In Beverly Hills at an exclusive A-list party during the summer of 1954, attention focused on a handsome, charming, well-dressed, slender young man from the East Coast. His family name was already a Hollywood legend. He’d recently married “the Queen of Debutantes” in New England at a wedding attended by his right-wing father, who had made millions producing movies and peddling bootleg liquor during Prohibition.
In the late 1920s, the philandering Joseph P. Kennedy had arrived in Hollywood and had begun systematically, like a serial killer, to bed its most famous stars, ranging from Greta Garbo to Constance Bennett. His most notorious affair was with the imperial vamp of the silent screen, Gloria Swanson, with whom he’d launched the ill-fated silent, Queen Kelly, which was never completed, thanks to the arrival of new technologies—the Talkies—in Tinseltown.
At a Beverly Hills party hosted by super agent Charles Feldman, John F. Kennedy, the charismatic senator from Massachusetts, was getting the attention usually reserved for the world’s top box office attractions. A rising political star, he was one of ten young men, including rival Richard M. Nixon, who had each been named as possible candidates who might seek the presidency in 1960.
Feldman had been known as the town’s most suave marketer of talent (sometimes called a “flesh merchant”) before graduating to a career as a movie producer. For a while, he had represented Marilyn, at which time they had launched an affair that was still ongoing.
When Feldman heard that JFK had hit town, he telephoned his suite at the Bel Air Hotel and told him he wanted to invite him to a party peopled with Hollywood stars. “I want you and Marilyn Monroe to be the guests of honor.”
JFK couldn’t turn down an invitation like that. Since he’d left Jackie on Cape Cod, he attended Feldman’s party with his new brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, who had married his favorite sister, Patricia, earlier that year.
By the Eisenhower era of the 1950s, JFK was no stranger to Hollywood. Before flying to Los Angeles, he said to his younger brother, Bobby, “You know how I like to get one up on Dad. I want to dwarf his fabled conquest of Swanson by seducing the most desirable star in Hollywood—female, that is.”
“You’ve had Lana Turner,” Bobby said. “Jayne Mansfield, Gene Tierney, Grace Kelly, Judy Garland, Betty Grable, Marlene Dietrich, Hedy Lamarr, June Allyson, Sonja Henie, Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner. Who does that leave?”
“There’s only one… Marilyn Monroe.”
What he didn’t remember was that without any particular fanfare, he had seduced Marilyn eight years previously, in 1946, right after the end of WWII. She was known at the time as Norma Jeane Baker. The seduction had occurred when JFK’s longtime friend, the glamorous actor, Robert Stack, had invited JFK to stay with him in Hollywood. He held out the promise that he’d introduce him to the most beautiful stars and starlets in Hollywood, and perhaps even to an Oscar winner or two.
Back in the 1940s, Robert Stack and JFK were the two most desirable males in Hollywood, at least in the opinion of Judy Garland, who’d had affairs with both of them. “Even Howard Hughes pursued Robert and Jack, getting Stack but losing out on Jack,” Garland claimed.
As Stack later recalled, “Jack at the time was the only man in Tinseltown who was better looking than me, and all the hot tamales in Los Angeles took notice. He really knew how to attract women. I’ve known him to have sex in the afternoon, sex at cocktail time, sex after dinner, with a midnight sleepover as part of the agenda. Oh, and did I say, each of these trysts was with a different woman?”
Robert Stack and JFK
“Like father, like son, but they handled women differently,” Stack said. “Joe sorta denigrated Rose and rubbed her nose in his affairs. I think Jack did that somewhat to Jackie, especially after he got to the White House. After weeks of philandering, Joe always came back to Rose carrying expensive presents. Jack didn’t even bring flowers to Jackie when he returned from whoring in Hollywood.”
To his jealous best friend, the very gay Lem Billings, JFK had referred to Stack as “my libidinous buddy.”
According to Lem, “Stack threw down the red carpet. Crossing it were beautiful stars, lovely starlets, and, what he didn’t promise, a lot of so-so wannabees who lacked star power, but made up for it in other departments. Those kind of gals wanted to get ahead and would do more than give head. They’d do anything.”
JFK’s Boston accent was a bit off-putting to those who lived in Texas, the Deep South, or the Rocky Mountains, but his words were as “soothing as licking honey off a woman’s breasts,” or so claimed an article submitted to Playboy but rejected by Hugh Hefner.
A New Yorker, Feldman had known Joseph Kennedy for years. Through the former ambassador, Chuck Spalding, one of John Kennedy’s closest friends, had gone to work for Feldman at United Artists in 1946. When young JFK went on one of his self-proclaimed “poontang hunts” in Hollywood, he was often the guest of Feldman, who was known for giving some of the best parties in Tinseltown. JFK had also dated such Feldman clients as Peggy Cummins and Gene Tierney, who had wanted to marry him.
A confidant of both Peter and Patricia, JFK was privy to all their extramarital affairs—Patricia with handsome, well-endowed young men, and her husband, Peter, with handsome, well-endowed young men plus hookers, studio messenger boys, and a few top female stars.
At the party, JFK sat between Lawford and Feldman on the sofa in the center of a large living room. JFK was nursing his second drink when he noticed a hush fall over the room. Feldman jumped up to greet his late-arriving guest.
JFK turned to look at the arrival of Marilyn Monroe clad in red alligator “Joan Crawford fuck-me high heels,” a black, low-cut dress tailored two sizes too small, and a white fox fur draped over her creamy nude shoulders.
“What tits! What an ass!” JFK whispered to Lawford, who was already a bit drunk, perhaps drugged. “I bet you’ve had her.”
“Who hasn’t?” responded a cynical Lawford. “On my first date with her, I had to step over dogshit in her bedroom to get to her nude body sprawled drunkenly on her bed. I was drunk, too, so we were evenly matched. I don’t think either of us had a climax that night, but we continued to date on and off.”
Charles Feldman
In spite of a sharp pain in his lower back, JFK rose to greet Marilyn as she wiggled across the room, waving at her fellow stars such as Alexis Smith, Virginia Mayo, Dana Andrews, and Melvyn Douglas.
She had just emerged from her hair dresser as a glorious honey blonde. The hairdresser had also bleached what she called “the hair down below—I like to be blonde all over, although sometimes I get burns on my sensitive vagina.”
Feldman made the introductions.:“Miss Monroe, our fellow guest of honor, Jack Kennedy, the senator from Massachusetts, and, of course, you known Joe DiMaggio. Like Marilyn herself, he needs no introduction, I’m sure.”
“Miss Monroe,” JFK said, taking her hand and gazing deeply into her eyes. “My pleasure. Jackie and I agreed that Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was the best musical of all time, or at least I did. I thought you were the greatest thing in the picture, Jackie sorta going for Charles Coburn.”
Marilyn laughed. “Thank you for the compliment and tell Jackie she’s welcome to Coburn.”
She would later claim that “Joe and Jack didn’t have much to say to each other. They were like two roosters circling the only hen in the barnyard. Jack didn’t bother to conceal his attraction for me, and that really pissed off Joe.”
Before she was served a drink, DiMaggio excused himself to go to the Feldman’s ground floor bathroom.
During the time he was gone, she cuddled closer to JFK. “You said it was a pleasure to meet me. Actually, you’ve had the pleasure before. It was back in 1946 at Robert Stack’s place.”
“You were one of those girls we auditioned!” he said in astonishment. “Surely I would have remembered Marilyn Monroe.”
“I was Norma Jeane Baker back then, with brown hair, very young, a bit shy. That was before I created this Marilyn Monroe thing.”
“I still can’t believe we did it,” he said.
“If you want evidence, I can describe exact details of your anatomy.”
“Let’s not go that far,” he said.
She reached into a red sequined purse and handed him a card with her private phone number on it. An imprint of her red lipstick was already on the card.
“Do you give a lot of these cards to men at parties?” he asked.
“Just a select few—bigtime movie stars, bigtime directors, bigtime producers, and any man that Peter Lawford and Charles Feldman tell me is going to become the Vice President of the United States in 1956.”
“How did you know I was going for that?”
“I’m not as dumb as I look.”
At that point, DiMaggio returned to protect his possession.
Seeing him coming, JFK changed the subject. “Are you in person like that fortune hunter, Lorelei Lee, in the movie?”
“Not at all,” she said. “I think a girl should make her own fortune and not depend on a man to do it for her.”
“Good thinking,” DiMaggio said, “since I’m retired and living off past glory.”
At that point, Feldman’s butler, attired in a red dinner jacket and a pink bow tie, announced that dinner was being served. In the dining room, DiMaggio seemed peeved that he wasn’t placed next to Marilyn. He was seated next to Patricia Lawford instead, and she knew a lot about baseball.
As prearranged with Feldman, JFK was seated between Lawford and Marilyn. On Lawford’s left was another glamorous blonde, Marilyn Maxwell, who was the on-again, off-again lover of both Lawford and Frank Sinatra.
Monroe whispered to JFK, “It’s bad enough that Maxwell and I have to share Frank and Peter, but I think this town isn’t big enough for two blondes named Marilyn.”
She once expressed that complaint to Feldman, who told her, “Maxwell was in pictures during World War II, meaning she got here before you.”
“From the looks of things, she must have been in pre-War films, perhaps even the Silents.”
“Meow!” he said.
***
As the dinner progressed beyond the soup, Lawford became aware of the guerilla tactics going on under the table to his right. While talking to Maxwell, he also managed to eavesdrop on Marilyn and JFK.
“I thought all senators were grandfatherly types,” she said, “until I met you.”
“If I met you in ’46, you must have been in the cradle. You look like you’re fresh out of high school.”
“Talk like that will get you anything you want,” she said.
“Lawford would later recall, “My God, she was practically inviting him to crawl under the table and go down on her. No, Tenth Avenue hooker working the night shift in Manhattan could have been more obvious that night.”
Young JFK
After Marilyn left the party two hours later, Lawford approached JFK. “Gonna go for that hot box?”
“Yeah, the way you, you fucking child molester, seduced that poor, virginal, teenager, Elizabeth Taylor.”
“Believe me, Marilyn is no innocent, much less a virgin.”
“That’s OK with me—neither am I. I’ll benefit from her vast experience. Do you think Feldman will be jealous? We know DiMaggio will, but we’ll see that he doesn’t find out.”
“Feldman will be okay with it,” Lawford said. “With his hairpiece, sagging jaw, belly over the belt, not to mention an unreliable dick, he knows Marilyn is only rewarding him for favors he’s done for her career. It’s not a romance.”
Marilyn and DiMaggio had been the last guests to arrive at the party, but the first to leave after dinner.
Over a nightcap with Lawford, JFK went into more detail about what was going on under the table. “My right hand slowly began to creep up her left leg, arriving at her creamy thigh. I was forced to eat with my left paw. When I got to the thigh, she warned me, ‘I don’t want you to be shocked. I’m not wearing panties tonight.’ I continued on my voyage of discovery. By the time the cherries jubilee was served, I had three fingers inserted into that overworked pussy of hers. After all the guys she screwed, she’s still tight, a perfect fit for a guy like me.”
“I’m sure it’ll become the romance of the century,” Lawford said. “But watch out for that dog shit.”
The following morning, in his suite at the Bel Air Hotel, JFK dialed the number Marilyn had given him.
To his regret, DiMaggio answered the phone. Hearing a man’s voice, he asked, “Just who is this?”
“A friend,” JFK said.
DiMaggio slammed down the phone.
***
When DiMaggio announced that he was going to spend the day playing golf with Bing Crosby, Marilyn seized the opportunity. As soon as DiMaggio was gone, she fled from what she called “my prison and my jailer,” taking a taxi to the Bel Air Hotel. During a call she’d placed, JFK had invited her for a late breakfast.
What happened next is the subject of some conjecture, and details can only be pieced together by snippets of information Marilyn revealed to Jeanne Carmen, Peter Lawford, and Shelley Winters, among others.
Apparently, she found JFK in his suite with a terrycloth bathrobe dangling open to reveal that he wore only a pair of white jockey shorts. He was having his coffee while reading The Los Angeles Times.
Marilyn’s friend, Shelley Winters, recalled that “She was as excited as a teenager to be having an affair with the handsome senator. She told me, ‘Jack is married to the most beautiful woman in Washington, but he desires me. He told me that I will do things to him that only a hooker will do.’ Marilyn apparently took that as a compliment.”
“I often wondered what she meant by that,” Shelley said. “Kennedy was known for having said that he wasn’t finished with a woman until he’d had her three ways. That could only mean that Miss Jackie didn’t go for any of that rear door stuff.”
Shelley continued: “Marilyn told me that Kennedy had told her that he was going to become President of the United States, and then she said, ‘He’s going to appoint me First Mistress.’ But she quickly added, ‘there can be no official announcement, of course.’”
“Later, Marilyn would upgrade her role, claiming that she had set her eyes on becoming First Lady. All this must have been heady stuff for a little abused girl who grew up in an orphanage and foster homes. Jack Kennedy was the biggest thing who had ever come her way, after years in Hollywood, time spent lying on casting couches, and ‘sucking a lot of Jewish cock,’ as Marilyn put it. Time spent in the late 40s saying only one word on the screen and sometimes, as in the case of Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!, even getting that cut.”
After a day spent in JFK’s suite, interrupted with a lot of phone calls from back East, Marilyn was eager to share her good fortune. DiMaggio would call it Monday morning quarterbacking—“He also watches football games,” Marilyn said.
In a call to Lawford, she told him, “I’ve known far better men in bed than Jack, including yourself, at least in the oral department. He uses the excuse of back pain, which is a signal for me to do all the hard work in getting him off. Frankly, he’s a bit quick on the draw for me to get any real satisfaction.”
“Are you going to continue this after he flies back to Washington?” he asked.
“By all means,” she said. “We’ve reached an understanding. Back East he’ll be faithful to Jackie. But out here, I’ll be his only woman. In other words, Jackie and I will share him with no other interlopers.”
Peter Lawford
“I know Jack very well, and when he promises something, he’s a man of his word.” It is not known if she realized that Lawford was being cynical.
