Marilyn Monroe (16 page)

Feldman, for his part, didn’t seem to understand. He never really comprehended Marilyn’s terror of being exploited. But there was one person who, however much he resented her work, was every bit as wary and suspicious as she. At a moment when Marilyn was particularly concerned with protecting herself against a host of potential users, Joe DiMaggio’s role in her life became increasingly important.

A blue Cadillac with the license plate “JOE D” was often parked outside Marilyn’s small white apartment house on Doheny, below the Sunset Strip. A high iron gate opened onto a courtyard. A fountain splashed blue-tinted water, but the sound was frequently drowned out by a television set in Apartment Four. Behind a screen door, then a black enameled door, a tiny hall led to the living room which contained a fireplace with a brick hearth, with mirrored walls on both sides. One mirror slid back to disclose the television set that DiMaggio, stretched out on a bright orange velvet sofa beneath several bookshelves, watched incessantly when he visited. Oversized crystal and ceramic ashtrays, filled with Joe’s cigarette butts, littered the cocktail table and other surfaces.

Off the hall was a small, dark bedroom. A double bed was flanked by a folding snack tray with a brass lamp, and a wooden night-table with a black telephone. The portrait of Lincoln hung over the bed.

When the Cadillac was gone, the apartment quiet, baskets of velvety, long-stemmed roses arrived several times a day. The delivery boy left them in front of Miss Monroe’s screen door. The attached card always bore the same message: “I love you, I love you.”

To most observers, Joe, who had his own quarters at the Knickerbocker Hotel, remained a shadowy presence in Marilyn’s life. Sometimes he was the subtext of Marilyn’s conversation, as when she asked Jane Russell what it was like to be married to a professional athlete. (Russell’s husband played NFL football.) Sometimes Marilyn talked openly about Joe, as when she told David Conover, the photographer who had discovered her in 1946, that DiMaggio had proposed on numerous occasions.

Did she love him? Conover asked.

“I don’t know,” Marilyn replied. “He’s very sweet and kind. And
very much a gentleman. But sometimes he’s so boring I could scream. All he knows and talks about is baseball. That’s why I’m not sure.” She complained to Sidney Skolsky in a similar vein.

Though DiMaggio’s refusal to escort Marilyn to industry events like the
Photoplay
Awards led people to speculate about the relationship, afterwards, more often than not, his blue Cadillac would be waiting for her outside. “You know Joe, he doesn’t like crowds,” Marilyn would apologize before they drove off together.

In contrast to those who merely glimpsed or heard about Joe, the few people who had dealings with Marilyn on a close daily basis, such as her new lawyer Loyd Wright and her agent Charlie Feldman, saw DiMaggio as a formidable presence, a strong if taciturn personality. Joe desperately wanted to marry Marilyn, but he was too stoical to allow other people to see his feelings. It was a point of honor to keep those feelings bottled up inside, leading him to suffer severe stomach-aches and ulcers.

He very much wanted Marilyn to give up acting, but as long as she planned to remain in the movies he did much to help and advise her. He wanted to protect her. He wanted to prevent all those phonies from taking advantage of her. He may also have wanted to show Marilyn that she could trust and depend on him. Whatever his motives, DiMaggio had an increasing influence on some of her most important decisions.

That May, just as she finished
How to Marry a Millionaire
, Marilyn’s weekly salary escalated to $1,250. It was an insignificant sum in relation to the box-office success of
Niagara
and, soon,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
There was no question that the terms of Marilyn’s contract had to be completely renegotiated. In 1950, Johnny Hyde had made a deal on behalf of a starlet in whom he alone believed. By the summer of 1953, it was obvious that Marilyn was about to be a very major star. From the moment Feldman had seen the rushes of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and heard the buzz about Marilyn at the studio, he’d known that the time to start talking about a new deal would be after the film went into release. If audiences and critics reacted as he expected they would, Marilyn would be in an excellent position to maximize her salary demands.

