EACH OF MARILYN’S THREE PREGNANCIES would end in a miscarriage, and her marriage to Miller would end in divorce, though she would stay close to his parents, taking his father as her chaperone to President Kennedy’s birthday party at Madison Square Garden.
In their Manhattan apartment and in their Connecticut country home, Miller had penned Marilyn’s last film, The Misfits. A Western about a group of horse wranglers who befriend a pretty divorcée, The Misfits was directed in 1960 by John Huston, who had given Marilyn her breakout role a decade earlier in The Asphalt Jungle. Her costars in The Misfits included her Actors Studio pal Eli Wallach, Montgomery Clift, and Clark Gable, whose character tells her, “When you smile, it’s like the sun coming up.”
The day after filming ended in the hot Nevada desert, Gable, fifty-nine, suffered a heart attack. His widow blamed Marilyn, saying her no-shows and late arrivals, making Clark wait in the brutal sun day after day after day, had caused him stress. Marilyn cried for two days when he died that November. The guilt added another layer to Marilyn’s growing depression and anxiety. It wouldn’t only be Clark’s last film, but hers as well. Her last days were also the last days of the studio star system, an outmoded, financially unsound, sexist institution.
Wilder, who stayed friends with Marilyn, partially blamed Miller for her sadness and her downfall. Miller “was a little too resentful of his wife. I was not married to her. I didn’t have to be patient and loving. But he was her husband and I thought he could have been more understanding.” Her marriages didn’t work, he quipped, “because Joe DiMaggio found out she was Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller found out she wasn’t Marilyn Monroe.”
To keep himself out of trouble, Harry traveled with Sunny and stepped up his philanthropy, donating money to build a youth center in Florida and helping create the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. His trips to Cuba, now a Communist stronghold, had come to an end. Harry made a 180-degree turn politically, joining the national council of the right-wing organization Common Cause. The CIA-backed, New York–based group was formed in 1947 to combat Communism and included such high-profile members as Hearst, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Samuel Goldwyn of MGM. Maybe Harry joined to cover up his Socialist past. But he made an about-face, and Superman went along with him.
Superman was no longer the Socialist champion of the masses he’d been in the thirties, but was now battling Communists and cheering on capitalism. He would eventually settle down, surrounded by Krypto, his superdog, and his long-lost cousin, Kara Zor-El, aka Supergirl. Unknown survivors of Krypton, Supergirl and her relatives would show up like illegal immigrants at Superman’s door, wanting a part of the American dream. By the 1960s, Marvel’s ironic, quirky superheroes more attuned to the counterculture made the overly patriotic Superman look uncool and corny. But Superman fought on, as he always did.
Harry, of course, partied on. Because of his Playboy distribution deal, Harry and his son, Irwin, were designated VIP key holders of the Playboy Club when it opened in Chicago in 1960, their key numbers, lucky 11 and 13. When Harry or any VIP guest signed in, their nameplate would appear on a directory at the front of the club, so that when you entered, you knew exactly what other bigwigs were inside. The waitresses, famously dressed as bunnies in their satin, skintight outfits, matching ears, and white cotton tails, served cigarettes, cocktails, and red meat to the mostly male guests, who constantly pawed and groped them. From certain VIPs, some bunnies would accept room keys for extra money to continue the partying in private. It was as if Harry had died and gone to heaven.
While Harry was living the high life, Jerry Siegel was struggling to pay the rent on a one-bedroom apartment in Great Neck, Long Island, which he shared with his second wife, Joanne (aka Lois Lane) and their young daughter, Laura. Over the years, Jerry tried all kinds of strategies to shine a light on DC Comics’ mistreatment of him and Joe. He went on a hunger strike. He picketed outside Harry’s home. Finally, Joanne wrote Jack Liebowitz a letter in 1959. She asked him if he wanted to see a headline: “Creator of Superman Starves to Death.” So Jack rehired Jerry to write scripts, but without any creative control or even a byline. DC Comics lowered his rate from $50 to $10 a page—right back to where he and Joe had started in 1938. It was humiliating for Jerry, but he was desperate. And, of course, still angry. A few years later, with the rights to Superman about to expire, Jerry filed for renewal of the copyright. But so did DC. They won. And Jerry was banished, this time forever.
In 1966, he and Joanne moved with their daughter to California. Joanne was unwell and they thought the climate would help. And maybe Jerry could land some writing work. But all he could find was a job as a clerk typist for the state’s Public Utilities Commission.
Somehow, Joe Shuster was doing even worse. He had left the horror comics behind, but anonymously drew for pornographic magazines. But even that petered out. By the 1960s, he was nearly blind, living with his mother on Long Island and working as a storeroom clerk and deliveryman. Legend has it that at one point, he delivered a package to the DC Comics offices, causing Jack to toss him a few bucks to buy a new coat, telling him to never return to the building again. Some say Harry stepped up and paid for Joe’s eye surgery. But Harry never talked about it. There was the story about Joe being picked up by a cop while freezing without a coat on a bench in Central Park. The cop took pity on him and bought him a bowl of soup. When some kids went by holding Superman comics, Joe drew his famous character for them on a paper napkin. They looked at him like he was crazy.
