The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  The unauthorized appearance of the story in the scandalous English newspaper upset Marilyn. Advised by DiMaggio, who strongly objected to publication, she withdrew her agreement, began a vitriolic legal dispute with Hecht – and then flew off to Japan. Enraged by the sudden turn of events, Hecht felt that if Marilyn prevented him from publishing the book, the results would be catastrophic. He would have wasted all his time on the project, the writing he'd done and the money he'd spent, and would have to repay Doubleday's advance. But, like the Hollywood directors and studio executives, Hecht found Marilyn extremely stubborn and difficult to deal with.

  Rose Hecht, writing or at least signing her husband's letters to Marilyn's lawyer and to his publisher, emphasized Marilyn's vacillating, irresponsible and often impossible behavior. She declared that Marilyn had lied to the Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons by claiming she'd never seen any of the written material. By changing her mind and reneging on their agreement, Rose maintained, Marilyn had acted in bad faith and responded to their pleas with "lies, fantasies and broken promises." Referring to Marilyn's sleazy past, Rose wrote, "far from harming her reputation, or libeling her in any way, Mr. Hecht aggrandized a young woman whose story has appeared in every pulp magazine." As Rose became more and more furious, she called Marilyn schizophrenic, her lawyer offensive, and Chambrun a liar and fraud. Ken McCormick, the editor at Doubleday, said that Hecht had been "dealing with thieves and dolts" and agreed that he'd been "thoroughly and abominably cheated."3 But if his firm could not publish the book, Hecht would have to – and did – return the advance. The possibility of publication was revived after Marilyn's death, but My Story, which did not discuss the last nine years of her life, was not published until Stein and Day brought it out in 1974.

  When Marilyn and DiMaggio returned from Japan and tried to live a normal life, they soon became aware of their radical differences in character, temperament and interests. He liked to live in San Francisco, she had to work in Los Angeles; he hated the movies, she had no interest in sports; he disliked her teacher, Lytess, she was devoted to her; he disliked publicity, she thrived on it; he was punctual, she was always late; he was neat and orderly, she was messy and chaotic; he was cautious and outwardly calm, she was impulsive and emotional; he spent his time with family and old friends at home, she liked to go out to movies and restaurants; she'd become interested in books, he read only newspapers. While he was riveted to the television set, which she felt should be removed from the bedroom, she read scripts, learned her lines and spoke to colleagues on the phone. She complained that "he's so boring I could scream. All he knows and talks about is baseball." Only quarrels relieved the boredom.

  They soon found they had nothing to say to each other. When they lived in a rented house in Beverly Hills, Marilyn recalled, "Everything went fine for a while, until Joe started complaining about my working all the time. He would even find little things to upset him after a while. It got so we didn't even talk to each other for days. I began living in one part of the house and Joe in the other." When they did speak, she deliberately provoked him into arguments, even violence. A friend said that "Marilyn could be a smartass, and when she drank champagne she'd goad him. And they weren't intellectuals, they couldn't discuss their pain, so they lashed out at each other." DiMaggio would sometimes lose his temper and begin to slap her around. Marilyn told friends that he'd hit her and they saw bruises on her body. But she did not, as expected, mention this fact in the divorce court.

  DiMaggio had strict ideas about how a wife should behave and a well-founded Sicilian jealousy. After they'd moved to separate bedrooms, Marilyn looked elsewhere for affection and "had two or possibly three affairs, all brief, all casual, late in her marriage to Joe."4 But at least one them, with her voice coach Hal Schaefer in July 1954, was not at all casual. Schaefer tried to commit suicide when DiMaggio forced her to break off the affair, and DiMaggio again became jealous when Marilyn visited Schaefer in the hospital.

  III

  The witty and sophisticated Billy Wilder, who made The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, was (along with Huston, Hawks and George Cukor) one of the few directors with enough courage, patience and masochism to do two pictures with Marilyn. The resourceful and enterprising son of a hotelier and small-time businessman in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, he had briefly studied law in Vienna and worked as a newspaper reporter in Berlin, where he supplemented his income as a dance partner and gigolo. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Wilder fled to Paris and directed his first feature film. He reached Hollywood in 1934, and roomed with a fellow exile, Peter Lorre. A versatile genius, Wilder was both co-author and director of superb films: Double Indemnity (1945), The Lost Weekend (1948), Sunset Boulevard (1951) and Stalag 17 (1954), as well as many witty and romantic comedies.

