Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  Yolande had seen quite enough of DiMaggio stumbling from one Manhattan nightclub to another, wanting to touch the bright lights of the city without getting burned, a feat he could seemingly accomplish only when semipolluted. She witnessed DiMaggio at his worst while both were visiting Paris, France. As Yolande related the story, she had brought along a female friend to help the friend get over a romantic involvement. In Paris, at the Hotel George V, where all three were staying, they ran into Joe.

  One evening the trio went drinking, first at the Club Lido on the Champs Elysées, then at Au Lapin Agile in Montmartre. When they arrived back at the George V, DiMaggio, “totally shit-faced,” put the make on Yolande’s friend. Yolande was treated, as she put it, to the sight of DiMaggio sitting on an upper-floor staircase of the hotel very late at night, trying to talk Yolande’s girlfriend into bed. The problem was that Joe had put away so much booze he could barely get out a coherent word. He was so smashed, in fact, he wasn’t aware that his pants were wide open and his member was fully exposed. “And that,” Yolande recalled, “was the biggest thing you ever saw.”

  Chapter 12

  JOSHUA LOGAN, THE DIRECTOR OF Bus Stop, Marilyn Monroe’s next film, couldn’t say enough on behalf of his star’s acting abilities. “When I tell people Marilyn Monroe may be one of the very finest dramatic talents of our age,” he ventured in an article for the New York Times, “they laugh in my face. But I believe it. I believe it to such an extent that I would like to direct her in every picture she wants me for, every story she can dig up.”

  Based on a hit Broadway play by William Inge, Bus Stop marked the first collaborative film effort between Twentieth Century–Fox and Marilyn Monroe Productions. In accordance with her latest contract with Fox, Monroe sanctioned the project, the director, the screenwriter, and the cinematographer. She’d had approval on Fox’s selection of cast members. She likewise had the last say on the choice of costumes, though her Bus Stop outfits turned out to be as low-cut and risqué as every other film wardrobe she’d ever slithered into. She replaced Natasha Lytess with Paula Strasberg, an action which so infuriated Lytess that she threatened to write a “tell-all” exposing her former pupil for what she was: “an ungrateful monster.”

  MM hired Hedda Rosten, Norman’s wife, as her personal secretary at $250 per week. The Rostens attended the University of Michigan at the same time as Arthur Miller; Hedda and Mary, Miller’s first wife, had been college roommates. Marilyn hired Hedda primarily because she’d heard that the Rostens were having money problems but also because, as a former social worker, Hedda had the capacity to be nurturing and supportive. And in February 1956 Marilyn leased a house at 595 North Beverly Glen Boulevard in the Westwood section of Los Angeles to serve as home base during the filming of Bus Stop. Marilyn shared the residence with Milton, Amy, and Joshua Greene, their two retainers, and Florence Thomas, her own housemaid.

  Although Josh Logan’s glowing assessment of Marilyn’s performance in Bus Stop seems accurate enough, the movie itself, at least by contemporary standards, ranks with the most mediocre of Marilyn’s previous films. In Bus Stop a naïve and simple-minded young rodeo cowboy named Bo (played by Don Murray) falls in love with Cherie (Marilyn Monroe), a hillbilly café singer whom he meets on a bus. His intentions are honorable—he wants to marry her—but his temper and jealous side are too much for her. When she tries to run away, he finds her and forces her to board a bus bound for his Montana ranch. When the bus stops at a diner, the passengers learn that the road ahead has been closed by a snowstorm and that poor Cherie is a kidnap victim. After spending a night in the diner, waiting for the storm to abate, the passengers prepare to reboard the bus. Our rodeo cowpoke is suddenly contrite and sorrowful enough for Cherie to reconsider her options. At the end of this rather unremarkable “boy-gets-girl” melodrama, the Monroe and Murray characters clamber aboard the bus and ride off into a glorious sunrise.

  So much for plot! One wonders just what Marilyn (and Milton Greene) saw in this tiresome film script and what compelled them to make it MMP’s virginal coproduction, though in fact it did well at the box office. Perhaps Monroe detected flashes of Joe DiMaggio in Bo’s demanding and controlling manner. Or maybe she simply welcomed the opportunity to be her own boss, regardless of the property.

