Both Marilyn and Sidney were surprised. Joe wasn’t expected until the following day. Sidney was famous in Hollywood for having spanked Shirley Temple after she damaged his new hat, and for having bitten Louella Parsons on the arm during a professional dispute at Chasen’s restaurant. But he was terrified of DiMaggio, especially of being given a good going-over with those big hands.
Joe greeted him. Instead of asking to be left alone with his wife, Joe inquired if he could do anything to change her mind about the divorce. Skolsky, eager to stay out of the dispute, said no. Jerry Giesler, a Hollywood attorney known for his ability to grab headlines, was scheduled to come to the house the next day. It was probably no accident that the media-savvy attorney waited until after the World Series—when baseball was off the front pages—to announce the divorce.
Marilyn, in constant pain, closed herself in the master bedroom. Joe was prohibited from going upstairs. At one point that evening, he did enter the room. In contrast to his violent mood in New York, he was penitential. He promised to change if only Marilyn would take him back.
On Monday, November 4, Giesler, accompanied by the Fox publicity director, Harry Brand, met about one hundred reporters on the lawn outside the cottage. Marilyn remained in the upstairs bedroom, Joe in the living room.
“The divorce action will be filed Tuesday in Santa Monica Superior Court,” said Giesler. “The charges will be gentle—just mental cruelty.”
“Marilyn still has a lot of work to finish on her picture,” Brand chimed in. “She’s due at the studio in the morning. I don’t know if she’ll make it.”
“Is there any chance of reconciliation?” a reporter shouted.
“I discussed reconciliation,” said Giesler. “None is possible.”
The next day, Giesler served the divorce papers to DiMaggio, still in residence on the ground floor. Then he went upstairs to rehearse Marilyn and Sidney for Wednesday. It was said of Giesler that he worked like a movie director, meticulously rehearsing and choreographing his clients. Marilyn’s first meeting with the reporters camped outside her house had to be carefully stage managed. DiMaggio remained immensely popular. His reputation was stately. The very qualities that had made him the man to be seen with at the time of the nude calendar scandal made him hard to get rid of now without making Marilyn appear unsympathetic. She, after all, was divorcing him. She had publicly humiliated him in New York; his upset over the skirt-blowing scene had been widely reported. America’s sympathies were likely to be with Joe. Nobody wanted to see the Big Guy get hurt.
Giesler detailed the scene he expected Marilyn to play the following day. Though Marilyn had initiated the divorce, she must appear to be as devastated as Joe. There was to be no trace of her steely determination to get rid of him. Giesler instructed Marilyn to hold his arm for support. Suddenly, she was to stumble on the winding brick path. That was Sidney’s cue. He was to break out of the crowd and rush to Marilyn. Giesler, however, would ignore Sidney. The huge attorney would grip Marilyn and steer her to the car. Throughout, she was to appear as if she were being torn apart.
On the morning of October 6, Marilyn, in the upstairs bedroom, prepared to meet the press. An assistant did her makeup. Marilyn slipped into a clinging black jersey dress, fastened by a wide leather belt with a rhinestone buckle. She decided whether to wear a pair of short white gloves or to hold them in one hand. Meanwhile, downstairs, Reno Barsocchini slung a bag of gold-plated golf clubs over his shoulder, picked up a pair of leather suitcases and walked outside. He was still loading the trunk of DiMaggio’s car when the cottage door opened again. “Hello, fellas,” said Joe.
He wore a gray suit, a white shirt, and a tie. His lips curled into a tense smile. He walked briskly, snapping “No comment” as reporters shouted questions all at once. His bearing called to mind Toots Shor’s remark that DiMaggio even looked good striking out. Joe faltered only once, putting out a massive hand to steady himself as he brushed past Marilyn’s black convertible.
“Where are you going?” someone called.
“I’m going to San Francisco,” said Joe, about to enter the passenger seat of his own car.
“Are you coming back home?”
“San Francisco’s my home. It’s always been my home.” He closed the door, Reno started the engine, and the blue Cadillac with “JOE D” plates rolled down the driveway.
