Amy Greene added: ‘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. …’ Greene saw only this one example of mistreatment.
Makeup man Whitey Snyder, one of the few Hollywood people who got on with DiMaggio, said, ‘They loved one another, but they couldn’t be married to one another. … Sometimes he gave her a bad time — he’d hit her up a bit.’
In September 1954, after the skirt sensation in New York, Marilyn showed a brave face to the world. ‘I’m just a pretty girl who’s soon forgotten,’ she told a group of sportswriters. ‘But not Joe. He’s an all-time great.’
In private the pretty girl was in pieces. Tom Ewell, her costar in Itch, noticed she was physically sick, ‘shaking like hell’ and guzzling medicine. Milton Greene, visiting her at the St Regis, found Marilyn in a haze of drugs — sedatives, he guessed — and incapable of sensible conversation.
Marilyn and DiMaggio flew back to California together, and went to ground for ten days. Marilyn spent a good deal of time talking to Mary, Fred Karger’s sister. Neighbors spotted her a couple of times walking the streets after midnight, apparently weeping. Within days she had taken to her bed, where she gave Sidney Skolsky an interview full of trivia about the visit to New York. Skolsky also observed a quarrel between the couple, but published nothing.
On the morning of Monday, October 4, Marilyn telephoned Billy Wilder, director of Itch. Distraught and stammering, she said she would not be coming to work because ‘J-Joe and I are going to get a d-d-divorce.’
The Twentieth Century-Fox publicity office promptly began a response masterminded by its director, Harry Brand. Everything was carefully stage-managed, and Brand conferred with Jerry Giesler, the colorful lawyer who habitually disentangled Hollywood follies. (It emerged later that Marilyn had been in touch with Giesler for the past ten days). On Monday afternoon lawyer and publicity director emerged to say that ‘conflict of careers’ had caused the breakup. Giesler said he would file a divorce suit the next day on Marilyn’s behalf; ‘the usual mental cruelty,’ he explained. He said the star herself was sick of an illness variously reported as a virus or a nervous disorder. One newspaper reported his only other comment — that Marilyn was not pregnant.
A horde of newsmen descended on the house on Palm Drive. Bus companies changed itineraries so that tourists could gawk at the DiMaggios under siege. Marilyn and DiMaggio stayed in the house for two days while the studio orchestrated a final spectacle. ‘The Monroe divorce,’ former Fox publicity officer Roy Craft recalled, ‘was quite a production.’
Early on the morning of October 6, as the press gathered outside by appointment, Twentieth Century-Fox delivered Marilyn’s usual team of beauticians. Hairdresser Gladys Whitten remembered, ‘Somebody sneaked us in by the back alley. And all the time we were preparing Marilyn, she kept saying, “I don’t want to do this,” and holding her head and crying.’
Dress designer Billy Travilla was there, drinking wine with Marilyn in spite of the early hour. He said, ‘She was crying, saying, “I wish I had been different. If only I could have given more love.” She was cursing herself, without saying exactly why.’ Their work done, the cosmetics crew were smuggled out again, and went round to the front of the house to watch.
Joe DiMaggio, offered the escape route through the alley, declined. At 10:00 A.M. he opened the door and ran the gauntlet of the reporters down the rose-lined walk to his car.
‘Where are you going?’ the newspapermen asked.
DiMaggio, briefly trapped in the crush, shouted above the din, ‘I’m going to San Francisco.’
‘Are you coming home again?’
‘San Francisco’s my home,’ DiMaggio said, running for his car. ‘It’s always been my home. I’ll never be coming back to this house.’ The car, driven by his friend Reno Barsochinni, took off, and DiMaggio vanished with a perfunctory wave.
Gladys Whitten remembered what happened next as ‘horrible.’ New York Herald Tribune correspondent, Joe Hyams, said years later that he still could see ‘as clearly as I had seen it then, her [Marilyn’s] tear-stained face as she came out of the front door, the half-a-hundred newsmen crowded in on her like animals at the kill. Only little Sidney Skolsky tried to protect her. Something about the scene and my profession of journalism sickened me.’