  Before filming began, she noticed that actress Hope Lange, making her film debut, had a head of hair the same color as hers. She demanded that Hope’s tresses be darkened so as not to compete with her own shade of platinum. Although Marilyn complied with Josh Logan’s request that Paula Strasberg be kept off the set, she sulked whenever the director made her reshoot a scene. And when he dared cut a scene she liked, her fangs came out. A year after the release of Bus Stop, when Logan tried to visit her in her dressing room on the London set of The Prince and the Showgirl, she lambasted him: “Why the hell did you cut out that scene in the bus? I’ll never forgive you as long as I live.” Logan told her he didn’t have final cut on the picture. Marilyn didn’t believe him. She slammed the dressing room door in his face. What Marilyn should have known was that few directors have final cut on a studio picture. It was Twentieth Century–Fox she should have blamed.

  Paula Strasberg did her coaching in Marilyn’s dressing room or at the actress’s rented home. Like Natasha Lytess before her, she made herself indispensable. She knew how. She created a need and then filled it. She became Marilyn’s alter ego, patiently listening to all her laments and regrets, assuaging her anger, soothing her ruffled emotions. She talked Marilyn through her insecurities: Could she play the role? Would Arthur Miller stop loving her? She combated Marilyn’s fears and the resentments of producers, directors, and costars. When Marilyn flubbed or forgot a line, Paula shouldered the blame. In short, she held Monroe’s hand. She became Lee Strasberg’s surrogate, doing what he would have done had he been present instead of his wife. “Operation Marilyn,” as the Strasbergs called it, brought in more money than they made with the Actors Studio and conferred upon Paula a newly discovered status. Her critics called her an opportunist and a starfucker, a designation they similarly bestowed upon Lee Strasberg.

  During one of her days off from the Bus Stop shoot, Marilyn and Inez Melson, her business manager, drove to Verdugo to visit her mother at the Rockhaven Sanitarium. Milton Greene had allocated $300 per month of MMP funds to pay for Gladys Baker’s health care. Melson took care of the finances. She frequently sent cards to Gladys, often signing Marilyn’s name. When Monroe returned from her visit with her mother, she felt so thoroughly deflated she called her analyst, Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, and asked her to fly from New York to Los Angeles for a personal consultation. Hohenberg complied and evidently succeeded in helping Marilyn to recover.

  Monroe also saw Joe DiMaggio Jr. during this period, inviting him to visit her on the set at the Hollywood studio. She took a taxi to Black-Foxe and brought along enough food to feed half his dorm.

  The actress spent most of her spare hours running through her lines. And late at night, unable to sleep, she would talk by phone with Arthur Miller, particularly when cast and crew found themselves on location, first in Phoenix, Arizona, and then at Sun Valley, Idaho.

  To avoid the red tape of a New York divorce (and probably to be nearer to Monroe), Arthur Miller temporarily moved to the Pyramid Lake Guest Ranch, forty miles north of Reno, Nevada. Since the cottage he’d leased lacked telephone service, he resorted to a pay telephone booth a quarter mile away, on the edge of the property. When using a long-distance operator to connect them, Miller answered to the name Mr. Leslie, and Marilyn to Mrs. Leslie. Having been tipped off to the true identity of the Leslies, a television camera crew soon showed up at the ranch and started asking questions. The first person they queried was fiction writer Saul Bellow, Miller’s neighbor at the ranch; like Miller, Bellow had come to Nevada to seek a divorce. Bellow and Miller frequently ate dinner together, each vocalizing the strains and tensions of his last marriage. After cornering Bellow, the television crew asked if he’d seen A
rthur Miller.

  “Can’t say I have,” responded Bellow.

  What about Marilyn Monroe—had he run into her?

  “I’d certainly know if I ran into Miss Monroe, and I can assure you I haven’t.”

  It wasn’t until 1959 that Saul Bellow met Monroe. They had dinner together in Chicago, after which Bellow observed that to be close to Marilyn “is like holding on to an electric wire and not being able to let go.”

  Arthur Miller couldn’t let go. Besides the phone calls, he wrote to Marilyn every day, sending her long, confessional letters that she kept in a stack by the side of her bed. Disregarding Nevada’s six-week residential requirement, he drove to Los Angeles and checked into an apartment that she’d rented for them at the Chateau Marmont, again using the pseudonym Mr. Leslie. Mrs. Leslie—Marilyn—soon joined him, and the couple spent the night together.