“I’m not in it for the good sex, because the sex is not good,” she confessed. “You and I both know we can pick up studs all over Hollywood just by walking out the door. A lot of guys out here would like to fuck a movie star, particularly the very handsome Peter Lawford and the very beautiful Marilyn Monroe. I understand even straight guys will put out for you.”
“Something like that,” he said.
“When I’m with Jack, I feel that I’m with a powerful man making big decisions that could affect the entire world one day,” she told him. “Women will understand that. For centuries, they’ve been attracted to men with power. I’m sure Eva Braun didn’t stay with Adolf Hilter just for the sex.”
***
Arthur James, a rich real estate agent living in Malibu, had known Marilyn in the late 1940s when she’d become involved with the sons of Charlie Chaplin, both Sidney and Charlie, Jr. James was a close friend of The Little Tramp, who eventually got around to seducing Marilyn himself, since he liked very young girls. Apparently, according to Marilyn, the original Chaplin wanted to convince her that he was better in the boudoir than either of his sons. He referred to his penis as “the eighth wonder of the world.”
Over the years, James had witnessed many of her affairs, and he also had a front row seat to watch the drama associated with the debut of her love affair with John F. Kennedy. James revealed some of what he knew to biographer Anthony Summers, author of Goddess, the Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe.
According to James, a favorite watering hole of JFK and Marilyn was the raunchy Malibu Cottage, a battered bar and grill along the coast. It had fewer than a dozen stools and some scattered tables along the sawdust-littered floor. If clients needed them, there were a few “hot beds” to rent nearby.
JFK wasn’t that well known on the West Coast at that time, and he felt he didn’t need to be so guarded about his burgeoning relationship with Marilyn, as he’d have to be in the years ahead.
Over various visits, they also checked into the Holiday House in Malibu, using assumed names, including Fritz Gerald and Jeane Mortensen, and they were seen, on occasion, coming and going from the Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, where everyone, from Greta Garbo in the old days to Paul Newman in the 1950s, went for off-the-record sexual trysts.
JFK was said to have liked Malibu Cottage because it evoked some of the low-rent Boston taverns he’d frequented as a horny young college student.
With all the elegant bars from which to choose, A-list movie stars often patronized Malibu Cottage as one of their favorite hangouts. Jayne Mansfield claimed, “You could take your pickups there—you know, blue collar types with dirt under their fingernails and big sausage in their jockeys—and no one asked questions, no one judged.”
A frequent patron of Malibu Cottage, Marilyn had invited JFK to go there with her “because it’s a lot of fun. Everything that goes on there is off the record.” JFK referred to it as “going slumming.”
However, there was always the possibility of embarrassment with that chance encounter. Such an event happened when Marilyn showed up with JFK to spot Lana Turner and Lex Barker (of Tarzan fame) drinking together in the far corner. Lana’s affair with Lex—Marilyn called him “Sexy Lexy”—would grow so intense that eventually, in 1953, he put a wedding band on Lana’s finger.
As the bartender, Bryan Pickins, recalled, “Lana and Lex invited Marilyn and JFK to their small table. The movie Tarzan had never met Kennedy before. But, perhaps unknown to Lana, Marilyn and Lex had had an on-again, off-again affair for some three years. Not only that, but all of Hollywood knew that Lana had been involved in an affair with Kennedy when he was still a congressman, right after the war.”
She’d been introduced to JFK in 1946 by another of her lovers, Robert Stack. After seeing Lana’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, JFK told friends that Lana was the “sexiest thing in pictures.” Before the war, Lana had also seduced another future U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, and she’d also had a long-running affair with Peter Lawford, JFK’s brother-in-law.
Lex Barker (left) as Tarzan and Lana Turner
Marilyn nursed her own fantasies about Lana, though presumably, they were not of a sexual nature. Ever since she’d seen Lana walking down that street, “bouncing her tits” in They Won’t Forget in 1937, Marilyn had dreamed of becoming the next “Sweater Girl” of the 1950s, usurping the title originally bestowed on Lana.
To Marilyn, Lana had been the ultimate symbol of a movie star—blonde, beautiful, wealthy, with numerous lovers and an occasional husband.
Marilyn dreamed of seducing some of the same men that Lana had bedded—Desi Arnaz, Kirk Douglas, John Garfield, John Hodiak, George Montgomery, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, and especially Victor Mature. Both of them had already shared Ronald Reagan, Dean Martin, Clark Gable, and Howard Hughes, not to mention John F. Kennedy and Lana’s husband, Lex Barker.
As a young, struggling model, Marilyn had purchased every movie magazine with Lana on the cover. She was drawn to her superficial glitz and glamour. Marilyn also knew that Lana didn’t depend on any great acting ability but was living proof that a beautiful young woman could get by in pictures with just her looks.
By 1954, movie columnists were hailing Marilyn as “The New Sweater Girl,” replacing Lana as the screen goddess of the 1940s. If Lana harbored any resentment toward Marilyn, she didn’t show it. But if she had known that Lex was Marilyn’s lover, that surface hospitality would surely have vanished.
Marilyn wasn’t the only woman—or male, for that matter—pursuing Lana’s husband. Today, thousands of his still loyal fans still mourn his passing in 1973. Born in New York, Lex had been a soldier during World War II. Unlike the Tarzan he depicted on the screen, the Ape Man was actually debonair, sophisticated, and well-educated. In addition to being blond and athletic, he stood a towering 6’4”.
During the course of a date with Lawford, Marilyn had met Lex at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel when he was still married to the also beautiful, flame-haired Arlene Dahl.
Lex had telephoned Marilyn the following day, in spite of his marriage to Dahl. Their affair began that afternoon, although each of them would continue to date other people during the course of their romance. At one time, Marilyn had wanted Lex to marry her, not Lana.
During her meeting with Lana and Lex, Marilyn somehow worked into the conversation the fact that DiMaggio would be out of town for several days. She was sending a signal to Lex, and he picked up on it.
She called Carmen that night: “Not bad for a working gal, don’t you agree? In the next few days, I’ll be screwing the handsomest politician in Washington and the handsomest actor in Hollywood. Of course, their cocks are different— one an acorn on the tree, the other the trunk of that tree.”
In the future, Marilyn would resent it when Jeanne Carmen, cast as the Indian girl, “Yellow Moon,” starred in Lex’s 1957 picture War Drums. Carmen went into lavish praise of Lex in the boudoir. “When he takes off his undies, you know you’re going to get something really special. But you’ve made it clear that you’ve been there before. There’s no need to be jealous. Lex screws a lot of beautiful women. There’s enough meat there for the poor. Besides, we’ve doubled up on men before.”
“I’m not jealous of you,” Marilyn said. “It’s Lana Turner. I wanted Lex to marry me, not her.”
“Don’t worry, kiddo,” Carmen said. “Turner is yesterday. You’re Hollywood’s new Lana.”
Inevitably, JFK had to fly back to Washington, but Marilyn had promised to drive over to Bel Air for “an adieu fuck,” as she put it. As was her custom, she was late.
As she came into his suite, she saw that he was fully dressed in a blue suit, and the bellboys were already carrying down his luggage.
“I wanted a private farewell, so you wouldn’t forget me like you did in 1946.” Marilyn told JFK. Shelley Winters, her former roommate, would learn all the details later that evening.
“After hustling the bellhops out with his luggage, Jack locked the door and signaled me to get into position—that is, on my knees. He didn’t unzip, since he liked me to do that for him. I gave him a terrific blow-job—really inspired. I thought he’d call me when he first got to Washington, but he didn’t. I guess he couldn’t shake Jackie to sneak away.”
Blondes who gossip: Jeanne Carmen (left) and Shelley Winters
“Even so, I’m in luck,” Marilyn told her longtime confidant. “Lana has to fly to New York for a few days, but Lex is here pursuing some sort of film role. That means I’ll have Tarzan swinging that vine my way for at least three days, maybe more. I’m going to try a new technique that Jayne Mansfield uses on her tricks. I’m covering Lex’s vital parts with the richest whipped cream I can find.”
“Marilyn!” Shelley said as if chastising her. “Don’t you know how fattening whipped cream is?”
***
In the autumn, and at long last, Senator Kennedy called her, inviting her to come and see him in New York. He told her that he’d be staying in a suite at the Hotel Carlyle, but “for the sake of appearances,” he’d had one of his aides book her a suite at the St. Regis.
Before flying to Idlewild Airport in New York, she spent money on wardrobe she could ill afford, because the clothes she wore around Los Angeles somehow didn’t seem appropriate for the drab streets of New York. She also needed some disguises, because she’d be mobbed if spotted on the street. “After all,” as she later told Jeanne Carmen, “I’m far more famous in New York, or anywhere else, than Mr. Kennedy.”
Marilyn had also received a call from Lex Barker, telling her that he, too, would be in New York for four days at the time she was flying there. In her final goodbye call to Carmen, Marilyn told her, “I’m sure that any sexual desires I have that Senator Kennedy can’t satisfy can be magnificently fulfilled by Lex, Mr. Third Leg himself.”
“What about Joltin’ Joe?” Carmen asked.
“I’ll give him to you. He can teach you how to play baseball and you can teach him golf.”
On her first night at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, Marilyn was told to wait in the King Cole Bar where a driver would come for her. As instructed, Marilyn was later slipped discreetly into the Hotel Carlyle, her blonde hair concealed by an Hermès scarf and her face partially hidden by large sunglasses. She was delivered to the bachelor pad that JFK maintained in the midst of the rare shrubs and small trees of the hotel’s roof garden. In a scarlet satin bathrobe, he came to the door to receive her himself.
The suite would become familiar to her in the coming months. So would a special bedroom set aside for them at the mansion of Peter and Patricia Lawford in a sprawling Santa Monica residence that had once belonged to MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer. Another venue would be a suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, or a suite at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. On rare occasions, and in a heavy disguise, she would be slipped aboard Air Force One after her lover assumed the presidency in 1961.
She could be very candid about admitting her sexual affairs. Some film historians claim she was the first A-list star who ever admitted that she promoted her career in films by lying on the casting couch.
“It comes with the territory,” she was fond of saying. “Producers weren’t shooting all those sexy movies just to sell popcorn. They wanted to sample the merchandise first hand. I was available. Had I not gone along with it, there were two dozen other bottle blondes waiting in line. I did make one amazing discovery. There are a lot of fat producers in Hollywood with three-inch dicks, Darryl F. Zanuck excluded, of course.”
After her first night in the suite with JFK at the Carlyle, Marilyn became a kiss-and-tell kind of woman. She insisted on re-living her sexual encounters with such trusted confidants as Peter Lawford, Shelley Winters, and especially Jeanne Carmen. She also bragged about her experiences even with her maids such as Lena Pepitone and her long-time friend, Robert Slatzer.
As Marilyn relayed the story, “Jack had three bottles of champagne cooling, the very expensive kind. I had on an extra-thick coating of ‘fuck-me-now’ lipstick. When I sipped my first taste of bubbly, I left a lipstick smear on the rim of the glass. He reached over and took it from me, offering me his glass. Then he put my glass with the red smear to his own lips and tongued off my lipstick. Isn’t that the most romantic thing you’ve ever heard in your life?”
She claimed that he’d told her “there are at least ten million men in the world who would give their left nut to be sitting where I am right now with the world’s most desired woman.”
“When I leaned over to give him an appreciative kiss, he got excited, wanting so much more. It was time for tongue down the throat. Once or twice he backed off to suck in more air, then went gangbusters on me. We must have gone at that for at least ten minutes. When he did back off, he confided in me that Jackie didn’t like a tongue in her mouth. ‘Her kisses are very chaste,’ he told me, ‘and I need so much more.’”
She told him that she’d read in the papers in September of 1953 that “you married that debutante. The press claimed she was getting America’s most eligible bachelor—in fact, yours was called the celebrity marriage of the year.”
“It wasn’t much of a honeymoon; There was constant pain in my back.”
“I want to know about that,” she said.
“Later. Right now I have something more pressing I want you to take care of.”
“Carmen was eager for a blow-by-blow description. “After all that commando activity on the sofa, his robe had fallen open,” Marilyn claimed. “At the Bel Air, he’d worn a pair of jockey shorts. But at the Carlyle, he was nude under the robe.”
In bed, Marilyn learned once again that JFK was no athlete like her retired baseball hero husband. “He spread-eagled himself on the bed and expected me to do all the work,” she said. “I was top gun that night. Actually, I was using him like men use a Saturday night whore. I was in the command decision post, manipulating him. When he was about to explode, and I wasn’t quite satisfied, I slowed down the action, much to his frustration. Then I worked him to fever pitch again.”
“God damn it, Marilyn,” he’d shouted at her, or so she claimed, “I’ve got to get off. Stop teasing me.’”
“Finally, I headed home,” she said. “During all this time, the fucker had been working my breasts. He got so carried away, he practically bit off my left nipple. It was bleeding, but I guess he couldn’t help himself.”
“When it was over, I fell on him, nibbling his neck, sticking my tongue in his ears, and even his nostrils. He loved that. He said that none of his previous women had ever attacked his head with so much passion.”
The evening, as she confided, took a sad turn for the first time when he confided to her the extent of his illness. He said that in October of 1953, he’d undergone a life-or-death operation on his back for a double fusion of his spine to correct a ruptured disk. Crushed bone fragments had to be removed and steel pins inserted. X-rays revealed that his fifth lumbar vertebra had collapsed.
He also told her he had an adrenal deficiency. “People call it Addison’s disease. That means that my surgical wounds might not heal.” As he explained it, the disease was caused by a deficiency of hormones needed to regulate potassium, blood sugar, and sodium.
JFK
“The doctors gave me a fifty-fifty chance,” he had said to her. “I told my dad that I’d rather die than spend my life in a wheelchair. But he pointed out that Franklin Roosevelt was elected president four times while confined to a wheel-chair.”
“Mr. Roosevelt in a wheelchair?” she’d asked in astonishment. “I’ve seen pictures of him. No wheelchair.”
“The press was kind,” he’d told her. “I fear I can’t expect such generosity if I become a cripple for life.”
She also claimed that before she left that night, JFK had reached for a bottle of capsules by his bed. “He took a little knife with a silver handle and just barely pierced the surface of his inner thigh. He told me he didn’t want to bleed very much. He inserted the capsule under his skin and bandaged it. “The tablet will dissolve in my bloodstream.”
