JOE DIMAGGIO WANTED TO HAVE a Roman Catholic priest conduct the marriage ceremony and to have it take place in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul, where fifteen years earlier he had married Dorothy Arnold. Marilyn had no objection to being married by a priest. But John J. Mitty, the archbishop of San Francisco, saw it otherwise. He informed DiMaggio by letter that the church refused to recognize the validity of his divorce from Dorothy, and if he remarried, the archbishop would have no choice but to have DiMaggio excommunicated. DiMaggio reacted to the archbishop’s dire warning by telling George Solotaire, “I’d rather head for hell in due course than give up my Garden of Eden. In other words, let them excommunicate me.”
Marilyn remained in Los Angeles while Joe, in San Francisco, worked out the final details of a wedding ceremony he hoped would remain as discreet and private as possible, particularly considering that it involved two of the most watched and talked-about personages in America. He and Marilyn spoke constantly by phone. She asked him if his son knew about their plans. He didn’t, said Joe. Eager to tell Joe Jr. that she and his father were going to be married, Marilyn visited Black-Foxe Military Institute. She stood on the sidelines with other parents watching the Friday afternoon student parade, and when it ended, she stretched out her arms and started shouting his name over and over until he ran to her for a smothering embrace. “She looked great,” said Joey, “her hair golden in the sunlight, her warm smile, the incredible figure. The older guys, the ones in high school, couldn’t stop staring at her. But she ignored them. She was there for me and let everyone know it.”
They went out to dinner that night, the two of them, and over dinner Marilyn told Joey about the impending marriage. He slept over in her apartment. “She gave me the bedroom,” he recalled, “and she slept on the couch in the living room.” The next evening she took Joey to a movie. “It was a World War II flick,” he continued. “Can you imagine sitting there in the dark, sharing a box of popcorn and a Coke with Marilyn Monroe, knowing that in a week or so she’s going to be your stepmother? How cool is that?” It seemed almost implausible that no one in the press had learned of Joe and Marilyn’s wedding plans. The closest anyone came was Hollywood scribe Louella Parsons, who posited, “If marriage is Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe’s ultimate goal, and I hear it’s just around the bend, they must resign themselves to the fact that it can’t ever be a completely normal union. Marilyn will remain in show business and Joe will not be able to take it.”
“Marilyn resented the column,” said Lotte Goslar, “while Joe DiMaggio dismissed it as ‘a bunch of newspaper talk.’ For myself, I believed Marilyn had finally overcome her reluctance to get married. Having made up her mind to go forward, she was determined to have a family and simultaneously continue her acting career. Or as she put it, ‘It’s not like I’m giving up my career; I’m simply starting a new one.’ ”
A day after the column appeared, Marilyn received a telephone call from Harry Brand, head of publicity at Fox, wanting to know if the couple had a date in mind. Marilyn trusted Brand and asked him to keep the news under lock and key until after the wedding took place. She divulged the date, and he more or less kept his end of the bargain. He notified the press but waited until the morning of the fourteenth. As a publicist, he must have wondered if being married might damage Marilyn’s status as a sex symbol. Such an eventuality would certainly have been problematic for Twentieth Century–Fox.
In the memoir Marilyn wrote with the help of Ben Hecht, she observed: “I had never planned on, or dreamed about, becoming the wife of a great man any more than Joe had thought about marrying a woman who seemed eighty percent publicity. The truth is that we were very much alike. My publicity, like Joe’s greatness, was something on the outside. It had nothing to do with what we actually were.”
On Tuesday night, January 12, her last evening in Los Angeles before departing for San Francisco, Marilyn called Anne Karger, Fred Karger’s mother, with whom she’d remained on close terms long after her early romance with Fred ended. She told Anne and Anne’s daughter, Mary Karger, about her plans to marry Joe. She also contacted Whitey Snyder to tell him. “It seemed only fitting,” he said. “I’d been pushing for the marriage for months. I wished her all the best and told her to name their first kid after me.”
