EVERY MORNING, FRED STERNBERG, FAYE’S fifteen-year-old son, would climb out of bed and then out of his family’s first-floor apartment window on Tryon Avenue in the Bronx. It was more exciting than using the front door. He would take the subway to the Grand Central Palace, riding the elevator to the DC Comics offices on the ninth floor.
It was the summer of 1955 and Fred, Neil’s younger brother, had aged out of summer camp. He was thrilled when Harry offered him a job—at Faye’s request, of course—and told all his friends he would be working in Midtown for Superman.
After getting off the elevator, Fred would pass by the artists stable of more than a dozen men bent over their drafting tables creating line drawings, and even a few women inking in those drawings. Women weren’t allowed to create comics, since publishers worried they would up and leave to get married at any time. Fred would then make his way past the computer room, which was filled with machines belching out coded cards, and technicians standing around and doing God knows what, figuring out circulation numbers, projecting sales. Fred didn’t know and he didn’t really care.
It was Fred’s job to help ship the new comics out to newsstands, slapping labels on the packages, learning the names of cities all around the country he’d never heard of. But his main job was giving credit to the dealers who had returned the unsold comics, whose covers had been ripped off. DC would either pulp or sell the mangled comics to bargain outlets. Fred would set three or four of the coverless comics aside each day to read on the subway back home every night. He loved his job and was so fired up ripping off those jackets that his four coworkers in the department, all full-timers, got annoyed.
“Slow down, kid,” one of them said. “You’re making us all look bad.”
Occasionally he would be sent into Harry’s office on some errand and would be greeted by the nearly life-size picture of the Man of Steel, painted by comic artist H. J. Ward. Harry was usually in a meeting with the other top executives, but greeted Fred warmly, slapping his back and introducing him around as his nephew. As far as Fred knew, Harry was a relative, though he wasn’t sure of the exact connection. Harry was part of Fred’s mishpucha, the Yiddish word for extended or almost family, a rich uncle who came in and out of his life. And Harry was the richest guy Fred had ever met. When he was a teenager, he did the math and calculated that Harry made $1.38 per second.
Some days, Fred would walk into Harry’s office and he would be in the middle of a manicure or a haircut. Harry’s days of meeting Costello at the Waldorf for a cut and a shave were long over. Harry was much too important—at least for now. Every two weeks, the barber came to him, throwing the cutting cape around him in his office chair, the manicurist filing his nails and then painting them in clear polish.
At the end of the summer, Harry slapped Fred on the back once more, smiled, and told him that when he finished college, he had a job waiting for him at DC Comics. But as much as the kid loved it there, he had higher ambitions. “I think I’ll probably do something else,” Fred told him.
Harry was slightly taken aback when young Fred refused his job offer, but laughed it off and wished the kid good luck. It turned out, by the time Fred was finished with college, Harry would no longer have a job himself.
A month before Fred started his summer job at DC Comics, a Senate investigating committee on juvenile delinquency and pornography convened in New York City, headed by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Kefauver had also headed the Senate investigation into organized crime, famously putting Harry’s buddy Frank Costello on the stand in 1951. Costello, who was considered the boss of all bosses, had always kept a low profile, so his appearance on the televised hearings was a major event, causing millions of Americans to stop what they were doing and watch him answer the government’s questions.
The new 1955 hearings called the publisher of Nights of Horror, Eugene Maletta, to testify, as well as a pornographer with ties to the Gambino crime family. The pornographer was not Harry Donenfeld, but a slightly younger, nastier version of Harry—a Jewish New Yorker by the name of Edward Mishkin, known to authorities as the “Sultan of Smut.” Harry had given up his girlie magazines long ago. But maybe it was all too close for comfort for Jack.
Because of his friendship with Frank Costello, his past arrests for pornography, and his heavy drinking around town, Harry had become a liability to DC. Hoping to take the company public to eventually increase profits, Jack made himself president and bought Harry out for a million dollars, with a promise to keep Harry’s son, Irwin, on the board of directors. Harry was slowly phased out, officially stepping aside finally in 1958 at the age of sixty-five.
