Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (46 page)

As part of the task, Marilyn telephoned her old friend Lucille Ryman Carroll, asking her to welcome Ben Hecht and to be entirely frank about Marilyn’s early days in Hollywood. “But you’re married to Joe now,” said Lucille, surprised. “Surely you don’t want me to tell Hecht
everything!
This will be the end of your career
and
your marriage.” But Marilyn insisted, perhaps because she hoped Hecht would indeed print the entire truth, thus simultaneously assuring ever-fresh controversy for herself as well as precipitating what Lucille feared, the end of her marriage to Joe. The calendar he had ruefully accepted as Marilyn’s momentary aberration; her days on the boulevard would surely be difficult to justify. But Hecht knew what could be published in those more discriminating days, and the more incandescent details of Marilyn’s life “walking the boulevard” were entirely omitted. Alas, the entire Monroe-Hecht enterprise collapsed that June, when Hecht learned that Chambrun had sold extracts from the manuscript—much of it doctored by Chambrun himself—to the London
Empire News
without the permission required of himself and Marilyn. At the same time, Skolsky was not about to let a good thing entirely evaporate: he quickly drafted a little book about Marilyn that received her endorsement when it was published serially in newspapers and between covers later that year. (The first book about her was a slim volume under one hundred pages—news items stitched together into a narrative by Joe Franklin and Laurie Palmer, published in 1953.)

But by this time Marilyn had other concerns. She rented a house at 508 North Palm Drive, Beverly Hills (Jean Harlow had lived at 512), and a reluctant Joe agreed to move from San Francisco to live with her there—at least part-time, for by the end of May she was back on a movie set. Of this he did not approve, but neither did he wish her to work without some sort of supervision.

Although Feldman had been representing Marilyn unofficially and without contract since the death of Johnny Hyde, the William Morris agency legally had rights to a percentage of her earnings through 1953.
With that deal now expired, Marilyn signed with Famous Artists at last, on March 31, 1954—just as Feldman and French were concluding the terms of her reconciliation with Fox.

Marilyn’s arrangement with the studio was straightforward, although it, too, would soon be open to question and become the basis for a complicated battle when she left Hollywood later that year. For the present, however, things looked manageable. Fox agreed to drop their demand that Marilyn appear in
Pink Tights
. Instead, if she would play a supporting role in the musical
There’s No Business Like Show Business
, they would give her the leading role later that year in the film version of George Axelrod’s Broadway hit
The Seven Year Itch
, to be directed by Billy Wilder.

Marilyn was back on her contracted salary—but only until August 1954, when a new seven-year deal would commence. There would also be a bonus of $100,000 for
The Seven Year Itch
, although this was never put in writing, was never entirely paid and became a bargaining chip when she next defied Fox and (they claimed) reneged on her contractual obligations.

A singular bit of contention was caused by Marilyn’s insistence on the studio paying for her drama coach (Natasha), her choice of music coach (Hal Schaefer) and her dance director (Jack Cole) for
There’s No Business Like Show Business
. These concessions she won, but Fox still feared losing the world’s biggest star; they demanded, therefore, that her time of suspensions (two periods from January to April) be added to her current contract before the new seven-year deal took effect in August. Thus Marilyn would have to be available for another film—a clear reflection of their anxiety that she would repeat the ploy of absence. Little did they know at the time that this demand would have disastrous consequences for them.

Because
The Seven Year Itch
would be co-produced by Wilder and Feldman (who had a particularly good relationship with Fox and many clients there), Marilyn realized that once again she would be making other people rich without either her creative control or fair financial compensation. At the same time, she was in fact planning a longer absence than anyone expected. Throughout 1954, letters and telephone calls were exchanged between her attorney, Loyd Wright and Milton Greene’s attorney, Frank Delaney—both men eager to find
financial backing for a new venture to be called Marilyn Monroe Productions. This was all discussed in remarkable secrecy, for had Fox learned her plans, the contract might well have been legally invalidated by virtue of her contrary intentions.

