Misfit

by Adam Braver

  He can tell she really has nothing to say to these people. It’s all just surface noise. But the difference is that she’s been better trained on how to make them feel as though they’re interesting. And most maddening and insulting to him is they obviously don’t give a shit about what she says, only that she’s saying it to them. So they keep her talking. And it makes him sick, watching that. For a moment he wishes he could just lean across the table and tell David March and his date to shut the crap up, and let Marilyn enjoy her meal, and just be. Can’t they see she’s just a child, and not some blow-up toy? Not everything has to be about desperate business interactions. But then he would lose his mental edge. And he knows the difference between winning and losing is all in your head.

  She turns to Joe and says she’s sorry. “This must be a bore. It’s just that I don’t know much about sports.” He says it’s okay, and dips his spoon into his water, stirring and looking for ice shards.

  Out of nowhere, Mickey Rooney approaches the table. March and his date look right to Marilyn, expecting he’s come to say hello to her. But Rooney zeroes in on Joe, rubbing his hands together, lacing his fingers in and out of each other. He says he was just seated a few tables over, and he couldn’t believe what he saw when he looked across the room. The Yankee Clipper, on the Sunset Strip of all places. And Rooney starts in about the Yankees, and he wants to know what Joe thinks their chances are. Will Ford and Lopat win twenty this year? Is Mantle the real deal? Each time Joe pauses after giving a polite answer, Rooney looks around the table and declares Joe to be the greatest athlete of all time. He tells the table he still can’t believe the “streak,” that baseball itself might have hit its peak when Joe broke that record.

  From the corner of his eye, Joe can see Marilyn watching with a new interest. Just like March and his date, Marilyn has the keen ability to home in on the spot where the attention is, and to move herself toward its center. It’s the gift of the Hollywood players. She scoots in a bit closer to Joe, putting her palm on the bench for support as she moves over, just beside his leg. He moves toward her a little, just enough to feel the heat coming off her hand.

  After Rooney leaves, Marilyn turns all her attention to Joe. He understands she now sees him as being something more than just a ballplayer. Tell me how to hit a baseball. What’s it like to hit a home run? Have you ever won the championship of baseball? Do you know Babe Ruth? She can’t control the phoniness. It’s that conditioned. But it doesn’t bother him. He knows what the entertainment business can do to a person. Looking at her, he doesn’t see a movie star or even the sexy pose from her publicity photos. He sees just an ordinary girl who’s been hamstrung and seduced into acting like some kind of hand puppet, and who is all the more miserable for it. Someone who needs to be looked out for.

  And as she prattles on at him, he stares past her into the darkening room, his eyes glazing. In his head, he’s imagining taking her up to San Francisco, where he could free her from the cycle of mutual sycophancy by giving her a quiet, respectable life. Show her a routine. Home meals. Quiet nights. Allow her the freedom to be just a homemaker. He’d offer her the chance to let her true nature come out—a decent, caring girl. Because he knows what it’s like to be barely out of childhood, and still owned by the grownup world. The recognition is almost heartbreaking. But the need to protect is even more compelling.

  She keeps talking at him about Hollywood nonsense. He barely says another word through dinner, instead slowly turning his thoughts into plans.

  Finally, she stops for a moment and says, “You don’t have much to say on these topics, do you?” which, at least to Joe, couldn’t make him feel more connected to her. And that much more committed.

  January 14, 1954: City Hall, San Francisco

  On the day of her wedding to Joe DiMaggio at San Francisco City Hall, Marilyn’s horoscope in the San Francisco Chronicle reads: “Ferreting out best way to improve emotional delights and getting more desirable system in practical relations with others yields big returns, by quickly putting conclusion into execution.”

  Page one of the same paper warns of shifting weather. The weather bureau forecasts a cold winter storm coming down from Alaska, predicting occasional rains and cooler temperatures—somewhere between 51 and 56 degrees.