The next day, January 13, Marilyn flew to San Francisco in full disguise and spent the night at the home of Tom and Louise DiMaggio. The civil wedding service took place on Thursday, January 14, 1954, at San Francisco’s city hall. It began at 1:48 p.m., in the chamber of Municipal Court Judge Charles Perry, the chief city officer, and lasted all of three minutes. They exchanged rings—Joe gave Marilyn a platinum eternity band set with thirty-five baguette-cut diamonds—and then he took Marilyn in his arms and kissed her. Among the handful of guests were (best man) Reno Barsocchini and his wife, Tom and Louise DiMaggio, George Solotaire, Lefty O’Doul, and his wife, Jean. Marilyn wore a very natty but proper chocolate-brown broadcloth suit with small rhinestone buttons and a white ermine collar. With the help of another former lover, fashion guru Billy Travilla, she’d bought the outfit the week before off the rack at Saks in Beverly Hills. Joe, having presented his bride with a corsage of three white orchids prior to the ceremony, wore a dark blue business suit and the same polka-dotted tie he’d donned when they first met. On the city register, Joe wrote his age (thirty-nine) and provided his signature; Marilyn gave her legal name, Norma Jeane Dougherty, and noted her age as twenty-five, reducing her actual age by two years.
The group remained in the chamber for another quarter hour, chatting and embracing and wishing the newlyweds well. As Joe and Marilyn left the room, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by the press. More than a hundred reporters and photographers had invaded the lobby and corridors of the building. The couple agreed to pose for one picture. As fifty flashbulbs went off, Joe planted a kiss on Marilyn’s lips. Could they do it again, please? They complied.
Before they could push and shove their way to freedom, they were asked to give the briefest of press conferences. One reporter asked Marilyn what she wanted out of the marriage. “I’ve got what I wanted,” she ventured. “I’ve got Joe.” And what did DiMaggio think of his new bride? “Marilyn’s a quiet girl,” he said. “She likes what I like.” Another reporter wanted to know if they planned to have children—and if so, how many? “A half dozen,” responded Marilyn. “At least one,” said Joe. And finally, somebody asked Marilyn if she felt excited about being married. “You know,” she said, “it’s much more than that.”
With George Solotaire, Lefty O’Doul, and Reno Barsocchini running interference, the newlyweds, trailed by dozens of reporters and a crowd of five hundred spectators, left city hall through a basement exit and headed for Joe’s Cadillac, which they’d prepacked with suitcases. Joe had asked Solotaire to be his best man, but not knowing if he could get there on time, George had willingly surrendered the honorary spot to Reno Barsocchini. Lefty held the car door open for DiMaggio, while Reno and George helped Marilyn into the passenger’s seat.
As the couple sped off, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle asked Solotaire where the newlyweds were planning to honeymoon. “I have no idea where they’re headed,” he said. “I’m not sure they know.” This exchange, as Monroe biographer Fred Lawrence Guiles accurately assessed it, seemed an “apt description” of a marriage slated to last little more than nine months.
They headed for Paso Robles (translation: “Pass of the Oaks”), a hilly village three hours south of San Francisco. They stopped long enough to fill a thermos with hot coffee and exchange wedding presents. Joe gave Marilyn a full-length black sable coat. She handed him the twenty nude transparencies taken of her in 1949 by photographer Tom Kelley, including the one that had become the “Golden Dreams” calendar shot. The transparencies were considered too graphic for calendar use; they showed Marilyn’s pubic hair before she began bleaching the area to match the bleached blonde hair on her head. “When Joe told me about the gift,” remarked Whitey Snyder, “I said, ‘Well, you can always airbrush the photos and hang them in your den.’ I was kidding, of course, but he didn’t see it that way. He refused to speak with me for a good six weeks.”
At six in the evening, they pulled into the Clinton Motel in Paso Robles, where DiMaggio had reserved room number 15 at the rate of $6.50 per night. They ate dinner by candlelight at a steakhouse across the street from the motel. After their meal, they checked into their room with two bottles of champagne, a box of imported French crackers, and two tins of caviar. Ernie Sharpe, the motel proprietor, later told the Los Angeles Times that the couple spent fifteen hours in the room, which came equipped with a double bed, a small refrigerator, and a TV. They checked out at noon the next day. Marilyn looked “radiant.” Joe appeared “solemn and tired.” “We’ve got to put a lot of miles behind us,” he said as they climbed into the car.
