The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Orson Welles remarked that almost everyone in Hollywood had slept with her. When the photographer Larry Schiller argued with Mailer about their book on Marilyn, Schiller tried to settle the dispute by claiming, "At least I fucked her and you didn't." Apart from the men she bedded while married to Dougherty, street clientele, casual pick-ups, movie moguls and the legions who claimed to or may actually have been her sexual partners, she had two dozen significant lovers (including three husbands) during the last twenty years of her life.13 Marilyn's apparently superficial and transparent character was actually quite ambiguous. She was naïve and innocent as well as flirtatious and seductive, unaware of conventional morality as well as completely indifferent to it, in love with her companions as well as merely distracted by them. She was at the same time Henry James' disingenuous and daring Daisy Miller and James Joyce's earthy and funny, unfaithful and sexually voracious Molly Bloom.

  With no parents, siblings or relatives to guide and protect her, Marilyn was essentially on her own: always vulnerable and frequently hurt. Unable to form a solid union with anyone, she suffered from lifelong depression and a profound sense of loss. Men, sensing her emotional chaos, tried to rescue or exploit her. The photographer Philippe Halsman wrote that "when she faced a man she didn't know, she felt safe and secure only when she knew that the man desired her; so everything in her life was geared to provoke this feeling." But after arousing this desire, she found the men were intimidated – both before and after bedding her – by her overwhelming sexual reputation. As she told Susan Strasberg, "I have to initiate relationships. . . . They don't know what the hell to do with me. . . . I almost have to say 'Do you want to fuck?' to get it out of the way. After they get me, they don't know what to do, either." Awkward and unsatisfactory sex was usually followed by disappointing silence and a hasty departure.

  Marlon Brando described Marilyn as a "sensitive, misunderstood person, much more perceptive than was generally assumed. She had been beaten down, but had a strong emotional intelligence – a keen intuition for the feelings of others, the most refined type of intelligence." Despite all her sexual experience, Marilyn also felt insecure about her own technique. The morning after sleeping with Brando, she confessed, "I don't know if I do it the right way." She not only had to be the bold seducer and active performer, but also had to fulfill men's erotic fantasies. "They go to bed with her, and they wake up with me," she told Susan Strasberg, "and they feel cheated. I feel for these guys. They expected the rockets' red glare, fireworks, and bombs bursting, you know, all that stuff, only I feel sorry for me, too." She could not possibly satisfy their passionate imaginings nor match the sexual newsreels that played in their heads.

  After strenuous efforts, she complained that "I'm a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me because of the image they've made of me and that I've made of myself, as a sex symbol. Men expect so much, and I can't live up to it. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman's. I can't live up to it."14 But her body, beautiful on the outside and ruined within, was not the same as other women's. She liked the companionship of homosexuals, who would escort her without expecting a sexual payoff at the end of the evening.

  Marilyn's memories of her childhood abuse made sex seem dirty and repulsive. Yet, lonely and desperate for affection, she hoped to win men's love by trying to please them. Like the beautiful but frigid writer Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway's third wife, she was willing to sleep with almost any man who really wanted her. Serious yet naïve, Marilyn took sex lightly and offered the only commodity she had as a reward. Sex was her way of saying thank you.

  Though sexually available, she was emotionally distant and unresponsive. She gave pleasure and asked nothing but approval in return, and admitted that she could not have orgasms. She made a free-flowing tape for her psychiatrist, with "extensive comments about her problems achieving orgasm – in very blunt language." Emphasizing the crucial paradox in her life, she bitterly said, "I just don't get out of sex what I hear other women do. Maybe I'm . . . a sexless . . . sex goddess."