His buddy Costello retired that same year, after surviving an assassination attempt in the lobby of his Majestic apartment building in May, his head grazed by a bullet from the gun of a young Vincent “the Chin” Gigante. Word on the street was that his old associate—and now rival—Vito Genovese had put the hit out on him in order to take over the Luciano crime family. The power grab worked; Costello relinquished control to Genovese and now spent most of his time gardening at his Sands Point, Long Island, home.
With a big chunk of the million dollars, Harry bought a fantastic new apartment on Park Avenue, after taking a cruise with Sunny, of course. The apartment was like a mansion in the sky, two full floors with a sunken living room that was about seventy feet long, with multiple couches and sitting areas. Servants greeted guests at the elevator, which opened up into the apartment. Over his fireplace, Harry hung the giant portrait of Superman, the one that had hung in his office, which he took with him when he moved out of the Grand Central Palace. Jack didn’t argue. It was part of the divorce settlement.
Harry also bought a house in Sands Point for each of his grown kids, across the street from one another and right near Costello’s twelve-room mansion. Costello and his wife never had any kids, and so they had long ago semi-adopted Harry’s. Sands Point had been the fictional setting for East Egg in The Great Gatsby, whose eponymous character was a bootlegger like Harry once was. Moving his kids to Sands Point, where the Guggenheims and Vanderbilts owned houses, was the final proof that Harry had truly made it. He would have moved there himself, but it was too far from the New York City bars and clubs he loved so much.
Harry still saw Faye and Murray from time to time. When their son Neil got engaged, Harry threw him a big dinner party at his Park Avenue apartment. Neil became a dentist, and Harry his first patient, his chauffer driving him over to his appointments on Eighty-Ninth Street and Second Avenue. Neil’s brother, Fred, who had turned down Harry’s DC Comics job offer, became a podiatrist. The brothers often joked that they had a hoof-and-mouth group practice.
Though he was no longer working in the Grand Central Palace building, now and then Harry would visit. He would peek in on the stable of comic artists, take his son, Irwin, out to lunch, and maybe even saw Zelda Schnook flitting past in the lobby.
Marilyn Monroe, at the height of her stardom, would abandon Hollywood and move to New York City in the midst of the Thrill-Kill madness of 1954, migrating from apartment to apartment like most new arrivals in their twenties. Marilyn found freedom and new life in the city. She lived at the Gladstone Hotel right around the corner from the subway grate scene, on Fifty-Second Street, then moved into a three-room suite on the twenty-seventh floor of the Waldorf, the hotel where both Sunny and Frank Costello’s mistress also lived.
Forming her production company with photographer Milton Greene, Marilyn met regularly with him at the Grand Central Palace to discuss business and to socialize with him and his wife, Amy. They went to dinner at nearby Gino on Lexington Avenue, or she would take her friends out for a big night on the town. One evening they showed up unannounced to see Sinatra at the Copa—which was partially owned by Frank Costello—and were seated ringside at a special table as the audience and Sinatra just watched, silently, mouths agape. She also spent time in the Greene’s Connecticut country home, surrendering to domesticity, cooking and cleaning.
Marilyn took classes at the Actors Studio on Forty-Sixth Street and eventually settled into a beautiful eighth-floor apartment in Sutton Place, one of Manhattan’s most exclusive enclaves. The building had a doorman and its own taxi lantern to attract cabs when the well-off tenants needed a ride. The lobby was luxurious, with a black-and-white-checkered floor and a fireplace and plush furniture. Across the street was a small pocket park with a view of the East River and the 59th Street Bridge, where Marilyn would sit on a bench sometimes with her little white Maltese terrier, a gift from Sinatra, which she named Maf (short for Mafia Honey). Her living room also had a view of the river and of Queens. With binoculars, she could have seen Eugene Maletta’s print shop.
