Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe Read online

  Summer in Los Angeles appeared to be merely the next chapter in the DiMaggio romance. There were press reports about Marilyn with DiMaggio and his ten-year-old son, Joe, Jr, lounging beside a Hollywood swimming pool, and DiMaggio’s former wife noisily objected to her son being in such a place and in such company.

  Then, curiously, the headlines began to fade. In early September 1952, Marilyn said she and DiMaggio had no wedding plans. On marriage in general, she ventured that a little male jealousy never hurt a wife. ‘It would be pretty dull without that occasionally,’ she said. ‘But it’s like salt on a steak. All you need is a bit of it.’ DiMaggio, it seems, was certainly getting his share.

  Robert Slatzer had come to California at Marilyn’s bidding. For two months, he said, life was something of a French farce. ‘I saw her as much as DiMaggio did,’ Slatzer recalled. ‘I don’t know if she made up excuses when he called her and she wanted to go out with me, and vice versa. DiMaggio had some deal with the network to broadcast during the World Series, and when he was out of town I saw her practically every night. I was at the house when he would phone. Sometimes I would call at midnight and DiMaggio would be there; then she might call me back at three o’clock in the morning saying, “I can talk now.”’

  Slatzer had one classic encounter with DiMaggio when both men turned up for a date on the same night. ‘I was there waiting for her,’ said Slatzer, ‘when DiMaggio drove up. We each knew who the other was, and there was a very quiet waiting period — there was not much we could say. Then Marilyn arrived and let us both into the house. He was a big guy, and I wasn’t about to get into an argument. I poured myself a drink, and he was put out about the fact that I seemed to know the place pretty well. The two of them had an argument, and he asked me to leave. I wouldn’t. And her temper just flared and she told us both to get out. About an hour later she called and apologized, and said she’d got her schedules mixed up.’

  In late August, Dorothy Kilgallen’s column carried a three-line teaser that broke the stream of gossip about DiMaggio. It read: ‘A dark horse in the Marilyn Monroe romance derby is Bob Slatzer, former Columbus, Ohio, literary critic. He’s been wooing her by phone and mail, and improving Her Mind with gifts of the world’s greatest books.’

  Three weeks later Slatzer himself was in print, reporting that he had been supplying Marilyn with The Rubyáiát of Omar Khayyám, and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. She in turn, he said, had given him The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran. This was not, one can assume, reading that Marilyn could share with Joe DiMaggio.

  One night in early October Marilyn talked at length about DiMaggio. According to Slatzer, ‘She told me she couldn’t see any way she could be happy with him. Because he was so jealous, not only over me — he was jealous if they were sitting in a booth having dinner and somebody asked for an autograph. He’d be all knocked out of shape and start giving her hell. I would have bet at that time that she’d never marry DiMaggio, if she lived to be a hundred.’ Instead, if Slatzer was to be believed, Marilyn now married him instead, in a civil ceremony on the Mexican border.

  Slatzer’s account of marrying Marilyn has understandably aroused skepticism. It has never been documented, and sensible people recoil from the notion that Marilyn could have done anything so significant without making headlines. The doubters point out that Slatzer said nothing publicly about such a marriage until years after Marilyn was dead. However, several people interviewed for this book supported the story.

  Two sources seem especially significant, because they suggest Marilyn herself mentioned the episode. Dr Firestone, Slatzer’s dentist, remembered Marilyn talking years later of her ‘honeymoon in Mexico with Bob.’ At the time Firestone had heard nothing of the marriage from Slatzer, and assumed Marilyn was speaking loosely about a romantic visit.

  Actress Terry Moore, former wife of Howard Hughes, said she knew Marilyn from her earliest Hollywood days; they were both under contract to Fox, and later to Columbia, at the same time. Moore said, ‘I remember very well her being excited about going out with Bob. She wanted so much to have culture, and she respected Bob because he was well-read. She did tell me she had married him, right after they did it. I remember, because I had been telling her about my own brief marriage to Glenn Davis.’

