Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (35 page)

In 1952, she had no less than three addresses—furnished apartments on Hilldale Avenue in West Hollywood and, two blocks from that, on Doheny Drive; and then a comfortable suite at the Bel-Air Hotel in the rustic, secluded setting of Stone Canyon. Then as ever, Marilyn seemed a rootless soul who felt she belonged to no one; it was her unstated (and perhaps unacknowledged) aim, therefore, to belong to everyone.

There would always be surrogate parents, and in 1952 those roles were neatly filled by Natasha Lytess and Michael Chekhov. In this regard, Marilyn’s renewed desire to play Grushenka in a film of
The Brothers Karamazov
had a pointed basis, for in so doing she could become the adopted Russian daughter of this exotic Russian “couple.” And because they were convinced it was possible, Chekhov and Lytess encouraged her—as did Arthur Miller, to whom she wrote. He had been “dazzled by the richness of
The Brothers Karamazov,”
he wrote, since his college days.

But Marilyn could be recalcitrant and uncooperative, selfishly late for appointments and presumptuous of others’ generosity. When Michael Chekhov told Marilyn that her tardiness upset his schedule and that perhaps they should suspend tutorials, he received an irresistible letter:

Dear Mr. Chekhov:

Please don’t give me up yet—I know (painfully so) that I try your patience.

I need the work and your friendship desperately. I shall call you soon.

Love,

Marilyn Monroe.

Chekhov was won over on the spot.

As for Natasha, she was left in a kind of emotional limbo with Marilyn, who wanted to be protégée, daughter and generally the most important person in Natasha’s life—but on her own terms, and without regard for the pain she must have known this caused. Such a situation Natasha sustained not only for the income and influence but also because she was still in love with her wounded but increasingly proficient student.

Following
Don’t Bother to Knock
, Zanuck again put Marilyn in two undemanding and decorative roles. First she was a shapely, dumb-blonde secretary in the farce
Monkey Business
, in which scientist Cary Grant invents a youth potion. Then, in the anthology comedy
We’re Not Married
, she appeared for about five minutes as a wife and mother who wins a “Mrs. Mississippi” beauty contest only to learn that her marriage was technically illegal and she can after all bill herself as “Miss.” The role was created, according to the film’s writer Nunnally Johnson, only to present Marilyn in two bathing suits.

Allan Snyder, as usual making up Marilyn for
Monkey Business
, agreed with director Howard Hawks that rarely had an actress seemed so frightened of coming to the set. But when she finally arrived, according to Hawks, the camera liked her; it was odd, he added: “The more important she became the more frightened she became. . . . She had no confidence in her own ability.” Snyder, who had by this time been working with her for almost six years, understood: Marilyn was simply terrified that she didn’t look good enough.

She knew every trick of the makeup trade—how to line her eyes, what oils and color bases to use, how to create the right color for her lips. She looked fantastic, of course, but it was all an illusion: in person, out of makeup, she was very pretty but in a plain way, and she knew it.

A crisis interrupted the filming of
Monkey Business
and preproduction of
We’re Not Married
. On March 1, 1952, Marilyn’s persistent abdominal pain and fever were diagnosed by Dr. Eliot Corday as appendicitis. She begged him to delay an operation, and for several days she lay in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital while antibiotics allayed the infection. After a week, Marilyn returned to work without surgery.

Her request did not signify any dedication to the two films, which she would happily have forsaken; on the contrary, she had a very personal concern. In early February, Marilyn had been introduced to a world-famous baseball player, and by the end of the month they were dating steadily. “But we’re not married!” she told an inquiring reporter who suspected monkey business.

1
. In his memoirs (pp. 220–222), Sidney Skolsky described an identical outing with Marilyn.

2
. Three years were necessary to resolve the matter of Marilyn’s agreement with the Morris office. She was not formally represented by Famous Artists until March 12, 1953, and did not sign a contract with them until March 1954—not long before that relationship, too, was terminated.

