The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Jasper Dies

  By the fall of 1951, Marilyn Monroe had moved out of Natasha Lytess’s apartment and begun sharing a home with Shelley Winters in Hollywood. There were no hard feelings, apparently, since the three women remained social together after Marilyn moved in with Shelley. That said, she would have a lot more fun with the thrill-seeking Winters than she ever did with the often maudlin Natasha Lytess. Also, at the suggestion of one of her intimates, Elia Kazan, Marilyn would begin taking additional acting classes with renowned drama teacher Michael Chekhov, known for his acting technique called “The Method.” She had told Kazan that she was bored with the roles she was playing because so many of them had been basically the same kind of empty-headed characterization. She wanted nothing more than to challenge herself with more complex parts—and also wanted others to think of her as being more than a caricature. He agreed. She had a lot to give, she just needed to sharpen her skills. (It’s not known how Natasha Lytess felt about Marilyn’s second acting teacher.) Kazan also suggested that Marilyn take more classes at UCLA, and she did. She enrolled there for a course in “Backgrounds of Literature,” described as “Historical, social and cultural aspects of various periods with an introduction to the literature, itself.” Anytime she had an opportunity to broaden her mind, she wanted to take advantage of it. This time, though, she caused quite a sensation on campus, unlike her previous experience there when she wasn’t as well known. She would have much preferred to blend in with the other students, but how could she?

  At this same time, Marilyn received a telephone call from her half sister Berniece. Berniece’s father, Jasper—who had been married to Marilyn’s mother, Gladys, and who had absconded with her children so many years ago—had died. Even though Marilyn never met him, she did have some knowledge of him. When, as Norma Jeane, she had become old enough to start asking questions about her father, Gladys had told her that he had died in an automobile accident. (Marilyn would later say that she never really believed it. Once, she said, when she pushed the issue, Gladys “went into the bedroom and locked herself in.”) Gladys had kept a photo of Edward Mortenson—Jasper—on her wall, seen by Norma Jeane on the few occasions she would visit. When the young girl finally inquired as to the identity of the man in the picture, Gladys lied and said that he was her father. Marilyn then fell completely under his spell, she would later say, even if he was just a man in a photograph. “It felt so good to have a father, to be able to look at his picture and know I belonged to him,” she later recalled. “And what a wonderful photograph it was. He wore a slouch hat a little gaily on the side. There was a lively smile in his eyes, and he had a thin mustache like Clark Gable. I felt very warm toward the picture.” In fact, Marilyn recalled that looking at that photo of her father was “my first happy time.” She said she spent many nights dreaming of him and fantasizing about the kind of man he might have been if only he’d been in her life.

  Now the man Marilyn had spun so many fantasies around was gone. Jasper was the only parent Berniece had ever known. The most Marilyn could do was feel sorry for Berniece’s loss and stash her conflicted feelings about Jasper in her heart—along with all of the other ambivalent feelings she had about her parents.

  Soon after Jasper’s death, authorities in Pineville, Kentucky, noted that he was listed on Marilyn’s birth certificate as her father. This gave them a great excuse to be in contact with a movie star. Marilyn was pestered by lawyers in Kentucky for months as to whether she wanted to stake a claim on Jasper’s meager estate, until finally she made it clear—via her own attorney—that she had no such interest. Also at about this time, she hired a robust woman named Inez Melson, with large round glasses and an officious demeanor, as her business manager. She was instructed to try to send money to Gladys on a regular basis—difficult to do since it was always so difficult to keep track of Gladys’s whereabouts. Though she had filed for divorce from John Eley, Gladys was still with him, as far as anyone knew, and the two were traveling across the country together.