“That time at the Carlyle was one of the very few occasions during their affair that she could spend the entire night in his arms, at least until seven o’clock the following morning, when he had to return to Washington.
Before the dawn’s light, he confided another secret to her. “My doctors told me I might have leukemia.”
“That I’ve heard of,” she said.
Before she checked out of his suite two hours after his departure, she had learned something that only a few people knew. She still wasn’t exactly sure what Addison’s disease was, but it sounded frightening. As she was later to find out, the leukemia turned out to be a false alarm, but Addison’s disease was real and threatening. It made her doubt for the first time that he might ever become President of the United States.
Before exiting from the hotel, she’d dressed herself up as her character of Marilyn Monroe. As the doorman hailed her a taxi, she was spotted by at least three people who screamed out her name. A crowd of onlookers quickly formed. Fortunately, the taxi whisked her away as she blew kisses to her fans.
On the plane back to Los Angeles, she knew she possessed one of the many “deadly secrets” about JFK she’d learned before the summer of 1962. She’d only confide them to people she really trusted, confidants who would not betray her—or so she thought at the time.
***
Getting off the plane after visiting JFK in New York, Marilyn was approached by a tall, sinister-looking man, his face hidden with very dark sunglasses and his body draped in a Humphrey Bogart-style trenchcoat. He didn’t introduce himself, but said, “Johnny’s waiting for you in his limo.”
She knew at once who “Johnny” was. There had been a number of Johnnies in her life before, including actor John Carroll, who was once billed as the replacement for Clark Gable (it never happened), and her agent, Johnny Hyde, an ugly little Russian whose parents had been circus performers in Moscow. He stood five feet three and was known in Hollywood as “The Ugly Dwarf,” yet he had represented such stars as Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, the love goddesses Marilyn most wanted to be, except for Betty Grable, whom she also hoped to replace on the screen.
With her baggage retrieved by the bodyguard, she was directed to the back seat of a long stretch limousine, its rear windows shaded.
The bodyguard opened the door to reveal a man in a dark coat sitting in the far corner, his black hat covering most of his face. “Hi, beautiful, get in. Haul that delectable ass over here and give your Johnny a wet one.”
It was the gangster, Johnny Roselli, who had issued the summons to her. She had long ago learned not to disobey any order issued from Roselli, or his boss, Sam Giancana.
After getting into the limousine and giving him the mandatory deep throat kiss, he announced to her that she was being driven to Las Vegas that night. She didn’t want to go, but dared not turn down the mob.
The smoothest of the Mafiosi, Roselli moved with grace between Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Washington. He’d been one of the mob who’d forced Harry Cohn to give Marilyn a contract at Columbia, where she’d made Ladies of the Chorus in 1948, where another blonde, Adele Jergens, cast as a burlesque star, played her mother.
Fellow mobsters referred to Roselli as “handsome Johnny.” Always immaculately dressed in $1,000 suits, he had jet-black hair sleeked back and olive skin, with a mouth full of “pearly whites” as he called them. He also had a pencil-thin mustache, and was smoking a Camel cigarette. “Lucky Strikes are for fags,” he always claimed.
Marilyn had first met Roselli at the home of the aging producer at Fox, Joseph M. Schenk, with whom she was having an affair whenever he could produce an erection.
The year was 1947, when Roselli had been paroled from a Chicago prison, where he’d been sentenced in 1943 to ten years on racketeering charges. Harry S Truman’s crooked attorney general, Tom C. Clark, had made a deal with the mob for Roselli’s early release.
Johnny Roselli
Schenck had warned her not to get involved with Roselli, and she promised she wouldn’t. Two nights later, she was seen leaving the gangster’s suite after an overnight sleepover.
Otherwise, Schenck was her mentor. Born in Russia to a Jewish household, he’d arrived in New York City in 1893 and eventually entered the entertainment business, which led to his relocation to Hollywood. He became a key player in the fledging motion picture world of the Silents. He was a partner with Marcus Loew in operating a chain of movie theaters. In 1916, he’d married Norma Talmadge, one of the top silent screen vamps.
In Hollywood, he was the first president of United Artists, and in 1933, he became a partner with Darryl F. Zanuck in creating 20th Century Pictures, which two years later merged with Fox. Schenck became chairman of the new 20th Century Fox.
But in time, he was convicted of income tax evasion and was sentenced to prison until freed by a presidential pardon.
When he returned to Fox, he’d spotted a young actress, Marilyn herself, “walking with a wiggle,” and had asked her to get into his limousine.
Schenck was fat, bald, and squinty-eyed, and was described as “looking like Kubla Khan after too many years at Xanadu.” But to a near-starving $75-a-week contract player like Marilyn, he looked promising.
Soon, she was living in his guest cottage. Their affair lasted until 1957, when he suffered a stroke from which he would never recover.
Unlike most gangsters, Roselli like to talk about his early days in the film industry. He’d arrived in Los Angeles in 1924, where he made a living as a bootlegger. In time, he’d become the West Coast representative of gangster Sam Giancana.
Roselli’s dream involved becoming an updated version of Brian Foy, a movie producer who was instrumental in the production of 214 films between 1924 and the time of Marilyn’s death. He was the eldest son of the vaudeville star Eddie Foy, and had been one of the original “The Seven Little Foys.” When film producing didn’t work out, Roselli found other ways to make money.
Over pillow talk, Roselli once confessed to Marilyn that as a mob figure “I extorted millions from the studios. The real key to Fort Knox came in 1936, when we forced all the major unions to contribute heavily to us. If a union didn’t march to our drum, I soon saw that they got in step.”
She was also astonished to learn that many of Hollywood’s top stars during the 1930s were “gang sponsored,” including George Raft, Clark Gable, the Marx Brothers, Jimmy Durante, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and Jean Harlow. “I used to fuck Jean Harlow in the 1930s, and now I’m fucking her 1950s replacement. We got fabulous contracts for all our stars, but, of course, they had to fork over a lot of their loot to me.”
MM with Joseph Schenck
On the way to Las Vegas, Marilyn looked with a certain despair out the window as night was falling across the Nevada desert. Roselli was telling her that he was more or less abandoning Hollywood for the rapidly growing and very profitable gambling mecca of Las Vegas. He was always blunt with her, knowing that he could trust her with his secrets because he had blackmail evidence on her.
He claimed that he was the Las Vegas emissary of “the boys in Chicago who want their fair share of casino revenues earned through skimming. Officially, though, I’m on the books as a producer for Monogram in Hollywood.”
In Las Vegas, Roselli dominated the booking of A-list celebrities in the hotels. Before arriving along the Strip, he’d told Marilyn that he was bringing her to town to entertain “some of the boys: Frank Costello will be there, Meyer Lansky, Mickey Cohen, and of course, Sam.” Then he informed her that Sam Giancana wanted to have dinner with her after her performance.
Because of the blackmail evidence Giancana and Roselli had on Marilyn, she had to perform on command.
When first informed of the blackmail, Roselli had warned her, “Your career survived that nude calendar, but it won’t survive our release of the blue movie we have on you.”
He was referring to a secret loop, filmed with a concealed camera, showing her performing fellatio on gangster Johnny Stompanato, and later having intercourse with him. “You look great,” Roselli told her, “when you’re sucking Johnny’s big cock. You have one deep throat.”
Stompanato’s greatest notoriety lay in his future, when he was stabbed by Lana Turner, his lover, or else by her daughter, Cheryl Crane, depending on which story you want to believe.
Before Marilyn, there was Jean Harlow
The handsome, well-endowed Stompanato was the trusted henchman and pimp for Mickey Cohen. Marilyn had met Stompanato at a Hollywood party in 1953 and had been impressed with his physique, flashing brown eyes, black wavy hair, and courtly manners. George Raft called him “the most cunning and cocksure man in Hollywood.”
Marilyn had succumbed to his charm, little knowing that he was a high-priced gigolo, having serviced such stars as Janet Leigh and Ava Gardner.
In his memoirs, In My Own Words, Cohen wrote, “Johnny Stompanato was the most handsome man I’ve ever known that was all man. He was an athlete and a real man, without any queerness about him.”
Unknown to Marilyn, Stompanato, through an arrangement made with Cohen and assisted by some of his goons, secretly filmed movie stars having sex with Stompanato and later using the “blue movie” to blackmail them.
At that point, Marilyn had very little money. Even though she was a film star, she had signed a low-paying contract at Fox. Since the mob could not extort the big bucks from her, she was forced to pay them back in other ways, one of which included making herself available to men such as Roselli and Giancana.
At the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, two bellhops directed Marilyn to Roselli’s suite while he excused himself for an urgent meeting with Giancana. She’d protested that she didn’t have a wardrobe.
“You’ll find everything waiting for you,” he promised her. “Listen, doll, this is Las Vegas, the entertainment capital of the world. There are more show biz costumes here than in Hollywood. The wardrobe mistress from Columbia is waiting for you with some two dozen gowns. If you don’t like them, I’ll have two dozen more sent up.”
“Thanks, Johnny,” she said, rushing into the elevator.
Waiting for her in the suite was the wardrobe mistress and two handsome young waiters who had placed champagne and caviar on ice.
After emerging from the bathroom, she reached for a glass of the bubbly. In front of the trio, she pulled off all her clothes for a fitting. The wardrobe mistress had seen nude stars for years and was blasé about the matter, but the waiters looked enthralled, although Marilyn had suspected that they were homosexuals.
The fifth gown, a satin outfit in shocking pink, fitted her perfectly. It was cut so low that she claimed that “only Jayne Mansfield would wear it.” But she liked it. “I guess the boys really want to see my tits tonight,” she told the wardrobe mistress.
As she was posing in front of a full-length mirror, three of the hotel musicians arrived with her music, which had been pre-selected for her. Although they had only an hour to rehearse, the songs were already familiar to her.
Lana Turner, Johnny Stompanato, and Cheryl Crane in 1958
She was to open with “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and follow with “I’m Gonna File My Claim” and “River of No Return” from her recent movie with Robert Mitchum. Her brief performance would conclude with “Bye Bye Baby,” also from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
An hour later, Roselli, looking distressed, arrived in the suite just in time to approve her selection of wardrobe and to change into a tuxedo. Giving her a kiss, he escorted her downstairs to a private party. Two armed security guards watched over the entrance. Seeing who it was, the guards quickly granted Marilyn and Roselli access to the dining room.
The party was already well under way when they came in. Waiters rushed about serving food and wine to some fifty members of the mob. At their tables sat some of the most glamorous showgirls in Las Vegas. Roselli whispered to her that six of the performers were stunningly beautiful transvestites who, later in the night, would allow mob members to beat and rape them for five-hundred dollars. “A lot of regular gals won’t allow that.”
By the time Marilyn stepped into the spotlight onstage, she was a little drunk on bubbly. She was greeted with such hysterical applause that at the appropriate time, she planned a slight “wardrobe malfunction” when one of her breasts would be momentarily exposed. She knew that would bring a standing ovation from the mob, but not from the jealous hookers, except those “more lezzie inclined.”
She viewed the show as a success. As anticipated, the exposed breast brought down the house. The applause was thunderous. “You were great,” Roselli told her backstage, giving her a wet kiss on the mouth.
Within minutes, Giancana embraced her like his long lost lover and gave her a kiss that was more tongue than lip.
“The boys loved you,” Giancana told her. “I’ll have to fly you to Chicago for another party sometime soon. We’ll have dinner in an hour.”
He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out an envelope. “You went over big tonight but you shouldn’t have to work for free. There are ten one-thousand dollar bills in this envelope. Roselli is such a cheap fucking bastard, I know he won’t give you anything.”
“Oh, thank you,” she said.
“I gotta go now,” he said. “But we’ll hook up later, doll.”
Roselli watched him go before turning to Marilyn. “Just look at him. He’s the big man. The boss. The Don. The Capo. But one day if he should meet a bullet, I might be the head honcho. We’ll see. Come along, cutie.”
***
The “boss of bosses,” Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana, sat on the shaky throne once occupied by the notorious mobster Al Capone. Giancana had launched his career in crime by being a hit man for Capone in Chicago.
In his bathrobe, he received his honored guests of the evening, Marilyn and Roselli, in his suite, where the champagne waited. The dinner was secretive and could not be held downstairs. The Desert Inn’s maître d’ himself served as their special and very discreet waiter.
Marilyn would later relate to her confidants that after the third glass of champagne, her favorite drink, Giancana turned to her and toasted her as “the Queen of Hollywood.”
“You think you’re the Queen now, but wait until you see what I’m gonna do for you,” he said. “Instead of just being the Queen of a lot of blonde bimbos, I’ve decided you’ve got what it takes to become a world player.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she asked. “What kind of world player? Checkers? Chess? Pool?”
He laughed. “None of the above. “There are two roles open for you, and I can’t decide what part you’re to play.”
“But I’d be the star, right?”
“No, you’d get second billing to one of two very famous men. The two I have in mind are not quite there yet, but they’re on their way.”
“Could one of these men be Jack Kennedy?” she asked.
“You do get the point. I have it on reliable authority that he’s been poppin’ you. He’s bragged about it to his shithead brother. I’m friends with his old man, Joe. The other night, Joe told me that Bobby wants to pork you, too. The Kennedy brothers share, you know. Sometimes old Joe himself likes to get to the honeypot, too, if his boys praise a cunt enough.”
“But what does my giving Jack an innocent kiss once or twice have to do with you?”
“He’s going places—maybe to the very top. Leader of the Free World and all that crap. There’s talk that the Democrats in ’56 are going to run him as their vice presidential candidate with Adlai Stevenson heading the ticket.”
Two views of Sam Giancana
“What a joke!” Those were about the only words Roselli had uttered all evening. When he was with Giancana, he let his boss do all the talking. “Stevenson and Kennedy. A faggot and a whoremonger.”
“Mr. Stevenson is a homosexual?” she asked. “But he’s dated my former roommate, Shelley Winters.”
“Faggots sometimes use a woman as a beard,” Roselli said.
“A woman with a beard,” she asked. “What a dreadful combination.”
“I like to look to the future.” Giancana said. “Even though he’s a Catholic, I think I smell President on this kid, at least by 1960, not before. I plan to help put him in the Oval Office.”