  In The Seven Year Itch (1955), co-produced by Wilder and Marilyn's agent Charles Feldman, she plays "The Girl," a sexy blonde on the loose in a summer sublet in Manhattan who gets involved with the man downstairs. Her co-star Tom Ewell plays the married New York publisher who's sent his wife and son to Maine for the summer. Ewell had played the role of the unattractive, ineffectual and permanently frustrated man in the successful Broadway play, and had a much bigger part than Marilyn.

  The Girl is the classic dumb blonde character, whose speech is peppered with sexual innuendos and unconscious double entendres. When the trailing cord of her electric appliance gets stuck, she exclaims, "my fan is caught in the door." She gets her big toe (the one Miller had delicately held on their first date) suggestively stuck in the faucet of her bathtub and has to have it extricated by a distracted but discreet plumber. She excites Ewell by declaring, "When it's hot like this, I always keep my undies in the icebox." And she has a touching speech about her preference for the kind of timid, unassuming man (like Ewell himself), rather than for the handsome and conceited hero a pretty girl is supposed to like.

  The film was laced with sly allusions and in-jokes that delighted the knowing audience. There's a reference to Charles Lederer, who wrote the script of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and a parody of the daring scene – passionate kissing in the wet sand as the waves break over their bodies – in From Here to Eternity (1953). The film confounds Marilyn's screen character with the real life and habits of the star. The Girl drinks Marilyn's favorite champagne, has posed in the past for sexy photos at twenty-five dollars an hour and, when she fails to turn up, provokes Ewell's question, "It's late. Where is she?" At the end of the film he says, "Maybe The Girl is Marilyn Monroe."

  The comic idea of the movie – a beautiful woman offering herself to a frustrated man whose moral scruples force him to refuse – is funnier than the execution. Ewell's long soliloquies, in which he fantasizes about sex instead of acting out his desires, worked better in the play than in the picture. Admitting he "has one child, very little, hardly counts," Ewell makes fumbling attempts to bed Marilyn while imagining that his wife is being seduced by his friend. During his wife's imaginary hayride with his dashing rival, the horses pulling their cart discreetly "wear blinkers." Ewell reads one passage from a book that parodies the lyrical lovemaking scene in Hemingway's "Fathers and Sons" and another that sounds like Kinsey's account of the sexual habits of middle-aged men.5 Oscar Homolka, an inept and mercenary psychiatrist and one of Ewell's authors, turns up early with his manuscript because his "patient jumped out of the window in the middle of a session." He admits that "at fifty dollars an hour all my cases interest me."

  The undies emerge from the icebox and reappear in the most famous scene in the movie, when Marilyn and Ewell leave the air-conditioned Trans-Lux Theater on Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street. They've just seen The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), a 3-D horror movie in which an Amazonian fish-monster falls in love with and abducts a pretty coed. In a line cut by the censors, the icebox girl asks Ewell, "Don't you wish you could wear skirts? I feel so sorry for you men in your hot pants." She then steps onto a subway grating, with a huge wind machine underneath it, whic
h sends her white pleated skirt fluttering above her waist like a wide-winged bird. The air from the New York summer subway would heat her up rather than cool her off, but that's part of the joke.

  Marilyn did not reveal any more of her body than if she were wearing a bathing suit on the beach, but seemed delighted to show what was not supposed to be seen on the street. Publicity agents had leaked the news that the scene would be shot at 2:30 in the morning, and a huge crowd turned up to watch. Happily exposing herself in front of Ewell, the technicians shooting the scene, the underground men working the wind machine and the crowd straining to watch the repeated takes, she suggests her sexual availability in an enticing but charming way. Back in 1943, when Norma Jeane and Dougherty were stationed on Catalina Island, he complained that "every guy on the beach is mentally raping you!" In the windblown skirt scene – which, like the nude calendar, became her iconic image – Marilyn seemed eager to act out and take pleasure in male fantasies as well as her own. It seemed as if the men, speeding underground in the subway, lifted her skirt and, in a penetrating rush, had sex with her.