Marilyn’s apartment was lined with shelves full of books that she had indeed read. Free of Hollywood and its sexist limits, Marilyn was happy in New York. At least for a while. She had her new production company and a new contract with Fox, starring in Bus Stop, where she played—surprise!—a burlesque singer, this time with an Ozarks drawl. In her first film production, she would play opposite Laurence Olivier, the showgirl to his prince. Though she was still playing showgirls, these scripts were smart and well written, a step up from The Girl in Pink Tights. Marilyn was not the dumb blonde they all thought she was or wanted her to be. She was uneducated, but she was always one step ahead.
Not so accidentally, she bumped into Brooklyn boy Arthur Miller at the Broadway premiere of A View from the Bridge in September 1955. They had met four years earlier on the Hollywood film set of the forgotten As Young as You Feel and had occasionally written to one another. But now Marilyn was a star. And living in New York City, Miller’s hometown. She knew that America’s favorite playwright could create a role for her that did not involve stripping. The prettiest girl in class was renouncing the jock for the brainy kid. This is not to say Marilyn wasn’t attracted to Miller or felt no love for him. But Marilyn, in an era when women were not allowed to have any real desires besides home and family, was looking out for her own interests. The photographers, the film directors, the studio heads, the press, the publicists, the magazine editors and publishers—all the men who would claim they had helped her get to where she was going—had all been working for her. Her talent, her brilliance really, was making them think that they were doing her a big favor. And she did it all disguised as a dumb blonde.
Miller, forty, was already married with two children when he fell in love with Marilyn. He was a nerd with glasses, but a tall, charming nerd who was at the height of his fame. He was also the voice of the common man, which likely appealed to Marilyn. And though he could be arrogant and sometimes too intellectual for his own good, he was the champion of the underdog. Marilyn was so famous, and so beautiful, that even Miller’s wife of sixteen years, Mary Slattery, couldn’t argue when he fell in love with her. According to Miller, his marriage to Mary had already been floundering. They parted amicably, and Marilyn became friendly with Miller’s children, Bobby and Jane.
Before marrying Miller, Marilyn converted to Judaism, meeting with a reformed rabbi and explaining her affinity not for just one Jewish man, but for the whole Jewish race. “Everybody’s always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me,” she explained. She would study from a Jewish prayer book from Miller’s Avenue N synagogue in Brooklyn and even place a mezuzah on her doorframe.
Before the wedding, Marilyn visited Miller’s parents in Midwood, Brooklyn, and, still searching for a family of her own, hit it off with them immediately. Outside the redbrick and white-clapboard house, the neighborhood kids climbed on each other’s shoulders to get a look at the starlet through the Millers’ windows. Miller’s mother—whose name was Gussie—threw open a window and yelled, “Get out! Go on home!”
Gussie taught Marilyn to make gefilte fish, borscht, tzimmes, and matzoh balls. After eating several bowls of matzoh ball soup, Marilyn cracked, “Isn’t there any other part of the matzoh you can eat?” Her mother-in-law also taught her some key Yiddish phrases like bubbaleh, oy vey, and tuches, prompting Marilyn to joke about her nude Playboy photo: “There I am with my bare tuches out.”
As a conversion present, Gussie gave Marilyn a big brass-plated menorah. In its base was a mechanism that, when wound up, played the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah.” The anthem’s lyrics, about searching for a homeland, struck a chord with Marilyn, who had never really had a proper home. “Our hope is not yet lost,” the song went. “The hope of two thousand years.” America’s favorite shiksa was now officially a member of the tribe.
The couple eventually settled around the corner from Marilyn’s Manhattan place, in an all-white apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street with a fireplace, a view overlooking the river, and a piano, the very same one that Gladys had bought Norma Jeane years before when she was a girl. Marilyn hoped she had finally found a family and was determined to have her own child with Miller. When she became pregnant, Marilyn happily filled her closet with maternity dresses, weights sewn into the hems so that they wouldn’t blow up in the wind.