenka. She’s a girl.” Then she added, “It’s no temptation to me to do the same thing over and over. I want to keep growing as a person and as an actress... in Hollywood they never ask me my opinion. They just tell me what time to come to work.”
Later that day, Monroe meets Dietrich as Milton Greene looks on. Of Greene, who was to take some of the loveliest pictures of her ever, Marilyn said, “I think he’s very capable and very talented and very artistic, and a lot of other people will know it someday. You’ll see. I feel deeply about him. I’m sincere about his genius. He’s a genius.”
Marilyn gives herself to charity. She also gave herself to Milton Berle, if Uncle Miltie’s autobiography is to be believed—he claims they had an affair.
March 31, 1955: Marilyn rides a pink elephant at a Madison Square Garden extravaganza put on by showman Mike Todd to benefit victims of arthritis. Joe DiMaggio was in the audience; that and their several dates over the previous three months had reconciliation rumors swirling.
President Monroe and V.P. Greene outside the corporate offices of Marilyn Monroe Productions, Inc. It was Fox’s insistence that she star in a “degrading” film, How to Be Very, Very Popular, that led to her latest walkout and the “New Monroe Doctrine”—as the press dubbed it—of independence. “I want to be an artist,” she said. “Not a freak.”
A night at El Morocco with Truman Capote, May 1955. They understood each other, Capote says. In his essay on Monroe, “A Beautiful Child,” Capote recalled Marilyn’s asking him what his best sexual experience was. He asked her to answer first. “Joe’s not bad,” she replied. “He can hit home runs. If that’s all it takes, we’d still be married. I still love him, though. He’s genuine.” Capote’s assessment of Monroe? “I don’t think she’s an actress at all, not in any traditional sense. What she has—this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence—could never surface on the stage. It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera... but anyone who thinks this girl is simply another Harlow or harlot or whatever is mad.”
The quintessential Marilyn with her favorite perfume.
In April 1955, Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person” visits Marilyn at the Milton Greenes’, where she was living after moving to New York. Monroe, so witty and effervescent at press conferences, became terrified at the thought of millions of TV viewers watching her live. She froze on screen, requiring Mrs. Greene to answer several questions for her, and the responses MM did give were often halting and vague. Marilyn, it was said, came off like “a scared rabbit”—some viewers thought her in need of protection from the wicked studio, others felt Fox should “forget about Marilyn and sign up Amy Greene.” In any event, Monroe’s appearance was the highest-rated “Person to Person” ever.
On June 1, 1955 (Marilyn’s twenty-ninth birthday), Joe DiMaggio escorts his ex-wife to the premiere of The Seven Year Itch. His hope for a reconciliation led him to agree to appear at the film’s opening, something he’d never done before. Earlier in the year, during a date in Boston, a reporter asked Joe if this was a reconciliation. He turned to Marilyn. “Is it, honey?” She replied, “No, no... just call it a visit.” Hearing that, DiMaggio refused to answer any further questions.
At a New York party toward the end of the year, Marilyn dances with Marlon Brando. He had long been her acting idol, and he was, she said, “one of the most attractive men I’ve ever met.” Gossips longed for a romance (“imagine what their kids would look like!”), but by this time Marilyn was secretly involved with someone else—Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman.
A 3 ½-story-high Marilyn advertises the opening of The Seven Year Itch on New York’s Times Square. The mammoth MM created the predictable chaos and controversy, not least with Monroe herself. She thought her face looked ugly in this picture, and she insisted that Fox put up another. They did, at considerable expense.
Marilyn’s reviews for The Seven Year Itch were excellent; she proved herself a sensitive comedienne well able to handle the rare nuances Axelrod had written into this “dumb blonde” character. Monroe’s acting was beginning to gain admiration, if not quite respect. Her desire for that respect prompted her decision to move to New York, where she could study acting at Lee Strasberg’s fabled Actors Studio.