“I don’t see how I can help you do that just by fucking him,” she said.
“Fucking is just the honeytrap,” Giancana said. “What I want you to do is to write down everything he tells you, and report back to Roselli, who’ll keep me posted. Blackmail is our game, and you of all people should know that. The other night, before I flew to Vegas, I watched that film of you and Johnny. Have you ever been deep-dicked by a cock like Stompanato’s?”
“On a few occasions,” she said, somewhat defiantly. “Take Milton Berle, for example.”
Brad Lewis, the author of Hollywood’s Celebrity Gangster: The Incredible Life and Times of Mickey Cohen, wrote:
“Misogynist Mickey regularly set up famous actresses, including Marilyn Monroe and Lana Turner, with many of the young men who worked for him. He filmed them having sex, so that he could sell the movies on the black market. If he wanted to influence an actress’s activities, he would threaten to make the film public.”
At Giancana’s private dinner, Marilyn signaled that she wanted more champagne. She seemed confused in trying to figure out just what Giancana wanted from her, as she’d later claim. “I think I get where you’re going. You want me to play a role like Greta Garbo in Mata Hari.”
“You catch on fast,” Giancana said.
“Well, maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” she said, although it may have been the champagne talking.
“I’m sure you will,” he said. “We’ve had to deal with the likes of Harlow, Lana Turner, and Rita Hayworth. It’s not just the blackmail we accumulate. It’s something else.”
“And just what is this something else you use to threaten a woman when she doesn’t play the game?”
“Even the greatest beauty in Hollywood such as yourself don’t look so good when one of our boys tosses sulfuric acid in her pretty face.”
She recoiled in horror, one hand gently touching her cheek as if it was contaminated. “You boys play rough. Screwing around with Jack Kennedy could get a girl in a lot of trouble. Who is this second man you mentioned? Maybe a relationship with him would be less dangerous.”
“Sorry, I can’t tell you that tonight,” he said. “I’ll ask Johnny here to set up our next meeting. He’ll bring you to me.” He looked at her suggestively. “Maybe then we’ll have a more pleasant evening.” He cast a glance over at Roselli. “Why should Johnny have all the fun?”
Back in Hollywood, when Marilyn relayed the details of her encounters with Giancana and Roselli, she left out a conclusion to her story. She didn’t say if she’d acquiesced to Giancana’s demands or not.
Years later, Carmen revealed that Marilyn did give in. “She could never imagine her face without its beauty. The idea of seeing her face as an acid-scarred monster, The Bride of Frankenstein, would not be her idea of a good time.”
She did confide to Carmen the conclusion of her weekend in Las Vegas with Roselli, knowing that her friend was an occasional off-again, on-again lover of Roselli.
“Did you sleep with Johnny, with Giancana, or with both?” Carmen asked her.
“With Johnny,” she said, “so you know the abuse I was in for. He doesn’t take a woman to bed to make love to her, but to humiliate her.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Carmen said.
“As you know, he likes to parade around naked as much as I do,” Marilyn said. “When we finally went to bed at around three in the morning, he plopped down and commanded, ‘Suck!’ I wet my lips and began to perform my specialty. But he slapped my face. ‘Listen, bitch,’ he told me. ‘When I say suck I mean only one thing.’ He turned over, presenting his buttocks to me.”
“Been there, done that,” Carmen said.
***
With no time off, Marilyn finished There’s No Business Like Show Business and flew to New York in September of 1954 to film the sequences in Manhattan for The Seven Year Itch. Fox wanted to keep the cash registers ringing.
It seemed that every studio in Hollywood wanted to produce The Seven Year Itch by Billy Wilder and George Axelrod, based on Axelrod’s play, with Wilder set to direct. But, to Marilyn, her role as “The Girl,” a TV model, was “just another one of those dumb blonde parts, and I want something more serious.”
Charles Feldman, her sometimes lover, had won the part for her, although she’d objected to having Tom Ewell cast as her leading man. She’d seen him in Adam’s Rib, in which he’d co-starred with Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Holliday.
“Ewell is really ugly, and I also hear he’s a homosexual,” she said. “I find his mouth looks like a carp. I hope we don’t have a kissing scene. God knows where that cocksucking mouth of his was the night before. He has the deadpan face of a hound dog.”
Feldman later observed that “Ewell might have directed that ‘cocksucking mouth” charge right back at Marilyn.”
“The part calls for an average-looking homely man,” Feldman had protested. “It’s not a pretty boy part; otherwise we would have cast Robert Wagner. The part calls for Ewell to have a lusty mischief in his eyes, and he does that better than any of the pretty boys.”
“I think all directors might as well call my character Marilyn Monroe, for that’s exactly what I play on the screen over and over again,” she said.
“But my dear,” said Feldman, “You’ve been around Hollywood long enough to know that all truly great stars play only themselves on the screen—Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Humphrey Bogart.”
Marilyn was cast as “the Girl,” who lived upstairs from Ewell and liked to keep her panties in the refrigerator during a long hot summer in New York City.
Arriving alone at Idlewild, Marilyn was besieged by reporters demanding to know if her marriage to DiMaggio was over. “Everything is fine between us,” she lied. “A happy marriage comes before anything.”
Donald O’Connor with MM in There’s No Business Like Show Business
“What she should have replied,” said Feldman, “was that a happy marriage comes before anything except her career, a family, and dozens of other men.”
During the filming, Marilyn bonded with her co-star, Evelyn Keyes, “Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister,” and they shared memories of director John Huston. Marilyn had had an affair with Huston the same year that Keyes divorced him (1950).
In spite of her original objections to Ewell, she ended up finding him very loving, supportive, and sympathetic to her angst. “Tom and I have one thing in common,” she told Wilder. “We both adore well-built men. It’s a competition between us as to whose will get Sonny Tufts first.” Actually, she had already seduced Tufts years before, in Las Vegas.
She was referring to the handsome actor who had fourth billing in the film. Tufts, when faced with the choice of Ewell vs. Marilyn, didn’t vacillate. Marilyn won.
Big (all over), blonde, and broad-shouldered, Tufts was on a downward spiral when he signed for his role in The Seven Year Itch. During the 1940s, he’d appeared on screen with another blonde, Betty Hutton, and with Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin’s wife.
He was hoping that the Monroe picture would revitalize his career. At the time Tufts met Marilyn, the mere mention of his name had become a punch line for comedians.
Marilyn had told Keyes, “I fear that someday I’ll be like Sonny. The mere mention of my name will evoke laughter in Hollywood. Jayne Mansfield will look like a serious actress when compared to me. My one hope is to enroll in the Actors Studio.”
Tufts, on the set of his final cinematic disaster, Cottonpickin’ Chicken-pickers (1967), claimed that Marilyn was very despondent over DiMaggio. “She couldn’t sleep, and in the wee hours of the morning liked to wander the deserted streets of Lower Manhattan, with a scarf covering her hair and wearing sunglasses. The Wall Street crowd was still asleep. I went with her, wandering through those ghostly caverns and willing to protect her. She could have been raped. She would walk for three or four miles without saying anything. Back in her hotel room, I got my reward for all those god damn strolls. That’s some gal, and I’ve had some of the best pussy in Hollywood, believe me.”
One night in New York, Tufts took Marilyn to an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village where the waiters sang opera. Management allowed Tufts to sing three numbers. “No one in the world would think Sonny Tufts is an opera singer,” she told him. “You’re good.”
“Everyone thinks I’m some dumb cowboy on the screen, but actually, I went to Yale,” he confessed. “But you know, in Hollywood, image is everything. In real life, you’re not Marilyn Monroe.”
On another night he took her to see Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. Later, during an après- theater dinner, she confided to him that “Miller is going to be my next husband, but he doesn’t know it yet.”
“That’s too god damn bad,” Tufts told her. “Tonight was the night I was going to propose.”
“It could never be,” she said. “The marriage of Sonny Tufts and Marilyn Monroe would make us even more of a laughing stock around America, even more than we are now.”
One night in Manhattan after midnight, Marilyn would film a sequence from The Seven Year Itch that became her most iconic image. In a scene set on a hot summer night, Ewell escorts Marilyn to a movie. On the way home to cool off, she stands, wearing a white dress, over a subway grate.
The novelist, Joyce Carol Oates, described it best:
“A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She’s standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blonde head is thrown rapturously back as an up-draft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. The dress is magic. Without the dress the girl would be female meat, raw and exposed.”
Sonny Tufts
“Do I wear panties or not?” she facetiously asked the director, Billy Wilder.
The first shot, with all the bright lights turned on, made her panties translucent.
Billy Wilder said, “You could see all the way to Honolulu.” The original footage of the scene was stolen from the Fox archives, and is believed to rest today in the files of a private collector.
DiMaggio arrived on the set with Walter Winchell, the columnist, who Marilyn had previously rewarded with her “favors,” although DiMaggio apparently had no knowledge of that.
Along with one-thousand early-morning rubberneckers, DiMaggio looked on in horror as Marilyn did seemingly endless takes of the wind whipping her dress up. Finally, he could stand it no more. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he told Winchell.
Later, Winchell claimed that “the death march of the Monroe/DiMaggio marriage really came to an end that night in the center of Manhattan. It was just one week short of becoming nine months of wedded hell.”
The billowing dress scene was the most famous shots of one of the most photographed actresses of all time. It would be blown up nearly fifty feet and placed in front of Loew’s State Theater in New York City for a long run.
Her poster became the best-selling in America. Marilyn herself later admitted that “red-blooded teenage boys probably masturbate to it.”
Noting her pouting delivery and puckered lips, the New York Daily Mirror claimed that she was “the personification of this decade’s glamour.”
The press called the skirt scene “the most dramatic since Lady Godiva took that horse ride in Coventry.”
***
Shortly before dawn at their suite at the St. Regis Hotel, DiMaggio and Marilyn indulged in their most violent confrontation. Her friend and makeup man, Whitey Snyder, claimed that “Joe often slapped her around. It was in his nature. It probably reminded her of her foster home with Albert and Ida Bolender, who often beat the hell out of her when she was a girl.”
A couple registered across the hall from Marilyn and DiMaggio later told the press what they heard coming from their suite. “You fucking slut!” came a man’s voice. “Showing your crotch for all the world to gape at.”
In the suite, he balled his slugger hands into fists, big hands, the hands of an athlete, and struck her body with them. After beating her severely, he stormed out the door of their suite. He didn’t plan to ever come back.
She confided to her hair-dresser, Sidney Guilaroff, “Joe slapped me around the hotel room while I screamed. I’m sure I was heard in the rooms nearby, but no one came to rescue me. You know, Sidney, the first time a man beats you up, it makes you angry. When it happens a second time, you have to be crazy to stay. I left him.”
Tom Ewell with MM in The Seven Year Itch
The next day, her makeup man discovered black and blue marks on her back, her left arm, and on her forehead. “No nude scenes today,” he told her, “but I can cover up that mark on your brow.”
“It’s over between us,” she said, “between Joe and me. I should never have married him. Even Tom Ewell would have been a better choice. Let’s just say Joe DiMaggio has struck out with Marilyn Monroe. Game over.”
***
Marilyn spoke frequently on the phone to her stepson, Joe DiMaggio, Jr. In one of those rare moments when “Big Joe” contacted “Little Joe,” he’d called his son after leaving the St. Regis “It’s all over between Marilyn and me,” he told the boy. “There is love there, but she is from Venus and I am from Mars.”
Joe Jr. immediately put through a call to Marilyn, telling her he was arriving in New York that night and wanted to stay with her in her suite at the St. Regis, so recently vacated by his errant father, who had also vacated most of his son’s life as well.
She invited him and eagerly looked forward to his visit. In spite of her troubles with his father, “Little Joe” had always held a special place in her heart. The family preferred to call him “Little Joe,” but she named him the more intimate “Joey.”
In her despair over Big Joe beating her and storming out, she called Jeanne Carmen. At some point, she related to her best girlfriend the news of Little Joe’s imminent arrival.
Joe DiMaggios, Jr. and Sr.
Marilyn revealed the details of her talk to Little Joe. She giggled before confiding in her friend, as if slightly embarrassed. “He told me that he had hoped ‘that you two guys would make it. But I’m not sure you will. Whatever happens, I want you to know that I’ll be the new man in your life to replace Joe. You can count on me. I’m old enough now to hit a home run.’ He actually said that to me,” Marilyn said, sounding drunk on champagne.
“Marilyn,” Carmen said, her name sounding like a chastisement. “How old is this kid? Isn’t he still in diapers?”
“We’ve gone swimming in the nude,” Marilyn said. “He may be called Little Joe, but he should be called Big Joe No. Two.” She giggled. “I knew he was coming on to me. Maybe it was the champagne. But I told him, ‘Are you making a girl an offer she can’t refuse?’”
“You’re taking a ride down a steep hill in a car with no brakes,” Carmen cautioned her. “Don’t even think about it.”
“It’s not so strange,” Marilyn said. “I mean, Zsa Zsa Gabor seduced her stepson, Nicky, when she was married to Conrad Hilton, and he was married to that cow, Elizabeth Taylor. When she was married to Nicholas Ray, Gloria Grahame had an affair with her thirteen-year-old stepson and later married him. I’ve gone to bed with Charlie Chaplin, but also with Sidney Chaplin and Charlie Chaplin, Jr. In fact, I used to share a bedroom with his two sons.”
“I know you’re taking your breakup with Joe really bad, but this is crazy talk,” Carmen said.
“Joe beat the hell out of me, and I want to get back at him,” Marilyn protested. “I’m black and blue.”
“But don’t do it with the kid,” Carmen said. “It will just fuck up his mind.”
“Fourteen used to be a fine old age,” Marilyn said. “At least back in the days of Daniel Boone, or so I read. Most men died by the age of thirty-five. Nature intended for young men to begin their sex lives at the age of puberty. Besides, I got his dad when he was graying at the temples. Maybe if I take up with his son, I can get to experience what it was like to have Joe at his peak, just as he was in 1941.”
“Dear, dear Marilyn,” Carmen said. “Please be careful. You’re swimming in shark-infested waters. If Joe ever finds this out, he’ll do more than beat you up.”