Marilyn spent most of April and May in San Francisco, where she and Joe lived with his sister Marie and others of his family. As before with the Kargers, Marilyn tried to attach herself to a family, longing to find what had been denied in childhood. But the idea of Marilyn as a simple housewife is ludicrous, as are fantasies of her scrubbing the stovetop, sewing booties for children-to-be and tasting to see if the pasta is perfectly
al dente
.

She returned to Hollywood in late May and worked daily with Hal Schaefer and Jack Cole for her numbers in
Show Business
.
⁶
Shooting began on May 29, with Natasha, at Marilyn’s request and to Joe’s annoyance, back on the set and very much in her life again. He was also jealous of the time his wife had with Schaefer, a handsome, polished bachelor with whom Marilyn spent long hours at the studio, often into the evening. For weeks, Marilyn ignored Joe’s jealousy over this, and (as she later said) Joe ignored her completely: they seemed, in fact, like mere roommates who met occasionally at Palm Drive.

There’s No Business Like Show Business
was little more than a Cinema-Scope excuse for overdesigned musical numbers by Irving Berlin, the sequences vaguely stitched together by the story of a terribly sweet family of Irish vaudevillians (Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Mitzi Gaynor, Donald O’Connor and Johnny Ray). Marilyn had the superfluous supporting role of a hat-check girl who falls in love with one of them and proves she can sing, pose and posture. But she and the film sink in an extravagant cuteness of bloated production values, excessively fussy costumes and saccharine pieties including everything from little homilies on sobriety to discourses on performers becoming clergymen.

*    *    *

Throughout the filming that summer, Marilyn was ill with bronchitis (the lingering effects of a virus she had picked up in Korea), anemia and, for the first time, serious side-effects of sleeping pills, which made her groggy, moody and weepy on the rare mornings she appeared on time for shooting calls. Director Walter Lang and the other cast members were annoyed and alarmed when Marilyn repeatedly arrived confused, shaky and unprepared. According to Natasha,

At night she would do scenes beautifully with me in a rehearsal, but the following morning she had forgotten the words entirely. “You don’t know how unhappy I am,” Marilyn said. And that was all she said, but the company working with her was driven half insane by the delays.

There was, her coach noted, “this conflict between her laziness and her ambition.” But even Natasha had to admit that more than an indictment of sloth was at stake here; she spoke dolefully of how Marilyn

called me at two or three in the morning that spring when DiMaggio was being so filthy to her, when he beat her. She couldn’t stand being treated that way. I talked to her for hours, until my hand was clammy on the telephone. She knew she could call me at any time, and that spring she did.

This reliance on Natasha explains an otherwise odd occurrence on June 14, when Marilyn telephoned Hugh French and insisted that Natasha be kept on the Fox payroll with an increased salary. When studio executive Lew Schreiber flatly refused this request, Marilyn threatened to resign from moviemaking for four years. This provoked a series of hastily called meetings among Marilyn, Zanuck, Feldman and French. Natasha got her raise. In light of that victory, Marilyn went further. She refused to sign the new Fox contract for
The Seven Year Itch
unless she was guaranteed her choice of dialogue, vocal and dance coaches on all forthcoming pictures. She insisted (thus the interoffice memoranda at Famous Artists) that she was “tired of having to fight the studio when all she was interested in was getting great parts.”

Natasha was not the only confidant to this bitter stage of Marilyn’s marital life: the Greenes, among others, were told of it later in excruciating detail, as were Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and Lee Strasberg. At the same time, an increasing reliance on barbiturates was Marilyn’s defense against the realization that she had indeed contracted an ill-advised marriage: more than anything, she needed and desired to sleep—not only to prepare for the next day’s work schedule, but also to avoid confrontations with Joe. Placid with strangers and acquaintances but condescending and often bitter toward women, he was not the right husband for her at that time of their lives; he was, in fact, very like Fred Karger, and Marilyn’s submission was much like a repetition of that earlier affair.

More poignantly, she was repeating the pattern of trying to form an alliance with a man who really had a low appraisal of her, who derided her wardrobe and took for granted that he knew what was best for her. Once again, the relationship confirmed her own pathetic self-estimation, and with Joe the motif of manly condescension took a more overtly abusive quality—perhaps because, according to the paradox of such relationships, he did indeed love her in his fashion.

