Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  In his new position, DiMaggio served as a kind of public relations figure, often traveling to military bases with the boss, Val Monette. He dined with generals and admirals, visited local officers’ clubs, and played an occasional round of golf with the company’s clients. He smiled, shook hands, and doled out his autograph. He met with the kids on the base and sometimes tossed a baseball around with them. Besides France, Germany, Italy, and Denmark, Joe accompanied Val to Poland and Russia, simply because Monette wanted to visit those countries. Joe remained with his employer through July, 1962.

  “It was a good job for him,” said Joe DiMaggio Jr. “It kept him busy but not all that busy. He had plenty of downtime. He even visited me at school. Marilyn shamed him into it. When she learned that he hadn’t come out to see me at Lawrenceville, she said to him, ‘If you don’t visit your son, I will.’ So he and George Solotaire drove out one day. And my dorm mates went gaga. The head of the athletic department and the baseball coach heard he was visiting and came around to meet him. They couldn’t get over being in the same room as the great Joseph Paul DiMaggio. They kept asking question after question about his days as a Yankee. I felt almost embarrassed for these two guys. George Solotaire just kept rolling his eyes.”

  Although unaware of Marilyn’s clandestine meetings with DiMaggio, Lena Pepitone acknowledged that Joe called Marilyn from time to time. “Marilyn enjoyed hearing from him,” said Pepitone. “She knew how much he loved her—and she always loved him. I remember the afternoon she went to Gallagher’s steak house with press agent John Springer. She came home afterward and said she’d seen Joe’s picture in the restaurant and how much that pleased her. I recall the day Lew Wasserman, her agent at MCA, called her to inquire whether she thought DiMaggio might agree to be the subject of a feature film. ‘You must be kidding,’ she told him. ‘That’s the last thing in the world he’d want.’ ”

  According to Pepitone, one of the basic problems in Marilyn’s marriage to Arthur Miller was that he never wanted to do anything other than sit in his study with the door closed. “One evening,” said Pepitone, “Marilyn suggested they go to a movie that had just opened. He agreed. She bathed and dressed and sat in the living room waiting for him. After a while, when he failed to materialize, she went to his study and timidly knocked at the door. ‘I’m working,’ he said. Marilyn was crushed. She went to her bedroom, tore off her blouse, and began to sob. The one function she succeeded in getting him to attend in 1958 was Elsa Maxwell’s April in Paris Ball at the Waldorf. She knew Joe DiMaggio sometimes attended Elsa’s parties, and I think she hoped he might be there. He wasn’t. But her presence at the function caused absolute pandemonium. The place went wild. DiMaggio also showed up at the Actors Studio the day she and John Strasberg performed a scene out of A Streetcar Named Desire. It was standing room only.”

  On weekends when Miller and Monroe happened to be in Roxbury, they sometimes visited Elia Kazan, whose country estate wasn’t far from theirs. Miller had reconciled with Kazan, at least professionally. The playwright still felt emotionally distanced from the director, but, as he wrote in Timebends, “the whole Communist issue had gone cold.” Miller chose Kazan to direct a production of A View From the Bridge because, wrote the playwright, “I was not at all sure that he should be excluded from a position for which he was superbly qualified by his talent and his invaluable experience with The Group.”

  “Seeing his old crony wasn’t a social commitment that particularly bothered Miller,” said Pepitone. “Kazan’s house was usually overridden with members of the Actors Studio: Ben Gazzara, Eli Wallach, Anne Bancroft, Walter Matthau, Paul Newman, and others, including Marlon Brando on occasion. They played softball in the afternoon, and as I heard the story, the first time Marilyn came to bat she belted the ball a country mile. None of them had hit it that far before. As she rounded the bases and touched home plate, Ben Gazzara said, ‘My God, Marilyn! Where the hell did you learn to do that?’ And she responded, ‘I had a good teacher. Remember? I was married to Joltin’ Joe.’ Needless to say, Arthur Miller didn’t exactly appreciate her response.”

