Marilyn: A Biography (19 page)

We can even wonder if she has told Joe about
it. Years ago, before she even met DiMaggio, she was introduced to
Miller on the set of
As Young As You Feel
just after Johnny
Hyde’s death in December 1950, and saw him again at a party at
Charles Feldman’s house not a week later. At that time she rushed
home to give her reactions to Natasha Lytess, with whom she was
living. “It was like running into a tree!” she said of Miller. “You
know — like a cool drink when you’ve got a fever. You see my toe —
this toe? Well, he sat and held my toe and we just looked into each
other’s eyes almost all evening.”

Later that week, back in New York, Miller
wrote her a letter. “Bewitch them with this image they ask for, but
I hope and almost pray” — he is a Marxist, after all — “you won’t
be hurt in this game, nor ever change.”

There was more correspondence and phone
calls. She spoke to Natasha of being in love. Perhaps they had an
affair in 1951 — we can presume to know her well enough to think it
is hardly to the point. She would not need an affair to conceive of
love for Miller, and the fact that his wife had helped to support
him through all the years he was unsuccessful put one more grave
responsibility upon an ordered man. Miller, already in his twenties
during the Depression, had a personality that spoke of the ability
to bear years of penury, and so probably felt comfortable in taking
no more than a first taste of Marilyn in 1951 before withdrawing to
dream of her.

Of course, it could never be said he gave her
no encouragement. During that communion while he held her toe
(which must have been an experience more thoroughgoing to her than
fifty fornications), she confessed to Miller that she wanted
someone to admire, and he recommended Abraham Lincoln, altogether
unaware, of course, of any resemblance to himself. “Carl Sandburg,”
he suggests in his letter, “has written a magnificent biography.”
No, Miller may have led a restrained life compared with other
playwrights, but had to feel pleasure that this exceptional young
starlet was attracted to him. It must have been like a scent of
perfume in a prison cell. And she in her turn had to make a
complete equation of literary greatness to Arthur Miller. How could
any play have moved her more than
Death of a Salesman
? She
was herself a salesman — there was probably not a nerve of her
intelligence that would not give a whole response to the lines,
“Way out there in the blue riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And
when they start not smiling back, that’s an earthquake. And then
you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re
finished.” He had written the psychological history of her life in
the part of Willy Loman, for it could say no less to her than that
every moment of existence went into sustaining one’s identity, and
the moment one weakened, it was over. Since a good actor always
marries a good role as the first way to get out of the narcissist’s
circle, it is natural to revere a good playwright. Like God, the
playwright can fashion a superb mate — a character in whom can rest
one’s search for identity. She must have given Miller up in all the
sweet sorrow of losing an ideal love and an ideal man, and now
could use the memory as a scent to ward off the direct impingement
of DiMaggio. Joe D. could fill everything in her, she must have
suggested, but the lonely summit of her mind. Other men were there
to think of then. Guiles gives an account of DiMaggio meeting Fred
Karger at a small gathering after his marriage with Marilyn has
ended in divorce, and when the two men find talk to be difficult,
Karger sits at the piano. DiMaggio listens, broods, thinks perhaps
of Marilyn’s description of unrequited love for Karger and holds up
two powerful arms. With “operatic melancholy” DiMaggio announces,
“These hands! They’re only good for hitting a ball with a bat.” Of
course, it is hardly a characteristic moment (and, since the
sister, Mary Karger, Marilyn’s close friend, is also there, we can
wonder if DiMaggio does not intend the story to get back to
Marilyn, and touch her). He is, after all, not without his own
flamboyance. If Joe is a man to dress conservatively for dinner, he
has also a closet full of sport clothes, and red predominates. His
hands are now also good for hitting a golf ball. It has become his
major activity in life other than serving as front man for his
restaurant. Indeed, in the middle of the nine months Marilyn will
be married to him, while they are living in San Francisco, she will
spend many a night sitting in a rear booth of his restaurant. It is
tempting to see her with a bandanna, and alone, doing her nails
while waiting for her husband, but in fact she draws crowds. Still,
the specter of a future as the bored wife of a saloonkeeper may
come to visit her.