Fifty minutes later the cottage door opened again. Marilyn seemed disoriented as flashbulbs exploded en masse. She appeared to feel faint. She clutched Jerry Giesler’s arm.
“I’m sorry, I can’t say anything, I’m sorry,” Marilyn whispered as microphones were thrust in front of her face.
She gripped the white gloves in one hand, wiping her eyes with the handkerchief clutched in the other. She chewed her lower lip, and kept her head down. She seemed on the verge of collapse. When a reporter asked what DiMaggio had done to her, Marilyn burst into tears.
“Miss Monroe will have nothing to say this morning,” said Giesler. “As her attorney I am speaking for her and can only say that the conflict of careers has brought about this regretable necessity.”
Marilyn stumbled on the brick path. Sidney Skolsky broke out of the crowd to assist her. Giesler, ignoring him, held Marilyn tightly and steered her to his car.
Joe had until Friday, October 15. If he did not contest the divorce complaint, Giesler would move for a default hearing. Meanwhile, the only person to speak out was Natasha Lytess, who relished the opportunity to vent her wrath at Joe: “The marriage was a big mistake for Marilyn and I feel she has known it for a long time.” Natasha had never forgiven Joe for the night he refused to put her through on the phone. She blamed him for Marilyn’s subsequent coolness toward her, refusing to come to terms with the fact that, in Marilyn’s eyes, the dramatic coach had betrayed her. She seemed to believe that without Joe, things would return to what they had been. “Now this is all behind her,” Natasha exulted.
Hours before the deadline, DiMaggio arrived in Los Angeles and checked into his former quarters at the Knickerbocker Hotel. Asked why he was in town, Joe said cryptically: “To take care of what I have to take care of.” In the end, however, he did not contest the divorce complaint. He didn’t even hire his own lawyer. Instead, he chose to permit Giesler to handle everything. Marilyn was granted a divorce on October 27, 1954. It would be final a year later.
Soon afterward, Sidney Skolsky was shocked to learn that DiMaggio wanted to reach him. Full of trepidation, he called the Knickerbocker. Joe summoned him to his room the following day, ominously declining a suggestion that they meet in a restaurant. He needed to see Sidney alone.
Sidney arrived fearing the worst. Following Joe’s instructions, he sat on the edge of the bed. Joe pulled up a chair. The two men were so physically dissimilar that they might have come from different planets. One was small and flabby, the other huge and muscular. Sidney had no idea why he was here.
DiMaggio’s voice, usually so sharp and strident, was gentle: “You know everything. There’s one thing I must know. Is there another man? Why did Marilyn divorce me?”
One can only imagine what it cost DiMaggio, intensely proud and reserved as he was, to ask another man that question. That he did so proved, if proof were needed, how much he loved Marilyn, and how devastated he had been by the divorce.
SIX
On the evening of Saturday, November 6, 1954, Marilyn pulled into a Hollywood gas station. She had completed principal photography on The Seven Year Itch two days previously. She wore long, glittering rhinestone earrings and a rhinestone bracelet on her left wrist. She had borrowed a strapless red chiffon gown with a low-cut back from the studio wardrobe department. Her neck and shoulders were bare. She appeared to be high. Marilyn’s escort, Sam Shaw, had a mustache and a mop of dark hair. He wore a hired tuxedo with sewn pockets and oversized patent leather shoes from Western Costume.
At that moment, Sam and Marilyn were out of gas, broke, and an hour late. She cajoled the attendant to fill the ta
nk for free. They proceeded to Romanoff’s, the glamorous Beverly Hills restaurant where the doorman always greeted you with a sunny “Welcome home!”
Down three steps from the bar was the dining room. Within, about eighty members of the Hollywood aristocracy attended a candlelit, private dinner party. A dance band played. The men wore black tie. Many faces in the room were instantly recognizable. Marilyn later said that it had been like stepping into a dream. Among those who feasted on steak and champagne she saw Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Humphrey Bogart, Susan Hayward, Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, James Stewart, and George Burns. On each round table, the centerpiece was a cardboard cutout of Marilyn in the skirt-blowing scene from The Seven Year Itch.
