Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (20 page)

On April 14 Twentieth Century–Fox notified Loyd Wright and Charles Feldman that they were once again lifting Marilyn Monroe’s suspension. They indicated they would be sending a new version of the contract for Marilyn to sign, with a sizable increase in salary. The studio had canceled plans to go forward with
The Girl in Pink Tights
, and instead would dispatch a script for a musical,
There’s No Business Like Show Business
. Feldman passed on the news to Marilyn in San Francisco. She considered the offer a concession on the part of Fox’s executives, a victory of sorts, for which she had Joe DiMaggio to thank.

•  •  •

Resigned to the fact that Marilyn could not and would not give up her career, Joe returned to Los Angeles with her in late April. In search of a more spacious residence than the apartment on North Doheny, they rented an Elizabethan cottage for $700 a month at 508 North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills, several blocks from the house she’d shared with Johnny Hyde in 1950. Soon after moving in, Joe and Marilyn drove an hour to visit Vic Masi and his wife at their vacation home in the San Fernando Valley. Vic, a radio sports broadcaster, had known Joe since the late 1940s. The two couples went to a dinner club near Toluca Lake, and, to Joe’s amazement, the performer at the club that evening was Dorothy Arnold. Following her set, Dorothy stopped by Joe and Marilyn’s table and had a drink with them. It marked the first and only time she and Monroe ever came face-to-face.

On April 30 Joe squired Marilyn to the Hollywood opening of
River of No Return
. Confronted by reporters on leaving the theater, Marilyn sputtered, “Joe and I want many little DiMaggios.” DiMaggio turned away. He’d become little more than an appendage to his wife’s fame. As one of his biographers saw it, “She’d broken through his wall of invincibility, that aloofness of the Yankee Clipper.” She’d bewitched him.
She’d obliterated his spirit. The Great DiMaggio had become subservient to his wife’s overbearing psychological needs. He must have known by this point in time that there would be no “little DiMaggios,” at least not with Marilyn. He must also have realized, without wanting to admit it, that though he maintained a brave front, his future with Marilyn was very much in doubt.

The new contract and the script for
There’s No Business Like Show Business
, by husband-and-wife screenwriting team Henry and Phoebe Ephron, arrived by messenger at Famous Artists, Charles Feldman’s agency. He sent them over to North Palm Drive. Marilyn grabbed the packet and started reading the contract. The increase in salary guarantee was clearly notated, but as Marilyn rifled through the document, she noticed that there was no creative-control provision. Not a word. Nothing. Once again the studio had stiffed her, reduced her to what she’d always been to them: a sexy body and a beautiful head of sugar-candy blond hair.

Marilyn turned her attention to the
Show Business
script. It reeked of the same exploitive vapidity as
Pink Tights
. Taking advantage of her status as “the hottest property in Hollywood,” Fox had fashioned an all-glitter, no-substance production that called for Marilyn to do little more than torch the screen with a song or two and otherwise wriggle around in a selection of all-too revealing show costumes.

Outraged by both script and contract, Marilyn informed Charles Feldman that she had no intention of going back to work, not under these paltry circumstances.
Show Business
had fewer production values than
Pink Tights
; the script was beyond insipid. And the contract constituted an affront, a slap in the face—it was an attack on her very being. Marilyn had no interest in
abstract, impersonal concepts. For her, everything was either completely meaningless or completely personal. This was personal.

In her memoir, Marilyn wrote: “I wanted to be treated as a human being who had earned a few rights since my orphanage days . . . When the rest of the world was looking at someone called Marilyn Monroe,
Mr. Zanuck, in whose hands my future rested, was able to see only Norma Jeane—and treat me as Norma Jeane had always been treated.”

