Henry Rosenfeld, Marilyn’s New York confidant, suggested Natasha’s love for her pupil was unrequited. He quoted Marilyn as saying harshly, ‘God! If I had a cock, Natasha would never leave me.’
Natasha Lytess provides the first hint that the private DiMaggio could be different from the strong, silent hero of American imagination. Lytess was to say, ‘All during those months of 1952 and 1953 she would phone me day and night, sometimes in tears, complaining about the way he misused her.’
In late summer 1953 Marilyn stepped off a train at Jasper, in the Canadian Rockies. She was arriving to make River of No Return, with Robert Mitchum, a movie that overran its schedule so seriously that Mitchum dubbed it Picture of No Return. Marilyn, unhappy in love and resentful at being packed off to such a remote location, at first seemed a withdrawn, reclusive figure. Jim Bacon, sent to interview her before she left Los Angeles, had been shocked. ‘Her hair was in tangles,’ he wrote. ‘She had cold cream all over her face, and her eyebrows were smeared. She was the same old Marilyn in spirit, but on the outside she was Dracula’s daughter. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.’
Now, out in the wilderness, Marilyn hid behind the mask of grease, even on trips into the nearest town. Whitey Snyder, the trusty makeup man, finally told her, ‘Get that crap off your face. You scare people.’
One person not scared was Robert Mitchum. He had first heard about Marilyn from Jim Dougherty, her first husband, on a factory line during World War II. On the set Mitchum was now playing the tough-guy lover to Marilyn’s barroom singer. Off the set Mitchum introduced her to his roistering hard-drinking style, and brought her out of herself. The result was a string of bawdy anecdotes that were still current years later.
Mitchum recalled finding Marilyn poring over a dictionary of terms used in psychoanalysis, and asking for enlightenment. She listened wide-eyed, at the age of twenty-seven, as he attempted an explanation of ‘anal eroticism.’
This was not the only hilarity over definitions. One day, said Mitchum, ‘My stand-in went up to her and said, “Hey, blondie, let’s have a round robin this afternoon.” “What’s that?” she says. “Well, what about my friend and me giving you a little bob?” She said, “Both at the same time?” He says, “Why not?” “Why,” she said, “that would kill me.” He said, “Well, I never heard of anybody dying of it yet.” She said, “Oh, but they do. Only that’s not what they put in the papers; they call it natural causes.”’ Mitchum, telling the story in 1982, added that Marilyn was joking. He was not so sure about his stand-in.
The shooting of River of No Return was a genuinely rugged affair. There were hair-raising scenes on a raft careering down a turbulent river, scenes which director Otto Preminger insisted could not be performed by stuntmen. The result was a chapter of accidents, both genuine and spurious.
First Marilyn slipped into the water while wearing high waders. The boots filled with water and she was hauled out by members of the crew, with Mitchum helping. Headlines across the country read: MARILYN MONROE NEARLY DROWNED. Another time, stuntman Norman Bishop recalled, ‘Marilyn and Mitchum went out on a raft, and the goddam thing got stuck on a rock. It was bounding and setting to turn over any second.’ Bishop and a colleague reached the raft with a lifeboat, and the day was saved once more.
A third incident, on August 20, would also make headlines, this time reading: MISS MONROE INJURES LEG IN CANADA. The report gave no details of any accident, because there were none. Marilyn had repeatedly clashed with director Otto Preminger, and it seems that she now took crafty revenge. Actress Shelley Winters, who had once shared an apartment with Marilyn, later recalled her deception.
Winters, who was working on another movie nearby, had come to visit Marilyn on the set. She watched, along with hundreds of tourists, as Marilyn stood on a raft tethered to a pier, making a scene that had taken all day. ‘Marilyn,’ Winters remembered, ‘did what she always did when she was confused. She just opened her mouth and smiled at anything in sight. Preminger began to use dreadful language, implying that she was so untalented that she should stick to her original “profession.” Marilyn never looked up; her smile just became more frozen.’
When shooting finished, Winters helped Marilyn come ashore and noticed that she slipped a little. ‘Watch your step,’ she warned her, ‘you can break a leg on this slippery pier.’ This inspired Marilyn. When the limousine reached the hotel she told Winters, ‘I can’t get out. I’ve broken my leg.’ Strong men were summoned, doctors called. Winters fed Marilyn Percodan, a pain-reliever, and a double vodka, then listened as the star talked long-distance with studio chief Darryl Zanuck. She expected, she said generously, to be able to finish the film, in spite of ‘considerable pain.’