Sidney Skolsky rushed up to greet The Monroe. Tonight seemed like the culmination of all they had worked for. There could be no doubt that The Seven Year Itch marked a watershed in her career. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire had introduced audiences to an enchanting creature known as “the girl,” who did much to dispel America’s fears about sex. But in those two films, there had still been one false note in her character: She had played a gold-digger, so unavoidably there had been a lingering sense of threat. The Seven Year Itch took “the girl” to a new level. She isn’t a gold-digger. Indeed, she doesn’t seem to want anything from the man at all, except a chance to cool off in his air-conditioned apartment. As played by Tom Ewell, the male character embodies the particular pressures of 1950s’ puritanism. He’s terrified of sex, yet thinks of little else. “The girl,” humorous and carefree, shows him there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. She takes the peril out of sex, but leaves in the pleasure. The emblem of her innocent sexuality is the skirt-blowing scene, in which Ewell peeks under Marilyn’s skirt—but without consequence to either of them. The image, provided by Sam Shaw, was so powerful because it perfectly articulated the fantasies of a buttoned-up era, and the immense relief when those fantasies, far from destroying us, prove to be utterly harmless. In The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn had finally embodied precisely the right character to appeal to the American psyche. With this film, she became a vivid cultural symbol.
Charlie Feldman saw The Seven Year Itch as only the start of a long and mutually profitable association. Tonight, he and Billy Wilder were hosting a dinner in Marilyn’s honor. Feldman had assembled the film industry elite to salute her on the eve of a brilliant new beginning. “I feel like Cinderella,” Marilyn whispered in Sidney’s ear. “I didn’t think they’d all show up. Honest.”
George Axelrod came over to tell Marilyn he’d loved the seven reels he’d seen so far. “It’s because of Billy,” said Marilyn. “He’s a wonderful director. I want him to direct me again. But he’s doing The Lindbergh Story next, and he won’t let me play Lindbergh.”
Wilder did offer one important piece of advice. He was appalled by an item in the Hollywood Reporter about Marilyn’s desire to portray Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. “Marilyn, don’t play that part,” he warned. “Everybody’s making jokes about it. You have created a great character. Stay with the character you’ve created. You’ll be an actress and a star like Mae West. Eighty years old, you’ll be playing lead parts with the character you created.”
Wilder asked her to dance. Impressed by the director’s swoops and glides, Marilyn inquired where he had learned to dance, and he told her that he had been a gigolo in Berlin. She danced with Clark Gable. She danced with Darryl Zanuck. She danced with Charlie Feldman. It was, said Sam Shaw, “the night of her life.”
How different this all was from the isolation Marilyn had known with Joe. As far as most people were concerned, he was out of the picture. She had moved to an apartment on De Longpre Avenue in West Hollywood. As well as a celebration of present and future success, tonight was also supposed to be a kind of coming-out party for Marilyn.
Nevertheless, as would soon be apparent, Joe, for better or worse, remained a powerful presence in Marilyn’s life. Determined to find out if she was involved with another man, DiMaggio had hired a private detective to follow her. For all she knew, Barney Ruditsky or one of his assistants might be lurking outside Romanoff’s. For all she knew, Joe, the veins and muscles in his neck bulging, might suddenly storm in and embarrass her as he done the previous Friday night as she dined with friends.
Marilyn had spent much of November 5 at the studio recording a song for There’s No Business Like Show Business with her singing coach, Hal Schaefer. The twenty-nine-year-old Schaefer, an associate of Jack Cole, had attempted suicide during the shooting period, by swallowing typewriter cleaning fluid and about one hundred pills. While he was in the hospital, Marilyn secured permission to delay one last bit of recording until after she completed The Seven Year Itch, in order to give Schaefer time to recuperate. That evening, Marilyn and Schaefer dined with another of his pupils in her apartment on Waring Avenue in West Hollywood. DiMaggio, tipped off by Ruditsky, rushed to the building, accompanied by his friend Frank Sinatra. There could be no mistaking Marilyn’s messy black Cadillac convertible parked outside, but Ruditsky and another detective burst into the wrong apartment. Alerted by the noise, Marilyn and Schaefer slipped out without running into DiMaggio or Sinatra.