  Will Fowler, Slatzter’s writer friend in Hollywood, said, ‘Bob told me he was going to slip away to Mexico and marry Marilyn. When they got back, I remember Bob showing me the marriage certificate. It looked like a fancy black-and-white high school diploma with a gold seal. …’

  Slatzer said the marriage took place on October 4, 1952, after a long night of talk and alcohol, while DiMaggio was away in the East. They climbed into his prize possession, a 1948 Packard convertible, and headed for the Mexican border town of Tijuana. They had been to Mexico before on weekend trips, and Tijuana was famous for rubberstamp marriages and divorces. A decade later, Marilyn would fly to another border town for her divorce from Arthur Miller.

  ‘We weren’t sure what the procedure was,’ said Slatzer. ‘I asked the assistant manager of the Foreign Club, whom I’d met before. He said to just go down the street to one of those real fast lawyers. Marilyn had been talking about a church, and she didn’t think that was very romantic. Anyway, we found a lawyer behind a storefront right on the main street. I don’t remember the name — it’s going back so damn many years. He said he could take care of us in about an hour and we’d need two witnesses. His wife would be one, and we were going to find another one on the street.’

  It was the second witness who provided Slatzter’s only firsthand corroboration of events on the wedding day. Without forewarning Slatzer, I contacted Kid Chissell, the old actor who first met Marilyn with Slatzer in the forties. Of the alleged marriage Chissell said, ‘It was pure chance. I was down in Tijuana looking up an old Navy buddy, and I suddenly saw Bob and Marilyn coming out of a shop. I gave him a shove and he swung round, looking mad. When they realized who I was, we all laughed, and they said, “Would I be their witness?” I said, “Yes,” I thought it was about time. …’ Then Marilyn said she’d feel better if she went into a church before she got married, and we went off to a Catholic church, which was the only sort they had there. Bob and I stayed near the door and Marilyn covered her head with her sweater and lit candles near the altar. When she was done we went to the lawyer, and his wife gave Marilyn a flower, and they filled out the forms, and he married them. Then we went to get Marilyn some Mexican sandals, because someone had taken the shoes she’d taken off at the lawyer’s office. We did that, and then we went to the Foreign Club for a drink.’

  If Chissell fabricated his story, he rehearsed it well. His account meshed with Slatzter’s in all significant details. There was little likelihood that Marilyn would be recognized, said Slatzer. ‘She was not looking like the raving beauty, Marilyn Monroe,’ he explained. ‘She had no makeup on, had her hair pulled back, looked just like any little girl going to Tijuana for the weekend.’

  That night, said Slatzer, he and Marilyn consummated the marriage in the bedroom of the Rosarita Beach Hotel, then an isolated old-fashioned place about twenty miles from Tijuana. ‘Next morning,’ he said, ‘I awoke to see her half sitting up in bed, kind of wiping her eyes. She was crying a little, but she wouldn’t say why.’

  The marriage lasted three days. ‘We got back to Los Angeles wondering what we were going to do about DiMaggio,’ said Slatzer, ‘but Darryl Zanuck got to us first. Late on Monday afternoon Marilyn called and said there were problems at the studio. She had told a couple of people on the qt and word had gotten around quickly. I ended up in a confrontation with Zanuck, and he was firm. He said, “We’ve got a lot of money invested in this girl, and we’re not going to be put on the hook with marriage. Get it undone.”’

  According to Slatzer, he and Marilyn both bowed to the studio’s will. His friend, Will Fowler, said this is what Slatzer also told him at the time; and actress Terry Moore said, ‘Marilyn told me the studio had put a stop on it in some way
.’

  Less readily, Slatzer admitted that Marilyn thought better of the marriage as soon as she returned to Hollywood. There were phone calls from DiMaggio, and Slatzer’s brief wife seemed confused and disoriented. Next day the couple were back in Tijuana, bribing the lawyer to destroy the marriage certificate, which had not yet been officially filed. It was done.

  In the sprawling mess that Tijuana became, the Slatzer claim of a brief marriage to Marilyn was beyond further investigation. The saddest comment on the matter came from Terry Moore. She said, ‘Marilyn wanted to be free, and yet she was so afraid of loneliness. I think she was in a muddle over DiMaggio, and she liked Bob. She just ran into it, and then ran out again.’