In 1961, Gussie suffered a fatal heart attack while staying at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. And though it freed up Harry to be with Sunny full-time, something important was lost for Harry. Gussie had been with him since he was a nobody and knew him better than anybody. Now there was no one to give him a hard time when he drank too much or didn’t come home at night, or for weeks at a time.
The following year, Harry booked a cruise with Sunny and had planned on marrying her during their trip. A week before they sailed, Harry really tied one on while clicking through the channels on his gigantic color TV console, more a piece of furniture than a screen. Replacing Superman in the ratings were the Beverly Hillbillies and the Jetsons, one family poking fun of the nouveau riche and another blasting into cartoon space. The landscape, not just of television but of the world, was changing right before Harry’s tired eyes. Pushing himself up in his armchair to get more ice and a small refill, Harry fell and hit his head. When he opened his eyes, he realized he’d been out for quite a while. There was some dried blood on his head, but he was still pretty drunk, so he simply crawled into bed and was found the next morning by the housekeeper.
Another version of the story had him falling in the shower with Sunny at the Waldorf. His kids would joke that Gussie had come down from heaven and kicked him.
However the fall happened, Harry wound up in a three-week coma. After surgery, he woke up with a hell of a headache and no memory, no recollection of Irwin or his daughter, Peachy, or of Jack or Superman. He couldn’t remember his childhood on the Lower East Side, the gangs, the mobsters, the Prohibition booze and girlie pulps. Not a flicker of those Marilyn magazine covers or of World War II, Cuba, or his Socialist days in the East Village. All of it, nearly every last memory, erased. Now and then he would look around for Gussie and ask her to bring him a Heineken. He also talked incessantly of the 1923 New York Giants, who had lost the World Series that year to the Yankees.
The December after Harry’s fall, a Playboy Club finally opened in New York, less than two miles from his apartment, and though Harry was still a VIP key holder, he would never go. He had no idea what Playboy even was. Crippled by paralysis, he would sit in his luxury apartment and receive visitors he couldn’t recognize. Frank Costello would drop in from time to time. But Harry had no idea who he was. He didn’t even recognize Sunny. And it broke her heart. Sunny loved Harry, but not enough to hang around and take care of him for the rest of his life. Still in her early fifties, she married another admirer that year, a fifty-nine-year-old widower with a grown daughter and several grandchildren. Sunny refused to be called Grandma.
A few months after Harry’s fall, Marilyn would also be found in bed by her housekeeper. But unlike Harry, Marilyn wouldn’t hang on. She would die of a drug overdose in her new Brentwood home, her back tan, her blond hair tousled like on that Milton Greene ballet dress shoot, one hand on the telephone receiver. In the weeks before her death, she had been in the process of decorating her new house, still searching for the home she’d never had. The small end table—one of the only pieces of furniture in the bedroom—was cluttered with prescription pill bottles. The brass, musical menorah Gussie Miller had given her was sitting silently on the mantelpiece in her living room.
DiMaggio claimed the body and arranged her funeral, placing a half dozen roses on her grave twice a week for the next twenty years.
Harry died three years later at the age of seventy-one; Sunny, naturally, went to the funeral. In his will, Harry not only left her a small fortune but called her “my beloved.” It made Sunny cry.
After Harry’s death, DC Comics was acquired by the parking lot giant Kinney, a Jewish-owned company that had moved into mergers and acquisitions. Kinney delivered a $60 million payday for Jack, but the sale forced Harry’s son, Irwin, out of the picture. Kinney, with the rights to DC’s characters, then swallowed up Warner Bros., which would pioneer the superhero film genre with 1978’s Superman starring Christopher Reeve. The DC and Marvel films would make untold fortunes, and eventually devour the Hollywood movie industry whole. A-list stars and directors—the Marilyns and Wilders of a new generation—would bow down to the superhero blockbuster film gods.
In 1975, while the first blockbuster Superman movie was still in production, Jerry Siegel put out a press release placing a curse on the film. “I hope it super bombs!” he wrote. He called Jack Liebowitz out for leaving him and Joe destitute while Jack and Warner Bros. were about to reap millions. “You hear a great deal about The American Dream,” Jerry said. “But Superman, who in the comics and films fights for ‘truth, justice and the American way,’ has for Joe and me become An American Nightmare.”
Because the film was so high-profile, newspapers and television talk shows ate up the story, shaming Warner Bros. into taking action. Jerry and Joe, who had been whitewashed from DC’s history for nearly thirty years, would finally win one battle against Goliath: an annual stipend of $30,000 and their names restored as creators in the movie’s opening credits—and in the many Superman films and comics that followed.
American justice was delayed. But had finally arrived.