  Her lovers and supposed friends confirmed that she became sexually frigid, and that neither her affairs nor her marriages satisfied her. The photographer André de Dienes said that "Marilyn is not sexy at all. She has very little feeling toward sex. She is not sensuous." The make-up man George Masters frankly called her "an ice-cold cookie, as frigid as forty below zero, and about as passionate as a calculating machine."15 The costume designer Billy Travilla, who knew her in the early 1950s, was more sympathetic and felt the need to protect her, but was also disappointed by her inability to respond: "Her lips would tremble. Those lips! And a man can't fight it. You don't want that baby to cry. . . . I think she wanted to love, but she could only love herself. She was totally narcissistic." Nico Minardos, a young Greek actor who met her in 1952, declared "she could never have a climax, though she would try so hard." And the actress Jeanne Carmen, her neighbor in 1961, stated that "Marilyn got nothing out of sex at all. She'd never had an orgasm – she used to fake it."16

  Marilyn's frigidity seems to have been caused by searing guilt about her prostitution and abortions, by her inability to meet the unrealistic expectations of her lovers, and by the psychoanalysis that revived painful memories of childhood abuse. She could never regain her girlish innocence, tainted early on by sexual molestation. Apart from countless liaisons, she'd been debased by prostitution as a starlet, couch-casting as an actress and adultery as a wife. Hollywood was filled with people who'd slept with her and who might at any time reappear, with disgusting leers and probing hands, to remind her of her past. No wonder she felt, in her innermost being, polluted and damaged, ashamed and desperate for redemption. She felt she was being punished for her sexual sins in two essential ways: she could not have orgasms and she could not have children.

  Five

  Joe DiMaggio

  (1952–1954)

  I

  Marilyn met Joe DiMaggio in March 1952, the month of the nude calendar scandal and just before her appendix operation, when she particularly needed emotional support. She became a star, while she was seeing him, the following year; married him, nearly two years after their first meeting, in January 1954; and divorced him, only nine months later, in October. Marilyn and DiMaggio had very different temperaments and expectations, but thought their problems could be overcome, or at least ignored. Though they loved each other, they were essentially incompatible and couldn't live together.

  DiMaggio, the eighth of nine children born to a Sicilian fisherman north of San Francisco, was the greatest baseball player of his time. He had a fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941 that has never been surpassed, and led the New York Yankees to ten American League pennants and eight World Series championships. In Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the brave Cuban fisherman frequently mentions "the great DiMaggio" as a touchstone of stoicism and humility. Strong and manly, with an athletic, muscular body, impeccably dressed and manicured, he was a handsome and dignified American hero.

  DiMaggio had been married to Dorothy Arnold, a nightclub singer and small-time actress, from 1939 to 1943 and had a son, Joe, Jr., who would become close to Marilyn. Retired from baseball in 1951 at the age of thirty-seven, DiMaggio interviewed guests on television before and after Yankee games and played exhibition baseball. He was a well-paid corporate executive and a wealthy man who owned a house in the Marina district in San Francisco, a boat, a Cadillac and a substantial portfolio of investments. He hung around his restaurant on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, dined with friends, signed autographs, read the sports section of newspapers, went to the racetrack, toured the golf courses, played poker and gin rummy, and was adored by his pals. But he had more energy than occupations.

  Marilyn was reluctant to see DiMaggio, who whetted his appetite on the nude calendar, when he first tried to meet her. Imagining him to be more like a Mafioso in movies than a professional athlete, she said, "I don't like men in loud clothe
s, with checked suits and big muscles and pink ties. I get nervous." She was two hours late for their first date, at an Italian restaurant on Sunset Strip, but DiMaggio, always the gentleman, waited patiently with his friends. Marilyn, who'd never been to a baseball game, was pleasantly surprised by his appearance:

  I had thought I was going to meet a loud, sporty fellow. Instead I found myself smiling at a reserved gentleman in a gray suit, with a gray tie and a sprinkle of gray in his hair. There were a few polka dots in his tie. If I hadn't been told that he was some sort of ball player, I would have guessed he was either a steel magnate or a congressman.

  He said, "I'm glad to meet you," and then fell silent for the whole rest of the evening.

  Calling the great DiMaggio "some sort of ball player" was like calling Marilyn "some sort of actress." But (as with Miller) words were less important than looks and gestures, physical attraction and intuitive sympathy. After driving around for a while after dinner, they spent their first night together.