They pushed on in a southeasterly direction and continued straight through until they reached their destination: a quiet hideaway mountain lodge outside Idyllwild, near Palm Springs. The lodge belonged to Loyd Wright, DiMaggio’s and Marilyn’s attorney. For their convenience he’d filled the refrigerator with food and stocked the liquor cabinet. Tired from the drive, DiMaggio went to bed. Marilyn stayed up and made several telephone calls, one to reporter Kendis Roehlen. “I finally did it,” she told Roehlen. “Except for Joe, I’ve sucked my last cock.”
The next morning, Marilyn received a call from Loyd Wright. He informed her that news of her marriage to DiMaggio had made headlines all over the world and that they were being heralded as the ideal couple. One newspaper dubbed them “the Legend and the Goddess.” Wright also wanted Marilyn to know that in recognition of her marriage and as a gesture of good faith, Twentieth Century–Fox had lifted her suspension, placing her back on payroll and even agreeing to pick up Natasha Lytess’s salary. The only condition was that Marilyn had to return to work—rehearsals for Pink Tights were scheduled to begin on January 20. DiMaggio was outraged. He informed Wright he had no intention of allowing his wife to appear in that movie or in any movie that called for her to run around half naked, playing a woman of easy virtue.
Monroe’s attorney advised Fox of the couple’s decision. The studio renewed her suspension. Unwilling to ruin her honeymoon, Marilyn deferred to her husband. She and Joe had struck a bargain whereby she could continue her career so long as he had an active voice in choosing her roles. They didn’t argue about it. For once they didn’t argue at all. They played a lot of billiards at a nearby bar. They took long early-morning walks in the mountain snow, Marilyn in boots, jeans, and her new sable coat. They built a snowman and had playful snowball fights. They occasionally drove into Palm Springs for dinner, always at small, out-of-the-way restaurants so as to avoid being recognized. Except for Wright’s periodic updates, they spoke to no one. The press reported that they’d “dropped off the face of the earth.” Marilyn later said the best part of it was that Joe never once turned on the TV set.
Their honeymoon didn’t end at Loyd Wright’s mountain lodge. The couple returned to San Francisco at the end of January after stopping off in Monterey. With Lefty and Jean O’Doul in tow, Joe and Marilyn boarded a Pan American airliner headed for Tokyo, Japan. The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun had invited the Yankee Clipper to help launch the Japanese baseball season, and DiMaggio had seized the opportunity to extend his honeymoon by taking along his bride as well as the O’Douls. Jean and Marilyn could shop and go sightseeing together while Joe and Lefty, both of whom had visited Japan in 1951, occupied themselves with baseball-related matters.
As Marilyn depicted it in her personal memoir, the Japanese leg of her honeymoon began on a questionable note. They were still airborne when General Charles Christenberry, a high-ranking US Army officer, came over to introduce himself. After ascertaining that the couple would be staying in Japan for the rest of the month, he asked, “How would you like to visit Korea for a few days and entertain the American troops currently stationed in Seoul as part of the UN occupation force?”
“I’d like to,” Joe DiMaggio answered, “but I don’t think I’ll have time this trip.”
“I don’t mean you, Mr. DiMaggio,” the general replied. “My inquiry was directed at your wife.”
“She can do anything she wants,” said Joe. “It’s her honeymoon.”
“I’d love to do it,” said Marilyn. “What do you think, Joe?”
Joe shrugged. “Go ahead if you want. As I told the gentleman, it’s your honeymoon.”
General Christenberry took down the name of their hotel in Tokyo and promised Marilyn he’d be in touch. DiMaggio, forever conscious of his public image, had consented but only because to do otherwise would have seemed unpatriotic.