3
. For decades it was erroneously reported that Marilyn’s Fox salary was contracted to peak at $1,500 weekly. In fact that was her salary when she walked out on her contract in 1955; had she remained, the increments would have been as scheduled here.

4
. According to Kazan (p. 408), Miller’s first meeting with Marilyn occurred when Charles Feldman tendered the playwright a dinner party some time later that winter. But Sam Shaw and Rupert Allan, among others, endorse Miller’s account of the earlier introduction. Kazan’s entertaining and sumptuously self-revealing autobiography often synthesizes, rearranges and wholly confuses dates and facts: he states, for example, that Marilyn was under contract to Harry Cohn when he and Miller took her along to Columbia Studios next day.

5
. According to reporter Louella Parsons, Marilyn vomited just before airtime on the several occasions she was a guest on Parsons’s radio program—a reaction surely betokening nervousness and not her reaction to Parson’s show (cf. Louella O. Parsons,
Tell It To Louella
[New York: Putnam’s, 1961], p. 225).

6
. This was of course true, but it was also virtually an indictment of Zanuck’s low estimate of Marilyn.

7
. Marilyn was the cover story for
Quick
magazine (November 19, 1951), which designated her “The New Jean Harlow”—as did
Focus
for that December, also designating her fair competition for Turner, Grable and Hay worth.

8
.
Ladies of the Chorus
was a so-called B-picture, a second feature; by 1951, it was also a forgotten film.

Chapter Eleven

M
ARCH
–D
ECEMBER
1952

W
HEN MARILYN MONROE
met Joe DiMaggio in early 1952, she was twenty-five, he was thirty-seven. Inner conflicts and constant fears notwithstanding, she was becoming the most famous star in Hollywood history. He had recently retired.

Joseph Paul DiMaggio was the eighth of nine children and the fourth of five sons, born to Sicilian immigrants on November 25, 1914 in Martinez, a small town in Northern California. A year later, the family moved to San Francisco, where Giuseppe DiMaggio had better prospects for the crab fishing that supported his family; his boat, the
Rosalie
(named for his wife) was docked at North Beach.

Young Joe was raised in a strict Catholic household where discipline, modesty and sacrifice were taken for granted, and where family devotion, schoolwork and attendance at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul circumscribed the DiMaggio children’s activities. Joe’s parents constantly enjoined on him the importance of good manners and honest work; they also warned against allowing anyone to take advantage of him. No one must think the DiMaggios unworthy as they worked into the American mainstream.

From the age of six to eight, Joe had to wear awkward, heavy leg braces to correct a mysterious congenital ankle weakness. This period reinforced his personality as a somewhat withdrawn boy as well as his
determination to excel at something physical. Free of the braces, he was soon playing baseball with his brothers Vincent and Dominic; born just before and after him, they were already talking about becoming professional ballplayers and eventually realized their goal.

Like many children of immigrants, Joe was raised to be proud of his Sicilian heritage, but he was also somewhat embarrassed by it and longed to be thoroughly, successfully American. Marilyn Monroe, too, had been discomfited by her early history and worked to overcome its effects, and this became one of the bonds between them. They were both shy but attractive teenagers, reserved with the opposite sex but clearly appreciative of stares and compliments. Joe preferred baseball, and at fourteen helped a Boys Club team win a championship.

By sixteen, Joe had reached his full height of an inch over six feet, and although wiry thin (his adult weight never topped 190), he was strong and naturally graceful. Like Marilyn, he quit high school in tenth grade—not to marry, however, but to work in an orange-juice bottling plant to help support his large family. On weekends and during every free daylight hour, he was in a park playing baseball. Before his eighteenth birthday, he was being paid to do just that as a shortstop with the San Francisco Seals, and by 1935, at the age of twenty-one, he was batting .398 under the guidance of his manager and friend Lefty O’Doul.