  They were surprised to discover that they had many things in common. Both came from a working-class background and, completely on their own, had achieved tremendous success. Both had left high school in the tenth grade, and had poor health: DiMaggio suffered from calcium deposits, bone spurs, arthritis and stomach ulcers. Both were loners, shy and uneasy with strangers, and had the well-founded suspicion that everyone tried to exploit them. DiMaggio, immediately wanting to protect her, called her "a warm, bighearted girl . . . that everybody took advantage of." Most important, he seemed to accept her for what she was, despite her promiscuous past, though he never actually forgave her for it.

  They saw each other as frequently as possible in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They went fishing on his boat, and she learned to cook his favorite spaghetti sauce (though he liked Mama's better). When Marilyn opened the door of his house for young trick-or-treaters on Halloween, word quickly spread around the neighborhood and grownup men put on costumes and rang her bell. Their sex life, according to Marilyn, was extremely satisfying. "Joe's biggest bat," she later declared, "is not the one he uses on the field. . . . If that's all it takes, we'd still be married." He was one of those lovers who performed well in bed, but didn't know what to do with her afterwards. Mailer wrote that they'd "lie around in the intervals suffering every boredom of two people who had no cheerful insight into the workings of the other's mind."1

  DiMaggio had been divorced for a decade; Marilyn had been mostly on her own since Dougherty went overseas in 1944. The adjustment to domestic life, after playing the field for so long, was difficult for both of them. They decided to get married, on very short notice, at San Francisco City Hall. The only guests were his closest friends: the manager of his restaurant, Reno Barsocchini, and his old teammate, Lefty O'Doul, accompanied by his wife. Marilyn, dressed demurely for the occasion, invited neither friends nor Hollywood associates to the ceremony. The Catholic Church did not recognize the marriage of a divorced man, and the Archbishop of San Francisco excommunicated DiMaggio as a wedding present. They drove down the coast to Paso Robles; and DiMaggio – not entirely occupied with his bride – made sure the motel room had a television set on the first night of their honeymoon. She told the press that she hoped to have two, or even six children, but never became pregnant with DiMaggio.

  DiMaggio had agreed to play exhibition games in Japan in February 1954 and Marilyn, who'd never been abroad, went with him on their honeymoon. He got his first bitter taste of her fame when they were dangerously mobbed at Honolulu airport and when she completely upstaged him in baseball-crazed Japan. As she stood on the balcony of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo to greet her fans, she recalled Mussolini addressing the crowd from a balcony in Rome and felt "like I was a dictator or something." While she was in Japan, an American army general asked if she would entertain the soldiers in Korea (the war had ended the previous July, but there was still a big military presence) and she readily agreed. A military newspaper called her "the biggest thing to hit Korea since the Inchon landing."

  Performing for the first time before a live, rapturous audience, Marilyn did ten shows in four days and entertained 100,000 troops. The soldiers were muffled up in fur hats with ear flaps, heavy winter jackets and thick combat boots, while she gamely appeared, outdoors and in the extremely cold Korean winter, in high heels and a tight, strapless, low-cut dress. She enlivened the show with some suggestive jokes, and asked, when describing sweater girls, "take away their sweaters and what have you got?"

  She sang four songs: "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," "Bye Bye Baby," "Somebody Loves Me" and "Do It Again." The refrain in the last song – "Come and get it, you won't regret it" – was considered too provocative for the sexually starved troops and had to be dropped from the repertory. She excited the audience, who screamed with delight and craved what she was offering, and brought the shows to a frenzied climax. (The scene in Apocalypse Now, when the exotic dancers are flown in to Vietnam, captures the kind of excitement that Marilyn aroused.)

  A military photographer who accompanied the tour praised both her exciting performance and her sympathetic attitude:

  This wasn't an obligation she had to fulfill, and it wasn't a self-promotion. Of all the performers who came to us in Korea – and there were a half dozen or so – she was the best. She showed no nervousness and wasn't anything like a dumb blonde. When a few of us photographers were allowed to climb up on the stage after her show, she was very pleasant and cooperative. . . . It was bitter cold, but she was in no hurry to leave. Marilyn was a great entertainer. She made thousands of GIs feel she really cared.