Thousands of fans greeted the plane when it landed at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. It soon became apparent that they had come to see Marilyn Monroe rather than Joe DiMaggio. As much as the Japanese loved baseball, they absolutely revered Hollywood movie stars. So eager were they to catch a glimpse of Marilyn that the police, fearing a riot, insisted that the honeymooners depart the plane through the cargo hatch and hide out in the customs office until the crowd dispersed. In Tokyo, the DiMaggios and the O’Douls were given adjoining suites at the five-star Imperial Hotel. The day after their arrival, Joe and Marilyn agreed to a hastily arranged press conference in the hotel lobby. The questions ranged from the risqué to the ridiculous. A reporter for the paper that had invited DiMaggio to Japan asked the actress how and when she’d developed her famous wiggle walk.
“I started when I was six months old, and I haven’t stopped yet,” she answered. The same journalist wanted to know what Marilyn hoped to do while in Japan.
“I’d like to find a good Japanese restaurant. Any suggestions?”
Another reporter noticed that Monroe had a small splint on her right thumb and asked how she’d injured it.
“I fell out of bed,” she quipped. “How else?”
Commenting on Marilyn’s arrival in Tokyo, an observant Japanese film critic wrote, “Marilyn Monroe’s greatest artistic achievement is the creation of Marilyn Monroe. She is the reincarnation of herself. She is truly an original.”
Besides Tokyo, the DiMaggios and O’Douls visited the Japanese cities of Kobe, Osaka, and Yokohama. While at the Imperial Hotel, Joe and Marilyn drew vast crowds whenever they came or went. Hundreds of curious locals gathered on the street in front of the hotel each morning and chanted Marilyn’s name until she emerged on the balcony of her suite, like a monarch greeting her subjects. She and Joe were followed around Tokyo by dozens of reporters and news photographers. Although Marilyn assured journalists she was there only in a supporting role and that “marriage is now my main career,” the press described her as “Joe DiMaggio’s greatest catch” and “America’s most famous actress.” They labeled her “the Honorable Buttocks-Swinging Madam” and irreverently referred to Joe DiMaggio as “Mr. Marilyn Monroe” and “the Forgotten Man.” If Joe hadn’t previously understood just how big a star he’d married, he realized it now, and it didn’t altogether please him. At times he became surly. And silent. At other times he became pushy. “We’re not going shopping today—the crowds will kill us,” he told his wife. She obeyed.
At a cocktail party thrown in their honor by the international set of Tokyo, which included several high-ranking US Army officials, they once again encountered General Christenberry. He told the couple he’d completed arrangements for Marilyn’s Korean visit with the troops. DiMaggio informed the general that Jean O’Doul would accompany Marilyn on the trip. “That’s fine,” said Christenberry. “We’re all extremely grateful for your wife’s service to the country.” Cholera and yellow fever shots were administered to both women, and they were issued visas for the trip.
On February 16, Marilyn and Jean O’Doul were flown by helicopter from Tokyo to the First Marine Division base in Seoul. They were received by a USO representative and several military officials, among them George H. Waple, who’d been assigned the enviable task of looking after Marilyn for the duration of her Korean tour. Their first stop was a US Army medical facility in Seoul, where Marilyn hobnobbed with American soldiers, many of them wounded in the Korean War, which had ended in July 1953. Following the hospital visit, Marilyn and Jean were issued combat boots, long johns, and GI trousers and taken by helicopter to an advance base outside the capital city.
Their living quarters consisted of a couple of cots in a small room in a makeshift barracks. “Marilyn never complained,” Waple noted in his report on her stay. “She seemed to like the basic living arrangement. Her only quibble was with the weather. She hadn’t expected it to be so cold and snowy. I told her I could give her an electric blanket for her cot, but she declined. She also turned down a small electric space heater for the room, saying she didn’t want to be the cause of any concern I might have had for her welfare. She was unspoiled to the nth degree.”
Once they reached their room, Marilyn asked Waple to help her out of her combat boots and baggy trousers. He followed orders, relieved (he wrote) that she didn’t force him to take off her long johns.