  One evening, Marilyn received a long-distance collect telephone call from Gladys, though she had no idea from where it originated. Gladys said that she didn’t want to be found, that she felt let down by Marilyn and Berniece, and that the two of them were “very, very disappointing daughters.” She ranted on about how much she loved Marilyn and that she had only given her up because her own mother, Della, had insisted upon it. She wanted to know how much longer Marilyn was going to hold it against her. Then she said that when Marilyn was a couple of years old, she caught “the whooping cough” from her foster brother, Lester, and that Gladys had moved into Ida Bolender’s home and nursed Norma Jeane back to health. “And I stayed there for a whole month with you,” she told Marilyn. “And you’ve never even thanked me for it.” Marilyn had a very vague memory of Ida once telling her about something like that, but she certainly didn’t remember it happening. It was very rare for Gladys to bring up the past. Marilyn thought perhaps it meant that Gladys was showing some improvement, because her memory was quite clear, and she suggested that Gladys return home as soon as possible so that they could discuss it and perhaps work things out between them. “But that’s not possible,” Gladys said, “because there are people telling me what to do, and they have told me not to go back to California under any circumstances. I could be in grave danger there.” Now Gladys’s illness was talking again. The disturbing telephone call ended with her warning Marilyn to be careful. “You’re being watched,” she told her daughter. “You must believe me, Norma Jeane.” Then she hung up.

  Marilyn later told Rupert Allan that she cried herself to sleep that night—but not before making sure all of her shades were drawn.

  Don’t Bother to Knock

  At about this time, Marilyn began work on what would be her most important role to date. Fox boss Darryl Zanuck, always ambivalent about Marilyn Monroe’s film future, was not quite ready to assign her to lead roles in “A” pictures and continued to look for more modest projects, budget-wise, for his contractee. He required her to screen test for Don’t Bother to Knock, which had the following story line: Nell Forbes, recently released from a mental institution, is recommended for a babysitting job by her uncle (Elisha Cook Jr.), the elevator operator in the hotel where the action takes place, while the child’s wealthy parents, Peter and Ruth Jones (Jim Backus and Lurene Tuttle), are having dinner. Dressed in a sexy negligee belonging to Mrs. Jones and wearing her jewelry and perfume, Nell begins a flirtatious, at-a-distance, slow dance of seduction for a cynical airline pilot, Jed Towers (Richard Widmark), who occupies a room across the courtyard. After Jed figures out her room number and knocks on the door, Nell invites him in, creating a situation that soon turns dangerous, with Nell alternately threatening to throw herself out the window or kill her young ward, Bunny (Donna Corcoran), now fully awake and terrified. Anne Bancroft, after a busy year acting in a series of TV programs, would make her feature film debut in this movie as Lyn Leslie, a cabaret singer in the hotel’s nightclub and the ex-girlfriend of Jed.

  The importance the studio placed on the film is evident in the care it gave the production artistically, assigning the studio’s top composer to create the score, multiple Oscar winner Alfred Newman. The script was adapted by Daniel Taradash, who would be awarded an Oscar in 1954 for his screenplay of From Here to Eternity, the year’s Best Picture Academy Award winner. Future Oscar winner Lucien Ballard was named director of photography; he had gained industry recognition as the creator of the Obie, a camera on which was mounted a key light, designed to eliminate any skin flaws on the face. Formerly married to Merle Oberon, he came up with the idea to disguise the imperfections on her skin that resulted from a serious car crash. The camera was named for her.

  Marilyn was extremely nervous about the screen test. She knew that Zanuck wasn’t a fan. She and Natasha Lytess spent hours working on the script. “I have to say that I didn’t think she was ready to take on a role of this magnitude,” Natasha later said. “I may have
underestimated her talent in that regard. Or, at the very least, I underestimated her resolve. The time we spent on the script—two days, nonstop and I don’t even remember sleeping!—was very dramatic and passionate and filled with angst, very much like Marilyn all the time. In the end, she did such a great job on the screen test that Zanuck saw fit to write her a note to congratulate her, which surprised—and thrilled—her to no end. She was so insecure and unsure of her ability, any validation at all was considered high praise.”

  However, Zanuck would say of her performance in the film, “She’s a dumb tomato and half-crazy to boot. She’s a sex pot who wiggles and walks and breathes sex, and each picture she’s in she’ll earn her keep, but no more dramatic roles.”