  In the last weeks of 1952 Marilyn started shooting Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, one of the major musicals of the fifties. It was also a mighty success for Marilyn, who shared top billing with Jane Russell. The two had attended the same high school, and Russell had once met Marilyn at a dance with her first husband, Jim Dougherty. Now, to the frustration of the gossips, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe became good friends.

  Russell was married to a retired football player, Bob Waterfield, and Marilyn asked her advice about marrying a famous sportsman. Russell said in an interview for this book, ‘I told her she must find time to go off with her own friends to talk about books and poetry and the arts. But apparently she wasn’t able to go off and do that. Marilyn felt part of her was dying because she wasn’t getting it expressed.’

  Joe DiMaggio showed no signs of going away. Marilyn’s friend, Sidney Skolsky, told how 1952 ended. ‘She had attended the studio’s annual Christmas party, appearing gay, seeming to be enjoying herself. Then she left, with nothing to do but to return home — at that time a single room at the Beverly Hills Hotel — and wait for a phone call from Joe, who was visiting his family in San Francisco. When Marilyn entered her room she found a miniature Christmas tree standing on the table, a pasteboard sign on which was hand printed “Merry Christmas, Marilyn,” and Joe sitting in a chair in the corner.’

  Marilyn told Skolsky a few days later, ‘It’s the first time in my life anyone ever gave me a Christmas tree. I was so happy I cried.’

  That same month, Marilyn’s studio fed the press with stories that Marilyn Monroe was now, officially, a full-fledged star. According to the studio, she now had the curious double distinction of being ‘more publicized’ than either Rita Hayworth or the Queen of England. She was receiving more than five thousand fan letters a week, and was now to occupy a luxurious dressing room once inhabited by Marlene Dietrich. The studio began calling her ‘Miss Monroe.’

  A few months earlier, a helicopter had clattered to earth beside the Hollywood swimming pool of bandleader Ray Anthony. The downdraft swept chairs and tables into the water, ruining the effect of thousands of floating gardenias. Marilyn descended from the helicopter in a flaming red dress that offended everyone except the photographers. She was there for a ceremony so tasteless that it appalled even the public relations man who had organized it — the unveiling of a song called ‘Marilyn.’ The words went:

  No gal, I believe,

  Beginning with Eve,

  Could weave a fascination like my MA-RI-LYN.

  I planned everything,

  The church and the ring,

  The one I haven’t told it yet is MA-RI-LYN.

  She hasn’t said yes,

  I have to confess,

  I haven’t kissed or even met my MA-RI-LYN.

  But if luck is with me,

  She’ll be my bride for evermore.

  In fantasy, Marilyn was now wedded to all America. In the real world, she was a shipwreck in the arms of many, with a baseball champion for sheet anchor.

  12

  AT MIDSUMMER 1953, SHORTLY after her twenty-seventh birthday, Marilyn lay down on the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Beside her was Jane Russell, her co-star in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. They placed their hands in wet cement, did the same with their feet, and then scrawled their names alongside the prints. A crowd roared approval, and Marilyn came up with her customary quips. She mischievously suggested that Russell, for whom Howard Hughes had once designed a special brassiere, should bend over into the cement. As for herself, celebrated since Niagara as being the one actress who could make an entrance by walking away from the camera, Marilyn proposed sitting in it. Her ideas were turned down, along with the suggestion that the i in her signature be dotted with a diamond to commemorate her song, ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.’ A rhinestone was used instead, and a thief stole it soon afterward.

  The ceremony at Grauman’s was corny but crucial, one more affirmation that Marilyn really was a star. Marilyn, said Jane Russell, was pleased and scared. Insecurity, those around her now saw, was ever-present in the world’s most brazen actress.

  On the day of the Grauman appearance, hairdresser Gladys Whitten, whom Marilyn called ‘Gladness,’ received a panic-stricken call from Marilyn. ‘I need your help,’ said the voice from miles across the city, ‘please come, Gladness, and bring your mom.’ It sounded like a real crisis, until Marilyn explained: ‘I can’t decide which dress to wear.’

  Whitten obliged, as she always did. ‘She was like a little girl,’ said Whitten. ‘I couldn’t help it. I just wanted to help her.’