In a period of four days, Marilyn gave ten performances for legions of American troops, representing every branch of the military. Wearing a low-cut, plum-colored, sequined gown (with nothing underneath), she sang and danced, creating “a frenzy of excitement,” Waple wrote, “an outpouring of adulation.” The lyrics to one of her songs, George Gershwin’s “Do It Again,” were deemed “too suggestive” by the commanding officer of the base. Acting as her own editor, Marilyn altered Gershwin’s original to “Kiss Me Again.” Between performances, Waple drove her around to meet the troops personally. Following her last show in front of the Forty-Fifth Division, the actress blew kisses to an audience that cheered and applauded her for half an hour. “This is the best thing that ever happened to me,” she told them. “Come see me in San Francisco.”
Before she left, the military brass gave her a farewell party, presenting her with an olive green GI shirt that could be worn as a jacket. She told them she was sorry she hadn’t seen more of the country, but if they ever needed her services again, she would be there for them.
Marilyn was glowing when she and Jean O’Doul returned to Japan. “It was so wonderful, Joe,” she told her husband. “You never heard such cheering.” Her brief, throwaway remark hit a nerve, reminding DiMaggio that his bride had surpassed him in popularity and renown. His response, though understated, came across with a resounding thud. “Yes, I have,” he said. “I’ve heard it.”
She subsequently came down with a fever and a hacking cough. A doctor in Tokyo diagnosed her illness as a mild form of bronchial pneumonia. She lay in her hotel room at the Imperial for three days, taking antibiotics, arguing with Joe. It seemed to her that he looked on women in one of two ways—they were either housewives or whores, nothing in between. Any time a man looked at her with anything other than casual disinterest, he bristled, accusing her of acting in a provocative manner. At the same time she knew he loved her and would do anything to protect her. He’d been the first man who cared enough to point out that the roles they offered her at Fox were always those of “the dumb blonde.” He stood with Marilyn in her battle to attain dignity and acclaim in a business that all too often seemed cruel and indifferent.
Before flying back to the States, Joe and Marilyn received a number of gifts from local government officials, including matching handmade fishing rods. The Emperor of Japan presented Marilyn with a vintage pearl necklace with a diamond clasp, valued in excess of $100,000, which she gave eventually to Paula Strasberg, her then acting coach. She would give Joe Jr. the GI shirt she’d received in Korea. While still in Tokyo she bought silk kimonos for friends, one of which she presented to Lotte Goslar, who happened to be in San Francisco when the couple arrived there in late February.
“Shortly after they got back,” recalled Goslar, “Joe DiMaggio had to leave for New York on business, so Marilyn and I went out for lunch in downtown San Francisco. Marilyn spoke about her tour of Korea. ‘Before I went over there,’ she said, ‘I never really felt like a star. Not really, not in my heart. I felt like one in Korea. It was so great to look down from the stage and see all those young fellows smiling up at me. It made me feel wanted.’ ”
On March 1 Marilyn sent Joe an incredibly loving two-page, handwritten letter, mailing it to him at the Madison Hotel in New York. In it, she addressed him as “Dad,” one of her nicknames for Joe. “I want to be near you,” she wrote, “and I feel so sad tonight. Darling, please don’t leave me anymore.” She signed it simply, “Love, Marilyn.”
Joe DiMaggio couldn’t have hoped for a more endearing letter had he written it himself.
• • •
In a true sense, Joe and Marilyn’s honeymoon had been both a beginning and an end. While DiMaggio tried to come to grips with the realization that his newlywed wife had no intention of giving up her career, Marilyn grappled with the notion that her husband would never be satisfied unless she gave it up, or at least reduced it to such an extent that it practically didn’t exist. Somehow DiMaggio couldn’t comprehend just how much Marilyn, in her difficult journey through life, had come to rely on her acting as a means of self-identification. Their differences (and similarities) also became more pronounced. He craved privacy and hoped to simplify his existence. She couldn’t get enough publicity and saw life as an endless labyrinth. He was as neurotically neat and organized as she was scattered and messy. He was introverted, practically repressed. She was hyper and at times manic. They were both stubborn and proud. Both were quick to anger. And they were both stars, but her stardom was here and now; his was a remembrance of days gone by.