  Over the next month, they had two additional clandestine meetings at the same hotel. One evening they ventured to the Mocambo club on Sunset Boulevard to hear Ella Fitzgerald. It had been Marilyn, in 1955, who’d convinced the owner of the legendary Los Angeles nightclub to break the color code by offering Ella a singing engagement. Ella later told an interviewer, “The owner said yes, and Marilyn was there, front table, every night. I never had to play a small jazz club again.” In fact, every year for the next five years, Fitzgerald appeared at the Mocambo, and often credited Marilyn for having helped to advance her career. “Marilyn Monroe was an unusual woman, a little ahead of her time. And she didn’t know it.”

  In 1956, after attending a Beverly Hills party at which she’d met (and charmed) Achmed Sukarno, president of Indonesia, Marilyn came down with bronchitis and had to be hospitalized, interrupting production on Bus Stop for nearly a week. Having learned of her illness, Joe DiMaggio flew from New York to Los Angeles and dropped in on her at Cedars of Lebanon. He’d sent her a large bouquet of roses the day before. But it wasn’t a good visit. Arthur Miller phoned Marilyn from Nevada while DiMaggio was still in the room. Joe, who later related some of the details of his visit to George Solotaire and Paul Baer, excused himself and waited in the hospital’s sitting room for Marilyn to finish her call. When he returned, she told him outright what he’d expected to hear: that she and Arthur Miller were going to be married.

  “Joe responded by telling Marilyn he’d read as much in the press but had wanted to hear it from her,” said Paul Baer. Paul accompanied George Solotaire to Los Angeles to meet up with DiMaggio. The three men then drove to Las Vegas, where Edward Bennett Williams awaited them.

  “Joe wasn’t a happy warrior,” said Baer. “Of course, there wasn’t anything he could do to alter the situation. He said to us, ‘Let’s go find Arthur Miller and take care of him.’ He wasn’t serious. He had contempt for the intelligentsia, but it didn’t compare to his hatred of Hollywood bigwigs. He had nothing against Arthur Miller. He figured Miller was in the picture primarily because he—Joe—had screwed up. If he hadn’t screwed up, he’d still have been married to Marilyn Monroe. That’s not to say he wasn’t upset. That first day or so, he drank himself sick. He drank in his Vegas hotel room because he didn’t want to tarnish his public image. I had the feeling, though, that he’d already mourned the end of his marriage. A day or two later, he came downstairs and joined us in the casino. He didn’t gamble much—he never did—but he chatted it up with the gangsters, the high rollers, the hookers, and the bookmakers, swapping stories about baseball and the underworld. And then he started jawing away with some showgirls. And as luck would have it, he wound up in bed with one of them.”

  Kurt Lamprecht, a German-born writer living in New York, contacted Marilyn Monroe through Arthur Jacobs, her new PR agent, requesting an interview for the German press. Back in her Sutton Place apartment in early June, having completed work on Bus Stop, Marilyn agreed to the interview.

  “She was enormously popular all over Europe, arguably the best known and most popular American actress,” said Lamprecht. “I found her to be an utter delight. Full of vitality and wonder, she also had an unquenchable desire to learn, to pick up knowledge and process it. She asked all sorts of questions about what my life had been like in Germany before I came to the States. Somehow we began talking about poetry. She showed me a letter she’d received from T. S. Eliot. ‘We’re pen pals,’ she giggled. She had an intense interest in politics and regularly wrote to the national affairs editor at the New York Times. We discussed the Actors Studio. She said she had grave doubts concerning her acting skills but felt the Strasbergs were helping her. In her eyes, Lee Strasberg could do no wrong. She called him ‘the Great White Father.’ She revealed that before performing a scene for the Actors Studio with Maureen Stapleton from Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, she became so nervous she peed in her panties. ‘And I don’t usually wear panties,’ she added.”