The following year Joe signed a contract with the New York Yankees, for whom he was very soon the all-star right-fielder and the most publicized rookie in twenty-five years. His salary was the very princely sum of $15,000, most of which he spent to move his family to a comfortable house on Beach Street. He also invested in a seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf (“Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto”), began to wear expensive suits, drove a Cadillac and was seen in San Francisco and New York in the company of pretty showgirls. By the time he was twenty-two, Joe DiMaggio was a folk hero—at a time when America, deep in a Great Depression, desperately needed idols and paragons. Admired by men, worshiped by schoolboys, desired by women, he was a powerful, smooth man whose impassive expression on and off the field made him all the more attractive and intriguing.

Like Marilyn at work, Joe was a serious, decent and respectful colleague; like her, too, he relished the results but not, it seemed, the effort. As friends and teammates found, Joe never seemed to play baseball
for the joy it gave him: it was a matter of achievement, of pride, and (unlike Marilyn’s motivation) he played for the money. In 1938, for example, he began the season late after holding out for a higher salary than the $25,000 he had been offered (and which he finally accepted). Similarly, on August 2, 1939, in the ninth inning of a Yankee game against Detroit, he caught a fly ball almost five hundred feet from home plate, so remarkable a feat that reporters celebrated it and virtually ignored the fact that the Yankees lost the game. “I didn’t let myself get excited,” was Joe’s typical comment. Indeed, he never seemed to rejoice in his good fortune, even when he was hailed Most Valuable Player in the American League—a thrice-won distinction. Remote and (some reporters said) aristocratic, Joe DiMaggio at twenty-five physically rather resembled the new pope, Pius XII.

But with obvious differences. In 1937, voted one of the best-dressed men in the country, Joe had a bit part in the movie
Manhattan Merry-Go-Round
. Also in the cast was a good-humored blond showgirl named Dorothy Arnoldine Olsen. On November 19, 1939, they were married.

Joe told the press they would live in San Francisco in the winter, on the road with the Yankees during the ball season; Dorothy said she preferred Los Angeles and New York. He wanted a family woman like his devoted mother and his doting sisters; Dorothy wanted a career. From the start, then, compromises had to be negotiated. During the 1940 ball season, the DiMaggios rented a Manhattan penthouse on West End Avenue. Very soon thereafter, she began to complain to friends that he was out most evenings at sports clubs and restaurants with his cronies, a habit he saw no need to modify when Dorothy became pregnant in early 1941, nor when their son, Joe Jr., was born October 23. The marriage was a rocky business by 1942, although such matters were not typically found in the press, which had far more important world issues to report.

When his batting average sank in 1942, Joe’s fans became confused and his wife more dissatisfied, and he abandoned his $43,500 salary. In February 1943, Joe enlisted in the Army Air Force. Assigned to supervise physical-training units, he served on the baseball battlefields of California, New Jersey and Hawaii—and spent much of the time hospitalized for stomach ulcers.

By the time of his discharge in September 1945, his wife had won
an uncontested divorce; she married a New York stockbroker the following year. Although Joe made some attempts at reconciliation with Dorothy after her second divorce in 1950, he continued to live offseason in his family’s San Francisco home, where his spinster sister Marie cooked, cleaned, sewed and attended his every household need; otherwise, he lived in New York hotels. “Joltin’ Joe” DiMaggio, returning to the Yankees, was a lonely, melancholy figure, apparently not much cheered by the historic $100,000 salary he was paid. He was, however, a steadying and influential presence on the team, often playing against doctor’s orders.

But some part of his personality seems to have become fixed in a kind of quiet, adolescent stasis, for his friendships with women were mostly transient, cool and uncomfortable after his divorce. Almost paranoid that people wanted to exploit his fame, Joe frequently complained that “everybody who calls me wants something.” As Allan Snyder recalled, Joe could be very difficult in social situations—especially those involving Marilyn—and surly and suspicious of everyone’s words and deeds.