Feldman called Zanuck and conveyed some of his star client’s grievances. The following day, he contacted Monroe. Zanuck, he said, had sweetened the pot. If she agreed to do
Show Business
, he promised to give her the hit Broadway comedy,
The Seven Year Itch
, as her next picture. As for the contract—according to Zanuck, it wasn’t negotiable. Take it or leave it. They’d bent over backward to appease her, but they weren’t going to bend any further. Marilyn must sign, or the studio would place her back on suspension—and if she went back on suspension, the studio would have to consider taking legal action against her. The cost of a legal defense team could be prohibitive, and there was no guarantee that in the end she would prevail.

Feldman felt she should sign. And Joe? Joe surprised everyone. He, too, recommended she append her signature. They’d allotted her a
substantial raise. That counted for something. To continue to hold out would only result in a hardening of positions. What was the point of that? DiMaggio told George Solotaire he couldn’t take it any longer. Not now, at any rate. He’d lost the battle but not necessarily the war. He still felt he could one day convince Marilyn to stop making films and start making babies.

W
HAT JOE IS TO ME
is a man whose looks, and character, I love with all my heart.” Marilyn Monroe’s words, as recorded in the pages of her personal memoir, were countered by a more cautionary reflection in the same document. “We knew,” she wrote, “it wouldn’t be an easy marriage.” It wasn’t.

The first public rumblings of trouble in the DiMaggio-Monroe union coincided with the start of rehearsals for
There’s No Business Like Show Business
in mid-May 1954. Earl Wilson ran an item in his newspaper column suggesting that all was not what it should be at 508 North Palm Drive. Louella Parsons followed with a similarly ominous item.

Jimmy Cannon, Joe’s sportswriter pal in New York, called the ballplayer to get his side of the story. DiMaggio denied that he and Marilyn were having marital problems, yet he described his life in Hollywood as “dull.” He claimed he tried not to interfere with his wife’s work.
“I don’t resent her fame,” he insisted. “Marilyn was working long before she met me—and for what? What has she got after all these years? She works like a dog. She’s up at five or six in the morning and doesn’t get through until seven at night. We have a bite to eat, watch a little television, and go to bed.” Their meals, he hastened to add, consisted primarily of frozen dinners or take-out Italian.

Whatever domestic fantasies DiMaggio might have entertained when he first married Marilyn had long been dashed. When he complained to her that they no longer spent a lot of time together, she reminded him that he’d been the one who pressured her to sign on for the film. She’d been willing to hold out and return with him to San Francisco, but he’d advised her to get on with it. It wasn’t her fault she had to spend the entire day in rehearsals. She also reminded him that Natasha Lytess was still coaching her, and since he detested Lytess, she felt compelled to work with her at the studio rather than to invite her back to their house.

Technically speaking, Marilyn wasn’t incorrect. It wasn’t so much that DiMaggio wanted her to do the film, rather that he had simply given up hope of convincing his wife to walk away from the entire Hollywood scene. He felt lost, trapped by his own jealousy and insecurity. Marilyn had invaded his bloodstream like a virus. She wasn’t Dorothy Arnold, a woman willing to trade in her identity and personal aspirations to be supported and bolstered by her celebrity spouse. And then, too, DiMaggio could no longer claim title to be what he’d once been, the star center fielder for the New York Yankees. He could proclaim himself “the greatest living ballplayer,” but he no longer played ball. While Marilyn, for her part, had been unofficially crowned Hollywood’s reigning queen. Even if she had married “a commoner,” she had no intention of abdicating the throne.

For the most part, DiMaggio passed his days at home, glued to the TV set, nervously smoking his way through one pack of cigarettes after another, waiting for Marilyn to come home. When she arrived after work, she and Joe invariably argued. He demanded a minute-by-minute account of how she’d spent the day. What had she done? With whom had she spoken? DiMaggio wouldn’t stop. Weary as she was, he kept at her. When she didn’t respond the way he wanted her to, he became physical; on one occasion he ripped an earring from her lobe and scratched her face. The tension between them made Marilyn increasingly resort to sedatives. Yet despite the sedatives, she couldn’t sleep at
night. The insomnia that had previously dogged her grew worse. To augment her sleeping pill regimen, she began drinking more heavily than usual—and not just champagne but straight, hard shots of vodka and gin. Still unable to sleep and in somewhat of a drunken stupor, she and DiMaggio kept at each other long into the night.

