Page 51 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Still, the Fox studio head finds fault. Production costs are mounting. Director Billy Wilder needs to film scenes more quickly. Marilyn needs to stop rehearsing on the studio’s time.

On October 27, Marilyn enters the Santa Monica Superior Court and delivers harrowing testimony before a packed gallery and Judge Orlando Rhodes, who is presiding over her appeal for a divorce from Joe DiMaggio.

She’s lived every line she speaks, frequently breaking down in tears as she chronicles her heartbreak, the long stretches where her husband refused to talk to her, his relentlessly critical attitude, his refusal to allow visits from her friends.

“I hoped to have out of my marriage love, warmth, affection and understanding,” she tells the judge, “but the relationship was one of coldness and indifference.”

A corroborating witness is Inez Melson, the business manager whom Marilyn has entrusted with sensitive personal matters, including her mother’s care.

“Don’t bother me,” Melson recalls Joe DiMaggio saying when Marilyn tried to shower him with affection.

After fifteen minutes of testimony, Judge Rhodes grants the divorce.

Marilyn is powerless to restrain her sobs as she exits the proceedings into a barrage of press. The cameras capture her funereal black suit with its glamorous plunging neckline and open collar—and her flowing tears.

“I’m sorry. I can’t say anything. I’m so sorry,” she pleads to reporters clamoring for her comment.

The divorce headlines have Joe DiMaggio commiserating with his pal Frank Sinatra, who is going through a second divorceof his own. Sinatra’s second wife—Ava Gardner, an actress known for her green eyes, auburn hair, and femme fatale roles—had filed for divorce in June.

The Italian American icons have been close since wartime, when DiMaggio’s Sicilian immigrant parents were declared enemy aliens out of fear for Italy’s role in the Axis alliance.

On November 5, 1954, a week after the divorce is granted, Sinatra and DiMaggio meet for dinner at the Villa Capri in Hollywood.

When DiMaggio spots actor Brad Dexter, he pleads with Marilyn’s co-star fromAsphalt Jungleto speak with her on his behalf.

Dexter places the call immediately, from the restaurant kitchen, and tells Marilyn who he’s with and why he’s calling. “Joe realizes that he’s made a terrible mistake in how he’s handled himself in his marriage with you. And he’d like very, very much to be able to pick up again and get together with you and maybe you could reconstitute your marriage.”

Marilyn listens quietly, then says, “Brad, I don’t want to talk to him. I absolutely don’t want to have any communication with him at all. I’ve had it and this is it.”

Dexter hangs up, then delivers the bad news. “Joe, she does not want to talk to you or have anything to do with you.”

Devastated, DiMaggio returns to the dining room. Not long after, an urgent call comes for him. It’s not from Marilyn, but it is about her.

Barney Ruditsky—a private investigator DiMaggio had hired to tail Marilyn in search of evidence in the divorce case—is still on the job. The legendary Prohibition-era former NYPD detective has impressed both Sinatra and DiMaggiowith his Hollywood résumé: consultant on crime and police pictures; undercover debt collector for the late Bugsy Siegel; co-owner of Sherry’s Restaurant, where “big names of gangland” congregate on the Sunset Strip.

Ruditsky alerts DiMaggio that he’s spotted Marilyn entering an apartment house on Kilkea Drive and Waring Avenue. Could she be with Hal Schaefer, her confidant and vocal coach onGentlemen Prefer Blondes? There have been rumors that the two have become close after working together again onThere’s No Business Like Show Business.

DiMaggio and Sinatra down their drinks and mount a search party.

As it happens, Marilyn and Schaeferaretogether. Half-dressed, Marilyn feels some warning “vibrations” compelling her to look outside. She and Schaefer spot a half dozen men approaching, DiMaggio and Sinatra among them.

They scramble out the back way to terrifying sounds of a forceful break-in and a woman’s screams.

Ruditsky had zeroed in on the right address but the wrong apartment. The woman discovered in bed—alone—is Mrs. Florence Kotz Ross.

TheLos Angeles Timesreports: “Mrs. Ross was fast asleep about 11 p.m. when five or six men suddenly battered down the back door to her apartment, tearing it from its hinges and leaving glass strewn on the floor … A bright flash of light was shone in her eyes and she was confronted with a number ofmen, some of whom seemed to be carrying an instrument which at first sight she believed to be an ax.”

Once she recovers from her fright, Ross threatens to sue.

For Marilyn, the incident is all of a piece with her mounting frustrations. She’s fed up with the lot of them. Joe. The studio. Everyone.

Marilyn has become accustomed to the barbed tongues of film critics, but the way they single her out of the ensemble cast forThere’s No Business Like Show Businessfeels like a stinging rebuke. Her “wriggling and squirming … are embarrassing to behold,” says theNew York Times.With a wink and a nudge,Timemagazine wagers that she “bumps and grinds as expressively as the law will allow.”

Marilyn makes a decision. “Now I want to be an artist. I want to be a real actress.”

She tells Fox that she wants to expand into dramatic roles, maybe an adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel likeThe Brothers Karamazov.Instead, they’ve commissioned Nunnally Johnson, producer and screenwriter ofHow to Marry a Millionaire,to direct her in his latest screenplay,How to Be Very, Very Popular.

What Fox sees as a “high-class screenplay” Marilyn dismisses as yet another “sex role.” She’s under contract until 1958, but terms are dangled. If she takes the new part, the studio will pay her a $100,000 bonus for her work onThe Seven Year Itch.If she doesn’t, they’ll suspend her. Again.

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