The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  However, the shoot was fraught with problems, mostly from Marilyn. She was ill with bronchitis for part of it and was also diagnosed with anemia. Moreover, her growing addiction to sleeping pills and barbiturates had become a real issue in her life, affecting her performance. She was sluggish and unhappy most of the time. Naturally, she was also late very often.

  Natasha Lytess—who was on the set with Marilyn every day, of course—later claimed that Joe was beating Marilyn during this period and that Marilyn had confided in her details of the terrible confrontations. It would be difficult to trust Lytess’s word given her animosity toward DiMaggio, but others close to Marilyn concur—and even some close to Joe. “He was smacking her around, yes,” said one of his closest friends. “He didn’t seem too ashamed of it, either. He said that she brought the worst out in him, that he wasn’t usually that kind of man. He said she was spoiled and very self-centered and it drove him crazy. He told me he was sick of coddling her, tired of her ‘woe is me stories,’ as he put it. I said, ‘Joe, maybe you two should get divorced.’ He looked at me as if I was crazy. ‘I ain’t letting her go,’ he said. ‘Hell if I’m letting her go.’ ”

  In marrying Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn may have repeated a pattern in her life of becoming fixated on a man who would not support her desires or her ambitions. The concensus is that he was physically abusive to her. He also could be insensitive and dense. For instance, Marilyn once gave him a gold medal as a gift that she’d had inscribed with a quote from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “True love is visible not to the eyes, but to the heart, for eyes may be deceived.” He took one look at it and said, “What the hell does this mean?”

  “When he came onto the set of Show Business, it happened to be the day we were doing Marilyn’s big ‘Heat Wave’ number. She had worked so hard on it with [her vocal coach] Hal Schaeffer, and I know she was proud of it. He just stood there, a big lug of a man, so unpleasant and unsupportive,” said one person who worked on the movie’s production team. “She would come in with bruises here and there that they would cover with makeup. If you cared about Marilyn, and I think everyone there really did, you wanted to say to her, ‘Dump this guy. Now!’ You just wanted to hold her and keep her safe, that’s the way she affected you.”

  The Seven Year Itch

  In August, Marilyn began work on The Seven Year Itch in New York. Like no other of her films before or after, The Seven Year Itch established Marilyn’s iconography as the world’s number one sex symbol and burnished her image as a contemporary love goddess, much as Rita Hayworth had been a dozen years earlier.

  The film’s roots were planted on the Broadway stage at the Fulton Theatre on November 20, 1952, and flourished for 1,141 packed-house performances. The play was written by George Axelrod and starred Tom Ewell, who won the year’s Best Actor Tony Award. It was originally acquired by Paramount as a Billy Wilder project, but when Wilder left the studio he took the screenplay with him to 20th Century-Fox, where he became the picture’s director, cowriter, and coproducer.

  In the movie, Ewell is Richard Sherman, a thirty-eight-year-old publishing executive, left alone in his New York apartment while his wife of seven years and son spend the summer in Maine. Subleasing the upstairs, non-air-conditioned apartment is a gorgeous blonde, a television pitchwoman identified only as “The Girl” (Monroe), who soon becomes the object of Sherman’s fantasies. A couple of brief encounters with her is enough to set Sherman off on a Walter Mittyish, wild-goose chase in which he imagines himself romantically involved with The Girl in a series of improbable situations. The “relationship” becomes so serious in Sherman’s mind that he becomes paranoid that his vacationing wife, Helen (Evelyn Keyes), is aware of his imagined infidelity. The rest of the plot doesn’t really matter—the movie falls apart halfway through. Suffice it to say, Marilyn is stunning in every scene.

  Filming commenced on September 1, 1954, at Fox’s L.A. studio. The first location scene in New York was the “flying-dress sequence” on September 15, at 1 a.m. The shot of Monroe in the Travilla-designed ecru halter-top dress, standing on a subway grate, the accordion-pleated skirt a-flying as she gleefully but vainly tries to anchor it, is firmly imprinted on the collective cerebral cortex of moviegoers for all time. Five thousand onlookers watched the filming of it at 52nd and Lexington near the Trans-Lux Theatre. Unfortunately, Joe DiMaggio was one of them.