The Associated Press correspondent had no such qualms. He merely wrote, ‘Marilyn Monroe today made an exit worthy of an Academy Award. …’
She appeared fifty minutes after her husband had driven off. Though her face was caked with theatrical makeup, it was not enough to hide what appeared to be a bruise on her forehead. She was dressed in black, clinging to the arm of her lawyer and the Fox publicity boss. The reporters, promised a press conference, bombarded Marilyn with questions. She sobbed, ‘There is nothing I can add,’ and said repeatedly, ‘I’m sorry. …’ She started stuttering and rocking on her heels as though about to faint.
There was an immediate reason to sob. Billy Travilla said, ‘On Marilyn’s way to the car someone gave her an envelope with a piece of toilet paper inside. The word whore was written on it in fecal matter. The public was so cruel with her. The ordinary people in front of the house were his fans, not hers.’
Early next morning Marilyn reported for work, confiding to her makeup man that she ‘felt alive for the first time in days.’ In San Francisco DiMaggio slept till noon, posed gamely for pictures, then played golf. So far as the outside world was concerned the drama was over. The press had little left to do but wait for the formal divorce hearing, due in three weeks. Behind the scenes, the dirty business had hardly begun.
As his marriage was collapsing, an utterly frustrated Joe DiMaggio, jealous of shadows, tried to buy confidence. He turned to private detectives, those Raymond Chandler characters of the 1950s, gumshoes whose reports could bring a spouse comfort — or heartbreak.
Meanwhile, at Twentieth Century-Fox, other men had the same idea, but for different reasons. Uneasy Fox executives feared their investment in Marilyn could explode in scandal, a catastrophe they might be able to prevent. They too called out their retinue of paid investigators. Now, and not for the last time, Marilyn was being watched.
One night in that year of the DiMaggio marriage Marilyn came, as she would till she died, to visit Anne, mother of the man she had once loved and lost, Fred Karger. She had known the family since she was dirt poor, and they gathered round delightedly to admire the clothes, the mink, and the Cadillac convertible. ‘When she came to leave that night,’ said Patti Karger, ‘there were two guys out there, waiting to follow her. Everybody at the house picked up on it, and we tried to help her. Marilyn didn’t know what to do.’
Marilyn had taken to phoning Sidney Skolsky at all hours. Once, his daughter Steffi recalled, she called again and again, starting in the early hours. ‘I finally woke up my father,’ the daughter remembered, ‘and Marilyn came over at seven o’clock in the morning, with no makeup, her hair all over the place, and her fur coat just slung on. … My father said later Marilyn just had to get out, to get away. She thought “they” were trying to drug her.’
Within days of the DiMaggio separation, actor Brad Dexter bumped into DiMaggio in Los Angeles at the Villa Capri restaurant. He was in a huddle with Frank Sinatra and a private detective named Barney Ruditsky.
Ruditsky was a former New York City detective who had emigrated to California and become part owner of Sherry’s, on the Sunset Strip, then a known rendezvous for gangsters. As a sideline he ran the City Detective and Guard Service, which specialized in bodyguard work and the sleazier sort of divorce investigations.
Frank Sinatra, who listed his profession in Who’s Who as ‘baritone,’ had, at thirty-nine, just struggled back from a slump in his fortunes. He had won an Academy Award for his role as Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity, and was established as ‘the first great bedroom singer of modern times.’ Within a few mont
hs Time magazine would be calling him, in a remarkable cover story, ‘one of the most delightful, violent, dramatic, sad, and sometimes downright terrifying personalities now on public view.’
Time also said of Sinatra: ‘The man looks, in fact, like the popular conception of a gangster, model 1929. He has bright, wild eyes, and his movements suggest spring steel; he talks out of the corner of his mouth. He dresses with a glaring, George Raft kind of snazziness — rich, dark shirts and white-figured ties … he had, at last count, roughly $30,000 worth of cuff links. … He hates to be photographed or seen in public without a hat or hairpiece to cover his retreating hairline.’