  If Marilyn felt emotionally cut off from Miller, he, too, felt frustrated in the marriage. “One subject Marilyn refused to discuss was money,” noted Pepitone. “Whenever the topic arose, she put her hands over her ears. ‘I don’t know a thing about money,’ she’d say. ‘I just want to act. I want respect. I don’t want to be laughed at. I want to be happy.’ She was totally impractical when it came to finances. I remember, for example, that for a while she used Kenneth as her hairdresser. He later became famous for styling Jacqueline Kennedy’s hair. He used to come to the apartment to do work on Marilyn, and she’d keep him waiting for hours. She paid him by the hour so she didn’t think it mattered to him if he had to wait. The trouble is that the final cost of a visit became exorbitant.”

  For all her difficulties with her husband, Marilyn remained infatuated with the thought of having a baby. “Whenever she saw a baby carriage with an infant in it, she would get excited,” remarked Pepitone. “A couple one floor below us at 444 East Fifty-Seventh Street had a newborn, and the baby nurse would take the infant for a carriage ride every morning. On weekends, the baby’s mother would push the carriage. Marilyn became friendly with her and began asking her all sorts of questions. What was it like giving birth? What did she feed the baby? Did the baby sleep at night? After they became friendly, the mother let Marilyn hold and play with the baby. Marilyn confided in the woman that she wanted a baby of her own but was having difficulties. ‘Why not adopt?’ the woman asked. ‘I know all about adoption,’ said Marilyn. ‘I want to give birth and then raise the child. More than anything, that’s what I’d like.’ ”

  The actress told Norman Rosten that she felt torn between becoming pregnant again and making another film. “I’d love my child to death,” she remarked. “I want to have one, yet I’m afraid. Arthur says he wants it, but he’s losing his enthusiasm. He thinks I should do the picture. After all, I’m a movie star, right?”

  • • •

  The “picture,” as Marilyn referred to it when talking to Norman Rosten, was Some Like It Hot, a United Artists production costarring Marilyn, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon. Produced and directed by Billy Wilder, who’d last worked with Marilyn on The Seven Year Itch, the new film began shooting in Los Angeles at the beginning of August 1958. A spoof about a pair of musicians (Curtis and Lemmon) who witness a gangland massacre and then, to avoid being bumped off themselves, dress up as women and join an all-girls orchestra, Some Like It Hot became a film classic. It is one of the funniest American comedies of its time—or of any time, for that matter. Monroe’s performance netted her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical. She told Earl Wilson that she thought she deserved an Oscar. In reality, although Marilyn had hoped to succeed as a serious actress performing serious roles, her greatest successes came in comedies such as this one.

  The quality of her Some Like It Hot performance aside, Marilyn’s personal behavior had never been worse. “Her lack of professionalism during the making of Seven Year Itch was bad enough,” complained Billy Wilder, “but it reached new heights in the present film.” With her endless lateness and pathological block against remembering even the most mundane bits of dialogue, she managed to antagonize almost everyone connected to the film. A scene in which Marilyn uttered a three-word line (“Where’s the bourbon?”) had to be reshot more than sixty times. Weakened by drugs, MM missed entire days on the set, remaining fast asleep in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. When on the set, she complained nonstop about numerous aspects of the film, starting with the fact that she’d once again been cast as “the dumb blonde.” She criticized the studio for shooting the film in black and white. She wasn’t getting along with Billy Wilder. She couldn’t stand Tony Curtis. Although she was top-billed, she thought it all wrong that the film’s plot line should revolve around her two male costars.

  Rumor had it that the only reason she�
��d signed on to do the film was because she and Arthur Miller had run out of money. Angry that she’d agreed to star in Some Like It Hot, Marilyn took out her wrath on the film’s director, embarrassing Wilder in front of the other actors by telling him he was incompetent and refusing to follow his instructions. “Don’t tell me what to do,” she berated him. “I’ll play the scene my way.”

  Marilyn’s delicate emotional state was nowhere more evident than in her diary entries, one of which read: “Help, help, help. I feel life coming closer when all I want is to die.”

  A letter she wrote to Norman Rosten while on location at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego was only slightly more uplifting: “Don’t give up the ship while we’re sinking. I have a feeling this boat is never going to dock. We are going through the Straits of Dire. It’s rough and choppy.”