  Prompted by Walter Winchell, who, it would seem, was trying to get a good reaction from Joe for his column, Joe found himself on the set that night. Watching his wife perform in such a provocative—even if very obviously staged—moment infuriated him. Billy Wilder described the look on DiMaggio’s face as “the look of death.” Even though Marilyn wore two pairs of panties for modesty, under the klieg lights there was still more visible than what Joe would have been comfortable with. James Haspiel was present for the filming, and he recalled, “I must confess I had no trouble seeing through Marilyn’s sheer panties. Most of the published photographs from that night do not illustrate this intimacy. I think they shot the scene fifteen times so it was a very exciting, intimate situation being played out over and over again before my eyes. Nonetheless, I could fully appreciate DiMaggio’s anger. Indeed, Joe stood there sour-faced. In defense of Monroe, I am reasonably convinced that in her dressing room she did not see what the powerful klieg lights then put on display.”

  DiMaggio rushed back to the St. Regis Hotel and waited for his wife to join him there at the end of her workday. Then he took out his rage on her, slapping her around the room. The altercation was so noisy, in fact, that other hotel guests reported it to the hotel’s management, afraid that someone was getting badly hurt. Natasha, in the room next door, was alarmed enough to pound on the door to the DiMaggios’ suite. “Is everything okay in there?” she shouted out, knowing, of course, the answer. The door swung open and there was Joe, eyes blazing, face reddened. “Get outta here,” he told her brusquely. “Mind your own business, for once.” Later that night, Milton and Amy Greene had dinner with Joe and Marilyn. They noticed bruises on Marilyn’s back. The next day, Gladys Witten, a studio hairdresser, noticed bruises on Marilyn’s shoulders, “but we covered them with makeup,” she said.

  “That was the last straw,” recalled Stacy Edwards, who met Joe in New York earlier in that day. “The way I heard it, Joe let her have it. It was pretty bad. After he hit her, she told him she’d had enough and wanted out of the marriage. I spoke to Joe maybe three weeks later and asked him about that night. He said, ‘Things got out of hand, I admit it. But she pissed me off so much. She didn’t care what I thought about anything, she just wanted to do what she wanted to do.’ That was DiMaggio. He could be a sweetheart if everything was going his way. If not, he was pretty mean. To tell you the truth, I lost a lot of respect for Joe when I found out he hit Marilyn Monroe. I thought to myself, ‘How could any man hit such a beautiful creature?’ ”

  Years later, Marilyn admitted to her hairdresser, Sydney Guilaroff, very famous in his time for his work with Hollywood stars, “Joe beat me up twice. The first time, I warned him. ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ I’m not going to stand for it. Then, after he witnessed me filming a sexy scene for The Seven Year Itch, he slapped me around the hotel room. I finally screamed at him, ‘That’s it.’ I don’t know what makes a man beat a woman—vulnerable and weak—I just don’t understand it.”

  The DiMaggios left New York on September 16. The next day, Marilyn did not show up for work at the studio. Her doctor said she was home in bed with the flu. It would be four days before she could return to work. Even Darryl Zanuck—arguably a cruel man himself, with his comments about his star Monroe—felt badly about what was going on in her private life. He sent a note over to Billy Wilder assuring the director, “Others could give a good performance, but nothing could make up for Marilyn’s personality in this film.”

  Billy Wilder summed up Marilyn’s appeal best when he told her biographer Donald Spoto, “She had a natural instinct f
or how to read a comic line and how to give it something extra, something special. She was never vulgar in a role that could have become vulgar, and somehow you felt good when you saw her on the screen. To put it briefly, she had a quality no one else ever had on the screen except Garbo. No one.”

  What’s most stunning about Marilyn’s performance in The Seven Year Itch is that she was able to rise to the occasion despite the misery of her private life. That’s what real movie stars do—they give all they have when on camera, even when they seemingly have nothing left to give. She inhabited the role of The Girl as if born to it. With her arresting beauty, she is totally aware of the effect she has on men, even joking about it. But the jokes are on her, not the men. Melissa Anderson of the Village Voice wrote, “So arresting is Monroe’s presence that when she’s not on-screen, we wait impatiently, wondering, ‘Where have you gone, Mrs. DiMaggio?’ ” She wears white throughout most of the film, appearing in a pastel pink shorts outfit briefly and in a slinky evening gown in one of Sherman’s fantasy sequences. It is apparently meant to point out the character’s virginal purity and her total lack of guile. Her short, curly hairdo by Helen Turpin is timeless and the one most closely associated with Marilyn for the rest of her life.