“But don’t you see?” Marilyn asked. “It’s good practice for me. When I’m fifty-five, I don’t plan to date any man who’s over twenty-five. That way, I’ll be known as the ageless beauty. The last time I hugged and kissed Joey goodbye, I could feel his erection pressing against me. One night in San Francisco, he admitted to me that he jerks off every night looking at my nude calendar.”
As author Fred Lawrence Guiles accurately wrote in Legend, The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe, “Marilyn won over the boy very early in their relationship. Visits with Marilyn became one of his chief joys whenever he was on vacation. His friendship with his stepmother would survive the marriage to DiMaggio and last until her death.”
Even when Joe Jr. was only twelve years old, Marilyn paraded around their house naked in front of him, especially when Joe Sr. was away. “Marilyn always liked kids,” claimed her former lover, the musician Fred Karger. “But she didn’t know how to relate to them. If it was a boy, she approached him with a come-on, very seductive. She liked young boys to be attracted to her. I’m sure her behavior was just as inappropriate in front of DiMaggio’s boy as it was with my own kids. That’s why I refused to marry her, because I didn’t see her as a proper mother.”
Sometimes DiMaggio complained to Marilyn that “you’re ruining my son.” Once, when they were staying in New York at the Hotel St. Moritz, they’d gone for a walk in Central Park. Passing Rumplemayer’s, a famous ice cream parlor, Joe Jr. wanted an ice cream soda, but DiMaggio refused, claiming, “Don’t you know how much those god damn things cost?”
Later, back at the hotel, Marilyn slipped Joe Jr. a twenty-dollar bill. Later, when DiMaggio found out what she’d done, he slapped her in front of his son.
In San Francisco, Marilyn and Joe Jr. often went off on their own, exploring the city and lunching and shopping together. She wore little makeup, dark glasses, and a wig. On only a few occasions was she recognized. Apparently, she was aware of his growing sexual interest in her as he matured and reached puberty, and she did Little to discourage that. “If anything, she prick-teased him,” in the words of her friend, Robert Slatzer. He once drove them to the beach at Venice. “My God, I couldn’t believe it. She was openly flirting with him.”
At one point, Jeanne Carmen joined Joe Jr. and Marilyn when she went shopping for new dresses. “She took us right into the fitting room and stripped down naked in front of the boy. It was obvious he was mesmerized. I didn’t want to piss her off, so I didn’t say anything.”
She used to tell Joe Jr. that, “I desperately want to have children. I picture myself having as many as six kids.”
As Joe Jr. reportedly told one of his friends, “If Marilyn really wanted to have children, she could have had that brood of six by now. At least one of them, if it were a boy, would have been Charlie Chaplin III.”
DiMaggio seemed to resent the burgeoning relationship between Marilyn and his son. He complained, “I love him or at least I used to, but I just can’t bond with him. He rejects me. I think he’ll soon be a pothead. As I found out, he smoked his first marijuana cigarette when he was twelve years old. I beat the shit out of him.”
Joe Jr. confided in Marilyn that when he was growing up, “Dad was always gone somewhere. Of course, his career as a baseball star was at its peak back then. Even when he could stay home, he preferred to go to Toots Shor’s restaurant with his buddies and not stay home with me and mother. He never even taught me how to play baseball.”
He also complained that his father never attended even one of his football games when he went to Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. “Hot damn!” he said to Marilyn. “Would I have been a big man on campus if my famous dad had shown up for just one game.”
When he lived with his mother, Dorothy, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan, he said, “my only entertainment as a kid was riding up and down in the elevator. For me, it was summer camp, military school, boarding school. He just threw his son away for more important things in his life.”
When DiMaggio had first met Marilyn, he was considering reuniting with his former wife, Dorothy Arnold, a minor actress whom he’d married in 1939. Joe Jr. was born on October 23, 1941.
After divorcing DiMaggio, she had married a stockbroker and that union was even less successful than her first. She divorced him and began dating DiMaggio again, spending a romantic snowbound weekend with him in Nevada. She even told a reporter that, “Joe and I are seriously considering getting married again.”
That plan quickly ended when DiMaggio began dating Marilyn. Dorothy was furious when the newspapers published a photograph of Joe Jr. posing with Marilyn in a skimpy bathing suit beside the pool at the Bel Air Hotel. Infuriated, Dorothy filed charges against DiMaggio, hoping to restrict his visitation rights. Privately, she told friends, “I don’t want that sluttish blonde around my boy. I don’t want him exposed to drinking and jive talk.” She filed charges with Judge Elmer Doyle. “Little Butchie should not be taken to adult places,” she insisted.
Newspaper reporters called it a catfight “between the ex-bride of the Yankee Clipper and the future Mrs. DiMaggio.” Privately, Dorothy told friends, “From what I hear, Joe and Marilyn would leave Butchie in the pool and go upstairs to one of the hotel rooms to shack up.”
Leaving court, Dorothy told reporters that Joe Jr. was “a little young for the smart set.” In a court document, she claimed that she had hoped that the birth of her son would have made her husband “realize his responsibilities as a married man, but even the baby’s arrival did not change him.”
One night at a party, Marilyn encountered Joseph Cotten, who two years before had been her co-star with Jean Peters in Niagara (1953). She told him that she was devastated at all the unkind charges Dorothy was making against her. “I’m being called an unfit mother. I’d kill myself if I am the reason Joey can’t be with his father.” Even so, she continued to flirt with Joe Jr.
DiMaggio, Sr. refused to attend a ceremony at Blackfoy Military Academy when his son was ranked at the top of his class. Marilyn attended, arriving late, interrupting the ceremony when all eyes turned on her.
Joe DiMaggio, Jr. with MM.
It was natural for young boys on the dawn of puberty to exaggerate or brag about their sexual conquests, and Joe Jr. was no exception. He’d told his classmates that he’d taken nude swims with Marilyn and that she’d let him feel her breasts.
At the end of the ceremony, Joe Jr. rushed to embrace Marilyn and give her a passionate kiss. He later told her, “My instructors tell me that I’m very good in weaponry.”
“What kind of weaponry?” she asked, teasing him.
Dorothy tied up DiMaggio in court for two years, but Judge Doyle, a baseball fan, eventually ruled against her. He said, “It’s too bad we don’t have more men like Joe DiMaggio coming to this court, trying to make good American citizens out of their boys.”
When Joe Jr. came home in uniform from the military academy, Marilyn tried to explain her relationship with him. “I can never take the place of your mother, but I want to be your special friend.”
“Make that special girlfriend, and you’ve got a deal,” he told her.
“Aren’t you a bit young to be talking like that?” she asked him.
“Growing bigger every day,” he bragged. “I’m advanced for my age. All the cadets are jealous of me when we take a shower together. I’m lifting weights, building myself up. Getting quite a build on me, wouldn’t you say?”
“You’re going to make some girl very happy,” she assured him.
“I want to marry a gal like the gal who married dear old Dad, if you get my drift.”
***
Before leaving New York for a return to Hollywood, Marilyn spent an off-the-record weekend in Washington, D.C. She flew there for a secret rendezvous with Senator Kennedy in a suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel.
She was a kiss-and-tell mistress. Shelley Winters said, “Marilyn liked to brag about her relationship with Jack, and she told several of us plenty. She wore her affair like a badge of honor and seemed to shout, ‘Look at me. I’m sleeping with the man who’ll be, some time in the future, the leader of the Free World.’ Of course, she’d slept with big time movie stars and producers, but nothing like a future candidate for such high office.”
At the Hay-Adams that night, she spent a complete evening with the senator. Usually their time together was very limited, as he always seemed on the verge of having to leave for another engagement.
But on this occasion, so she claimed, she spent all night in the same bed with him, but didn’t actually get that much shut-eye. She’d decided not to take sleeping pills, and she lay awake throughout most of the night. She was afraid to move, not wanting to disturb him. After they’d had sex, he’d fallen asleep. “He was a gentle snorer,” she later said. She was disappointed that, like Joe DiMaggio, “the senator was not a cuddler. He just did the dirty deed, turned over in bed, and went to sleep.”
The sex with him was as before. “He lay on his back, which always caused him pain, and let me do all the work.”
That morning, both of them rose at ten. She discovered that he, like herself, was not ashamed to walk around nude. Even Jackie confessed that at Hyannis Port, Jack often came out naked under a towel. “Sometimes that towel dropped, and he didn’t exactly rush to cover himself again. He was very casual about nudity, even when ladies were present.”
When Marilyn learned that Jackie was in Hyannis Port, she made a special request. Please drive me down into Virginia so I can see where you live.” At first, he seemed reluctant, but finally gave in to her request since it was a Sunday and the servants were off.
For a girl who had grown up in California, the ride through the horse country of Virginia, with its gentleman farmer estates, was like entering another world. As they drove along, he pointed out estates owned by influential movers-and-shakers from among the East Coast establishment, but the names were not familiar to her.
As they neared JFK’s home at Hickory Hill, he told her that the house had once been the command headquarters of the Union’s General George McClellan during the Civil War. He even told her what he’d paid for it: $125,000. “Jackie spent more remodeling it and furnishing it with antiques than the purchase price,” he said.
When the house came into view, she found it a dream estate, a sprawling white Georgian house set on six acres of woodland above the Potomac River.
The location was in McLean, two miles from Merrywood, the home where Jacqueline Kennedy had spent part of her childhood. JFK told her there was a swimming pool at the bottom of the hill. The old stables had been restored and housed Jackie’s horses. Inside the house, she was stunned at the antiques and paintings. “My god, it looks like a museum.”
He looked at her and smiled. “That’s what it is. That’s Jackie for you. If I ever get to the White House, she’ll probably throw out all the furniture and redecorate it.”
Hickory Hill.
He led her to the kitchen, where he made coffee. Sitting at the table, she asked him, “Do you two spend much time here?”
“No,” he said, “we’re too busy. We often have different schedules. The place is too big for us. I don’t like it. We’re thinking of selling it to my brother, Bobby. He and Ethel plan to have at least twelve kids.”
“I hope all of them are boys,” she said. “It would be nice to know that an array of beautiful girls in the future will have a dozen Kennedy boys to enjoy.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said.
His telephone rang, but he didn’t bother to answer it.
“Sometimes Jackie and I go off together. One time we were invited aboard a yacht, the Christina. It’s owned by Aristotle Onassis. I had wanted to meet Winston Churchill who was on board. He was at least eighty, I think, and had retired as prime minister. He didn’t have much to say to me. I was wearing a white dinner jacket. Jackie later told me she suspected that Churchill thought I was a waiter. She impressed both Churchill and Ari. Ari told me that he thought my wife had a carnal soul.”
“What would he have said about me?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “He would merely have ripped that polka dot dress off you and raped you right on deck.”
“Men, you can’t get enough,” she giggled.
“I have a medical reason for that,” he said. “I have to take large doses of cortisone for my Addison’s disease,” he said.
“Does that do something to your libido?” she asked.
“It does, but not in the way you may be thinking. The doctor warned me that it makes me priapic.”
“What in hell is that?” she asked.
“It’s named for the Greek God Priapus, the god of male generative powers. It makes you virile. Horny, if you like.”
“Oh, Jack,” she said. “Not again. We already did it this morning.”
“Time for a matinée.” He led her upstairs to the bedroom where he slept with Jackie. Fully dressed, he lay down on his back, patting the mattress. “Come over here, doll, and unzip me and do your thing.”
When it was over, she asked him, “Does Jackie know you have women on the side?”
“Sure she does,” he said. “She learned to accept that all men have their mistresses. She was taught that lesson as a girl. Her father, “Black Jack” Bouvier, had numerous affairs with lots of other women, even men like Cole Porter and Cary Grant. Jackie and I have our rules. I’m never to rub her face in it.”
Once again, he fell asleep after some pillow talk. But, as she later claimed, she couldn’t sleep. She decided to explore the house a bit, beginning with Jackie’s closet. She was fascinated by her wardrobe, and found a white gown particularly appealing. She was nude, so she tried it on.
As she was looking at herself in a full-length mirror, she saw and even felt how wrong it was for her.
Suddenly, Jack woke up and discovered her. “What in hell are you doing?”
“I was just trying on one of Jackie’s Dior gowns. But it doesn’t fit in the breasts. Doesn’t Jackie have breasts?”
He rose up in bed in anger. “Get the hell out of that dress and hang it back up where you found it. Don’t ever do that again.”
During the ride back to Washington, he was mostly silent. She feared he regretted taking her to Hickory Hill. She shouldn’t have tried on that Dior.
He let her off about a block from the entrance to the Hay-Adams Hotel. “I don’t want to be seen,” he said.
Before getting out of the car, she asked him, “When will I see you again?”
He didn’t answer at first. “I don’t know. I’ll call you. I’m thinking of seeking the vice presidential nomination on the ticket with Adlai Stevenson. I’m going to be busy.”
“But I’m sure you’ll miss your Marilyn,” she said. “I’ll come running whenever you call, even if you interrupt an acceptance speech I’m giving the Academy for winning an Oscar.”
***
Fearing disapproval and perhaps afraid that DiMaggio would find out, Marilyn never spoke of the brief time in New York she spent with Joe DiMaggio, Jr. He did stay with her in her suite, but they didn’t appear together in public.
Jeanne Carmen referred to it as an “off-the-record weekend.” Whatever happened, a bond between Joe Jr. and Marilyn was sealed that would endure throughout the remainder of her short life. It included a phone call from him on the night before her murder. Joe Jr. did tell one of his girlfriends, “I loved Marilyn Monroe, but she seemed out of my reach. You can’t blame a guy for trying.”
Lena Pepitone, Marilyn’s one-time maid, privately told friends that one morning she caught Joe Jr. and Marilyn in her bed, both of them nude.
Back in Hollywood, and under the guidance of her drama coach, Natasha Lytess, Marilyn completed work on The Seven Year Itch in November of 1954. It had run $150,000 over its budget.
At the end of the shoot, Charles Feldman threw a lavish private party for Marilyn at Romanoff’s, inviting only guests on the A-list. Darryl F. Zanuck, Samuel Goldwyn, and Jack Warner were there. Famous couples showed up, including Betty Grable and Harry James and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Jimmy Stewart was seen talking with Claudette Colbert and Doris Day.