That is later, however. Her marriage begins
with a display of publicity works. After the honeymoon, they go
back to San Francisco and live in a prosperous house belonging to
the DiMaggio family. Joe’s sister, Marie, comes in to cook and run
the household. Almost immediately, they are off for Japan. DiMaggio
is mixing business with a wedding trip, for he is also going on a
baseball tour with his old coach, “Lefty” O’Doul. In his mind, the
scenario of marriage calls for the husband to become the center of
attention. He has no chance. From the day of their marriage, she
has become the leading female character in that great American
movie which runs in serial each day in the newspapers of the world.
Not until the funeral of Jack Kennedy and the emergence of Jackie
Kennedy will a woman occupy so central a place in American life
again. They start to get off the airplane in Honolulu, and are
mobbed. “Thousands of Hawaiians ran out onto the field. . . .
Strands of her hair were actually torn away.” Taken in a convoy to
the airport lounge, she is promised Japan will be more civilized.
It is worse. A stampede of the crowd toward their plane, and an
eight-mile drive in an open convertible to downtown Tokyo with
Japanese lining the street to scream “monchan.” She is more
“monchan” than anyone in the Orient since Shirley Temple.

Crowds surround their hotel. She must sneak
out for sightseeing, or to visit the Kabuki Theatre. In the morning
she can go to watch DiMaggio coach baseball with O’Doul, or study
the two men playing snooker in the game room at night. “No matter
where I’ve gone or why I’ve gone there, it always ends up that I
never see anything,” she will soon write by way of Ben Hecht.

At a cocktail party in Tokyo where
high-ranking Army officers meet the DiMaggios, she is invited to
take a quick trip to Korea and entertain American fighting troops.
DiMaggio has the unhappy choice of accompanying her as a flunky —
he can smile at the troops — or stay in Tokyo to do his job and
suffer in her absence. He chooses the second course, and she takes
off for Seoul, and is then shuttled by helicopter up to rear areas
of the front lines where the First Marine Division is waiting on a
winter hill. She asks the pilot to fly low over the assembled
soldiers, and then with a separate airman holding each of her feet,
she leans out of the helicopter, no, hangs outside to wave and blow
kisses, all the while asking the pilot to make more passes over the
troops. It is her strongest public appearance since she walked the
six studio blocks in a negligee, and naturally excites the Marines
to break ranks and crowd up on the landing pad. As she lands, she
sees road signs: drive carefully — the life you save may be marilyn
monroe’s. It is a newsman’s love affair: G. I. Joe meets America’s
most gorgeous doll. Officers and enlisted men dispute over her
attendance at company messes, and when she entertains it is in
regalia.

Marilyn changed from an olive-drab shirt and
skin-tight pants to an equally clinging gown of plum-colored
sequins, cut so low it exposed much of her breast to the frigid
winds. She was decked out with rhinestones to go with her first
song, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Her singing voice was
slight and was always amplified . . . now she had an ordinary mike.
In mid-performance, she stopped singing and walked over to a
soldier in the wings who was about to snap her picture . . . She
gently plucked a lens cover from his camera saying, “Honey, you
forgot to take it off.”

The ovation roars up from the thousands.
There is a newsreel of her shivering in the dark winter afternoon
air, her chest exposed and her blonde hair flying out like her
arms. She coquettes and wiggles her shoulders in a quick showgirl’s
cooch, thus setting up an automatic wail in the troops, she sings
and shivers, her voice is small and yet she is like no other
entertainer. “I swear,” she says in recollection, “I didn’t feel a
thing, except good.” She is the acolyte of Hemingway’s dictum that
whatever makes you feel good is good. For this hour of her life,
she needs no one to admire. “I guess I never felt I had an effect
on people until I was in Korea,” she will say years later. She
looks beautiful. She is happy. She may never look so immensely
happy at any other time. And sings “Do It Again” so well down into
the last innuendo that the Army requests her not to sing it at
other bases. She is too happy to refuse.

At the airport farewell party she tells the
assembled officers and enlisted men, “This was the best thing that
ever happened to me. I only wish I could have seen more of the
boys, all of them. Come to see us in San Francisco.” A great laugh,
and she is on the plane and in a fever of 104 degrees from all the
sexual promises sent to her across the winter winds by men she
would never meet. She is sick for four days in Japan. Once again,
DiMaggio is the nurse. What a sweet convalescence. Actors love
extreme change around themselves.