Winters recalled, ‘She didn’t seem to be in any pain to me.’ Marilyn, Mitchum, and Winters then enjoyed a vast lobster dinner, washed down with copious alcohol.
Next morning a posse of doctors arrived by private plane from Los Angeles. X-rays revealed no damage, and the experts politely suggested there was ‘perhaps’ a sprain. Marilyn insisted on being fitted with a plaster cast and crutches. Shooting resumed after an expensive delay, with Marilyn rigged out as a cripple, and Preminger oozing studied courtesy.
‘Dumb? Like a fox, was my young friend Marilyn,’ said Shelley Winters. ‘That night we celebrated at a nightclub, and at one point she was sort of doing a rumba with Mitch. “For God’s sake, Marilyn, sit down!” I told her. “You’re supposed to be crippled!” “Oh, yes, I forgot,” she said, giggling, and sat down on Mitch’s lap.’
The caper not only tamed Otto Preminger, it brought Joe DiMaggio running. According to Maurice Zolotow, who interviewed Marilyn a year or so later, he called her the night she began the injury charade. She wept, and DiMaggio arrived next day accompanied by yet another doctor. DiMaggio also brought along his habitual shadow, New York ticket broker George Solotaire. They made a curious pair in the Canadian wilderness: DiMaggio in sports clothes, toting fishing gear; Solotaire tagging along behind in suit, dark glasses, and Homburg.
DiMaggio was more at home in the outdoors than he could ever be in the surreal atmosphere of Hollywood. He loped around, cigarette drooping, helping the crew and snapping pictures of Marilyn. The couple went fishing, taking with them ten-year-old Tommy Rettig, the child actor who played Mitchum’s son in the movie. Earlier the boy had confided to Marilyn that, according to his priest, it was all right to work with ‘a woman like you,’ but not to see her socially. Shocked by the implication, Marilyn now tried hard to win his confidence. Children, it seems, were now increasingly on her mind.
One evening, on the train chartered to carry the cast, makeup man Whitey Snyder asked Marilyn, ‘Why don’t you marry that dago and raise a dozen kids?’
‘Maybe I will,’ she replied.
During the DiMaggio visit the couple vanished for a weekend, sparking rumors of a secret wedding. Soon there were visits to DiMaggio’s home on Beach Street in San Francisco, the house he had bought for $14,000 in the early days of his success and where his sister Marie played hostess. Sometimes the couple would rise before dawn to go fishing, Marilyn bundled up in leather jacket, jeans, and scarf. They were rarely recognized, and the times when they were spotted DiMaggio angrily told reporters to ‘beat it.’ On his home turf, DiMaggio offered a tranquility rarely experienced by Marilyn.
On Halloween that year, writer Lee Belser spent the evening with a new and calmer Marilyn. She lounged around the Doheny apartment, worried about a kitten crying outside, and took apples and cookies to young trick-or-treaters who came ringing the doorbell. The cookies had been made by Joe’s sister, and Joe was the focus of conversation.
‘The later it got,’ Belser noticed, ‘the older the guys got that came to the door. Marilyn asked me to start answering the bell, and it got really funny. There I was opening Marilyn Monroe’s door, turning away all these grown men in Halloween regalia.’
In the last weeks of 1953, Marilyn effectively vanished, beginning a new
game with the press and her studio. She was due to start shooting a movie called Pink Tights, and Frank Sinatra was to be her co-star, a detail which was not enough to bring her back to work. After Christmas, when DiMaggio gave her a mink coat, Marilyn surfaced by telephone to say she had no plans to get married. A DiMaggio emissary arrived in Las Vegas, made plans for a marriage ceremony at a local hotel, then canceled.
The next day, in Los Angeles, Twentieth Century-Fox announced Marilyn’s suspension for failing to appear for work. Marilyn, at last fully aware of her power, did nothing at all. She had decided that Pink Tights was not good enough for her.
A year later Marilyn was to offer a winningly prosaic scenario of what happened next: ‘After much talk Joe and I decided that since we couldn’t give each other up, marriage was the only solution. … One day Joe said to me, “You’re having all this trouble with the studio and not working, so why don’t we get married now? I’ve got to go to Japan on some baseball business, and we could make a honeymoon out of the trip.”