Marilyn was especially attracted to William Holden and Gary Cooper. She’d told Carmen that she’d seen Holden in Golden Boy and had fallen in love with him. “I can show him a better time than that dyke,” She was referring, of course to his Golden Boy co-star and lover at the time, the bisexual actress Barbara Stanwyck. Stanwyck had put the make on Marilyn during the making of Clash by Night (1952).
“I’d also like to have at least a one-night stand with the Montana Mule,” Marilyn told Carmen. Gary Cooper went by that nickname among the women of Hollywood because of his prodigious endowment.
“As she was preparing to divorce DiMaggio, Marilyn was staging so many one-night stands I couldn’t keep up,” Carmen recalled. The slogan ‘So Many Men, So Little Time,’ must have been created for her.”
Keeping A-list Hollywood waiting for one hour, Marilyn had shown up at Romanoff’s in a black tulle gown cut low. She danced with her idol, Clark Gable, and she still carried a picture of him as Rhett Butler in her wallet. Many biographers have claimed that Gable and Marilyn had a one-night stand that night. Actually they’d had a one-night stand years before.
Marilyn was slightly heavier and pregnant, with Carmen recalling her “looking radiant.” She was an expectant mother, but confessed to Carmen, “I don’t know who the father is. I doubt if it’s Joe’s child.”
Biographer Sandra Shevey claimed that Dr. Leon Krohn, Marilyn’s gynaecologist, had examined her and arranged for her to be admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. She was there for four days, and from reports, she had an abortion in spite of her previous claims that she’d wanted children.
William Holden.
After checking out, she appeared dissipated and in desperate need of rest. She said, “I looked into a mirror, and Marilyn Monroe was nowhere to be seen. What happened to her?”
Back home, she acted out a different script from the happy marriage scenario she’d presented at Idlewild Airport when she’d arrived for the New York shoot of The Seven Year Itch. She called attorney Jerry Giesler and asked him to proceed with court papers for her divorce from DiMaggio. Giesler called Harry Brand, who handled publicity at Fox, to make the announcement that led to world headlines.
Robert Mitchum, Marilyn’s lover from the set of The River of No Return, had advised her “to get Giesler.” He’d gotten Mitchum off on a marijuana rap. Thanks to Giesler, Errol Flynn had avoided going to jail for statutory rape, and Busby Berkeley had escaped a murder charge. Giesler had also won acquittals for three performers who had been Marilyn’s former lovers—the stripper Lili St. Cyr, Charlie Chaplin, and gangster Bugsy Siegel.
Giesler had become the attorney for the stars. He’d started out in Los Angeles on his first job, driving a horse-drawn lumber wagon, for two dollars a day.
The Monroe/DiMaggio love affair and their subsequent doomed marriage had been one of the 20th century’s most dazzling pairings, and their clash of two powerful egos was played out in public. Shadows loomed on their path— her need for endless love, her affairs; his temper, his jealousy. In time, the hawk-faced baseball hero and the screen goddess ended their marriage because, as he claimed, “I was tired of sharing my wife—naked at that—with the world.”
On October 4, 1954, Harry Brand, chief of publicity at 20th Century Fox, announced to the press that Marilyn and her baseball player were breaking up “because of the incompatibility resulting from the conflicting demands of their careers.” That terse announcement launched a media feeding frenzy.
At the time of the announcement, DiMaggio was still living under the same California roof as Marilyn, but sleeping in the ground-floor den, not in her upstairs bedroom. When she had to face an array of international reporters who had gathered outside—“like vultures,” she’d said—she called makeup artist Whitey Snyder to come over and repair her face.
He made his way through the crowd of reporters and photographers gathered outside her home on Palm Tree Drive in Beverly Hills and entered the house through the back door. In the living room, he found DiMaggio watching a football game on television.
Going upstairs, Snyder discovered Marilyn with two black eyes. Apparently, the night before, she had refused DiMaggio’s attempts at reconciliation.
She would later tell her confidants that “Joe raped me when I refused to have sex with him. He also beat me.”
It took a lot of work, but Snyder repaired her face as best he could. “We can always claim it was eye shadow or else your mascara was running.”
In the living room, DiMaggio took his eyes off his game on TV to tell her goodbye. By that point, Giesler had arrived on the scene to escort Marilyn out the door.
When she stepped outside, her appearance created a sensation. Questions from all corners were yelled at her. But all she could do was sob, “I’m sorry…I have nothing to say.” Giesler escorted her into the rear seat of a waiting limousine.
Jerry Giesler, Marilyn Monroe
Within a half hour, DiMaggio himself emerged from the house. When reporters asked him where he was going, he allegedly said, “I’m going back to the City On the Bay,” meaning, of course, San Francisco.
Once in San Francisco, DiMaggio privately told friends that Marilyn’s sexual behavior was “abnormal—I mean with men, but she’s also abnormal in that she has occasional lesbian affairs, including with her drama coach.” He was referring, of course, to Natasha Lytess.
***
Unknown to DiMaggio, Marilyn had met privately with Frank Sinatra and told him she planned to divorce DiMaggio in a court in Santa Monica. “He’s cruel to me, goes for days without speaking, and holds my film roles in contempt. One time he went ten entire days and spoke not a word to me. I begged him to tell me what I’d done wrong. Finally, when he did speak, he said, ‘I’m tired of your God damn nagging.’ Then he stormed out the door and was gone for an entire month.”
Before leaving Sinatra’s villa at Palm Springs that hot afternoon, she made an astonishing request. “If I divorce Joe, will you promise to marry me when we’re both free of entanglements? Knowing you’ll eventually marry me will give me the courage to go through with the divorce.”
“You’re on, kid,” he told her, although it is highly doubtful if he meant it.
Privately, he told Dean Martin and others, “I wish Marilyn would divorce Joe. He’s not right for her. She even offered to give up her career for the sucker, and even that didn’t help the relationship. For Marilyn to give up her career— now that’s making the big sacrifice.”
She called Sinatra when Judge Orlando H. Rhodes granted her interlocutory decree, with her divorce scheduled to become final in one year. “I’ve just counted the days on my calendar. I was married to Joe for 286 days.”
Sinatra was playing a dangerous game, being Marilyn’s confidant and protector on the one hand, and DiMaggio’s good pal on the other. He seemed torn in his loyalties.
DiMaggio didn’t want the divorce and developed a plan to sabotage it. Sinatra agreed to meet him for dinner at one of their favorite Italian restaurants in Hollywood, Villa Capri. Previously, he had lent DiMaggio the services of his private detective, Barney Ruditsky. As a favor to DiMaggio, Sinatra agreed that Ruditsky could “get hot on Marilyn’s trail and learn the dirt, especially who she’s fucking.”
When Ruditsky arrived at the Villa Capri, he told both DiMaggio and Sinatra that Marilyn was “shacked up with some woman” at an apartment at Waring Avenue and Kilkea Drive.
This came as no surprise to either man, both of whom had heard of some previous lesbian involvements of Marilyn’s, with such stellar lights as Shelley Winters, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck.
DiMaggio told Sinatra that he wanted him to accompany him to the apartment house and break in on Marilyn. That way, he might stall the divorce, or make her forget all about it, if he had a detective photograph her in a compromising situation with another woman. “Marilyn might have survived that nude calendar scandal, but none of her fans would stand for it if she’s caught in some lesbian affair,” DiMaggio said.
“After all these years in Hollywood, I’m never surprised at what men will do with other men when they’re alone or women with women,” Sinatra said. “Surely you’ve had a few blow-jobs in your day in some lonely shower room.”
“Forget that shit,” DiMaggio said. “I want you to go with me. I need you to back me up.”
“Okay, God damn it,” a drunken Sinatra said. “I think it’s a stupid stunt, but you seem determined to go through with it.”
That night of November 5, 1954 would live in infamy in the annals of Hollywood scandal. In separate vehicles, Sinatra and DiMaggio, and four “private dicks,” arrived at the apartment house where they hoped to entrap Marilyn.
Sinatra later maintained that he waited in his automobile outside, but witnesses asserted otherwise. The corps of private detectives consisted of Ruditsky himself, along with his cohorts, John Seminola, Philip Irwin, and Patsy D’Amore.
One of the detectives had brought an ax to cut through the door; another carried a camera to capture the sexual tryst in a photograph.
After the apartment’s door was smashed in, DiMaggio led the “posse” into the room as one of the detectives shined a flashlight on the bed’s lone occupant, who had gone to sleep.
It was not Marilyn and a girlfriend, but the fifty-year-old Florence Kotz, who had retired for the night. Thinking it was a “band of burglars,” as she later claimed, she screamed at the top of her lungs.
She later told friends, “I thought they were going to rape me.”
Joe DiMaggio with Frank Sinatra
When Sinatra turned on the light, she recalled, “I couldn’t believe my eyes. Along with these other guys, I recognized Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, two of the most famous men in America. I suspected those two Lotharios wouldn’t have needed to break down any woman’s door for rape.”
DiMaggio had ordered the break-in at the wrong door. Marilyn, along with her lover, Hal Schaefer, were in the upstairs apartment, which belonged to a girlfriend of hers, Sheila Stewart, who had graciously lent it to Marilyn for the night. Grabbing Shaefer’s arm, Marilyn fled with him out the back door and hailed a taxi, leaving her own car parked in front of the building.
Schaefer remains one of Marilyn’s least publicized lovers. His career spanned seventy years, and he was one of the leading vocal coaches of Hollywood. He’d worked with Marilyn on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, orchestrating her biggest hit, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
Hal Schaefer (top) and (bottom) front page of the tabloid that exposed the Sinatra and DiMaggio “Wrong Door Raid”
Schaefer was also a pianist, conductor, arranger, composer, and accompanist. As long as it lasted, he had a romance with Marilyn.
The police were called, but by then the “burglars” were back at the Villa Capri, ordering fresh pasta. In the police report, the raid on Florence Kotz’s apartment was reported as an attempted burglary.
There was an ironic end to that night that was not reported. Yet another private detective had been assigned to stake out the blonde bombshell’s official residence. After the raid, Marilyn drove up alone and entered her house. About an hour later, DiMaggio by himself also drove up.
The detective saw Marilyn answer the door in her panties, wearing no bra. She let DiMaggio into the house. The detective remained at his post until five o’clock that morning. DiMaggio had not left the house all night.
As Sinatra had anticipated, Kotz filed a $200,000 lawsuit, but his attorney was able to get her to settle for $7,500. When word about the raid leaked to a reporter, Sinatra angrily shouted, “Case closed.”
He paid the final settlement himself. “Tightwad Joe didn’t cough up a penny. And it was the fucker’s idea, not mine.”
The story might have died, but Confidential magazine published the details in its September, 1955 issue. The break-in on Kotz became known as “The Wrong Door Raid.”
***
“As much as I understood Marilyn, and I think I understood her better than any of her friends, she shocked me every time we got together with another revelation,” Carmen said. “I visited her after the divorce and she delivered her shock du jour.”
Marilyn had revealed to Carmen that the nights both before and after her hearing before a divorce judge, where she testified against DiMaggio, she spent it with him in Frank Sinatra’s apartment. “He violated his rule of only one round per night,” Marilyn said. “Before dawn’s early light, Joe was good for three rounds, each of them terrific. And do you know where I spent the first night after I was granted a divorce from Joe? Also in Sinatra’s apartment. And do you know who was in bed with me that night? The ex-Mr. Marilyn Monroe.”
Even though she’d pressed for a divorce, Marilyn felt lonely and abandoned after leaving court. She made an attempt to get in touch with Stanley Gifford, whom she believed may have been her real father, and not Martin Edward Mortensen as so often reported. Gifford had recently married for the third time, and Marilyn got his new wife on the phone.
Even though she was arguably the most famous movie star in the world, he refused to take her call. She was mortified and plotted revenge. She told friends that she was tempted to disguise herself, approach her father in a bar (he was a heavy drinker), and “shack up with him and then ask him, ‘How does it feel to fuck your own daughter?’”
Back in Los Angeles, two policemen spotted Marilyn, a divorced woman, scantily dressed late at night. They stopped the squad car and inquired about what was the matter. She was crying.
“My God, you’re Marilyn Monroe,” one of the cops said.
She looked at them. “I’m just a pretty girl the world will soon forget.”
“She practically threw herself at us,” one of the policemen confessed to a tabloid, which refused to publish his revelations. “I got in the back seat while my friend drove. She gave me a blow-job. Then my friend got in the back seat while I drove around, and he got a blow-job. She was a great cocksucker. Obviously, she’d had a lot of experience. She swallowed, too. When it was over, we drove her home and thanked her.”
In the days that followed, Marilyn suffered a recurring pelvic pain, with severe cramps that extended down to her legs. For the first time in her life, she experienced dyspareunia [painful sexual intercourse due to medical or psychological reasons]. Her agony became so severe, she visited a doctor, who conducted a gynecological examination.
It revealed that she was suffering from endometriosis, a medical condition in which cells from the lining of the uterus appear and flourish outside the uterine cavity, in this case, in and around her ovaries.
“Oh, my God,” she lamented to her doctor and her close girlfriends. “I have the most desired vagina on the planet, but if any man could see an X-ray of what is going on inside me, he’d never want to put his most treasured possession down that hole.”
Ten days after the divorce, DiMaggio, to the surprise of almost everyone, was seen driving Marilyn to the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. There, he checked her in for a gynecological operation.
He held her hand before and after the delicate operation and filled her room with red, white, yellow, pink, and lavender roses.
When Sidney Skolsky asked her about her post-divorce relationship with DiMaggio, she told him, “In most movies, certainly romantic comedies, the couple live happily ever after—fade out, kissing scene. Joe and I are now living out what comes after when they lived happily ever after.”
A week after the divorce, DiMaggio called from San Francisco. What he said to her is not known except for one lingering statement that she later claimed sounded almost like a threat.
“He told me that I’d never get rid of him…ever.”
***
Wanting “to get the hell out of Hollywood,” Marilyn flew into New York during the closing weeks of 1954 to turn much of her life and all of her career over to her Svengali, fashion photographer Milton Greene.