  Lamprecht, an acquaintance of Arthur Miller’s, felt that Marilyn wanted to marry the playwright in order to validate her intellect. Not that there wasn’t also a sexual component to their relationship. Several days after his first interview with Monroe, Lamprecht accompanied the couple to lunch at Sardi’s. “They both looked suffused with a glow,” he remarked, “that could only come from a highly charged sexual relationship. To me it seemed obvious that sexuality represented an important factor for both. But evidently not everyone realized they were involved. Joan Copeland, Arthur’s younger sister, joined us for coffee and dessert that day, and it was clear she didn’t have the faintest idea they were anything other than good buddies. Joan, like Marilyn, took courses at the Actors Studio. But she seemed unaware that Marilyn would soon become her sister-in-law. I’d spoken to Truman Capote concerning Arthur and Marilyn, and he suggested that Miller was all but addicted to her—he was not merely besotted with her, he was smitten. Like Joe DiMaggio, Miller was in love, seriously, completely, with the full force of a man trapped in quicksand. Capote said to me, ‘If you ever write a book about the two of them, you ought to call it Death of a Playwright.’ ”

  After lunch, Lamprecht returned to Marilyn’s apartment to complete the interview he’d begun with her a few days before. “She suddenly became very serious and at the same time sarcastic,” said Lamprecht. “She began talking about Arthur Miller’s problems with the government, how they’d unconstitutionally canceled his passport because maybe he’d once read a book by Karl Marx. She talked about his pending June 21 appointment to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which she referred to as ‘an agency dedicated to the destruction of morality, creativity, and intelligence as we know it in this country.’ She was on her soapbox. She said that in August 1955 she, herself, wrote to the Soviet embassy, requesting an application for a visa to visit the USSR. It had nothing to do with politics. She’d hoped to see Russia because she wanted to look into the possibility of producing (and appearing in) a film version of The Brothers Karamazov. After she contacted the Russian embassy, all hell broke loose. The Daily Worker, an American Communist Party newspaper, ran an article reporting on her request to visit Russia. The FBI began tracking her every move, as if she were selling state secrets to the KGB. She surmised that by now her FBI file bulged with reports documenting all her ‘subversive’ activities, including her romantic involvement with, as she called him, ‘Comrade Miller.’ Marilyn insisted it was all part of the same whole-cloth plot: Congress wanted to implicate anyone and everyone they considered even remotely controversial. An amusing side note to all this is that whenever Marilyn got angry at Arthur, she called him ‘that Communist.’ ”

  As scheduled, on June 21, ten days after Arthur Miller secured his divorce from Mary Slattery, he traveled to Washington, DC, to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Having been implicated by his relationship to Elia Kazan, who infamously named names for the HUAC, Miller was adamant that he was innocent and that he would provide no names for its witchhunt.

  Marilyn Monroe remained in her New York apartment and watched the proceedings on televis
ion. Before the hearing began, ABC-TV aired a brief interview conducted several days earlier with Monroe, in which she vigorously defended Miller, proclaiming him “the only man I ever loved.” During the hearing, Miller, who purportedly attended a half dozen meetings of the Communist Party in the late 1940s, stated he was not and never had been a party member, and to the best of his knowledge had never attended a Communist Party meeting. He requested that his passport be returned to him. He wanted to go to England because for one thing, A View from the Bridge was opening in London in October, and for another, because “I want to be with the woman who will be my wife.” He went on to say that he and Marilyn Monroe planned to be married, and she, too, had to be in England to begin work on a new movie.

  Edward Bennett Williams told sportswriter Maury Allen that the hearing broadcast, including the opening interview with Monroe, had “hit Joe DiMaggio like a brick wall. I figured he would cancel a dinner date we’d made for later that evening. He didn’t. He went straight ahead with it and never said a word about Marilyn all night. Joe has a way of blocking unpleasant things out of his mind like that. If he doesn’t want to discuss something that would hurt him, he just forgets about it.”

  Once the HUAC hearing was over and had gone reasonably well, Miller and Monroe held an impromptu press conference at Marilyn’s apartment, the purpose of which was to formally announce their forthcoming nuptials. “Because of Miller’s HUAC hearing, half the country already knew of their plan, so I suppose the announcement was directed at the other half,” said Kurt Lamprecht, who attended the event. “One of the more notable incidents that afternoon took place when Marilyn hugged Miller. She embraced him with such force that he told her to stop, ‘or I’ll fall over.’ I didn’t know him personally, but I had difficulty imagining Joe DiMaggio making such a comment.”