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that Marilyn would again seek emotional satisfaction elsewhere, and this she found in the gentle, patient Hal Schaefer, her musical director during
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and
River of No Return
. He returned to work with her on
Show Business
at her insistence, and she later saw that he was given onscreen credit for his work with her—an achievement so highly regarded that Schaefer was loaned to Warner Bros. to work with Judy Garland in
A Star Is Born
(although, alas, without the appropriate credit).

Schaefer was a kind and untemperamental man who guided Marilyn through four songs for
Show Business
and several more she recorded for RCA that year. Very soon there were such widespread rumors of a romance between teacher and student that DiMaggio spoke openly of his resentment. “It’s ridiculous that Mr. DiMaggio could be any more jealous of me than he is of other people working with Marilyn,” Schaefer said, perhaps unwisely. “She’s a wonderful girl and kind to us all. I’m embarrassed about the whole thing.” Such statements did nothing to diminish either the gossip or Joe’s fuming.

And then a dreadful thing occurred. On the evening of July 27,
Schaefer had an appointment to meet with Sheila Stuart, another actress-singer he was coaching, at the home of studio lyricist Harry Giventer. When Schaefer failed to arrive, they made several phone calls to his home, his office and mutual friends, but without success. Concerned because they knew of the Marilyn-Hal affair (or at least the rumors of it), they decided to drive to his bungalow at Fox, where at four in the morning they found him sprawled on the floor, unconscious. Giventer and Stuart rode with Schaefer in an ambulance to Santa Monica Hospital, where emergency gastric lavage saved him from an overdose of Benzedrine and Nembutal, washed down by a lethal liquid later identified as typewriter cleaning fluid. On this both police and hospital reports were unambiguous. As for the situation that precipitated this unfortunate incident, no one ever elaborated. At her husband’s insistence, Marilyn may have told Hal it was necessary to end this intense relationship, whatever its category; it has also been suggested that anonymous callers had threatened Schaefer.

Giventer and Stuart confirmed that although Marilyn was not Hal’s only visitor during his recovery, she was the most constant. In fact, someone had called her at once, for Marilyn arrived just as Hal was wheeled into the emergency room, accompanying him as far as she was allowed, clinging to the stretcher and crying repeatedly, “It’s okay, baby—it’s Marilyn—I’m here—it’s okay.” At the request of Fox’s publicists, the press considerately but not convincingly reported Schaefer’s illness as nervous collapse due to overwork: the story occupied so much space for so long, however (and Giventer and Stuart gave such adamant denials of anything really
serious
), that no one believed the event was anything but the result of a romance somehow gone tragically wrong.

Columnist Louella Parsons adored Marilyn, never accepted rumors of the troubled marriage to Joe and was the last to believe its rupture. She usually wrote of her rhapsodically, as if she were Hollywood’s very own Joan of Arc battling the treacherous enemies of capricious fame and fickle studios; she also heaped purple prose on Joe. But Parsons knew of the Marilyn-Hal business, and she informed her readers that Joe was “very unhappy when Marilyn went to the hospital many times to see Hal Schaefer when he was critically ill. . . . He was just as jealous of Marilyn’s relationship with Natasha Lytess, whom he once ordered out of their house.” Whatever the precise nature and
extent of Marilyn’s relationship with Hal Schaefer, it was so revived at the time of her divorce from Joe that their friends believed it was an importing contributing factor. And events following the divorce proved them right.

On their work, Schaefer was candid. “She had very little self-esteem,” he said years later.

But at the same time she was a quite complicated woman with a sure grasp of what she wanted to accomplish. By this time, despite her insecurities, she was no longer hiding behind the music. I was with her all the time in the recording studio, and there was very little intercutting, editing or overdubbing. She trusted me, and we became quite close. I had been warned to stay away from her, not to socialize. I was gentle and considerate with her, which seemed to mean everything, and she warmed to this.