Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe Read online

  It worked, of course, and Marilyn’s calendar shots are still selling today. The truth about the breaking of the story, though, has never been told in full. It is a droll tale, and one that reveals a good deal about Marilyn as mistress of her own propaganda.

  With the collusion of her friend, Sidney Skolsky, Marilyn stage-managed the newsbreak in her own mischievous way. She arranged to be interviewed by United Press International’s female reporter, Aline Mosby. Mosby, whose agency serviced thousands of newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations, was summoned to interview Marilyn and tipped off to ask her about the nude calendar. Sonia Wolfson and Johnny Campbell, studio publicity agents, sat in on the interview. They had been kept in the dark about the calendar ploy, and Marilyn found a way to give Mosby the impression she was truly getting a scoop.

  ‘She asked Aline to follow her into the ladies’ room,’ Campbell recalled, ‘making as though she was having some sort of menstrual mishap. I certainly could not follow them in there. Then, in the safety of the powder room, she proceeded to identify herself as the heroine of the calendar picture. We were all disturbed about it, but there was nothing we could do.’

  Mosby’s sympathetic story broke a few days later, and Marilyn was all amazement. ‘I still don’t know how I was recognized,’ she protested. As Campbell admitted, ‘Marilyn understood the temperament of the country better than all of us. She understood that the times had changed.’

  The calendar story was one that would run and run. Soon the nude Marilyn Monroe was in living rooms across the nation, color-printed on cocktail trays and drinking glasses. Marilyn murmured that she did not want the picture to become ‘a national institution,’ but she said it very quietly.

  Meanwhile, the defenders of American morals made certain the story did not die. In early 1953 a Los Angeles camera-shop owner was arrested after schoolboys had been observed peering at the calendar in his window display. The calendar was officially banned in Pennsylvania and Georgia. Marilyn graciously thanked the authorities, and the picture reappeared draped in black lace. The calendar was still selling a full three years later, after the U.S. Post Office had ruled that the picture was obscene.

  In December 1953 one of the nude calendar shots, purchased for $500 by a young unknown named Hugh Hefner, was to grace the pages of the first edition of a new magazine, Playboy. Marilyn also appeared, clothed, on the cover. Playboy can therefore boast that its first Playmate — or Sweetheart of the Month, as the spread was then called — was Marilyn Monroe.

  Marilyn therefore played a key role in this early offensive in the American sexual revolution. Contrary to a highly commercialized fiction, however, there is no substance to the notion that she once paid the rent by making pornographic movies. Later years would see the exploitation of two old stag films, one a crude portrayal of the sex act, and one a striptease act, rejoicing in the title of Apple Knockers and the Coke Bottle. Both have been sold on the basis that the woman involved is Marilyn, but in each case research has identified the actress as someone else.

  The closest Marilyn is known to have come to making pornographic movies was when she was twenty-one, five years before the calendar episode — and that was tame stuff. Steffi Skolsky, daughter of Marilyn’s friend Sidney, once accompanied her father to the studio on a Saturday. While waiting for him, she wandered into a viewing room, where the contract players were running sequences they had made ‘for fun and kicks, and because Zanuck liked to have something to run in the wee, small hours.’ Young Steffi saw Marilyn, fully dressed, in a ‘highly suggestive’ embrace with the actor, Robert Karnes. The sequence has probably long since been junked.

  The nude calendar story broke on March 13, 1952. Meanwhile, one of Marilyn’s less successful press operations was quietly brewing. She had never tired of telling people of the saga of deprivation her childhood had been. It had become another tree of sympathy, one that she would feed on and feed to others till the end of her life. One of its main branches was the mystery of her parentage.

  At the age of eighteen, while married to Dougherty, Marilyn had suddenly announced that she was going to call her ‘father.’ She said she had identified him through people who had once worked with her mother. In front of Dougherty, she dialed a number, then quickly hung up. Her ‘father,’ she said, had refused to talk to her.

  Marilyn always called her first husband ‘Daddy.’ After she died Inez Melson, her executrix, found an attaché case containing letters from another husband, Joe DiMaggio. Melson noticed that DiMaggio signed himself ‘Pa.’

