CHAPTER 34 FLESH IMPACT

NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 9, 1954

EARLY ON A THURSDAY MORNING, Marilyn landed at Idlewild Airport on the Lockheed Super Constellation, the sleek triple-tailed beauty financed by Howard Hughes—who, of course, had discovered Marilyn years before while propped up in his souped-up hospital bed. At the TWA terminal, she was greeted by press and fans, stopping as always to wave and smile at them all, her long fox stole draped over her shoulders. She traveled to Manhattan in a big black limousine, checking into suite 1105 at the St. Regis Hotel on Fifty-Fifth Street under her usual alias Zelda Schnook, then met with her friends Amy and Milton Greene. Milton, a photographer, had a penthouse studio in the Grand Central Palace, the same thirteen-story building where Harry worked.

Marilyn had met Milton while he was doing a photo shoot for Look magazine in Hollywood the year before. She had always admired his work, but was surprised at how young he was. “Why, you’re just a boy!” Marilyn said to him the day they met. “And you’re just a girl!” Milton replied. When he introduced her to his wife, Amy, the three clicked and became fast friends. What Marilyn liked about them was how they treated her like a regular person and not a starlet.

Whenever Marilyn walked the streets of New York, she took on her secret identity, wearing a dark wig and sunglasses, playing the part of Zelda Schnook. (A schnook in Yiddish is a stupid person, and Marilyn was nobody’s schnook.) At the Grand Central Palace, Zelda may well have ridden up in one elevator as Harry was coming down in another. Or maybe they passed each other in the lobby. They were just four floors away from one another, Harry on nine and Zelda on thirteen, the comic book baron and savvy Hollywood starlet passing like taxicabs in the night.

At his studio, Milton shot the famous photos of Marilyn in a ballerina dress. Amy, a former model from Cuba, had bought the taffeta tutu dresses, but they were sample sizes and didn’t quite fit Marilyn. She couldn’t zip them up all the way. But it made for an even better shot, the dress hanging open in the back, her feet bare, painted toenails curled like a little girl’s. The hairdresser never showed up, so Marilyn’s hair was a tousled mess. But it didn’t matter.

DiMaggio wasn’t planning on coming in for The Seven Year Itch film shoot, but his buddy Walter Winchell—smelling the drama of a potential story—convinced him to change his mind. So Joe flew into New York City that Sunday, staying with Zelda Schnook at the St. Regis. It was one of the city’s most luxurious hotels, built at the turn of the century by John Jacob Astor, the fur scion behind the Waldorf and those beavers on the wall at the Astor Place subway stop. The St. Regis was most famous for its celebrity watering hole, the King Cole Bar, with a long mural by Maxfield Parrish of Old King Cole. The bar was a favorite of Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, and, of course, Joe DiMaggio.

The first scenes of The Seven Year Itch were shot the next morning inside and out of a four-story townhouse at 164 East Sixty-First Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues, right around the corner from Jules’s apartment. The shoot began at 8:00 a.m., and Marilyn was up early for it. Maybe she had never even gone to sleep. She arrived in her black limousine dressed in costume—a white satin and lace slip covered by a white terrycloth bathrobe—with her mink coat thrown over it.

The black townhouse had a big white arched doorway and white windows and shutters to match her costume. It was a peaceful, tree-lined block, with the occasional Third Avenue elevated subway rattling by in the background, and a quiet neighborhood restaurant, Villa Capri, on the corner. But it wouldn’t be peaceful for long. Three policemen blocked off the street to traffic as the fifty technicians and extras went to work. Silver-foiled reflectors, black velvet sunshades, and two thirty-six-inch brute arc spotlights were set up to create the best light for Marilyn.

The scene involved Marilyn leaning out the second-floor window wearing just the slip, blow-drying her hair, messy and curly like in Milton’s shoot. Marilyn glowed, as usual. “Flesh impact,” Wilder called it. “Flesh which photographs like flesh. You feel you can reach out and touch it.” Though most press photographers would be arriving the next night for the subway grate scene, a few members of the press were invited to the day shoot as well. Life magazine freelancer Bob Henriques, art photographer Garry Winogrand, and George Barris, who would take the last photos ever of Marilyn, on a Santa Monica beach, were each allowed inside the townhouse. They would shoot her alone at the window in her slip—like johns taking turns in a bordello.

Within minutes, a thousand gawkers clogged the sidewalk across the street, and eventually the street itself, down and up the block, trying to get a good look at Marilyn’s flesh. The crowd included Roddy McDowall, a less successful film star, who just happened to live in the neighborhood, and a group of sweaty teenage boys from the nearby Manhattan High School of Aviation Trades. In the avalanche of press that followed, the Asbury Park Evening Press erroneously reported that five thousand students from the high school showed up. There weren’t even five thousand kids in the whole high school. Marilyn waved to the boys between takes, setting off a flurry of catcalls and whistles.