  Marilyn’s friend John Gilmore quoted Montgomery Clift, who said it best about Marilyn’s relationship with Zanuck and Fox at this time: “Fox wanted to keep a tight grip on her and drain her dry. That’s what they were after. The best talents, the other artists, they saw that differently and understood Marilyn had a right to make the choice of not demeaning herself. But the boss wouldn’t let her. They didn’t want an actress. That’s what they agreed upon. They’d sit at their round table and decide that Marilyn wasn’t capable of making a relevant decision.”

  While some critics of the day were dismissive of Marilyn’s emotive skills—giving Fox’s Zanuck ammunition to use against her—others would praise her, including Daily Variety: “[Marilyn Monroe] gives an excellent account of herself in a strictly dramatic role which commands certain attention.” Studio decision makers were encouraged, and after filming concluded in January 1952, they had another film ready for her (Monkey Business, which began its eight weeks of production on March 5).

  Over time Marilyn’s acting in Don’t Bother to Knock has been reassessed and her notices when the film was released in 2002 as part of a DVD boxed set were uniformly excellent. As film noir, the film has stood the test of time, and gives an inkling of what the future superstar would do with a highly emotional, offbeat role a year later—that of Rose Loomis, an adulterous wife, in the splashy 1953 Technicolor hit Niagara. When Marilyn’s psychological problems eventually became known, many overanalytical parallels would be made between her and her screen character, Nell Forbes; but these parallels are unwarranted, and unfairly diminish her talent as an actress. She came to the set prepared, and though coached by Natasha Lytess, she delivered a great performance.

  Still, after Don’t Bother to Knock, the bad movies continued for Marilyn. In fact, the next year—1952—would start off on a difficult note when in March, Marilyn began work on Monkey Business, in which she played, much to her dismay, a stacked and dumb secretary to Cary Grant’s scientist. Also at around this time, she made a movie called We’re Not Married, which starred Ginger Rogers, Mitzi Gaynor, Eve Arden, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Because the film is centered on three self-contained stories, there is no interaction between most of the various players, so we are denied the pleasure of seeing Zsa Zsa and Marilyn lock horns. This was another dead-end movie that added nothing much to her résumé. It was also the year O. Henry’s Full House was released, consisting of five self-contained mini-movies, each with a separate cast, separate writers, and separate directors, all based on famous short stories by O. Henry, the acknowledged master of the literary form that always bore a touching and unexpected irony in its denouement and became the author’s signature. It received a first-class production and starred some of the Fox lot’s most popular actors, but there wasn’t much for Marilyn to do in this one and most people don’t even know she was in it.

  “This is not easy,” Marilyn would tell Berniece when speaking of her career. “I don’t know how many bad movies an actress can make before she just becomes known for… bad movies!”

  Joe DiMaggio

  Joltin’ Joe. The Yankee Clipper. No matter the nickname, few major-league baseball players in history had as much of an impact on our culture as the famous Joe DiMaggio. In the view of some historians, though, he may be as well known for his relationship with Marilyn Monroe as for his skill as a New York Yankees center fielder (for his entire professional career, 1936 to 1951).

  Born Giuseppe Paolo (Joseph Paul) DiMaggio Jr. on November 25, 1914, Joe was the eighth of nine children of Sicilian immigrants in the small town of Martinez, California. When he was a year old, the family moved to San Francisco. He was raised with strict Catholic values in a household that stressed a strong work ethic and, above all, pride in their Sicilian heritage. At the same time, like most children of immigrants back then, the DiMaggio children were taught by their parents that nothing was more important than successfully merging into the American culture and being thought of as American. When he was a young boy, around six, he was forced to wear a leg brace due to a congenital weakness in his ankles. When the brace came off after two years, he was shy and withdrawn but also determined to excel at some physical activity. His brothers Vincent and Dominic played baseball—both went on to the pros—and he was thus inspired to also play the game. Joe dropped out of high school in the tenth grade—like Marilyn. His father, Giuseppe, had wanted him to be a fisherman—crab fishing had been a family trade for generations—but Joe couldn’t stand the smell of fish and cleaning them made him sick to his stomach. For many years, his father would view him as “good for nothing” as a result of his decision to do something other than fishing for a living. Joe’s brother Vince played for the San Francisco Seals, and it was he who persuaded the team’s management to bring Joe, then eighteen, on as a shortstop in 1932. He wasn’t such a great shortstop but he could definitely hit. By the age of twenty-one, he was batting .398. It wasn’t long before he became known as a reliable hitter for the team. He made his major-league debut with the Yankees in 1936, batting ahead of Lou Gehrig. From the start, he was a wonder on the field. It had been four years since the team had been in the World Series, but thanks in large part to DiMaggio, the Yankees would find themselves winning the next four fall classics. Joe joined the team in 1936 amid a great deal of publicity and attention. He was viewed as the greatest thing to happen to the sport in a long time. Paid $15,000 a game, he used the money to set his family up in a nice home as well as to invest in his own seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf called Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto. He had a fifty-six-game hitting streak, from May 15 to July 16, 1941, that is thought of as the greatest in baseball history. Then, after going hitless for one game, he bounced back and hit in the next sixteen games for a total of seventy-two out of seventy-three.