  Sensing that Arthur Miller could neither control nor help his wife, Paula Strasberg telephoned Dr. Kris in New York and asked her to come to California and see Marilyn in person. Monroe had bombarded Kris all summer with letters, telegrams, and phone calls. Kris had contacted Anna Freud in London to discuss Marilyn, and Anna had advised her to see Marilyn on the set. Her presence did little good. In addition to her massive drug abuse, MM was drinking more than ever. After each take, she insisted she be brought a thermos of coffee, but as Billy Wilder soon discerned, the thermos was filled with vermouth and not coffee. At the completion of the film, Wilder sent Arthur Miller a letter of complaint: “Had you, dear Arthur, been not her husband but her . . . director, and been subjected to all the indignities I was, you would have thrown her out on her can, thermos bottle and all, to avoid a nervous breakdown. I did the braver thing. I had a nervous breakdown.”

  It had been Miller who apprised Wilder that his wife had again become pregnant. Dr. Leon Krohn, Monroe’s gynecologist, had confirmed the pregnancy. At the same time, he cautioned the actress that the effects of accumulated barbiturates—and other drugs—could cause her to lose the fetus. He advised her to cease her use of sleeping pills and to reduce her hours on the set. Arthur Miller asked Wilder if Marilyn could leave every day no later than four in the afternoon, to which the director responded, “That’s the time she usually gets here. If you bring her at nine in the morning, ready to shoot, I’ll let her go at noon.”

  The possibility of giving birth, an eventuality Marilyn anticipated with both hope and dread, encouraged her to follow her physician’s recommendations. She stopped drinking and cut back on her consumption of drugs, limiting herself to the use of Amytal, a milder barbiturate than Nembutal. She began turning up early for work, as Wilder had suggested. He, in turn, kept his end of the bargain and most days allowed her to leave the set just before lunch. The damage, after all, had already been done: the film was more than two months behind schedule.

  Marilyn contacted Lena Pepitone in New York and asked her to buy a cradle for the baby. “She told me she sensed it would be a girl,” recalled Pepitone, “so she wanted the cradle to be pink. ‘And if it’s a boy?’ I asked. ‘What’s the difference?’ said Marilyn. ‘No baby ever cared about the color of its cradle. That’s an adult perversion.’ So I went to an antique store and purchased a pink handmade wooden cradle, with a pink-checkered baby girl in a bonnet carved into the tiny headboard. A pink baby lamb had been etched into the side of the cradle.”

  Shooting on Some Like It Hot came to an end on November 6. Billy Wilder threw a cast party but didn’t invite Marilyn, though in the end, it was largely her comic brilliance that made the film such a success.

  On November 8 the Millers were back in New York. Marilyn placed the tiny cradle next to her bed and spent most of the next five weeks at home, resting. She wrote poems, sending one or two of them to Norman Rosten with a letter that she signed “e. e. cummings,” in imitation of the famous American poet who rarely used capital letters. She took one night off to accompany her husband to the opening of Yves Montand’s one-man Broadway show in which the Italian-born (but French-speaking) actor demonstrated his skill as a singer.

  Montand and his wife, actress Simone Signoret, had starred in the French film version of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, and the two men had become friends. Following the show that evening, Miller, Montand, and Monroe ate a late-night dinner and discussed the possibility of Yves and Marilyn working together on a film. When the Millers returned home, Marilyn admitted that she liked Montand and found him attractive.

  Sadly, in mid-December, despite her precautions, Marilyn suffered yet another miscarriage. She was taken by ambulance to Manhattan Polyclinic Hospital. News of the miscarriage received wide media coverage. When he heard, Joe DiMaggio called her at home. They spoke briefly. DiMaggio told Paul Baer that Marilyn couldn’t stop crying.

  Lena Pepitone had forgotten to remove the newly bought pink cradle from Marilyn’s bedroom. “I tried to take it out after she returned from the hospital,” said Pepitone, “but she insisted I leave it. That night, she hurled it against the wall, and it broke into pieces. ‘This was my last chance,’ she wept. ‘My last chance.’ ”

  Late at night on December 26, a highly distraught Arthur Miller called Norman Rosten and asked him to come over as soon as possible. The Rostens arrived at three in the morning. Marilyn had taken Amytal plus Nembutal with wine. Unable to rouse his wife and seeking to avoid unwanted publicity, Miller had called a physician friend of his, who’d come over and pumped her stomach. She made a rapid recovery. On New Year’s Eve, the Millers attended an Actors Studio party given by Lee and Paula Strasberg.