Meanwhile, Feldman had considered other ways to squeeze money out of the studio. A strategy he had used with other clients seemed appropriate here: Feldman urged Marilyn to buy the screen rights to a novel and to commission a screenwriter to tailor a script for her.
Famous Artists would then make it a condition of her new contract that Zanuck purchase the rights from Marilyn. He calculated that would earn her a profit in excess of $200,000. Marilyn, advised by her lawyer to go ahead, agreed. Feldman’s office sent ten different books to Doheny, and Joe and Marilyn studied them carefully.

The sports pages were DiMaggio’s typical reading matter, but in the end it was he who chose the novel
Horns of the Devil.
Marilyn, with $5,000 advanced by Feldman, bought the book strictly on Joe’s say-so. Then she conferred with the screenwriter Alfred Hayes, whom she had met during
Clash by Night.
She paid him another few thousand dollars of Feldman’s money to complete a script. The decision to buy
Horns of the Devil
would have a significant impact on the timing of the contract negotiations. For tax reasons, Marilyn had to hold on to the screen rights for at least six months after the date of purchase. Therefore, if the rights were to be used as a negotiating tool, she couldn’t sign a new studio contract until six months had passed.

Even at this stage, Feldman was not being paid for his work on Marilyn’s behalf. Johnny Hyde had negotiated her current contract, and the agency commission deducted from her paycheck still went to William Morris. As long as that contract remained in force, no matter who handled Marilyn’s day-to-day interests, William Morris collected the commission. That situation would change when a new studio contract was signed. Then, Feldman would be entitled not only to the agent’s commission but also to a cut of the proceeds from the sale of
Horns of The Devil
, if (and that “if” was beginning to be a source of embarrassment) Marilyn had finally signed an agency contract with Famous Artists. She had postponed so many times that Feldman had stopped raising the issue. Until she did sign, Feldman would not be entitled to a penny, no matter how many hours he and his staff devoted to her.

On July 15, 1953,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
was released. It was a spectacular critical and box-office success. This was the moment Marilyn had been working toward since she was a sad, lonely little girl in an orphanage. This was everything Grace and, later, Johnny Hyde had wanted for her.
Niagara
had excited audiences; but the impact of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
was entirely different. Suddenly, people felt they really knew “Marilyn Monroe.” And it was immediately obvious that they couldn’t get enough of her.

Zanuck expected to hear from Feldman with his demands for a new contract, but the agent, usually so aggressive, was mysteriously silent. What Zanuck didn’t know was that the purchase of
Horns of the Devil
would not become final before August 5, 1953. Lest a deal be struck before the six months required by the tax law had safely passed, Feldman did not plan to renegotiate Marilyn’s contract until February. The delay had several advantages. By that time, the box-office figures on both
Niagara
and
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
would be in and
How to Marry a Millionaire
would have opened. Furthermore, six months would give Marilyn and her representatives plenty of time to work out exactly what they wanted from Twentieth.

At the moment, however, Marilyn was preoccupied with the more immediate issue of what assignments Zanuck planned under her current deal. A few weeks after the premiere, she was due to leave for Canada for her next film,
River of No Return
, with Otto Preminger directing. Marilyn was unhappy with her role as a frontier cabaret performer. Soon there was new cause for upset. Just before she left town, Zanuck announced that when she was finished with Preminger, he intended to put her in another musical. He didn’t have a finished script for
The Girl in Pink Tights
, so he sent Marilyn a précis of the plot. That was enough to convince Marilyn that
Pink Tights
was, in her words, “another Betty Grable picture.”

Marilyn’s impulse was to refuse. She talked angrily to Feldman about wanting to protect her career from being destroyed by Zanuck. The agent, for his part, thought there might be another reason to turn down the assignment. He suggested that Marilyn should say no just to signal that she was aware of her new power at Twentieth. Feldman was thinking ahead to February; he didn’t want Zanuck to imagine that Marilyn had waited to ask for a new deal because she or her agents were naïve or oblivious to the fact that she’d become “the most important personality on the lot.” Feldman also thought that Marilyn would need a rest after she finished
River of No Return.
And he was worried that she risked over-exposure with so many films in release.

