The Genius and the Goddess (11 page)

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.

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 clothes, 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

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.

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.