The Genius and the Goddess (12 page)

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.

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, which 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