Sinatra had once written: ‘If it hadn’t been for my interest in music, I’d probably have ended in a life of crime.’ Time noted: ‘He is an admitted friend of Joe Fischetti, who is prominent in what is left of the Capone mob, and he once made himself a lot of trouble by buddying up to Lucky Luciano in Havana — all of which is not to say that he mixes his pleasure with their business; Frankie is too smart for that. …’
Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, both first-generation Americans, were then the most celebrated Italians in the world. They patronized the same watering holes, such as Toots Shor’s in New York City, and in 1954 it could be said they shared the same misfortune. Sinatra was having his own problems in the disastrous marriage with actress Ava Gardner. In Reno, even before they married, he had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Two years into the marriage he was admitted to a New York hospital with ‘several scratches on his lower arm.’ At the time of DiMaggio’s break with Marilyn Monroe, this tumultuous relationship with Ava Gardner remained unresolved.
So it was, in the fall of 1954, when Brad Dexter found the baritone, the baseball player, and the private detective huddled together in the Villa Capri. Dexter had seen neither Marilyn nor DiMaggio since the awkward encounter at North Palm Drive, when Marilyn had tried vainly to use him as a bridge to her husband. Now, in the shadows of the Villa Capri, DiMaggio vouchsafed, ‘Jesus Christ, I’m sorry about the other night. I didn’t know who you were, or what sort of guy you were. Can you help me now?’
According to Dexter, Marilyn was hiding out in her dressing room at Twentieth Century-Fox, refusing to see DiMaggio as the days ticked by to the divorce. DiMaggio was now desperate to get her back. Fox chief Darryl Zanuck had given orders that nothing should interfere with Marilyn’s work, and had barred DiMaggio from the studio. The scheme now proposed was that Dexter, an actor known to the security guards, should smuggle DiMaggio into the studio in his car, hidden under a blanket.
‘They tried to pressure me,’ Dexter recalled, ‘so I said, “I’ll call Marilyn and ask if she wants to see you.” I spoke to her, and she said, “Brad, please, I don’t want to see Joe, I don’t want to talk to him; it’s over.” So I went back, and I told them, and I refused to do it.’
On the morning of October 27, Marilyn appeared at the courthouse in Santa Monica. After a perfunctory hearing, she was granted a divorce on the grounds of ‘mental cruelty.’ Joe DiMaggio was not in court and did not contest the hearing. Formalities aside, however, he was still desperately trying to retrieve the situation. Seen in Los Angeles the day before the divorce, DiMaggio claimed he was only there ‘to see my son.’
Then, on the day of the divorce itself, DiMaggio took the uncharacteristic step of contacting the press about his private life. He let it be known that he hoped for a reconciliation. ‘I hope she’ll see the light,’ he was quoted as saying.
Marilyn, meanwhile, was sending strange and contradictory signals. On the eve of her court appearance she gave her first interview since the rift, to emphasize that there was no involvement with another man. Then, as she prepared to persuade a judge of DiMaggio’s mental cruelty, she sought solace — with DiMaggio. She reportedly spent the night before the hearing, and the night of the divorce itself, closeted with her husband. Their hiding place was Frank Sinatra’s apartment.
Skeptics in Los Angeles did not accept the reasons given publicly for the DiMaggio divorce. The courtroom script about DiMaggio’s ‘coldness and indifference’ did not ring quite true. Nor did people accept that Marilyn’s occupational displays of sexuality had triggered the separation. Fox spokesman Roy Craft bluntly rejected that explanation. ‘Marilyn had a flamboyant reputation when they got married,’ he said. ‘If you build a home behind a slaughter house, you don’t complain when you hear the pigs squealing.’
Eight years later, when Marilyn died, DiMaggio’s friend, Walter Winchell, would write: ‘After the divorce Joe told me the “real” reason she filed. It has never been published and it won’t be here. He wept telling it to me as the Cub Room crowd stared and wondered why he cried.’
With Marilyn dead and Joe DiMaggio silent, the smoke of mystery long eddied around the end of their marriage. New information, however, revealed a fresh scenario. It detailed an extraordinary pursuit of Marilyn, and the harassment of the man she was seeing.
Thirty years later, the man still recoiled at the very mention of the name DiMaggio.
Marilyn’s mother, Gladys, in 1963, aged sixty-two, and as a young woman. She has survived her famous daughter.
An early developer. Marilyn, the foster child, aged twelve, with one of her “families.”
With her first husband, Jim Dougherty, on Catalina Island, 1944. She was seventeen, and her eyes were already wandering to other men.