Before meeting Joe in San Francisco, Marilyn arrived in Los Angeles for an appointment with Charles Feldman and Loyd Wright to discuss her career options. While in town, she saw Joe Jr. and took him to dinner at Romanoff’s, in Beverly Hills. She also saw Sidney Skolsky and told him, rather matter-of-factly—and her recent love letter to Joe notwithstanding—that she had every intention of marrying Arthur Miller. Taken aback by her proclamation, Skolsky reminded her that she’d just returned from her honeymoon with DiMaggio. How, he asked, had she come up with this latest bombshell? She explained that before marrying Joe, she’d obtained a post office box so she and Miller could correspond.
During her trip to Japan, Miller had sent her a note suggesting that in the near future he anticipated leaving his wife. Marilyn assured Skolsky she had far more in common with the playwright than she did with the ballplayer. Joe didn’t want her to be a movie star. He wanted her with him at all times. He didn’t approve of the women she portrayed on film. He didn’t like it when she had to perform a romantic scene and kiss the leading man. He didn’t like anything about Hollywood or the studio system. “Show business isn’t any business for a girl like you,” he’d maintained. How could she possibly stay with Joe? Skolsky listened in semidisbelief. Hadn’t Marilyn known all this when she married DiMaggio?
Although at this point Joe knew nothing of Arthur Miller, he couldn’t help but sense Marilyn’s urgent desire to resume her film career. He took it as a personal rejection. When she rejoined him in San Francisco, he accorded her the same “silent treatment” he’d so often bestowed upon Dorothy Arnold. He’d done it before with Marilyn, but on this occasion, he carried it a step further. He began sleeping in a separate bedroom at the Beach Street house. Marilyn rebelled, telling her husband she knew it was chic for a husband and wife to maintain separate sleeping quarters, but she was an “old-fashioned” girl—she believed a married couple should share the same bedroom and bed. When DiMaggio offered the lame excuse that his present bed was too confining and that he had trouble sleeping, she hired a carpenter to construct a bed seven feet wide and eight feet in length. He resumed sleeping by her side.
In fact, it was Marilyn, much more than Joe, who had trouble sleeping. When she’d torn a ligament in her leg during the production of River of No Return, a Canadian physician placed her on Demerol to help relieve the pain. The pain had long subsided, but she’d become addicted to the drug. To combat her insomnia, she procured a prescription for Nembutal. She was currently addicted to both medications, giving DiMaggio something new to vent about. If her profession caused her such pain and anxiety, perhaps she ought to consider doing something else. After all, he reasoned, he’d quit baseball when his injuries became too acute to continue. Marilyn’s solution was simply to get hold of more pills. Sidney Skolsky visited from Los Angeles and brought along a satchel of pharmaceuticals. Marilyn dubbed Sidney her “pill pal.”
Possibly to appease Joe, if for no other reason, Marilyn told him she’d been thinking of going to school in New York to study history and literature. “I’d love to learn how things get to be the way they are,” she said. They could move to Manhattan and start a family while she pursued adult extension courses at Columbia University or NYU. But later that month, Modern Screen magazine named her one of Hollywood’s five most popular actresses—along with Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly—and Photoplay presented her with a Best Actress award for work she’d done in 1953. She and DiMaggio turned up in Los Angeles in March to collect the latter prize, and while there, they sat down with Charles Feldman to discuss further the ongoing negotiations with Fox.
DiMaggio advised Feldman to insist on a partial “creative control” clause in Marilyn’s next contract. Such a clause, not uncommon in the case of leading box office names, would at least entitle her to exercise a certain degree of control in the selection and scripting of future films. Although Marilyn’s existing seven-year contract could not be completely overturned, it could at least be altered to include raises in salary and a modification of certain individual clauses.
True to his word, Joe supported his wife financially during the period she remained out of work, deciding what to do next. One of the obstacles he encountered, as he told George Solotaire, was that Marilyn was a “bog of contradictions.” It was nearly impossible to make concrete plans with her because she constantly shifted directions. She was prepared to go back to school one minute, and the next she had an entirely different idea, one of which entailed starting her own film production company. She and Joe explored the possibility.