  This need for a father figure seems to have become part of Marilyn’s tapestry of fantasies. In 1950, as a young starlet, she asked Sidney Skolsky to take a drive with her, to ‘visit my father.’ Next day she drove him in the direction of Palm Springs, claiming the father lived on a dairy farm in the area. At a chosen spot Marilyn parked the car, then walked up the drive of a house that lay hidden behind trees. Skolsky could not see what happened next.

  When she returned, Marilyn told Skolsky that her ‘father,’ a ‘sonofabitch,’ had told her, ‘Listen, Marilyn, I’m married, I have children. I don’t want you to start any trouble for me.’

  Skolsky did not write about the incident in his newspaper, though that may have been what Marilyn intended.

  One wonders whether Marilyn really confronted anybody behind that screen of trees. Two weeks later, when Skolsky began telling the story to Natasha Lytess, she interrupted him. She explained, with most of the same details, that Marilyn had recently gone through the same performance with her.

  Years later, again in two incidents separated by only a month or so, Marilyn rehearsed similar scenes with Ralph Roberts, her masseur and with her press aide, Pat Newcomb. They occurred in 1961, not long after Marilyn had emerged from a psychiatric hospital.

  Were these genuine contacts with the father who had abandoned her? Or were they manifestations of a complex fantasy, a long-running screenplay on a theme of sympathy for Marilyn? Stanley Gifford, one of Marilyn’s possible fathers, did own a dairy near Palm Springs after World War II. Perhaps he was her father, and did reject her. What is certain is that after the odd double pilgrimage in 1950, Marilyn’s mind became scrambled on the subject of paternity.

  She was to tell her New York hostess, Amy Greene, that she had met her father. Yet Marilyn told Henry Rosenfeld, her longtime confidant, that she had discovered her father was ‘a farmer in the Mid-west,’ and that she longed to meet him.

  Once, at a New York party, Marilyn took part in a game in which she had to say what she wanted most in the world. Her reply, Rosenfeld said, was that she would like ‘to put on her black wig, pick up her father in a bar, and have him make love to her. Then she’d say, “How do you feel now to have a daughter that you’ve made love to?”’

  In early 1952, as the Marilyn legend began to take hold of the public imagination, she tried to capitalize on her family history. It happened when she went to meet reporter Jim Henaghan at his beachfront home in Malibu. Dusk fell and the drink flowed, Henaghan wrote later, and Marilyn began to expound. She said her father had been killed in a road accident, which had been the real fate of one of her putative fathers. Then she said, ‘I never had a house or a home that was mine. Or anything that was really mine alone. My mother died when I was a baby. …’

  Whatever the truth about her father, Marilyn’s mother certainly was not dead. Marilyn knew full well that she was in a mental asylum not far away. However, she had long told her public relations people that both her parents were dead, and now she was happily exploiting the myth.

  This time, events boomeranged. Henaghan filed a story depicting Marilyn the orphan as ‘Hollywood’s loneliest girl.’ Then another journalist, Erskine Johnson, discovered that Marilyn’s mother was alive. His newspaper ran the story.

  Somewhat to her surprise, Marilyn’s world did not collapse. The newspapers thought it was just one more good Monroe story. Why would they do otherwise? Marilyn had become a public property, a na
tional entertainment that nobody wanted to lose. Her life henceforth was to seesaw between sensation and sadness, with all the world watching.

  In spring 1952, in the wake of the calendar affair, Marilyn received massive publicity. Life magazine bestowed its prestigious benediction, proclaiming that ‘the genuine article is here at last — a sensational glamor girl, guaranteed to entice people from all lands to the box office.’ Then, while Marilyn was making Monkey Business with Cary Grant, the world had perhaps its surest sign that a star was born — the newspapers began reporting Marilyn’s illnesses.

  On April 28 production of the movie ground to a halt, as Marilyn lay abed waiting to have her appendix removed. The operation was performed at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, where her lover, Johnny Hyde, had died just over a year earlier.