Somebody else’s baby — during the Dougherty marriage. The idea of having a child “stood my hair on end,” Marilyn was to say. Dougherty says the opposite was true. Abortions would follow, then fruitless efforts to bear children.
A starlet with a library. Marilyn immersed herself in art and culture. She admired the Italian actress Eleanora Duse (in photograph at upper left). The half-obscured picture (center right) shows Arthur Miller, who met Marilyn in 1950, six years before they married.
A little man with mighty influence. Lover and agent Johnny Hyde, dying of heart disease, set Marilyn firmly on the road to fame.
The jogger. In about 1952, twenty years ahead of her time. Marilyn used to run through the Hollywood alleyways before breakfast.
The lifeguard. Tommy Zahn, 1946.
The voice coach. Fred Karger, to whom Marilyn gave her heart in 1948. He did not want to marry her.
The second husband? Robert Slatzer at Niagara Falls with Marilyn in 1952. He knew her all her adult life.
At home with “Nana” Karger [left], mother of a former lover, 1960. The “orphan” attached herself to a number of families, and to Mrs. Karger above all.
The acting lesson. With Natasha Lytess, her first acting coach, in the early 1950s. They lived together for a while.
The courtship of the Last American Hero. With Joe DiMaggio, shortly before their 1954 marriage. The honeymoon was hardly over before she was talking of one day marrying Arthur Miller.
Announcing separation from DiMaggio — their marriage lasted nine months.
“Co-conspirators.” Marilyn with photographer Milton Greene, who engineered her flight from Hollywood in 1955.
The fan who became a friend. James Haspiel started by cadging a kiss from Marilyn at the age of sixteen and — in the New York period — became a regular companion.
16
A FEW DAYS AFTER THE divorce hearing, in early November 1954, Joe DiMaggio telephoned Marilyn’s journalist friend Sidney Skolsky, asking for an urgent meeting. Skolsky suggested lunch, but DiMaggio insisted they talk in the privacy of his bedroom at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. What happened at the meeting made Skolsky squirm. He felt himself ‘confronted by an idol on his knees, begging to have his clay feet examined.’
As Skolsky later recalled, DiMaggio ‘pointed toward the bed and asked me to sit down on the edge of it. He drew his chair up close to me. “You know everything. There’s one thing I must know,” he said, as softly as a torch singer squeezing the pathos out of every note. “Is there another man? Why did Marilyn divorce me?”’
Skolsky, deeply
embarrassed, talked around the subject and ended the meeting as speedily as possible. He had been aware for some time of DiMaggio’s obsessive jealousy. There had been Marilyn’s frenzied calls, saying that she was being watched and trailed. In recent months, Skolsky believed, DiMaggio had picked up the widespread rumor that Marilyn was homosexually involved with her drama coach, Natasha Lytess. The watching and the trailing, however, had been focused above all on a man — Marilyn’s twenty-nine-year-old voice coach, Hal Schaefer.
Schaefer, a brilliant composer and pianist who had started as a protégé of Duke Ellington, would one day count among his pupils Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, and Barbra Streisand. He had won Marilyn’s confidence the previous year during the shooting of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and, two films later, they had become close friends. Marilyn had specifically requested his services, at the start of her marriage to DiMaggio, while she was doing There’s No Business Like Show Business, and by April 1954 she and Schaefer were working flat out in Bungalow 4, at the back of the Fox lot.
The future heads of the music department did notice the mutual devotion of the star and the voice coach. They also noted gratefully that Marilyn’s singing skills were improving by the day. Nobody made much of the fact that they worked till all hours of the night in Bungalow 4, or that they slipped out together for meals. As work progressed, though, Marilyn showed herself violently protective of Hal Schaefer.
The future head of the Fox Music Department, Lionel Newman, recalled an occasion on which Irving Berlin himself descended on the studio to hear some of the new arrangements of his songs. ‘He raved about how good it was, and how well Marilyn was performing,’ Newman remembered. ‘Then next day Marilyn came to my office in a rage, asking why Hal was not getting the credit he deserved. She said that if Irving Berlin didn’t go over and personally tell Hal how wonderful he was, she wasn’t going to finish the picture. Eventually Berlin did sort it out, but she was ranting about it, screaming.’