Whitey Snyder recalled that once they started shooting
Show Business
, Marilyn would arrive at the studio half asleep because she hadn’t slept in days, and he would walk her around the dressing room for an hour or two to get her blood circulating and work the cobwebs out of her brain.

“They assigned her Betty Grable’s old dressing room, and she’d come in all groggy and disoriented,” recalled Whitey. “She couldn’t remember her lines, or if she did she’d slur them. And because it took me time to get her going in the morning, she’d invariably be late on the set. She apologized, but it didn’t do much good. Walter Lang, the film’s director, wasn’t sympathetic. The worst criticisms came from some of the other cast members. Veterans like Ethel Merman and Mitzi Gaynor began picking on her. Merman, who could belt a song in her sleep, criticized her singing ability. And this made matters even worse. Marilyn collapsed on the set and then developed bronchitis and had to be hospitalized. The delays cost the studio a small fortune.”

Whitey suspected that Marilyn’s marriage to DiMaggio had begun to unravel, but he didn’t know to what extent. “Marilyn realized my wife and I were fond of Joe, so when talking about him to either of us, she chose her words carefully. Then one day in June, Joe called and asked me to meet him for lunch and not to say anything to Marilyn about it. So we met, and Joe seemed upset. And this was a man who very rarely revealed his inner feelings. After going through his usual harangue about the horrors of the studio system and a recitation of his expectations as to a proper wife’s domestic role, he started complaining that he saw less and less of Marilyn, that she spent far too much time away from home and on the set. And then out of the blue he asked if I knew Hal Schaefer, Marilyn’s voice coach on the film. I told him I
did and that Hal had previously coached her on both
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
River of No Return
. And I knew he’d taken it upon himself to help her with an album of songs she planned to record for RCA. DiMaggio evidently hadn’t met him on the set of
River of No Return
. ‘What does he look like?’ he asked. ‘Does he have a wife? Is he a ladies’ man?’ And so on. At the time, I had no idea what he was getting at. Why all the questions? I soon found out.”

What Whitey Snyder “soon found out” was that Marilyn and Hal Schaefer were having an affair. Schaefer was twenty-nine, a year and a half older than Marilyn. He had dark hair and eyes and a soft, melodic voice. Though he felt Marilyn never reached her potential as a singer, he worked hard to improve her voice. He was gentle, patient, and encouraging. She told friends he reminded her of an earlier voice coach, Fred Karger, with whom she’d also fallen in love.

“She claimed she loved me,” said Hal Schaefer, “but I’m not sure she knew what that meant. In a sense, I think our relationship represented an escape for her from a marriage that had gone bad. I believe she’d simply outgrown DiMaggio. He wanted a homemaker, and she hoped to become a serious actress. She cultivated certain tastes, which he didn’t share. After he found out about us, he called me up and said he knew I was in love with Marilyn and she was in love with me. He said I should be a man and come face him and discuss it with him at the house. Like an idiot, I said I would. I could hear Marilyn in the background. ‘Don’t come here,’ she pleaded, ‘he’ll kill you. He’ll beat you up. Don’t be foolish.’ I absolutely believed her, because she’d mentioned how crude and controlling he was. She’d said he was very severe and had a short fuse. He had a violent streak. He physically abused her at times, slapped her around. I think she put up with it because she lacked self-esteem. She wasn’t grounded, the result of her terrible childhood, constantly being shifted around from here to there.”

Hal Schaefer acknowledged that despite the menacing presence of Joe DiMaggio, his affair with Marilyn became serious. “We discussed marriage,” he said. “Marilyn would have converted to Judaism, which
is what she eventually did when she married Arthur Miller. After he learned of the affair, or maybe before, I’m not sure which, DiMaggio hired a private detective to follow us around. He bugged my car, my phone, and my apartment. He bugged Marilyn’s car as well. I guess the work was done by the detectives he hired.”