  The wedding was supposed to be a secret, but it’s not much of one. Having been suspended by Twentieth Century-Fox the past week for failing to show up for filming on a new picture called The Girl in Pink Tights, Marilyn has been staying in the Marina district with Joe’s sister. It was the role that bothered her, a lead she referred to as a “cliché-spouting bore in pink tights [who] was the cheapest character I ever read in a script.” There were rumbles of agreement within the studio, but the front office had no intention of letting Marilyn Monroe dictate the terms of how the studio’s decisions and its movies were made. She took the suspension with some pride, and went north. With Joe’s encouragement, she is willing to be out of the business altogether, if that’s how they see her. Rumors of a wedding have already circulated. The speculation is that one took place somewhere in Nevada. Another bit of scuttlebutt places it in Hollywood. And among many watchers, suggestions of a settled domestic life in San Francisco have made the rounds. It’s rumored that Joe has had it with show business, telling television producer Jack Barry that he won’t do another TV gig like The Joe DiMaggio Show again, and, following the nonsense of The Girl in Pink Tights, he’s encouraged Marilyn to do the same with Fox. Neither of them needs it anymore. The word is they are cashing in Hollywood for an ordinary life.

  Gossip reporters claim the couple now spends their evenings at home in front of the television. The occasional night out finds them in the back of Joe’s restaurant. Eating quietly. Hardly conversing.

  The press arrives at Municipal Judge Charles S. Peery’s chambers well ahead of the 1:00 PM scheduled ceremony, as do somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred people, turning an otherwise respectful city hall office and entryway into what local columnist Art Hoppe deems a “madhouse.”

  Then in comes the couple through the Polk Street doors, slowly moving across the marble floors. Their presence alone seems to light the gilded trim and molding of the great hall. The groom wears a dark blue suit with a checked tie. The bride teeters between city style and homemaker elegance in a brown broadcloth suit with an ermine collar; her nails are freshly done with a natural polish, and her fake eyelashes, long and dark, obscure the disquiet in her eyes.

  All of city hall has stopped. The secretaries, the bureaucrats, the local legislators. Paperwork stays on their desks. Telephones ring, unanswered. No one can say why; there is just the sense of splendor in the building. Someone will lean across a service counter in the real estate department on the third floor and say to his colleague that it feels as if the earth is stuck, paused on its axis, and then they’ll both, along with the others in the division, spill into the hallway in front of the judge’s chambers.

  The only person who can’t stop working is a deputy county clerk named David Dunn. He’s running from office to office with a blank marriage license, unable to find access to a free typewriter so Judge Peery can have the paperwork in hand once the nuptials begin.

  The couple walks two steps ahead of their guests, a tightly knit train of an entourage: Mr. and Mrs. Tom DiMaggio (Joe’s brother), Mr. and Mrs. Francis “Lefty” O’Doul (Joe’s first baseball manager from the Seals), and Mr. and Mrs. Reno Barsocchini (Joe’s restaurant partner).

  The Examiner doesn’t neglect to report that Marilyn was raised in an orphanage.

  “Are you excited, Marilyn?”

  “Oh, you know it’s more than that.”

  “How many children are you going to have, Joe?”

  “We’ll have at least one. I’ll guarantee that.”

  The day of the marriage, the San Francisco Chronicle runs its column called “Hints for Homemakers.” It offers many fine bits of advice, including

  * Always rinse your eggbeater under cold
water right after you use it.

  * Next time you have a cod-liver oil stain to remove, try this: Sponge the stain with glycerin, then launder as usual.

  * Every kitchen should be supplied with a dozen dish and glass towels, six dishcloths, and at least four pot holders. Have two of the pot holders large and heavy. The other two may be smaller and lighter in weight.

  * Before putting your vacuum cleaner away, wind the cord loosely. Tension may cause fine wires inside the cord to break.

  It’s impossible to see behind her heavily made-up eyes that she is only twenty-seven. In a roomful of reporters, seated across from her husband-to-be, nearly a dozen years his junior, she’s like a little girl at her mother’s dressing table for the first time, smudging on makeup, almost clownlike in bright reds and silvery blues. On the day of her wedding in city hall, she’s but one of a million babes who suddenly finds herself living in the middle of her wishes, unable to stop wondering whether it’s equally possible to will them away.