  That said, Marilyn’s emotional problems took their toll during filming. This, along with her tardiness and ill-preparedness—by one report as many as forty takes for a single scene—was said to have added over a million dollars to the film’s $3.2 million budget. It still managed to earn a nice profit, taking in $12 million at the box office for Fox. The still shot of the famous billowing-dress scene that so infuriated Joe became the film’s graphic signature, and Fox’s marketing team decreed that it be blown up to a height of fifty-two feet. The enormous Monroe image was then cut out and placed in front of Loew’s State Theatre in Times Square when the movie opened. It caused a sensation.

  Marilyn Divorces Joe

  She knew what she had to do—but that didn’t make it any easier for her. The much-reported story is that she called her attorney, Jerry Geisler, and told him that she wanted a divorce. However, Marybeth Cooke worked for Geisler at the time and she tells a different story. She recalled, “We all knew that Marilyn Monroe was still crazy in love with Joe, but that he was beating her up. Still, she did not want to let him go. I have to say—and Jerry would not have wanted anyone to know this at the time—that Marilyn called him from New York and told him that she might want a separation from Joe, but she wasn’t sure. When she got back to Los Angeles, she was not calling Jerry to ask him to file divorce papers. She thought maybe he knew someone who could talk to Joe and make things better. She was desperate to find a way to save her marriage. It was Jerry who said, ‘Look, I like you a lot, Marilyn. As a friend, I have to tell you—you have to get this creep out of your house.’ That was not like Jerry. He represented the biggest names in Hollywood and never injected his personal opinions. But with Marilyn Monroe, it was different. When he found out what was going on, he was very upset, I remember him saying, ‘God damn it, I’m a big fan of Joe DiMaggio’s, too. Or at least I was a fan.’ ”

  On October 4, Jerry Geisler—middle-aged, stout of frame, and balding above a ruddy face—was ready to serve “Joltin’ Joe” DiMaggio with divorce papers. Marybeth Cooke continued: “I remember him saying, ‘Christ, almighty, I just called Marilyn to ask her where Joe was so I could serve him myself out of respect and guess where he is? At home with her!’ It turned out he was still living in the same house, though I believe in separate bedrooms, or maybe on separate floors. He went to the house and gave Joe the papers. He told me DiMaggio glanced at the papers, said, ‘Thanks a lot,’ popped a beer, and then went back to watching television. When he got back to the office, Jerry sank into a chair and looked drained. I asked him, ‘Are you okay?’ He said, ‘I just told Joe DiMaggio that Marilyn Monroe is divorcing him. How do you think I feel?’ I think at about that same time, he and Marilyn sent a memo to Darryl Zanuck telling him that DiMaggio wasn’t allowed on the property. So, it was really over.

  “The next morning was chaos at Marilyn’s home on Palm Drive in Beverly Hills. I had to meet Jerry there and give him some papers, but I couldn’t even get into the house there was so much media in front of it, just camped out and waiting for the next shoe to drop. I finally got into the house and it was just teeming with people. It was also a mess. I couldn’t believe the clutter—it looked as if it hasn’t been tidied up—ever! There was food left out in the kitchen and on plates in the living room. There were crushed, empty beer cans on the floor… clothes strewn about… ashtrays filled with cigarettes… I mean it was really a pigpen. Someone who worked for Marilyn—I can’t recall who wouldn’t let me upstairs to her room, where I knew Jerry was. I was told she was too sick to be disturbed, or, as it was put to me, ‘She has taken to her sick bed.’ So, I left. I spoke to Jerry that night, who told me, ‘The kid is sick, she’s on drugs, she’s sad… she’s a mess.’ The next day was the press conference. I didn’t go. It was a zoo.”