  When she came back from the successful trip, she told DiMaggio that 100,000 men had been clapping and cheering for her, and exclaimed, "You've never seen anything like it." To which he replied, "Yes, I have."

  DiMaggio's baseball career ended just as Marilyn's fame reached its peak. They never resolved the central conflict, either before or during their brief marriage, about whether she would retire or continue to work in films. Like Jane Russell, she hoped to maintain both her movie career and a stable private life, but discovered that she could not have both. He expected her to give up films and become a wife, mother and housekeeper; she said, "he wanted me to be the beautiful ex-actress, just as he was the great former ballplayer." (Grace Kelly would give up her career in 1956, but – unlike Marilyn – she became Princess of Monaco, had many official duties, and received only the most dignified and respectful publicity.)

  DiMaggio didn't think she had talent and discouraged her career as an actress. He disliked the movie business and was unhappy about the time she spent at work. Used to the spotlight himself and jealous as a husband, he resented the publicity that not only focused on Marilyn, but was also an intrusive, prurient and vulgar violation of his wife. Marilyn explained their irreconcilable differences: "He didn't like the women I played. He said they were sluts. He didn't like the actors kissing me. He didn't like my costumes. He didn't like anything about my movies. And he hated my clothes. He said they were too tight and attracted the wrong kind of attention. . . . Joe said when he was a baseball star, he got whatever he wanted, but there I was, a movie star, and Hollywood people just pushed me around."2

  II

  In late 1953, Joseph Schenck, still an executive producer at Fox, hired Ben Hecht to generate publicity by ghost-writing Marilyn's autobiography. A leading Hollywood screenwriter, Hecht had written Wuthering Heights (1939) and Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), and had worked on three of Marilyn's minor pictures: Love Happy (1950), Monkey Business and O. Henry's Full House (both 1952). Hecht signed a contract with Doubleday and, subject to her approval, sold the serial rights to Collier's magazine. Shortly before Marilyn's marriage, Hecht went to San Francisco and spent four days with her, talking to her about her life while his secretary took notes. After he began the book, she went over the first twelve pages, and made some intelligent and helpful suggestions.

  When Hecht finished the book, he rented a bungalow in the Beverly
Hills Hotel, where Marilyn was living, and spent two more days reading the story to her in the presence of his secretary and his sometime collaborator, Charles Lederer. Hecht had to project a favorable, if false, public image of the star. He had to base his book on Marilyn's unreliable or deliberately distorted memories, and he needed sensational material in order to sell it. She explained how one aspect of her past had been considerably exaggerated: "I never intended to make all that much about being an orphan. It's just that Ben Hecht was hired to write this story about me, and he said, 'Okay, sit down and try to think up something interesting about yourself.' Well, I was boring, and I thought maybe I'd tell him about them putting me in the orphanage, and he said that was great and wrote it, and that became the main thing suddenly."

  After Hecht's reading, Marilyn was pleased with his work and said her life had finally been portrayed in "a dignified and exciting manner." Hecht's wife, Rose, later recalled that "Marilyn laughed and cried and expressed herself 'thrilled,' said she 'never imagined so wonderful a story could be written about her' and that Mr. Hecht had 'captured every phase' of her life." When Marilyn had approved the book, Doubleday paid him an advance of $5,000.

  Hecht's agent, Jacques Chambrun, then entered the scene and ruined the project. A charlatan and bogus count, Chambrun was an ugly man with "a certain charm and elegance. Everything about him gave off an aura of prosperity and good-natured joie de vivre." Chambrun, who'd been Somerset Maugham's wartime agent, "not only charged exorbitant commissions of 20 to 30 percent, but also kept more than $30,000 of Maugham's royalties." Chambrun, true to form, forged Hecht's signature on a contract, secretly sold Marilyn's story to a London tabloid, the Empire News, for £1,000 and kept all the money.