  “Marilyn. Miss Monroe. Are you planning on giving up acting for homemaking? Care to comment?”

  “What difference does it make, I’m suspended . . .”

  “This is no time to talk of suspensions. We’ve got to get going. We got to put a lot of miles behind us.”

  “Is that right, Joe? Tell us, tell your fans, where you two going, Joe? Where’s the honeymoon gonna be?”

  “North. South. West. And east.”

  Sometime after 1:30 PM, Judge Peery’s chambers are cleared. The couple enters, and waits. Reporters are moved to an office just outside the room, and the swelling crowd jams the hallway.

  One reporter, standing tiptoe on a desk, is able to glimpse into the chambers through the transom. An anxious silence quells the area, as the report of his observation is anticipated. “They’re not getting married,” he calls to the crowd. “They’re drinking martinis.” A cheer goes up, if only because it seems as though a cheer is in order.

  Deputy county clerk David Dunn is still running from office to office, blank license in hand, trying to find a machine to type on.

  That same day, at about the same time the wedding is taking place, Albert Einstein’s grandson is pleading guilty to petty-theft charges in Pittsburgh, California. According to the San Francisco Examiner, the twenty-three-year-old, along with an accomplice, was arrested “in the act of pilfering money from a soft drink dispenser coin box.” The amount was $1.10. They were set free on bail, to await their sentencing from the district judge. The judge’s final sentence is not reported in the paper. And there appear to be no reporters on site to get the reaction of the defendant or his family. Receiving attention is all a matter of perspective.

  Deputy county clerk David Dunn runs into the judge’s chambers, reportedly having to “beat his way through the crowd.” He comes back out within a minute or two. The blank license is still in his hand. A “great howl” begins to swell, with the crowd chanting, “Machine. Machine. Machine.”

  Once Dunn finally locates a typewriter at an empty desk, he types out the license in duplicate, carefully and hurriedly, looking at each letter as it strikes the page; not in admiration, more in a submissive fear.

  The ceremony starts at 1:45 PM. It ends at 1:48 PM.

  An advertisement in the daily paper offering new mixes from Duncan Hines claims that Hines himself has “achieved what he set out to do: bring you homemade quality without the work of making homemade cake.”

  Following the ceremony, the couple poses for photos and answers some questions. They kiss playfully, shy away, until a news photographer suggests one more for the paper. “Aw, shucks,” Joe says. He looks down, then at her, and shrugs, “Well, okay, then.” The photos have a certain intimacy to them, as though capturing the center of a raw moment between very public people. It is that privacy exposed that unsettles. The way she smiles unsurely. As if she understands the expectations of happiness but can’t quite call them up. And Joe, looking oddly flat-footed, more proud than joyful, at times kisses her the way passionless parents would kiss at the marriage of their daughter, utterly practiced. But there is one picture in which both his hands grip her back while her left hand nearly rests on his lapel as though it might pull away at a moment’s notice, and neither looks as though they’re really holding on, and she seems to be slightly leaned back, stretching her face out to meet his, which is cocked and pushed forward; and what’s there is not romance but the belief in it, the willingness to try. After the sounds of the shutters fire and die, Joe pulls away. “Let’s go,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  “I met him two years ago on a blind date in Los Angeles, and a couple of days ago we started talking about this.”

  As she spoke about this to eager reporters, the Examiner reported, “DiMaggio puffed nervously on a cigarette.”

  It was more accident than miscalculation that found them in the real estate department on the third floor. They’d been trying to leave the building, figuring they could move down the two flights of stairs and into the waiting blue Cadillac that would whisk them up McAllister Street toward the Marina. They were taken somewhat by surprise at the relentlessness of the press and the fans who began tailing them down the hallway. The pace hastened, and soon they were engaged in a full game of chase. From above it must have looked like a wedged school of fish moving through the halls, with the newlyweds at the point, turning corners and circling around, knowing they had to give up on the stairs when it became clear they too would be jammed. They dashed around the circumference of the third floor, her heels sometimes catching on the marble, opening doors and closing them, pulling up short just before getting trapped into corners, doubling back, hoping to find the elevator that would drop them straight to the first floor, forced to navigate less by instinct and knowledge and more by adrenaline.