  Some Like It Hot premiered to rave reviews and record box office revenue on March 29, 1959, at Loew’s State Theater on Broadway. Plugging the film in Los Angeles, Tony Curtis was asked what it was like to have kissed Monroe in the film. “It was like kissing Hitler,” he said. Marilyn’s response to her costar’s hurtful remark was offered in a Life magazine interview conducted in the summer of 1962. Asked how she felt about Curtis’s earlier remark, she said, “That’s his problem.”

  Tony Curtis perpetrated one further indignity against Marilyn, claiming in his book The Making of Some Like It Hot, published in 2009, and in a number of interviews publicizing the book, that he’d had a fleeting affair with Monroe during the production of the film. Yet in his autobiography, published sixteen years earlier, Curtis makes no such claim, stating only that he and Marilyn had dated informally when both were new to Hollywood. When asked about the discrepancy by a British journalist, Curtis—who died in September 2010—responded, “I’m not the only Hollywood actor who fantasized about sleeping with Marilyn Monroe. To put it another way, I so frequently dreamed of sleeping with her that it seemed almost as if I had. But I do stick to my earlier statement: kissing Marilyn was like kissing Hitler. Of course, that’s also a debatable statement, since I never had the pleasure of kissing Herr Hitler—I never even met the man.”

  • • •

  In mid-April 1959 Truman Capote met with an editor friend to discuss his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which was soon to be made into a feature film. Having just seen Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, Capote felt she would make a wonderful Holly Golightly, the book’s main character, a kind of wholesome harlot, a girl-woman with her own set of values and a singular vision of the world. “Marilyn’s perfect for the role,” Capote told the editor. He’d discussed the possibility with her, and she’d expressed interest.

  “Have you seen her lately?” asked Capote’s companion. “I heard from Delos Smith that her psychiatrist put her on Tuinal, a barbiturate composed of Seconal and Nembutal. She takes five Tuinal pills at night to try to sleep. Seven Tuinal can kill you. She’s two pills away from oblivion. I have the feeling that girl’s not going to be around much longer. Delos agrees. He says in class at the Actors Studio she sits next to him and keeps whispering to him, ‘Let’s kill ourselves.’ ”

  “She should be monitored,” remarked Capote. “Blood tests and all that. Her shrink’s got to monitor her.”

  Capote went on to say that t
here were two Marilyns. There was the frenetic, fast-talking, street-savvy, tough, sometimes mean and spiteful Marilyn, often so drugged and drunk that she didn’t know who or where she was. But when she felt relaxed, she changed into the other Marilyn. She became a soft, lovely person with a wonderfully sweet smile and a full, hearty laugh, a bit shy, a keen listener, with wide, inquisitive eyes, nice but always naughty.

  “The two Marilyns in combination,” said Capote, “are what make her the perfect Holly Golightly.”

  Lee and Paula Strasberg were against Marilyn’s accepting the role. The last thing she needed was to play the part of a hooker, even a sophisticated one. Paula called the producers to remove Monroe’s name from the list of actresses being considered. Audrey Hepburn came away with the part. When the film came out in 1961, Marilyn sent Hepburn a telegram congratulating her on a fine performance. She graciously told Truman Capote, “Audrey probably did a better job of it than I would have.”

  • • •

  “Joe DiMaggio finally confided in my father about seeing Marilyn again,” said Robert Solotaire. “I believe she considered him a great friend, somebody she could always count on. She obviously didn’t want to lose him. She enjoyed sleeping with him, so that feature became part and parcel of their new arrangement. Being on intimate terms with Marilyn Monroe, sex goddess, idol of millions, probably meant more to Joe than it did to Marilyn. He believed no other man could love her as much as he did. And he was probably right.”

  DiMaggio sent Marilyn flowers when, on June 23, 1959, she underwent surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York to try again to correct her chronic endometriosis, an ailment that would continue to flare now and then until the end of her life.

  Marilyn saw Joe at Paul Baer’s house in early September. Then, later in the month, she flew to Los Angeles to attend a Twentieth Century–Fox luncheon for the Russian premier, Nikita Khrushchev. Spyros Skouras, organizer of the event, had called Marilyn in New York to tell her that Khrushchev had personally requested her presence at the function. Perhaps because he wanted to avoid further problems with the government, Arthur Miller had refused to attend.