  In the operating room, a nurse wondered aloud whether Marilyn really was ‘blonde all over,’ as she had once joked to the press. (She was not, and in later years pubic-hair peroxiding would become one of her hairdresser’s chores.) The jokes stopped abruptly when a nurse found this note, scrawled in pencil, taped to the patient’s stomach:

  Most important to Read Before operation.

  Dear Doctor,

  Cut as little as possible I know it seems vain but that doesn’t really enter, into it — the fact that I’m a woman is important and means much to me. Save please (can’t ask you enough) what you can — I’m in your hands. You have children and you must know what it means — please Doctor — I know somehow you will! thank you — thank you — for Gods sakes Dear Doctor No ovaries removed — please again do whatever you can to prevent large scars. Thanking you with my all heart.

  Marilyn Monroe

  The surgeon, Dr Marcus Rabwin, already knew of his patient’s concern about being able to bear children. There was a small possibility of complications involving the pelvic area, and a gynecologist stood by. This was Dr Leon Krohn, who would henceforth serve Marilyn through most of her long quest to bear children.

  The operation went smoothly, and the star awoke with only the routine scar. ‘When I told Marilyn she could go home,’ Dr Rabwin recalled, ‘she looked tearful and said, “I can’t because I don’t have the money to pay the hospital bill.” I told her to call the studio; they would do all that. She said, “Do you think they would?” She did call, and of course they had the bill paid and a limousine at the door within an hour.’

  Insecurities and all, Marilyn could now live like a star. The studio limousine swept her to the relatively modest Beverly Carlton Hotel, where she had been staying before the operation. Soon, though, she was ensconced in the luxurious privacy of a pool suite in the Bel-Air Hotel. She paid the $750-a-month bill, and she could now afford it.

  On June 1, 1952, her twenty-sixth birthday, Marilyn received mountains of gifts and telegrams from Hollywood’s elite. That night, it is said, the star dined alone; but she had a long telephone conversation with a man in New York. It was not Arthur Miller — he was not yet available. The man’s name was DiMaggio.

  Part Two

  THE DIMAGGIO DISASTER

  ‘It’s no fun being married to an electric light.’

  JOE DIMAGGIO

  10

  ‘THE NEWSPAPERS USED TO call him The Last Hero. Joe DiMaggio, who swung a bat in earnest for the last time in 1951, spent the half-century that followed listening to the applause. He played golf, made nostalgic appearances for the baseball faithful and, for those who watched television commercials, became ‘Mr Coffee’ and the Bowery Savings man. On thousands of sunny California mornings he held court in the taproom of the San Francisco restaurant that bore his name. Without doing very much anymore, his laurels remained evergreen.

  Year after year, in the publishing mills of New York City, editors would realize that the Last Hero had never written his autobiography. They would offer contracts, and he would decline. It was not that DiMaggio was not prepared to talk about his long-ago heyday or the finer points of coffee commercials. ‘People aren’t fooling me,’ he said in the early 1980s, ‘they want to know about Marilyn, and that’s something I’m not of a mind to talk about.’

  On paper, what DiMaggio would not talk about was a nine-month wonder, an embryonic marriage that flared and popped as briefly as the flashbulbs of the press that made it a public circus. In fact, it was a full decade that DiMaggio could not bear to discuss, a time that began as glamor and ended in mystery and grief.

  ‘There are two ways to look at it,’ DiMaggio said. ‘One is, stories should be told as a point of history. The other is, guys have the right to go to the end in privacy.’ Without DiMaggio the story lacked a key witness. Research for this book, however, does provide a rounded picture of the saga — a sad saga in which the Last Hero often emerges as distinctly unheroic and Marilyn, for her part, as no romantic heroine.

  Suitably — since that was the way she made sure it continued — Marilyn met Joe DiMaggio thanks to a publicity picture. In spring 1952, at the suggestion of press agent Roy Craft, Marilyn had posed at a training session with two players on the Chicago White Sox team. The picture had made the part of the newspaper that Joe DiMaggio read, and he studied it closely. Marilyn, looking refreshingly innocent in shorts and sweater, stood teetering on stilt heels wielding a baseball bat. DiMaggio, who made something of a hobby of meeting young actresses, checked with Gus Zernial, one of the ballplayers who had posed with Marilyn.