  To enhance her sexy image, Marilyn had often said that she never wore underwear, though she usually did. One of the still photos from The Seven Year Itch, illuminated by powerful lights, reinforced her popular image and pleased the crowd by showing the dark patch of hair showing through her white panties. A photo by Eve Arnold captured her in the ladies room of Chicago's airport with her tight dress lifted high up – so she could raise her arms to comb her hair – and her lace panties and pert bottom in full view. Yet another photo, unexpectedly shot between her open legs, confirmed her assertions and revealed her pubic hair.6

  The gossip columnist Walter Winchell, knowing that DiMaggio would be furious about the display that everyone else adored but wanting a good story for his newspaper, maliciously brought him over from Toots Shor's nearby restaurant to watch the scene being shot. First puzzled and then enraged, DiMaggio asked, "What the hell's going on around here?" Many husbands would be proud to have the woman whom millions of men desired. But DiMaggio, combining Sicilian possessiveness with American puritanism, hated all the publicity and wished to keep her in purdah. He'd wanted Marilyn to be his wife, and did not want her to behave like "Marilyn Monroe." The flagrant exhibition of her body and underwear reminded him once again of her disgraceful past, her numerous lovers and her vulgar image. To DiMaggio, The Seven Year Itch was a recurrent: when the scene was shot, when the photograph was blown up into a gigantic fifty-two-foot advertising poster that dominated Times Square and when he – and millions of others – actually saw the movie. That night, after DiMaggio returned with the exhausted Marilyn to the St. Regis Hotel, they had a fight and he hit her. The next day he flew back to California alone; three weeks later they publicly announced their separation. The marriage that began with her exposure on the nude calendar ended with the flying skirt in The Seven Year Itch.

  Though the movie was a great success, Wilder was also angry with Marilyn, who'd caused many delays by turning up late and forgetting her lines. Emphasizing her artificiality and her dimness, he declared, "The question is whether Marilyn is a person at all, or one of the greatest Du Pont products ever invented. She has breasts like granite, and a brain like Swiss cheese, full of holes." He then added, with surprising animosity, a backhanded compliment: "Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anyone as mean as Marilyn Monroe nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo," for whom he'd written Ninotchka. Wilder, too severe on himself, described the difficulty inherent in the script: "Unless the husband left alone in New York . . . has an affair with the girl there's nothing. But you couldn't do that in those days, so I was straitjacketed. It just didn't come off one bit and there's nothing I can say except I wish I hadn't made it."7

  DiMaggio suffered another public humiliation during their closely watched divorce. On October 4, 1954, he finally left 508 North Palm Drive, "grim-lipped and walking the last mile," and had to face a barrage of photographers and reporters at a miserable moment in his personal life. One of them asked, "Where are you going, Joe?" "I'm going home," Joe said. "We thought this was your home, Joe." "San Francisco has always been my home." Marilyn hired the best lawyer in town, Jerry Giesler, a short, pot-bellied but rather courtly man, who'd successfully defended Charlie Chaplin and Errol Flynn in scandalous sex cases. Coached by Giesler, she stated in court that DiMaggio "didn't talk to me. He was cold. He was indifferent to me as a human being and as an artist. He didn't want me to have friends of my own. He didn't want me to do my work. He watched television instead of talking to me." Oscar Levant, the pianist and wit, wisecracked that their divorce "proved that no man can be a success in two national pastimes."8

  Like many ex-husbands, DiMaggio remained jealous and possessive. On November 5, a month after their separation, he took part in a scene right out of a Marx Brothers' farce, an episode the tabloids called the "Wrong Door Raid." A private detective had informed him that Marilyn and her lover Hal Schaefer (now recovered from his attempted suicide and back in action) were sequestered in the apartment of Hal's friend on Waring Avenue in Hollywood. DiMaggio's pal Frank Sinatra hired a few mobsters, who broke down the door. The heavies charged in and began taking pictures, but found the fifty-year-old Florence Kotz – asleep and alone in her flat – who clutched the bedclothes to her bosom and let out a terrified scream. "Meanwhile, through a door just a few yards away, Marilyn and Hal Schaefer left the apartment of actress Sheila Stuart (another of Schaefer's clients) – and they got clean away." The cops were paid off and called the break-in an attempted robbery. Kotz sued Sinatra for $200,000 and settled for $7,500. Two years later, after an exposé in Confidential magazine, the California State Senate, investigating scandals in the magazine industry, forced Sinatra and his cronies to testify. DiMaggio, who'd wisely remained hidden in a nearby car, was never called.