  It was fortunate for Marilyn that her aides were long-suffering. ‘Sometimes,’ Whitten said, ‘she’d come in; we’d get her hair all done, and her makeup on, and she’d start to get dressed, and then she’d say, “Oh, I forgot to take a shower.” And she’d go ahead and take the shower — and then we’d start all over again. …’

  Marilyn could be as funny as she was frustrating. Once the helpless little voice called from just outside the studio. ‘Gladness,’ it begged, ‘would you come and pick me up? My car didn’t arrive. I’ve had to walk all the way from Beverly Hills, and nobody would pick me up.’

  A puzzled Whitten hastened to the rescue, to find Marilyn waiting, her face thickly coated in vaseline. It would, she insisted, keep her skin young, though others advised that it would simply encourage the growth of unwanted hair.* Drivers that morning had scorned to pick up the ‘Fastest Rising Star of 1953,’ clad in jeans and sweater, with her face smothered in grease.

  The once-punctual Marilyn now began to enrage directors with the lateness that would become legendary. Jane Russell remembered that ‘she would come in way before me, and she’d have rehearsed. She’d be all ready, but too nervous to go out on the set. So I’d arrange it with Whitey that when it was time to go I’d come and get her, and we’d walk out there together.’ The insecurity was now chronic.

  On the set Marilyn was easily wounded by any sort of criticism. Actor Tommy Noonan was heard to say, after a stage kiss with Marilyn, ‘It was like being sucked into a vacuum.’ Marilyn’s response to Noonan’s comment was tearful collapse. ‘She was really distraught,’ said Jane Russell. ‘She said, “How can people be so cruel? Nobody can be so cruel and not pay for it one day.”’

  Behind the scenes Whitey Snyder had now become as much babysitter as makeup man. For some time now he had been assigned to sit with Marilyn, in hotel or dressing room, quietly coaxing her into facing the cameras. Snyder, who married Marjorie Plecher, wardrobe assistant on several Monroe movies, said there never was a time when Marilyn did not feel ‘terror, pure terror’ about acting. Plecher said, ‘She never felt secure in front of the cameras. She was so scared about looking right, acting right, that she was physically unable to leave the trailer. It was the ultimate stage fright. She had a great talent, but she never felt sure of herself, never could believe in herself.’

  Snyder, along with hairdresser Whitten and a handful of others, would now become Marilyn’s loyal personal troops. These were the soldier ants of the industry, and Marilyn was more at ease with them than with most of the great and the famous. She knew their value, and tried to let them know it with gifts. It might be a gold-plated money clip for Snyder, a silver-tagged
decanter for Whitten, or a signed photograph reading, ‘To Gladness, for making me look like this. I love you.’

  After Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Marilyn gave her car, a Pontiac she had owned only a few months, to drama coach Natasha Lytess. It was followed by a vicuña coat. For Lytess, gratitude was tempered with the reflection that Marilyn gave material things because ‘she was unable to give of herself.’ It was a character judgment to be echoed, in the end, by the next in Marilyn’s succession of men. This was Billy Travilla, dress designer on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and several other movies.

  Travilla had first met Marilyn three years earlier in 1950. She was twenty-four, he twenty-five. ‘My introduction,’ he recalled, ‘was the sight of her in a black bathing suit. She opened the sliding doors of my fitting room, and a strap fell off, and her breast was exposed. She had a delightful quality, being so beautiful, of wanting to show herself. Some people were offended by it — and of course she did it on purpose. She was so childlike she could do anything, and you would forgive as you would forgive a seven-year-old. She was both a woman and a baby, and both men and women adored her. A man wouldn’t know whether to sit her on his knee and pet her, or put his arms around her and get her in the sack. … I’ve dressed many women in my life, but never one like this lady. She was for me a dual personality. She was not well educated, but an extremely bright woman, and she had the whims of a child. She had a wonderful ability to woo. She’d come in the office, as people would, to complain about something; but Marilyn would always have a little tear, a real tear, in one eye, and her lips would tremble. Those lips! And a man can’t fight it. You don’t want that baby to cry.’