‘And so we were married.’
14
ON JANUARY 14, 1954, SAN Francisco Judge Charles Peery was disturbed at a Bar Association lunch by a phone call from Reno Barsochinni, manager of Joe DiMaggio’s restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, asking if the judge could perform a civil marriage ceremony at once. Peery arrived at City Hall just moments before DiMaggio and his bride. Marilyn was demurely dressed in a brown suit with an ermine collar. The bridegroom was accompanied by Barsochinni, his best man; and Frank ‘Lefty’ O’Doul, the old baseball star who gave DiMaggio his start in baseball before the war. No friends of Marilyn were at the wedding. Marilyn would say later that the decision to marry had been made only two days earlier.
The secrecy about the wedding had its drawbacks. There was an embarrassing delay on the third floor of City Hall when the Chief Clerk had to send out for a typewriter to fill out the marriage license. This was useful to Marilyn, who made a series of phone calls she considered vital.
Before leaving for the ceremony she had telephoned the publicity director at Fox, briskly announcing what she was about to do. Now, ignoring romance in her last unmarried minutes, she looked after her key press contacts. She tried to call Sidney Skolsky and got no reply. She was able to leave a message for the immensely powerful columnist, Louella Parsons. Then she personally reached Los Angeles journalist Kendis Rochlen, couching her news in terms Rochlen never forgot.
There was hubbub around Marilyn in City Hall as Rochlen asked Marilyn how she felt about getting married. ‘Kendis,’ she whispered, in the familiar fluttery voice, ‘I have sucked my last cock. …’
Journalistic legend has Marilyn making this announcement on a number of occasions. Perhaps she did, but Rochlen, a veteran professional, insisted she did say it minutes before taking her vows with DiMaggio. At the time, as Marilyn well knew, the remark was unprintable.
By now five hundred people were gathered in the plaza outside City Hall. When the judge opened a window to let in the breeze, the baying of the crowd drowned out all conversation. Reporters peered over a partition. Finally DiMaggio cried, ‘Okay, let’s get this marriage going,’ and the judge appealed to the crowd for quiet. An obedient ‘sh-h-h’ drifted up from the plaza.
Marilyn signed the marriage certificate as Norma Jeane Mortenson Dougherty, and falsely gave her age as twenty-five; she was nearly twenty-eight. DiMaggio produced the ring — white gold with a circle of diamonds.* The press observed that Marilyn pledged only to ‘love, honor, and cherish’ DiMaggio, and did not promise to obey him. This was already a fashionable omission by 1954, but it may not have sat easily with the son of a Sicilian immigrant. That afternoon a spokesman for the archbishop declared DiMaggio, whose previous marriage had been in the Catholic Church, ‘automatically excommunicated’ by his civil wedding to Monroe.
In the mêlée after the ceremony DiMaggio was asked what he and the bride were going to do next. ‘What’cha think?’ he replied with an emphatic wink. Asked whether they would have children, he said, ‘We expect to have one. I can guarantee that.’ Marilyn added, ‘I’d like to have six.’ Finally DiMaggio exploded. ‘I’ve had enough of this mob. Let’s call the reception off,’ and the couple drove away.
Marilyn and DiMaggio sped south two hundred miles to the town of Paso Robles, where they ate steak by candlelight with the curious peering round the door. They then said they were leaving for Hollywood, but doubled back to the Clifton Motel. There, after DiMaggio had been assured there was a television set, the couple took a four-dollar room, hung out a Do Not Disturb sign, and stayed inside for fifteen hours. In days to come the room would be adorned with a brass plaque reading, Joe and Marilyn Slept Here. After leaving the motel, Mr and Mrs DiMaggio vanished for more than two weeks, a rare event in the life of Marilyn Monroe.
In the last week of January, however, when DiMaggio flew to New York on business, Marilyn could not resist calling a journalist. Soon she was closeted with Sydney Skolsky in a car parked on a quiet street. Marilyn, who said she had been ‘told she shouldn’t be seen,’ poured out the story of her honeymoon.
She and DiMaggio had holed up at a friend’s cabin in the mountains near Palm Springs. ‘There weren’t any other guests,’ she said. ‘Joe and I took long walks in the snow. There wasn’t a television set. We really got to know each other. And we played billiards. Joe taught me how to play.’ Skolsky had a national exclusive and Marilyn prepared for the next stage of the honeymoon, which would be an international spectacle. The DiMaggios were to go to Japan.