As Feldman and Marilyn talked, her personal history began to cloud her thinking. The idea of refusing an assignment seemed to make her exceedingly nervous. Marilyn said that if she turned down
Pink Tights
, Zanuck would put her on suspension. She had no savings. She
lived from one paycheck to the next. How would she get along? Feldman promised to advance money to tide her over financially. Besides, he pointed out, she was too valuable for Zanuck to keep her off the payroll for long. Sooner or later, Zanuck would have to give in and put Marilyn in a project more to her liking. Still Marilyn wavered. One minute she planned to refuse
Pink Tights;
the next she said she would do it if Zanuck borrowed Gene Kelly as her co-star. It became evident that she was just trying to find a way to justify accepting a role she didn’t want. In raising the issue of suspension, Marilyn had come perilously close to alluding to her lifelong fear. Constantly being passed from one foster home to another had taught her to dread being cast out and abandoned.

Finally, Feldman sent Marilyn off to Canada without a decision having been made. He reassured her that since there was still no script, nothing was definite. There was plenty of time to make up her mind if and when she was formally assigned to
Pink Tights.
Meanwhile, “Mr. Z.”—as Marilyn called Zanuck—had made a number of unprecedented concessions to her on
River of No Return
, confirming Feldman’s view that she was “in the driver’s seat.” In the past, Marilyn’s sole request had been permission to have Natasha on the set. This time, she also asked for her choreographer from
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, Jack Cole, to help with the dance numbers. She asked permission to meet with Preminger to discuss script changes. And, newly concerned about the calibre of her leading men, she asked for Robert Mitchum, then under contract to RKO. Zanuck agreed to everything.

Preminger was considerably less accommodating. The trouble started in the train’s dining car, where he took an instant dislike to Natasha. Preminger, born in Vienna, couldn’t understand why Natasha insisted on pretending she was Russian. In Banff, dislike quickly turned to hate. Time and again Natasha wrecked line readings by encouraging Marilyn to enunciate each syllable. The result—mannered, artificial speech—was disastrous. According to Preminger, Marilyn’s exaggerated lip movements were impossible to film. When Preminger tried to correct Marilyn, she ignored him. Refusing to speak in the distinctive “soft, slurred voice” that Preminger so admired, Marilyn seemed concerned only with what Natasha thought. Mitchum, for his part, agreed with the director.

“Now stop that nonsense!” Mitchum would say, slapping Marilyn’s
backside a second or two before Preminger started shooting. “Let’s play it like human beings. Come on!”

Natasha was also a source of dissension in Marilyn’s own camp. DiMaggio had unexpectedly decided to tag along on location, accompanied by the spectral George Solotaire. Joe’s ostensible reason for making the trip was to do some fishing. Some company members, however, suspected that he was really there to keep an eye on Marilyn with Robert Mitchum. Nonetheless, to careful observers, it seemed to be Joe and Natasha, not Joe and Mitchum, who were at war. Natasha found DiMaggio sullen and vapid, and he treated her as though she were one of the very people in Hollywood against whom he needed to protect Marilyn. He hated users; he hated phonies; he hated sycophants.

Also appearing in the film was the child actor Tommy Rettig. One night as the company was eating dinner, Natasha approached little Tommy and warned him that without a coach’s help most child stars lose their gift. “You must learn to use your instrument,” said Natasha, wasting no time in applying for the job. Though Marilyn frequently forgot her lines, sometimes requiring twenty or more takes, the eleven-year-old’s memory was impeccable. The next day, the boy, visibly agitated, forgot his dialogue. Unable to do as Preminger asked, he began to cry. Preminger summoned his mother, who disclosed what had happened at dinner.