Jules noticed the commotion that morning when he opened his fur shop around eight o’clock. Excited to have a celebrity on the block, he left Edith in charge, grabbed his Bolex, and positioned himself right in front of the townhouse. The Bolex was loaded with Kodachrome film and was ready to roll—though not exactly for moments like this. Jules was always filming something. He had just shot Edith that weekend at their twentieth wedding anniversary party. The twenty-year itch, he would joke.

Jules usually shot at eighteen frames a second, considered silent speed. Shooting that slow made the film last longer. Jules usually shot color Kodachrome, which cost almost twice as much as black-and-white and cost more to process as well. He wound the camera up, held it to his eye, and shot Marilyn for several seconds at a time. The mechanical clanging ting! ticked second by second, like the meter at a gas station pump, reminding Jules how much time he’d spent on each shot and how close he was to re-cranking. Resting against his face, the twelve-pound camera purred as it wound its way down, its lens wide open and taking in all of glorious Marilyn.

Jules was a fan, not only of the woman but of the furs she had worn both on- and offscreen. Marilyn was a walking advertisement for the fur industry. And he loved her for it. Maybe one day she would even wear one of his. Her furs were designed by the best in the business, Jules’s fellow refugees from Europe who had fled pogroms and, later, the rise of Hitler.

The number for Maximilian furs, Jules’s competitor on Fifty-Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, was listed in Marilyn’s private phone book. The Maximilian family, who would design for Audrey Hepburn, Helena Rubinstein, and Sophia Loren, had escaped to America in 1939 from Poland and were the ones Marilyn entrusted with her fur storage and repairs, including the upkeep on her giant white fox muff, the first fur she ever personally owned. A foot wide, the muff snapped on to the end of her matching white fox stole and had a small secret pocket where Marilyn could stash her eyeliner or lipstick.

The muff was not just to keep Marilyn’s manicured hands warm or her makeup hidden, but to signal that she was now Hollywood royalty. Marilyn was the female manifestation of the American dream, in all its luxury and beauty, a sign that good times had finally arrived. War, and all its horrors, in Europe, Japan, and Korea, was finally over; America was, once again, the promised land. Marilyn was the symbol of what all those GIs had been fighting for: blond, well-fed, and full-figured.

Jules knew that DiMaggio had recently given her a three-quarter-length ranch mink with a wide lapel, bell sleeves, and velvet-lined pockets, the one she had thrown over her robe when arriving on set that morning. There was the white ermine collar she had worn with her brown suit when they’d gotten married. Ermine had been the fur of royalty, used for coronation cloaks for centuries. When she was in New York, Marilyn often wore her black jacket with a wide brown mink collar. She also had a marten fur collar and her white fox cuffs, which could snap together to create a collar as well. There was the white beaver coat and the black fox stole trimmed in silk.

Then there were the studio furs, which Jules had always taken note of. In Love Happy, she had draped a light brown mink over her arm, and in How to Marry a Millionaire sported a darker brown mink muff and collar. Though, to that film’s premiere, she had worn her white fox stole.

In both her scenes in All About Eve, she wore film studio furs, first an ermine wrap and then a small skulk of foxes with their sad little heads still attached. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she and Jane Russell were responsible for a small massacre of animals, including black minks for cuffs, a silver fox for a wrap, a brown mink for a hooded coat, and a leopard cape and muff.

Jules even remembered the Gold Coast black colobus monkey fur coat that Marilyn wore to the premiere of The Emperor Waltz way back in 1948. But nobody really liked to think about that. Monkeys were too close on the evolutionary ladder.

Today there would be no fur. Just bare human flesh. Over three hours, between takes, Marilyn would don her white terrycloth robe over her slip, since the temperature was only in the sixties, and come downstairs to mug for the crowd from the first-floor window. She would look directly at Jules and wave just at him. She even came out and sat on the stoop. No one paid any attention to her costar, Tom Ewell, who was pacing the sidewalk.

As the shoot was wrapping up, Jules chatted with some of the camera and ground crew. “Where’s the next shoot going to be?” Jules asked one of the gaffers.

“Tomorrow night on Lexington outside the Trans-Lux movie theater,” the gaffer told him. The theater, which usually showed newsreels and short subjects, was between Fifty-First and Fifty-Second Streets, just four blocks from Harry Donenfeld’s office.

“Do you know what time?” Jules asked.

“I think we’re starting around midnight,” said the gaffer. “It’s gonna be a late night.” The next afternoon, in preparation, Jules took a nap on one of his fur pillows to rest up.