For the baseball champion the trip to the Far East was routine business on familiar territory. Two years earlier in Tokyo, to shouts of ‘Banzai DiMaggio!’, Joe had played his last competitive game. General MacArthur and Joe DiMaggio were rated the two most popular Americans in Japan, and baseball was now big business there. The DiMaggios’ honeymoon was, in fact, a long-planned promotional trip, funded by the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun to launch the opening of the Japanese baseball season.
At San Francisco the couple were ushered aboard their Pan-American Clipper flight by Kay Patterson, the Shimbun’s representative in California. She said, ‘Joe looked very comfortable — he was Mr Big in San Francisco — and Marilyn seemed charming, so in love, ogling him, playing the secondary role, of course.’
The airplane made a refueling stop at Hawaii, where the truly explosive nature of their union may have dawned on the couple for the first time. A crowd thousands strong swarmed on to the tarmac screaming Marilyn’s name. Frenzied hands ripped out strands of Marilyn’s hair on the way to the transit lounge. She recovered herself enough to murmur to the press, ‘Marriage is my main career from now on.’
Hawaii was a foretaste of the utter hysteria in Tokyo. The couple had to be smuggled out of the aircraft through a baggage hatch. The scream now was ‘Mon-chan! Mon-chan,’ which means, roughly, ‘sweet little girl.’ Later, at the Imperial Hotel, two hundred police struggled with a throng that would not be satisfied until Marilyn appeared on the balcony. She thanked them for ‘the wonderful reception,’ but again she was frightened. ‘I felt,’ she told Sidney Skolsky later, ‘like some dictator in a wartime newsreel.’
Marilyn tried to muzzle the monster of her own image. She emerged with dignity from a press conference at which two hundred Japanese reporters bombarded her with inanities. To the question, ‘Do you wear underwear?’ Marilyn replied, ‘I’m buying a kimono.’ Photographs reveal that she was, for once, wearing underwear on this occasion — DiMaggio’s influence perhaps.
As the days passed the Japanese themselves calmed down a little. ‘The Japanese will probably not discard their underwear as a result of the visit of the Honorable Buttocks-Swinging Actress,’ one pundit observed, ‘because it is much too cold … but I’m sure they will soon start swinging their buttocks.’
For ten days in Japan, and especially after they escaped from Tokyo, Marilyn did seem to play the ‘secondary role’ to DiMaggio’s baseball hero. Modestly dressed, quiet
ly made up, she traipsed behind as her husband played golf, and sat unobtrusively in the car while DiMaggio held court for sports fans. In the evenings she watched as DiMaggio played snooker with his friend and colleague, Lefty O’Doul. Then, after two weeks, Marilyn stepped back into her own myth. She went off to entertain the American troops in Korea — without her husband.
Weeks earlier Marilyn had talked of ‘a Marine who came to the door of my home after having been in Korea. He told me how much pictures had meant to the men in the service and while he talked he started to cry. …’ Now, behind the canvas curtain of a makeshift dressing room, in freezing cold, she was changing into her Marilyn Monroe costume for the men of the First Marine Division. Thirteen thousand of them roared approval as she sang in a reedy voice unaided by amplifiers, ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ ‘Bye, Bye Baby,’ and ‘Do It Again.’
Marilyn had trouble with ‘Do It Again,’ when an interfering officer claimed the song was too suggestive. She appealed in vain that it was written by the illustrious George Gershwin, then changed the chorus line to ‘kiss me again.’
Marilyn did not allow censorship to percolate to her audience. In whirling snow, gowned in lowcut purple, she was the soldiers’ angel of lust for three hectic days. Film of the concerts shows a Marilyn high on her own gyrations, visibly reveling in the excitement of a uniformed multitude.
Marilyn was later to tell her friend, Amy Greene, that after this, crowds no longer scared her. She was to say, ‘I never felt like a star before, in my heart. It was so wonderful to look down and see a fellow smiling at me.’ Joe DiMaggio, waiting in Japan, had seen the newsreels, and did not think them very wonderful.
There had been tense phone calls between the couple during her Korea trip; one of them, thanks to the expertise of the Signal Corps, was broadcast over loudspeakers to a dinner party Marilyn was attending. The military audience had heard her ask, ‘Do you still love me, Joe? Miss me?’ DiMaggio’s response had been distinctly muted.