* * *

Warrior back from the wars, she is obliged to
be bored in San Francisco. There is a limit to how long she can
visit the restaurant, smile at his family, go out in his cabin
cruiser – it is named The Yankee Clipper after himself – or seek to
be a good stepmother to his twelve-year-old son, who, for that
matter, is away at school. They begin to have fights. Later, when
she is divorced from him, she will tell ugly stories which quickly
become exaggerated, so that Lee Strasberg will, for example, be
under the impression DiMaggio is a brute who in a fit of rage once
broke her wrist. The story when reduced by Arthur Miller comes down
to an episode where the ballplayer in a fury at something she said
slammed a suitcase shut, and her hand was accidentally caught and
bruised. Whatever was going on, murder or boredom, she must have
been afraid she would lose something interesting. So she goes back
to films, accepts a part in
No Business Like Show Business
.
The script is patently inferior to
Pink Tights
, and instead
of playing with Frank Sinatra she will have Donald O’Connor for a
leading man. When she wears high heels, O’Connor looks six inches
shorter. Worse, Ethel Merman is in the film. She can hardly sing in
competition with Merman. Dan Dailey, an old pro from the days of
Ticket to Tomahawk
, is used to dancing at his best and
hamming at his utmost in atrocious scripts. There is also Johnny
Ray, at the top of his vogue. She feels like an amateur among
veterans and is shamed by the speed with which they pick up
routines. She is out of practice and has not made a film in eight
months, indeed, is only making this one as part of an arrangement
to get
The Seven-Year Itch
. And in the house she has rented
with DiMaggio in Beverly Hills, there is neither peace nor family
life. She comes home exhausted from the studio and they eat out
every night. Sullenly. She has lost some respect for him. DiMaggio
has been invited to join a holding company by a businessman who
suggests “that it might be helpful if Marilyn would appear at
certain affairs planned by the new company – sales meetings,
conventions, and possibly stockholders’ meetings.” DiMaggio,
apparently, has not said no. He has been weeding out her attachment
to leeches and phonies! But he has not said no on the instant! Leon
Shamroy, the cameraman who gave Marilyn her first screen test eight
years before, sees the DiMaggios one night in a fancy Chinese
restaurant. They do not say a word through the meal.

She has also become a wretched housekeeper.
There are open toothpaste tubes, clothes on the floor, water
running in the sink, electric lights burning – it is nothing to the
slovenliness that will come. Billy Wilder gives a description of
the back seat of her black Cadillac convertible: “There’s blouses
lying there and slacks, dresses, girdles, old shoes, old plane
tickets, old lovers for all I know, you never saw such a filthy
mess in your life. On top of the mess is a whole bunch of traffic
tickets. . . . Is she worried about this? Am I worried about the
sun rising tomorrow?”

It is as if the energy one employs in holding
one’s identity together cannot be wasted to put objects in order.
Small wonder the back seat of her car looks like a crash pad. She
is an animal who needs the funky familiar of her lair.

The war with her husband carries over to the
set. He comes to visit one day. He is no longer the shy suitor who
was mugged at
Monkey Business
. Now he consents only to have
his picture taken with Irving Berlin, and announces that he has
really come to listen to Ethel Merman sing. The “Merm” is also a
favorite at Toots Shor’s. We can guess Marilyn’s reaction.

She is working four hours a day with her
singing coach, trying to work her way back into shape, but
collapses three times on the set during shooting. For her big dance
sequence in “A Tropical Heat Wave” she brings in Jack Cole, her
choreographer in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, but the number
will prove a critical disaster. She is pushing for effect, and
looks pasty in a Carmen Miranda costume. Her skin seems to have
lost tone. She is drinking. Her eyes look flat when they do not
look dead. She has never looked less attractive in a film. So she
wears black panties and a flamenco skirt open up the front, and
thereby looks as if she is giving flashes of pubic hair every time
she kicks a leg. The guardians of the republic kick her back. Hedda
Hopper does a furious column. Ed Sullivan will write, “Miss Monroe
has just about worn the welcome off this observer’s mat. . . .
‘Heat Wave’ is easily one of the most flagrant violations of good
taste this observer has ever witnessed.” The fan mail has lines
like, “Marilyn Monroe sickens me and even my children.” The abuse
will come later, but as if she senses how bad a film she has made,
she finishes the last week of shooting with a low-grade infection,
and goes without a day’s rest to the set of
The Seven-Year
Itch
.