As Marilyn remembered it, “Milton wasn’t much bigger than me. He had the sweetest brown eyes and could have looked like a young John Garfield if John Garfield had been chewed over by a lion who didn’t have all of his teeth.”
Ever since they’d met in 1949, she had been entranced by him and had talked endlessly about forming a partnership with him one day. She was only a starlet when she first met the personable twenty-seven-year old. “You’re young enough to be a boy,” she said.
“And you are young enough to be a girl,” he answered back.
From such an unlikely introduction, a bond was formed. It was obvious that each of them was attracted to the other. He told her how much he wanted her to pose for him.
“With or without clothes?” she asked.
“With clothes,” he told her.
By ten o’clock that night, she found herself in his bedroom at the Château Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. “Milton was an ardent lover,” Marilyn later confided to Shelley Winters. “But he’s more attracted to fashion model types than to a Venus like me.”
Marilyn would tell her maid, Lena Pepitone, that Greene “did everything he could to make me look like a Vogue model…a fat Vogue model. Mr. Kenneth, nail girls, makeup girls, skin girls, dressmaker, everything. I think he wanted to make me another Amy, a sophisticated New York fashion model. He gave up pretty quick.” Greene, at the time, was married to Amy.
As a celebrity photographer, Greene wasn’t in the same league as Richard Avedon or Cecil Beaton, but he was rising fast. He was also a well-known photographer of celebrities, his subjects including Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Judy Garland, and Ava Gardner.
In 1953, Look magazine assigned Greene to photograph Marilyn in Hollywood, and it was here that their dream of forming a business partnership was cemented, with a little romance thrown in on the side.
Greene had been married before, but had divorced his first wife and had married Amy. The two of them lived in a farmhouse near Litchfield, Connecticut, to which they invited Marilyn.
Marilyn anticipated that she would not like Amy, but she bonded with Milton’s wife, finding her “as tiny as a nightingale, the smallest fashion model in New York. She was as beautiful as if she’d just popped out of a cake on the society pages. Except her arms were so thin I didn’t see how she could make love without getting crushed under Milton’s weight.”
While in Hollywood, Greene photographed Marilyn “the way I want you to look.” Before their partnership ended, he would pose her for fifty-two different sessions, including the celebrated “Black Sitting,” where she was photographed against deep black backdrops, with her face sometimes only slightly illuminated.
Over dinner in Hollywood, Marilyn had confided to Greene that she’d been paid only $18,000 for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, her co-star, Jane Russell, getting $100,000.
Three views of Milton Greene
“You’re worth a million dollars per picture,” he told Marilyn. “Fox is just using you.”
She also shared her dream that in future pictures, she’d be teamed with such actors as Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Paul Newman, and “most definitely James Dean.”
From Manhattan, the Greenes drove her to their Connecticut farmhouse, where she more or less moved in. For the final day of 1954, she preferred to remain in their home while they attended a New Year’s Eve party. Before he left the house that night, she told Greene, “I want to be more than a movie star. I want to be a great movie star. You must see that that happens.”
For Christmas, he’d given her an elegant leather-bound diary—not the infamous “Red Diary” she maintained in 1961 and 1962.
Greene told her that in it, she should write down the details of her encounters with famous men and women, including Senator Kennedy. “We’ll need all these memories when we publish your memoirs when you’re eighty. I assure you that I can get an advance of twelve million dollars for them. You keep a diary, and in time, it will keep you.”
Before facing the world as “the new Marilyn Monroe,” Milton set out to change her look and especially her wardrobe. “You dress like a slob…a shmatte,” he told her. “You exhibit no class, no taste. If you want to be a great actress, quit dressing like a dumb blonde and carry yourself with elegance and grace like Audrey Hepburn. Don’t look like some whore trying to turn a trick on 8th Avenue.”
“Been there, done that,” she said. “That’s how I met Brando.’
Milton asked Amy to take Marilyn on a shopping expedition along Fifth Avenue and purchase a new wardrobe for herself, which he agreed to pay for, including a white sable coat. Amy had told her, “Mink is for futbol. If you must wear fur, make it sable or ermine.”
Later, after she’d gotten the coat, Marilyn claimed, “I loved every Little animal that sacrificed its life to make the coat happen for me. The first night I owned it, I slept with all those dear little white animals in my bed.”
At Saks and Bonwit Teller’s, Amy discovered that Marilyn wasn’t embarrassed to go nude in a dressing room, in spite of Peeping Toms who saw fit to open the curtains to gape at her.
On that afternoon, Amy, along with several sales clerks, discovered that Marilyn wore no panties and wasn’t entirely displeased with what she called “the scent of a woman.” Since she hadn’t used peroxide, her pubic hair appeared quite dark.
“Maybe I should use deodorant,” she told Amy, “but I do like a Little sniff of myself from time to time—and so do many of my lovers, except Ronald Reagan. He took a shower before sex and right after sex. He was the cleanest man I ever knew.”
On January 5, 1955, Marilyn and Greene were ready to face the press with the announcement that they’d formed Marilyn Monroe Productions, with Marilyn herself as its president.
Before a sea of photographers, she looked dazzling with her hair dyed platinum like Jean Harlow’s, her role model of the 1930s. She faced nearly a hundred members of the press, wearing a white ermine coat and a white satin dress.
She made it clear that she wanted to be taken seriously as an actress— “no more dumb blonde roles.” It was ironic that her first choice of a movie for Marilyn Monroe Productions would be William Inge’s Bus Stop, in which she’d play Cherie, another bubble-headed blonde.
She revealed to the press that day that she was considering appearing in such films as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “Not as one of the brothers, but as Grushenka.”
“How to you spell that, Marilyn?” one of the reporters shouted at her.
She looked annoyed. “Look it up.”
Milton Greene was a friend of Marlene Dietrich and arranged a meeting between these two femmes fatales on the night of Marilyn’s press conference. “The world’s most glamorous grandmother” allowed herself to be caught on camera standing next to the more youthful Marilyn with her protruding breasts.
After the session, Marlene invited Marilyn back to her apartment. “I’m a very good cook. I also hear that Fox is preparing to film The Blue Angel again, the movie that made me a star. I must talk to you about this.”
Marilyn seemed somewhat embarrassed that Marlene had learned that Fox was working on a script for a modern version of The Blue Angel. Marilyn had only recently seen the English-language version of Marlene’s The Blue Angel, which had originally been released in 1930 and directed by her Svengali, Josef von Sternberg and starring Emil Jannings, who was an immensely popular star in Germany at the time. Marlene played Lola Lola, a petty bourgeois Berlin tart, with dazzling legs and a come-hither manner. One German critic wrote that she played the role with a “callous egotism and cool insolence.”
Although nervous about being alone with Marlene—she’d heard tales—Marilyn was eager to be in the company of one of her early role models. As a young girl, she’d seen most of her American movies from the 1930s.
In the book My Story, published more than a Truman Capote decade after Marilyn’s death, Marilyn is alleged to have written: “I was young, blonde, and curvaceous, and I had learned to talk huskily like Marlene Dietrich and to walk a Little wantonly and to bring emotion into my eyes when I wanted to. And though these achievements landed me no job, they brought a lot of wolves whistling at my heels.”
Truman Capote
Marilyn’s night with Marlene would be the first entry she would make in the leather-bound diary Greene had given her as a Christmas present. En route to Marlene’s apartment, she talked not of The Blue Angel, but of author Truman Capote.
“Milton told me you’re having dinner with Capote tomorrow night,” Marlene said. “Have your guard up. He pretends to be your friend, and then spreads the most vicious gossip about you. His latest claim was that he was visiting me and saw Eleanor Roosevelt emerge nude from my bedroom. He claimed that Eleanor had long had a crush on me. That may be true, of course, and, if so, I don’t blame her. But Capote did not see Eleanor emerge naked from my bedroom.”
As she sat drinking champagne with Marlene on her champagne-colored sofa, Marilyn decided to bring up The Blue Angel herself. “I want you to know I’m thrilled at the idea of playing Lola Lola. Of course, I could never create the performance that you did.”
Top: Marlene Dietrich Bottom: MM, Marlene Dietrich, and Milton Greene
“Of course not, darling, and I understand that,” she said. “Zanuck is out of his mind to think of redoing The Blue Angel. Every actress in Germany wanted to play Lola Lola, even Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s mistress. The search for an actress to play Lola Lola was not equaled until David O. Selznick began his search for Scarlett O’Hara.”
“Do you have any advice on how I should play the part?” Marilyn asked, appearing more innocent than she was, as she later confessed to her diary.
“Josef von Sternberg, my director, said the part called for an actress to represent a new incarnation of sex. At first, he didn’t want me. He said my bottom was all right, but that Lola Lola must have a face.”
“What an odd thing to say,” Marilyn said. “You have one of the most fabulous faces ever seen on the silver screen.”
“That’s true,” she agreed, “but Josef and I had to invent that face the way you invented your Marilyn Monroe character. Lola Lola must be an irresistible presence, singing on a barrel and showing off her derrière. She must have electricity and charm, her songs crackling with sex. She must be corrupt, decadent, actually vile, and evil.”
“I don’t know if I could be that,” Marilyn said. “That’s a pretty tall order.”
“I understand,” Marlene said. “Even when you’re playing a slut on screen, you project a virginal innocence. The actress Lola Lola, in contrast, must be an alley cat screaming for a tomcat, especially in that song. ‘Tonight, kids, I’m gonna get a man.’ Lola is jaded, lustful, naked in her emotions. A harlot who can destroy a man, especially the professor in the film. It calls for a voice singing out in a crude German bierstube late at night, cutting through the smoke of a cabaret catering to perverts.”
Marlene continued with her pronouncements, as Marilyn’s insecurities were reaching a feverish pitch. “Critics have written that the screen character of Lola Lola must never be repeated, that I have immortalized it. If any actress dares, she will be weak lemonade on the screen. It could destroy a woman’s career. Audiences might get up and walk out on the wrong Lola Lola. Your sensuality is wholesome and real, whereas Lola Lola is an artificial creation of the night. She is the wrong image for you. Edith Piaf would understand that. So would Greta Garbo. When men flock to see one of your movies, they want to see the Marilyn Monroe they love—not some prostitute in a Berlin cabaret. Men want someone who will make love to their prick—not castrate them.”
Marilyn burst into sobs, as Marlene moved closer to her, taking her in her arms and comforting her. “I can’t play Lola Lola. It’s not for me.”
“A wise decision, my dear. You need to go on to greater parts, like you said in your news conference, not be a low-rent German trollop, a devouring female predator.”
Over a harmoniously flavored coq au vin, Marlene said, “Your attempt to play Lola Lola would be as foolhardy as an attempt to star as Scarlett in a remake of Gone With the Wind. You’d be laughed off the screen: Don’t do it! You are an all-American girl, not Lola Lola. European characters, especially those who worked the cabarets of 1920s Berlin, are not for you. Don’t allow yourself to be ridiculed and mocked.”
Marilyn later recalled that she fell asleep in Marlene’s arms in her bed, as the chanteuse sang softly in her ear.
Ic bin die fesche Lola
Der Liebling der Saison
The next day, Marilyn wrote about her night with Marlene in her diary. “I stayed over,” she said to Greene. “But lesbian sex is not really my thing, although I’ve indulged in it. Marlene is very oral. She did her own thing down there, but I didn’t reciprocate. It was worth staying over for the career advice and to taste her scrambled eggs, for which she is so famous. She’s such a good cook, she would have made a wonderful wife for Josef Goebbels. Isn’t he the one who liked movies so much?”
“He did indeed,” Greene said. “And movie stars. As for Hitler, he liked movie blondes himself, but both you and Marlene would lose Der Führer. His favorite blonde was Alice Faye.”
***
In Hollywood, executives at Fox, especially Darryl F. Zanuck, were shocked to read of Marilyn’s press conference. The studio’s lawyers had told the producer that their contract with the blonde goddess was still valid, and that she was not free to appear in any independent production, or in any film for a different studio.
During a meeting with Fox executives, Zanuck told them that “Monroe has complained about dumb blonde roles. She overlooked telling the press that I am right now supervising preliminary work on a movie called The Queen of Sheba. I’m giving Monroe a great chance, placing her up there with Salome and Cleopatra, even Helen of Troy. Sex, glamour, seduction—what more can movie audiences ask? She might win an Oscar as the glamorous but evil temptress. I think Queen of Sheba might be one of the biggest box office draws of all time.”
The film was never made, but in time, Fox would produce an epic of one of these great female icons of the ancient world. The picture was Cleopatra, and it starred not Monroe, but Elizabeth Taylor. Solomon and Sheba was released in 1959 by United Artists, with Gina Lollobrigida starring as Sheba.
In the more immediate future, Zanuck had ordered Nunnally Johnson to write another dumb blonde role for Marilyn in a movie entitled How To Be Very, Very Popular.
When Johnson’s script was completed, Zanuck ordered his New York office to send a copy to Marilyn. She was shocked to read that it was the role of a stripper, the type of role she wanted to avoid.
She wired Zanuck that she wouldn’t accept the role. “Too bad for you, kiddo,” he told her. “There’s a number in it called ‘Shake, Rattle, and Roll’ that could make a star’s career. If you don’t do it, I’m casting Sheree North, your replacement at Fox.”
In subsequent calls, Zanuck threatened Marilyn with suspension. Still, she refused to do the role. He therefore reneged on a promise to pay her a $100,000 bonus for her role in The Seven Year Itch.
“You would do that to me?” she said, “after I’ve sucked that big cock of yours you’re so god damn proud of?” She slammed down the phone on him.
For the rest of 1955, she had virtually no income, and Greene was obliged to support her. He felt that while in New York, she should live like a star, and he installed her at the Waldorf Astoria Towers. He also purchased a wardrobe for her, and even presented her with a black Thunderbird sports car in which she could drive out to spend weekends at the Greene farmhouse in Connecticut.
Privately, Greene told such friends as author Stanley Mills Haggart, “When I get through with her, the public is going to be introduced to an entirely new Marilyn Monroe.”