  Joe DiMaggio was more than just a baseball player, though. He was a cultural icon during the Great Depression, a desperate time in our history during which Americans sought out public figures for inspiration and motivation. He elevated the sport, but he also elevated the country. Watching DiMaggio in action was a thrill because of his grace and agility, but also it felt like a validation of the American dream. Injuries got the best of him, though, and by the late 1940s there were times when he could barely walk, let alone play the sport. Still, in 1949, he signed a contract with the Yankees for $100,000—an enormous amount of money in the sport at that time. He was deeply depressed after surgery on his foot and the breakup of a marriage—his first, which brought forth one child, a son named Joe Jr. So his heart wasn’t really in the sport at this time. Still, even in his darkest hours, he was an amazing player. That year he had four home runs in three games and was rejuvenated. He went on for another year or so playing the game in historic ways as the country watched, mostly amazed by his exploits: He played in 139 games in 1950, scoring 114 runs and three home runs in a single contest! By 1951, though, his injuries (as well as persistent ulcers and painful arthritis) began to take a toll on him. He announced his retirement at the end of 1951 at just thirty-six. By the time he gave up the sport, he had the fifth most career home runs (361) and the sixth highest slugging percentage (.579) in history. He’s the only player in baseball history to be selected for the All-Star Game in every season he played. He’s still considered one
of the best professional baseball players to ever walk out onto a field.

  Joe DiMaggio was a complex person, a study in contrasts. Like many celebrated people, he could be charismatic in a room full of people yet distant and sullen behind closed doors. Also, like many celebrities—especially in the sports world—he was accustomed to getting whatever his heart desired when it came to the opposite sex.

  What follows is the oft-reported story of how Marilyn Monroe met Joe DiMaggio. It’s true that the two did meet at this time; however, new interviews for this book reveal that this really was not the first time they met.

  First, the accepted story:

  After seeing Marilyn in a dazzling series of photos she made with the White Sox, Joe decided that he wanted her. Or at least he wanted to meet her, and then take it from there. Marilyn had done the photo shoot with the Sox during their spring training that year at Brookside Park in Pasadena as a publicity gimmick set up by the studio. She posed with popular baseball player Gus Zernial in one of the pictures. After Joe determined that he wanted to know Marilyn, he contacted a mutual friend, David March, and the date was set for March 8, 1952, at Villa Nova, an Italian restaurant. *

  Marilyn wasn’t exactly eager to meet Joe. She didn’t quite know who he was, and didn’t much care. She figured he was just an egotistical baseball player—or maybe a football player, she wasn’t sure—and since she knew little about the sport she couldn’t imagine what they would have in common. So while Joe DiMaggio sat waiting with David March and an actress named Peggy Rabe, Marilyn did what she did best in these kinds of social situations—she was late. (“It was a balmy night, and I was late, as usual.”) In fact, she kept them waiting for almost two hours. Of course, when she appeared, the table was more than happy to see her, especially given that she had on a revealing, low-cut white blouse and a tight little blue skirt that made sitting down just a tad perilous. She didn’t know it, but DiMaggio was apprehensive about meeting her.