  When journalists asked about the break with DiMaggio, Marilyn used her recently acquired psychoanalytic jargon and declared, "I feel I have to avoid the psychological confinement that marred our relationship when we were married." DiMaggio – who always felt sorry for her, never gave up his urge to protect her and often came to the rescue in later crises – later asked her, "Who in the hell else do you have in the world?"9

  IV

  After she became a star, Marilyn became increasingly difficult to work with. But many outstanding directors were willing, even eager, to benefit from her luminous quality on the screen and her enormously profitable films. Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger were authoritarian, angry and explosive, while Joshua Logan and Laurence Olivier were astonishingly patient, kind and tolerant.

  Though Marilyn attracted first-rate directors, she rarely got serious roles. (Fox lent her to RKO for her first dramatic part in Clash By Night.) She began as a decorative secretary in three early movies; was a model in two other pictures; and ended up as a singer and dancer in almost all her starring roles from 1953 to her last film in 1961: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, River of No Return, There's No Business Like Show Business, Bus Stop, The Prince and the Showgirl, Some Like It Hot, Let's Make Love and The Misfits. In four cliché-ridden, thematically similar pictures – How to Marry a Millionaire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Prince and the Showgirl and Let's Make Love (1953–60) – she plays a poor girl who attracts and snares a millionaire. Her four great films – The Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve, Some Like It Hot and The Misfits – all shot in black and white, were infinitely better than the Technicolor and Cinemascope extravaganzas that made her a star.

  Apart from her performance in her best film, The Misfits, Marilyn was one-dimensional, melodramatic, even hysterical in her serious roles: Don't Bother to Knock and Niagara. But she had a subtle knack for comedy. She could be both sexy and naïve, blatant and vulnerable, semi-serious and amusing, and created distinctive comic effects by speaking her lines as if she didn't quite comprehend them. Miller noted that "she was both able to feel
what she was doing and comment on it at the same time. So that irony made her sexuality funny."

  Though Marilyn's success as a comedienne was based on her sexy image, which she carefully cultivated, she bitterly resented being treated as a mere sex goddess. The movie Production Code, which at first inhibited her impact, began to break down after Otto Preminger's liberating sex comedy, The Moon is Blue (1953), which was banned (but screened anyway) for using shocking words like "virgin" and "mistress." When interviewed by the press, Marilyn threw out provocative one-liners like "I do not suntan because I like to feel blonde all over" and, when daringly asked if she wore falsies, replied, "Those who know me better know better."10 She usually wore, and sometimes had to be sewn into, very tight, low-cut, shimmering dresses, and attracted rabid attention by contriving to have a vital dress strap break during a packed press conference.

  Contrasting Marilyn to a famous predecessor, a critic observed that Jean Harlow was "tough, wisecracking, even masculine in type. With a slight, lisping voice, a soft curvaceous body, and a seriousness about life, Marilyn Monroe projected an intense femininity and an inner vulnerability." Marilyn puckered and twitched her lips like a fish coming up for air. She swayed her hips as if trying to balance on a tightrope. But she never learned (or never wanted to learn) how to suggest sexiness in a subtle way. She always appeared, all guns firing, with the sensuous appeal of a Playgirl bunny: breasts projecting, bottom wiggling, mouth half-open, eyes half-closed.

  In March 1953 Marilyn appeared in all her glory to receive the prestigious Gold Medal for the "Fastest Rising Star" at the Photoplay awards ceremony. Joan Crawford, inappropriately assuming the role of grande dame, condemned her behavior with an insulting remark: "The publicity has gone too far, and apparently Miss Monroe is making the mistake of believing her publicity. Someone should make her see the light. She should be told that the public likes provocative feminine personalities; but it also likes to know that underneath it all the actresses are ladies." Playing the orphan card and using her insider's knowledge of Hollywood, Marilyn ironically praised Crawford, long before her adopted daughter exposed her sadistic acts in Mommie Dearest: "I've always admired her for being such a wonderful mother – for taking four children and giving them a fine home. Who better than I knows what that means to homeless little ones?"