  Cornered in the real estate department office, unsure of what to do (Marilyn without her coat, accidentally left behind in the judge’s chambers), they stared through the small rectangular window in the door, wires crisscrossed into diamond shapes. In the glass, the couple could see their reflections, a sort of waxy version of themselves laid over the swelling crowd outside. The room felt deadened, as though it were a bubble of silence. Already it was understood not only that this protective bubble was temporary but also that it was bound to pop, because that’s what bubbles do—they pop.

  They took smalls steps backward until they were stopped against the service counter, neatly arranged with organized stacks of forms at each end and a clipboard with a sign-in sheet in the middle. Pods of empty desks were abandoned behind them. On one desk a phone rang but stopped after a single ring, the bell momentarily hanging and then fading like a chime.

  She pushed her back harder against the counter. A black plastic nameplate fell to the floor.

  They waited like hostages. Hands pressed against the smooth blond wood. No words. Just slow breaths. A whistling through his nose. They looked once at each other and, as though on cue, nodded. On an unspoken count of three they rushed at the door, pulling it open and running straight into the mob, hands held and eyes closed, like warriors making their last stand against a force dozens of times their size, not even bothering to dodge and weave a path through the wave of bullets, believing only in the hope that there’s always a way out.

  One more piece of advice from the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Hints for Homemakers”:

  * A quick rub of Vaseline keeps corks from sticking in bottles of liquid cement, polishes, and glue. And a dab of glue on the knot will seal the ends of cord when there isn’t enough to knot securely.

  September 1954: Los Angeles

  Marilyn Monroe was intended to be about the wanting, never the having. And now Joe, representing all the men in the world who’ve wanted you, suddenly is in your home with his hands on your body and his breath on your neck. To be fair, you initially did find the storybook marriage intoxicating, in part due to the improbability of that being your life, the little orphan girl of the crazy mom now envied for
doing something so big as to marry a superstar ballplayer. But too soon he wants to change things. Remove you from the spotlight. Chastise you for always having to act like Marilyn Monroe. The boundaries get confused. And he tells you that you need to stay home and be a wife, and in fairness you can see that he really does value that role by the way he points to his sisters and his mother as prime examples of womanhood, but this storybook is starting to make less and less sense because he really doesn’t want you to be the main character in it anymore, and you can feel the rage inside him when he visits the set of The Seven Year Itch on Lexington and Fifty-Second in New York and sees you showing your legs take after take and flirting with the gathering crowd and the press in between, and he walks off the set, heading straight back to the St. Regis Hotel, where, even though he barely says a word when you return, you can see the outrage building, almost expanding in his gut, until he bursts out that he doesn’t understand why you do this, and why you don’t want to be freed from this degrading career and realize the opportunity he’s giving you to have a settled life as a homemaker.

  And now sometimes he won’t talk to you for days, sometimes a week at a time, and you ask him what’s wrong and he tells you to leave him alone, and it’s hard to know what’s what, only that he bristles every time you talk about a potential new movie deal or magazine shoot, and he seems to puff larger, as though it’s a further betrayal; and on occasion he reminds you how much you need him, how he protects you, and you’ll say you don’t want his protection, and that’s when he shuts down—all he ever knows how to do is get disturbed and indignant when you’re lousy with grief; and you run into the bedroom and slam the door and lie on the bed, waiting to hear his footsteps leaving the house, remembering being taken to the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society, crying as you were led through the door, trying to explain to whomever would listen, Please, please don’t make me go inside. I’m not an orphan, my mother’s not dead. I’m not an orphan—it’s just that she’s sick in the hospital and can’t take care of me.