From DiMaggio’s perspective, it wasn’t an ideal solution, but it seemed preferable to being an indentured slave at Fox and having to comply with the whims and fancies of various studio bosses. The main problem with such an undertaking was that it demanded far more knowledge of the film industry than either DiMaggio or Monroe possessed. It might also call for the investment of large sums of private capital, an eventuality that almost certainly didn’t appeal to DiMaggio. Moreover, if Marilyn attempted to start her own film production company, she would no doubt face legal action on the part of Fox, which would attempt to invoke the seven-year contract she’d signed with them long before she emerged as a full-blown star.
The couple spent much of the spring in San Francisco, Marilyn seated in a back booth of the DiMaggio restaurant while Joe stood in front greeting customers, many of whom came in with the hope of spotting Marilyn. “She used to sit back there and read, waiting for Joe to finish up,” said Dom DiMaggio. “She was reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. She told me she’d started it months earlier but couldn’t get a handle on it. She always had a notebook with her as well, which she filled with lists. She had a list of actors, a list of foods, a list of cities around the world she planned on visiting, and a list of movies and plays she wanted to see. I recall her making a list of composers and their best-known pieces of music: Bach, Bartok, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mozart, Ravel, Stravinsky. She asked me to name my favorite composer. I told her I wasn’t up on composers. ‘I thought all Italians loved music,’ she said. ‘You know—wine, women and song. Or is that a myth? I’m beginning to think Italian men are all cranky and overpossessive, like Joe, and the rest is just a lot of self-promotion.’ I’m not sure what I said in response. I didn’t tell Joe what she’d said. I didn’t want to upset him any more than he already was.”
Over spring break, Joe Jr. visited Marilyn and his father in San Francisco. As usual, Joe DiMaggio had little to do with his son, leaving him in Marilyn’s care. “Marilyn and I went on long walks together,” recalled Joey. “She wore dark glasses that fooled no one. On a few occasions we were followed. One evening we walked to Coit Tower, a well-known tourist site shrouded in fog and mist, and some weird-looking homeless character trailed after us. We visited the San Francisco Zoo, and this creepy guy shadowed us until we managed to lose him in the House of Reptiles. Another day we drove to San Mateo and walked to Seal Point, which is in a park with miles of hiking and biking trails. She took me to the Cliff House for lunch, a landmark eatery in an old chateau, and made me promise not to tell my father because he’d be insulted we hadn’t dined in the family restaurant.”
At least one harrowing episode took place during Joey’s stay in San Francisco. Late one night he heard a loud argument coming from the top floor of the house. “I was asleep downstairs,” he said, “and I woke up to the sound of my father and Marilyn screaming at each other. I couldn’t make out the words, but it had all the makings of a violent argument. After a few minutes I heard Marilyn race down the stairs and out the front door and my father running after her. I looked out the window, and I could see Marilyn, in a bathrobe, heading away from the house. My father caught up to her and grabbed her by the hair and sort of half-dragged her back to the house. She was trying to fight him off but couldn’t. The next morning Marilyn looked ragged. Her eyes were all red and her face swollen. My father wasn’t around. I don’t think Marilyn realized I’d witnessed the episode. I asked her what happened. ‘Nothing happened, Joey,’ she said. ‘Everything’s fine, just fine.’ ”
On April 14 Twentieth Century–Fox notified Loyd Wright and Charles Feldman that they were once again lifting Marilyn Monroe’s suspension. They indicated they would be sending a new version of the contract for Marilyn to sign, with a sizable increase in salary. The studio had canceled plans to go forward with The Girl in Pink Tights, and instead would dispatch a script for a musical, There’s No Business Like Show Business. Feldman passed on the news to Marilyn in San Francisco. She considered the offer a concession on the part of Fox’s executives, a victory of sorts, for which she had Joe DiMaggio to thank.