  It happened that DiMaggio knew a business agent named David March, and March had a different sort of interest in Marilyn — he wanted her to retain his services. DiMaggio had a word with March, who promised he would try to arrange a blind date. When he telephoned Marilyn, she was unenthusiastic.

  ‘I don’t care to meet him,’ Marilyn responded. ‘I don’t like men in loud clothes, with checked suits and big muscles and pink ties. I get nervous.’

  Marilyn, who was vague as to the difference between baseball and football, admitted that she had heard the name DiMaggio. She ventured to say that he was, perhaps, an Italian actor. Finally, she agreed to make up a foursome for dinner with DiMaggio, March, and another young actress. The rendezvous was for 6:30 P.M. at an Italian restaurant — of course — called the Villa Nova.

  Marilyn did not show up at the restaurant, and DiMaggio began to doubt whether his host really knew her at all. March telephoned Marilyn, who grumbled that she was too tired to come out. Finally, nearly two hours later, she floated into DiMaggio’s vision for the first time. What Marilyn saw was a powerfully built, graying man, some twelve years her senior, wearing a conservative suit.

  ‘He was different from what I’d expected,’ she would tell Sidney Skolsky ‘I’d visualized him as having slick black hair, wearing flashy sports clothes, and with a New York line of patter.’ In fact, according to March, DiMaggio said hardly anything at all that evening.

  The remainder of what took place at that first meeting is lost in a welter of imaginative reporting. By Marilyn’s account, offered before the collapse of their marriage, she surprised herself by offering to drive DiMaggio home. Then, because there seemed to be a good deal to say after all, they drove around Beverly Hills for three hours. He ended up with her telephone number, and it dawned on Marilyn that DiMaggio was, as the rest of the nation already knew, a great celebrity in his world.

  Next day at the studio, Marilyn promptly told her publicity man about the encounter. ‘She was giggling like a schoolgirl,’ recalled Roy Craft. ‘She’d met this marvellous man. At first she made a secret of who it was. You’d think she was a fifteen-year-old on her first date.’

  Craft’s was the professional response — Marilyn must be photographed with America’s favorite champion. When DiMaggio visited the set where Marilyn was making Monkey Business, he was persuaded to pose with Marilyn and Cary Grant. The photograph, with DiMaggio looking as if he wished he were somewhere else, was duly published around the country. Cary Grant’s face had been carefully cropped out, and America had its new romance.

  A few rumors aside, the lov
e match would move from headline to inane headline for two years, and then to marriage. For Marilyn, and especially for DiMaggio, it was not so simple.

  Joseph Paul DiMaggio was an Italian’s Italian. He was the eighth of nine children born to a Sicilian couple who emigrated to the United States at the turn of the century. His father, Zio Pepe, was a fisherman, and after a false start in a fishing village to the north, he brought his children to San Francisco the year after Joseph was born. San Francisco was then an unspoiled place, but life in the port was tough. The business of catching fish aside, life on the piers was fiercely competitive and often dangerous. The brutal side of Sicilian custom had crossed the ocean with the immigrants, and violence was commonplace. Poverty, in those early days, was never far away.

  Young DiMaggio was supposed to become a fisherman, but he disappointed his father. He did not much like boats; he got seasick, and his father and brothers made him feel less than a man. He would sneak off and practice baseball in the sand, using a broken oar for a bat. That was considered childish, and for years DiMaggio lost that vital Italian possession, the respect of his brothers.

  Pride returned when Joe DiMaggio was nineteen. Playing for the San Francisco Seals, the boy established a Pacific Coast record by hitting safely in 61 games. The talent scouts started watching, and in 1936, at twenty-two, DiMaggio was in Yankee Stadium playing baseball for New York. For the next fifteen years, with a break for Army Air Force service during the last part of the war, his prowess mesmerized a vast public. In 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, DiMaggio hit 56 runs in 56 consecutive games — one of them with a borrowed bat when his own had been stolen — and broke a record that has yet to be surpassed. The New York Yankees won the pennant, and the World Series, and the nation’s jukeboxes blared out a song written specially for him:

  He’ll live in baseball’s Hall of Fame,