For all that, Marilyn remained ambivalent. Joe may have been volatile and possessive, but he was also loving. He had caused a scene the night before her party at Romanoff’s, but the day after the party he drove Marilyn to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital where she was to undergo surgery for endometriosis. He waited until Marilyn was admitted and put to bed. Then he stayed for half an hour talking to her until a nurse ordered him to go.
On Monday morning, a “No Visitors” sign was posted outside Marilyn’s fifth-floor room. But when nurses brought her upstairs following surgery, Joe was waiting. He spent the rest of the day with her. He ate dinner with her. He talked to her and held her hand until late at night. Finally, a nurse came in to say there was a crowd of reporters in the lobby. Marilyn, still groggy, asked Joe to talk to them. “She’s looking wonderful, but I guess she’s having kind of a rough time,” DiMaggio told them.
Did his presence mean that Joe and Marilyn were reconciling, everybody wanted to know.
“I’d rather you didn’t ask me about that.”
Joe’s kindness did not change Marilyn’s mind about the divorce. Nor did a party at Romanoff’s weaken her resolve to leave Famous Artists and Twentieth Century–Fox. Marilyn had known that she would fire Feldman since September 16, when he failed to get her the role of Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls.
Why was Marilyn so angry at Feldman? What had he done to become the focus of her resentment? He had, after all, offered her the opportunity to appear in The Seven Year Itch. He had made it possible for her to give the best performance of her career so far. Marilyn did not doubt that he had other strong projects in mind for her. If she wanted to continue to make good films, Feldman was uniquely equipped to make that happen. But more importantly, Marilyn understood that Feldman didn’t respect her as she wanted to be respected. He had never connected with her dreams. His attitude toward her had never really been different from Zanuck’s. When Marilyn realized that he wanted her to sign a studio contract that offered her no creative control, Feldman’s fate was sealed.
Feldman, for his part, had no idea that anything was wrong. When she visited his office on the afternoon of November 22, Marilyn behaved as if she had every intention of staying with him. It might seem odd that she put on a performance for Feldman at this point, but she admired his literary taste. She eagerly listened to his ideas for new projects; she shamelessly picked his brain.
Feldman gave Marilyn a copy of Terence Rattigan’s light comedy The Sleeping Prince. Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier had performed it on the London stage when Vivien was recovering from her nervous breakdown. Feldman had been putting out feelers about buying the property for Marilyn since February, when she was in Japan; his idea was for Marilyn to portray the chorus girl opposite Richard Burton as the prince. But there was no
rush. Feldman, thrilled with her performance in The Seven Year Itch, was eager to protect his investment. He wanted Marilyn to have a long rest.
A week later, Marilyn appeared without warning in Frank Ferguson’s office at Fox, requesting copies of all her old contracts. She said that her papers had been placed in storage following the divorce, and asked many oddly detailed questions about the contracts. When Ferguson inquired why she didn’t talk to her own lawyer or her agent, Marilyn replied cryptically that Wright and Feldman didn’t know much about what was going on.
Suspicious, Ferguson contacted Loyd Wright. Wright waited to see if Marilyn would call to say what this was all about. When she didn’t, he alerted Feldman. By that time, however, Marilyn had already sent the copies to New York. Milton Greene wanted to show them to his lawyer, Frank Delaney.
Delaney pored over the documents, and concluded that several months previously Twentieth had failed to pick up Marilyn’s option in time. Following a suspension, it was customary for film studios to add the missed time onto a performer’s contract. According to Delaney, Twentieth had miscalculated the number of days they could wait before renewing her contract. The technicality, he argued, rendered her 1951 contract null and void. Thus, Marilyn had begun The Seven Year Itch without a valid contract. Now that it was finished, she was free to do as she wished.
The lawyer drew up papers establishing Marilyn Monroe Productions, and Milton Greene flew to Los Angeles to deliver them. There was also an undated letter for Marilyn to sign, informing Feldman that Famous Artists was no longer authorized to act for her. Greene’s people would fill in the date later when they agreed precisely when it ought to be sent. Marilyn and Greene decided to go full steam ahead with Harlow.
Marilyn Monroe Page 17