  Marilyn Monroe emerged from her home on the morning of October 6 to meet the press wearing an all-black ensemble: a skintight black sweater with a matching gabardine skirt and heels along with a black leather belt. She leaned on Jerry Geisler for support as he told the assembled reporters that “Miss Monroe will have nothing to say to you this morning. As her attorney, I am speaking for her and can only say that the conflict of careers has brought about this regrettable necessity.” While reporters shouted questions at her, Marilyn seemed ready to faint. “I can’t say anything today,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She then broke down and began to cry, her head on the attorney’s shoulder. Never in any reporter’s fantasy could the scene have been any more melodramatic—and newsworthy. Even when she didn’t intend it, Marilyn Monroe always gave a good show. Photographs from that brief press conference appeared all over the world that night and the next day. It wasn’t an act. “She was at the end of her rope that day,” said Marybeth Cooke. “Jerry had to take her straight to a doctor’s office where she was given more pills to get through the rest of that day. Then he took her back to her house where she went right to bed. She didn’t want to speak to anyone. I remember thinking, this girl is only twenty-eight. How much longer can she endure this kind of life?”

  Indeed, Marilyn was very difficult to reach during this difficult time and even her beloved half sister, Berniece, could not get through to her. Therefore, on October 8, she sent her a letter:

  Dear Marilyn,

  The news about you and Joe came as a shock and we were very sorry to hear it. I know you are lonely—do try and come visit us and it may help you over the cloud. You are very busy and all, but if you could fly here for a few days I’m sure you would feel better. We three are just the same as when you saw us last, except a little fatter and older, ha ha. Mona Rae is very busy in school and loves it. She is trying hard to become a cheerleader for the football team this year. We love you loads and hope to see you soon.

  Your sister,

  Berniece

  If Berniece had known of some of the bizarre situations unfolding in her half sister’s life, she might have tried even harder to get her to Detroit. However, Marilyn was keeping a lot of the sadness of her life from Berniece. First, she didn’t want to worry her. Second, she just didn’t want her to have the information in case any reporter ever tried to trick it out of her. Every time she talked to Berniece, she would say the same thing to her before ending the call: “Please promise me that you won’t give out stories about me.” One might have thought, given all they shared, that Berniece would be the last person Marilyn would feel she’d have to worry about in terms of discretion. However, that wasn’t the case. A sister of Jim Dougherty’s gave a story about Marilyn to the press, and even though it would be flattering, Marilyn would still be very unhappy about it. It was getting to the point where she felt she couldn’t trust anyone.

  Sinatra

  One of the
people Marilyn Monroe did trust during this time was Frank Sinatra. Lena Pepitone, her maid and sometimes seamstress, once recalled that while Marilyn’s divorce from Joe DiMaggio was being finalized, she went to live with Sinatra for a couple of weeks so that she could regain her emotional bearings. Much of what Pepitone recalled in a book she wrote with William Stadiem titled Marilyn Monroe—Confidential has been called into question. However, this memory of hers is in fact true.

  It’s difficult to determine when Frank and Marilyn first met. She had always been a fan of Sinatra’s. His friend Joey Bishop recalled the time Marilyn went to see Frank at the Copacabana, “sometime in the fifties. I’m doing my act, and in the middle of it in comes Marilyn Monroe walking into the room like she owns the joint,” Bishop remembered. “Of course, I lost the crowd. Who’s gonna pay attention to me when Marilyn Monroe walks in? There wasn’t an empty seat in the house, so they pulled a single chair up for her to sit in and stuck it ringside, about four feet away from me. I looked down at her and I said, ‘Marilyn, I thought I told you to wait in the truck.’ ” Like many people’s memories of their star-crossings with Marilyn, Joey’s is a little off. What actually happened was that Marilyn was with a group of friends in New York when she decided she wanted to see Sinatra perform at the Copa. However, the show was sold out. “So?” she asked her friends. “What does that have to do with me? Of course we can get in.” Marilyn and her group then took a cab to the nightclub. As soon as the management saw her, they made quick arrangements. They brought a table into the packed club—Sinatra was already onstage, not opening act Bishop—as the Copa staff put white linens on the table and moved it right to the front of the nightclub in an empty corner. Frank stopped his song, winked at Marilyn, and continued with the show.