• • •
Resigned to the fact that Marilyn could not and would not give up her career, Joe returned to Los Angeles with her in late April. In search of a more spacious residence than the apartment on North Doheny, they rented an Elizabethan cottage for $700 a month at 508 North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills, several blocks from the house she’d shared with Johnny Hyde in 1950. Soon after moving in, Joe and Marilyn drove an hour to visit Vic Masi and his wife at their vacation home in the San Fernando Valley. Vic, a radio sports broadcaster, had known Joe since the late 1940s. The two couples went to a dinner club near Toluca Lake, and, to Joe’s amazement, the performer at the club that evening was Dorothy Arnold. Following her set, Dorothy stopped by Joe and Marilyn’s table and had a drink with them. It marked the first and only time she and Monroe ever came face-to-face.
On April 30 Joe squired Marilyn to the Hollywood opening of River of No Return. Confronted by reporters on leaving the theater, Marilyn sputtered, “Joe and I want many little DiMaggios.” DiMaggio turned away. He’d become little more than an appendage to his wife’s fame. As one of his biographers saw it, “She’d broken through his wall of invincibility, that aloofness of the Yankee Clipper.” She’d bewitched him. She’d obliterated his spirit. The Great DiMaggio had become subservient to his wife’s overbearing psychological needs. He must have known by this point in time that there would be no “little DiMaggios,” at least not with Marilyn. He must also have realized, without wanting to admit it, that though he maintained a brave front, his future with Marilyn was very much in doubt.
The new contract and the script for There’s No Business Like Show Business, by husband-and-wife screenwriting team Henry and Phoebe Ephron, arrived by messenger at Famous Artists, Charles Feldman’s agency. He sent them over to North Palm Drive. Marilyn grabbed the packet and started reading the contract. The increase in salary guarantee was clearly notated, but as Marilyn rifled through the document, she noticed that there was no creative-control provision. Not a word. Nothing. Once again the studio had stiffed her, reduced her to what she’d always been to them: a sexy body and a beautiful head of sugar-candy blond hair.
Marilyn turned her attention to the Show Business script. It reeked of the same exploitive vapidity as Pink Tights. Taking advantage of her status as “the hottest property in Hollywood,” Fox had fashioned an all-glitter, no-substance production that called for Marilyn to do little more than torch the screen with a song or two and otherwise wriggle around in a selection of all-too revealing show costumes.
Outraged by both script and contract, Marilyn informed Charles Feldman that she had no intention of going back to work, not under these paltry circumstances. Show Business had fewer production values than Pink Tights; the script was beyond insipid. And the contract constituted an affront, a slap in the face—it was an attack on her very being. Marilyn had no interest in abstract, impersonal concepts. For her, everything was either completely meaningless or completely personal. This was personal.
In her memoir, Marilyn wrote: “I wanted to be treated as a human being who had earned a few rights since my orphanage days . . . When the rest of the world was looking at someone called Marilyn Monroe, Mr. Zanuck, in whose hands my future rested, was able to see only Norma Jeane—and treat me as Norma Jeane had always been treated.”
Feldman called Zanuck and conveyed some of his star client’s grievances. The following day, he contacted Monroe. Zanuck, he said, had sweetened the pot. If she agreed to do Show Business, he promised to give her the hit Broadway comedy, The Seven Year Itch, as her next picture. As for the contract—according to Zanuck, it wasn’t negotiable. Take it or leave it. They’d bent over backward to appease her, but they weren’t going to bend any further. Marilyn must sign, or the studio would place her back on suspension—and if she went back on suspension, the studio would have to consider taking legal action against her. The cost of a legal defense team could be prohibitive, and there was no guarantee that in the end she would prevail.
Feldman felt she should sign. And Joe? Joe surprised everyone. He, too, recommended she append her signature. They’d allotted her a substantial raise. That counted for something. To continue to hold out would only result in a hardening of positions. What was the point of that? DiMaggio told George Solotaire he couldn’t take it any longer. Not now, at any rate. He’d lost the battle but not necessarily the war. He still felt he could one day convince Marilyn to stop making films and start making babies.