***
In Florida, during the course of his affair with actress Evelyn Keyes, Mike Todd encountered an old friend, John Ringling North, who was a household name in America because of his Ringling Brothers Circus. Ever the entrepreneur, Todd pitched the idea for a charity performance of the circus at Madison Square Garden. It was for a good cause, the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation. Eventually the event was scheduled for March of 1955.
Todd conceived a headline-grabbing idea of having a bigtime movie star ride into the arena on a pink elephant. At first he came up with a wild scheme to enlist the aging Mae West as the “passenger” atop the elephant. He knew she was unlikely to accept, but he always dared go forth when other producers were more reluctant.
He had had an affair with the aging diva when he produced Catherine Was Great on Broadway in August of 1944 at the Shubert Theatre in Manhattan. Over his objections, West had insisted on playing Catherine as a serious dramatic role, and Todd wanted high camp. The critics were ravenous, the New York Daily News asserting, “The play is a bust, which will give Miss West one more than she needs.” In spite of the attacks, West’s loyal fans kept the show running for 191 performances, plus a successful road tour.
Todd telephoned West in Los Angeles, and she turned him down. “I don’t do animal acts. Why not get that dumb blonde Marilyn Monroe? If the party was stupid enough to pose nude for a calendar for fifty bucks, she’ll do anything…and anybody, so I hear.”
“Why not?” Todd asked. That afternoon, he called Milton Greene, who seemed to go for the idea. Todd was smart enough to know that with Marilyn off the screen, her backer needed to keep her name in front of the public. “Get her to go for it, and I guarantee she’ll have her picture—and a pink elephant—on the frontpage of every major newspaper in America.”
The publicity-shrewd Greene already knew that.
That night, he pitched the idea to Marilyn, who seemed intrigued. “I once saw Marion Davies in a movie called Polly of the Circus, and I decided then and there when I became a movie star I’d like to make a circus film, something on the order of Cecil DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. The pink elephant thing isn’t exactly my childhood fantasy, but I’ll do it.”
Back from Florida, Todd was invited at eight o’clock one evening to visit Marilyn at her Waldorf Astoria suite. He didn’t leave until four o’clock the next morning.
The following day, Marilyn joined Greene and a writer and photographer, Stanley Mills Haggart. She told the men that, “I’ve never met a man quite as cocky as Mike. What an impresario, what a larger-than-life figure.”
Haggart told her, “I knew he’d go for you. A friend of mine, Joan Blondell, was married to him, and she said he was partial to blondes. Mae West, Veronica Lake, June Havoc, Evelyn Keyes. He’s versatile, too, or so Hedda Hopper, my former boss, told me. I understand that on one drunken night or two, Todd has even persuaded Eddie Fisher to get plugged.”
She looked at him with a wry smile. “Okay, you can add the name of Marilyn Monroe to that illustrious list.”
That night, Todd invited Marilyn out for drinks with the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. In the powder room, Lee told Marilyn, “Mike has more chutzpah than any producer on Broadway.” The stripper had to explain what chutzpah meant to Marilyn.
Stanley Mills Haggart
She told Greene and Haggart the next day, “I’ve added a new word to my vocabulary. Also, Gypsy gave me some great tips about how I should play Cherie in Bus Stop.”
One afternoon, when Greene was in the studio with Haggart, taking photographs of Marilyn, she told them an amusing story. “Mike took me to a dinner party and introduced me as Tondelayo Schwartzkopf. The hostess and all the guests claimed I was a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe, although the hostess added that to really pull off the Monroe impersonation, I’d need to take off a pound or two. After the dinner party, when I was getting into a cab, Mike patted me on the ass. ‘Okay, fatso, he said to me, ‘bumping up and down on that pink elephant at Madison Square Garden will take a few pounds off that butt of yours.’”
Later on, so it was said—and the story could be apocryphal—Mike pulled the same stunt with Elizabeth Taylor before their marriage, but it seems almost unbelievable that the guests at a hip New York party would not have recognized either Marilyn or Taylor.
When Greene went to see about dinner that night, she confided a secret to Haggart. “Actually, Mike wants me to dump Milton and Lee Strasberg. He wants to take personal charge of my career, and I think he would do such a terrific job. He’s like the father every girl should have.”
“Are you going to go with him?”
“I’m afraid of him,” she said. “He’s too mercurial, even for me. Besides, your dear buddy, Arthur Miller, is dead set against it. He’s also my father-lover. Two father-lovers would be just too incestuous for me.”
Finally, the big night at Madison Square Garden arrived. Backstage, Marilyn was reunited with Milton Berle, who’d first seduced her in 1948 when she was making Ladies of the Chorus. She whispered to Greene that night, “It’s as big as Uncle Miltie says it is.”
Berle announced her appearance: “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and goils, here comes the only goil in the world who makes Jane Russell look like a boy.”
Dressed in a white blouse, a black pompom skirt, and looking like a Dégas ballerina in feathers and spangles, Marilyn rode out on that pink elephant and faced a wildly cheering crowd.
The ordeal lasted twenty minutes of searing pain. She’d been fitted into her costume at the last minute, and a pin had been left in it. As she bounced bareback on the elephant, the sharp pin dug into her flesh. By the time she’d finished her act and dismounted behind the stage, her costume was bloody.
In spite of all this, she stole the show, according to the nation’s press. She even bonded with the pink elephant, later saying, “He was not so dumb—just speechless.’
Noting her career changes and her ability to generate publicity, Time magazine claimed, “There is persuasive evidence that Marilyn Monroe is a shrewd businessman (sic).”
In time, Marilyn confronted Todd and turned down his offer about taking over the management of her career. His response was explosive: He slapped her face. His violence against women was well documented by former wives and girlfriends.
Mike Todd
Not succeeding with Marilyn, Todd would begin the pursuit of her chief rival for the title of Queen of Hollywood. He’d have better luck winning over Elizabeth Taylor.
Marilyn claimed, “She can have my rejects if she wants them.”
***
“In Hollywood, I am just another movie star,” Marilyn told Milton Greene. “But in New York, I’m treated like an exotic creature descended from the planet Venus. “Everybody is extending invitations.”
“To my party tonight,” he told her, “I’ve invited Truman Capote. He wants to know you better. He said he danced with you one night at El Morocco.”
“He’s very flamboyant,” she said. “The press calls him an enfant terrible. Whatever in the hell that means. When he comes, send him back while I get dressed. I’ve never read anything he wrote, but he seems like a more interesting character than anything he can create on a page.”
“You’ll find him fascinating,” Greene said. “He knows more indiscreet gossip than anyone in New York. As an example, he privately tells friends that he knows the dick size of every major star in Hollywood, and what they like to do in bed. He writes it all down in some diary, which may be published one day when the world has grown more sophisticated.”
“Who did he tell you had the biggest one in Hollywood?” she asked. “I’d cast my vote for Milton Berle.”
“Would you believe John Ireland?” he said, “at least according to the Truman Capote Bible. Ireland fucked Monty Clift when they made Red River, that picture with John Wayne. Joan Crawford also awards Ireland top prize, and she should know. She’s fucked every big star except Lassie.”
“Thanks for the tip,” she said. “I must work him into my schedule.”
“I asked Capote by a little early so you can gossip over a pre-party drink. When the party is in full blast, he becomes the center of attention, with a crowd clustered around him as he tells one outrageous story after another. Much of what he says is actually true, but he does embroider a bit. He says all good Southerners never let truth get in the way of a good story.”
“Send in my amusement for the night,” she said.
When Capote did arrive two hours early, Greene directed him to Marilyn’s quarters. He knocked on her door. She called for him to come in. Not finding her in the bedroom, he heard her voice summoning him to the bathroom, where she was taking a bubble bath.
“Hi,” he said, “Truman Capote, in your boudoir and now in your toilette.” He spoke in a high-pitched voice, and had grown up shunned by other children because of his “sissyish traits.” In the way he walked and talked, he was different from most men, with that babylike, slightly artificial voice. She would remember him as a writer “trapped forever in boyhood, as if refusing to mature.”
As Capote himself later said, “The way I spoke in the fourth grade is the way I talk now. When I was growing up, everyone told my mother I should have been born a girl. She even took me to psychiatrists hoping to find a drug or therapy that would turn me into a boy. In spite of my odd behavior, I always had to be myself.”
And that is what he presented to Marilyn, who seemed mesmerized by him. He immediately established his credentials as a gossip. Gazing at her in the claw-footed tub, he said, “The last time I saw a movie star in a bubble bath was in a hotel in Barcelona. The star was Errol Flynn. After I bathed him and dried him off, I discovered what ‘in like Flynn’ means.”
She giggled. “You’re my kind of guy, Truman. What a name. It sounds so presidential. Why don’t you wash my back for me so we can get acquainted? I hope you won’t get too turned on.”
“You can rest assured that I won’t,” he said, taking off his jacket and moving toward her. “Half the men in America would want to be in my shoes right now, and I’m not even tempted.”
As he reached for the soap, he said, “You must tell me everything about Joe DiMaggio. I want all the details. Cock size. Duration in the saddle. Cut or uncut. I suspect uncut. The exact taste of his semen. What does he prefer? Fellatio? Analingus? Around the world? The missionary position?”
“My, you’re an inquisitive little demon. But I like you for some perverse reason. Humphrey Bogart told me you’re the kind of guy he’d like to put in his pocket and take home.”
“Wait until I get to know you better and tell you stories about that one on the set of Beat the Devil.”
“Joe’s biggest bat is not the one he uses on the field,” she said. “If that’s all it took, we’d still be married.”
“Lucky girl!” he said. “How I envy you.” He began an expert soaping of her luscious back.
As she emerged from the bath, he helped dry her off. She put on a robe. In her bedroom, he took a chair beside her dressing table, sipping a glass of champagne that Greene’s cook had brought in. The cook thanked Marilyn.
After she’d left, Capote asked, “Why is she thanking you?”
“This afternoon, I peeled potatoes for her and snapped beans for dinner tonight.”
One of Marilyn’s biographers, Fred Lawrence Guiles, in his book, Legend, wrote: “She was never very serious with Capote. They spoke a secret language liberally sprinkled with sex and gossip.”
Marilyn heard Greene’s party guests arriving, but she wanted to extend her private talk with Capote. He noticed that she was reading a book about Napoléon Bonaparte and Josephine. “I didn’t know you were interested in history,” he said.
I’m not, but when I visited Marlon Brando on the set of Désirée, where he played Napoléon, I became interested in playing Josephine in a movie focused on her. Perhaps you’ll write the script for me.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “Unlike Josephine, I wouldn’t have gone to bed with Napoléon. His cock was too small. I’ve seen it.”
She looked astonished. “How in hell could you have seen Napoléon’s cock? I didn’t know you were that old.”
“Before he was buried, someone cut off the emperor’s little penis, and it is preserved in alcohol. Today, it’s owned by this old queen in Connecticut. He exhibits it on occasion. It looks pretty withered these days. Perhaps it was an inch or two longer in the days of the Empire.”
“That is such a ghoulish story. It’s delectable,”
“Speaking of small cocks, can Senator Kennedy satisfy you?”
“We manage,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’ve been to bed with him too.”
“Not at all,” he said.
“What I don’t understand is why everybody thinks the Kennedys are so sexy. I know a lot about cocks—I’ve seen an awful lot of them—and if you put all the Kennedys together, you wouldn’t have a good one. I used to see Jack when I was staying with Loel and Gloria Guinness in Palm Beach. I had a little guest cottage with its own private beach, and he would come down so he could swim in the nude. He had absolutely nuthin’.”
Marlon Brando as Napoléon, with MM
“Unlike you, I haven’t seen all the cocks I want to see,” she said. “But I’m not on the East Coast to chase after them, at least that’s not my first goal. As you know, I want to be a serious actress.”
“If you mean that, I’ve got the right acting coach for you, since you seem to have left Natasha Lytess back in California,” he said. “She’s a British actress, rather old at this point: Constance Collier.”
“I’ve heard of her,” she said.
“Constance is the best acting teacher in New York. If you’d like to meet her, I can take you to a luncheon this week. I’ve been invited to her apartment. Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn will be there.”
“Garbo?” she asked in astonishment. “And Hepburn? Are they still taking acting lessons?”
“No, they’re admirers. Will you accept?”
“Are you kidding? I’d be honored. But I don’t know what to wear.”
“A single string of pearls and Chanel’s little black dress.”
“Can’t wait,” she said. “But I fear I’ll be speechless.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “All three of them are dykes, and each of them will be salivating when you walk into the room. You don’t have any skin blemishes, do you?”
“No, but why do you ask?”
“Hepburn won’t go to bed with any gal with blemishes on her skin,” he said. “But Garbo doesn’t mind all that much, considering that she slept with Marie Dressler.”
There was a sudden knock on the door. “Marilyn, the guests are here, and you’re the guest of honor,” Greene said. “Shake your ass, girl. Norman Mailer’s here. So is Gene Kelly. He’s with a real cute trick. I bet if you work it right, you can take the hunk from Gene.”
Capote rose to his feet. “I don’t care who they are. Kelly always manages to get them first before anyone else in Hollywood, even beating out Joan Crawford.”
She called that she’d be right out after putting on her white high heels. “I’m anxious to meet this Adonis,” she whispered to Capote. “With Amy hanging on to Milton all the time, I haven’t been getting much.”
“In that case, after Constance’s luncheon, I can arrange a date for you with Porfirio Rubirosa. After all, the two richest women in the world, Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, spent millions on that eleven-inch octoroon dick. But I can get it for you for free.”
“Is that why in a restaurant when some men request a pepper-mill, they ask for a Rubirosa?”
“You learn quick, gal. Now it’s show time. There are a lot of important people out there tonight. It’s time for you to become Marilyn Monroe.”
Constance Collier
On the way out the door, he took her by the arm. “By the way, I forgot to ask. Why in hell do you have a picture of Abraham Lincoln by your bedside? That’s weird.”
“I’ve always had this fantasy about going to bed with Honest Abe,” she said. “I know it’s crazy, but that’s how I feel. Since he’s cold and in his grave, I’ll settle for someone who reminds me of him. Call it second best, since I can’t have the real thing. He’s coming to the party tonight, if he’s not already here.”
“You have stumped me on that one,” he said. “Who might this august personage be?”
“My next husband,” she said. “Arthur Miller.”
Arthur Miller