PART FIVE
The New Marilyn
1956-1957
Marilyn’s new life included a love affair with Manhattan. She would often take walks along a nearly deserted Park Avenue in the early morning hours and marvel at the skyscrapers and the chill. “I love it here. I lived in California all my life; now I plan to stay here. The California climate is wonderful, but I love to see the seasons.”
Monroe—with a new, more natural hair color—poses outside the Actors Studio. Her association with Lee Strasberg and his Method actors would teach Marilyn a great deal about her own potential as an actress. She listened intently in class, just one of dozens of students; when her turn came to perform a scene in class—from Anna Christie, along with Maureen Stapleton—the consensus among her discriminating peers was that it was a touching, surprisingly realistic portrayal. Strasberg—who along with his wife, Paula, would remain a Monroe mentor until her death—saw tremendous raw talent in Marilyn. He was in fact to say that the two greatest talents he had encountered at the Actors Studio were Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. It was this kind of belief in her ability that led Monroe to the marvelous performances she was to give in four of her next five films.
At a New York press conference in February of 1956 to announce that the first Marilyn Monroe production will be The Sleeping Prince, co-starring Monroe and Laurence Olivier, Marilyn steals the show from Sir Laurence when her shoulder strap breaks. Monroe reiterated her dramatic ambitions, and Olivier opined that Monroe was “a brilliant comedienne, which to me means she is also an extremely skilled actress.” But the newsmen gave Marilyn an unusually hard time. Contemptuous of her desire to be taken seriously as an actress, they grilled her unmercifully, asking questions such as “How do you spell Grushenka?” and, in a tone suggesting that it was all a stunt, “How did it feel when the strap broke?” Hurt and angered by the hostility, Marilyn snapped, “How would you feel if something of yours broke in front of a whole room full of a lot of strangers?”—and walked out.
Returning to Hollywood to play Cherie in Joshua Logan’s film of William Inge’s critically acclaimed Broadway play Bus Stop, February 1956. Monroe had made peace with Twentieth Century-Fox, and Bus Stop would be her first film in a seven-year, four-picture contract worth $8 million. She also received a retroactive $100,000 to make up for her having worked for $500 a week on some of her biggest Fox hits. Even more important to her (“I don’t care about money. I just want to be wonderful”), the contract guaranteed her script and director approval. The Los Angeles press treated her more civilly than the New York group had. One of the reporters asked, “Marilyn, when we last saw you, you were wearing a low-cut gown. Now you’re wearing a high-necked suit. Is this the ‘new Marilyn’?” Monroe thought a moment, pursed her lips, and replied, “Well, I’m the same person—it’s just a different suit.”
Marilyn as Cherie, the pathetic saloon singer starved for respect. Joshua Logan has said that when he was told Monroe would play her, his reaction was, “Oh, no—Marilyn Monroe can’t bring off Bus Stop. She can’t act.” Now he says, “I could gargle with salt and vinegar even now as I say that, because I found her to be one of the greatest talents of all time.”
Monroe’s chalky makeup, right for Cherie but deglamorizing, caused consternation in the Fox front office. They wanted it changed, but she and Logan held out. “Marilyn’s attitu
de toward her makeup and costumes was courageous,” Logan said. “Incredible, really. Here you have a well-established star. She was willing to risk her position with a makeup many stars would have considered ugly. She wasn’t afraid. She believed she was right in her analysis of the character, and she had the courage to commit herself to it completely.”
Years after Bus Stop was completed, Joshua Logan would remain the director who most admired Marilyn; he later called her a combination of Chaplin and Garbo. “She was always the most beautiful person in the room, and certainly the most fun to talk to—warm, witty and with the enthusiasm of a child. Innocent, yes, but she was never ignorant, stupid or gross. She was in my opinion extremely bright, totally involved in her work. I think she was at some kind of peak in her emotional as well as intellectual life [then]. There are still those of us who remember that extraordinary performance, who know how badly she was judged by most of the world, including her so-called peers, how stupidly she was written about. Like Cherie, she was never able to feel what she longed for—respect.”
