Page 43 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“He dislikes crowds and glamour,” Marilyn says, explaining away his absence from yet another Hollywood event. To Sid Skolsky, she says, “All he does is watch TV night and day.”

CHAPTER 32

TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD CHICAGO ENTREPRENEUR Hugh Hefner’s pulled a fast one. The first issue of his new magazine,Playboy,hits newsstands in December 1953 with a picture of Marilyn on the cover.

She didn’t pose for that photo. It’s a shot recycled from the 1952 Miss America Pageant parade where Marilyn served as Grand Marshal. And the cover line claiming the “FIRST TIME in any magazine FULL COLOR the famous MARILYN MONROE NUDE” refers to the two shots Tom Kelley took back in 1949 for the “Golden Dreams” pinup calendar. Hefner tracks them down and buys the rights to the whole calendar. “I discovered that the Marilyn Monroe calendar—which everyone had heard about but nobody had seen—was owned by the John Baumgarth Calendar Co. out on the West Side of Chicago, very close to where I had grown up,” he says. “So I drove out to Chicago and talked to John Baumgarth, and I walked out of there with the rights to the Marilyn Monroe calendar and the color separations—all for five hundred dollars.”

The Marilyn photos are a big chunk of his $8,000 budget, but an amazing payoff.

“She is natural sex personified. It is there in every look and movement. That’s what makes her the most natural choice in the world for our very firstPlayboy Sweetheart,” the magazine proclaims.

The fifty-cent magazine quickly sells out its 70,000-copy run. Marilyn is paid nothing.

Yet Marilyn is starting to push back when she feels advantages are being taken. Twentieth Century-Fox tells her that her next picture will beThe Girl in Pink Tights,a remake of the 1943 Betty Grable pictureConey Island.

MARILYN MONROE PLAYING TEACHER IN NEW MUSICAL, Erskine Johnson announces in his column.

But she refuses to be typecast as yet another “dumb blonde,” especially when she learns that co-star Frank Sinatra’s salary forThe Girl in Pink Tightsis to be $5,000 per week—more than three times her $1,500 rate.

She asks to see the script.

More difficult behavior from “Straw Head,”Zanuck grouses, but he agrees to the contract player’s bold request and sends her the script.

The role of Jenny, a prim schoolteacher turned burlesque dancer, is poorly written, banal, and foolish. Marilyn scribbles “TRASH” across the cover in bright red ink before hurling the script across the room. She refuses to play the part.

Joe DiMaggio is relieved. The studio has been exploiting Marilyn, and not just in business matters. Shots calculated to show her legs and her bust, both at the same time, are too risqué for his taste.

The Fox executives are furious. Last month, they successfully launchedHow to Marry a Millionaire. She’s a star. She’stheirstar. They made her, and they demand their pound of crystal-clad flesh. Marilyn must take the part to fulfill her contract. She isnotbigger than the studio. No one is bigger than the studio.

Work onThe Girl in Pink Tightsis to begin immediately upon completion of the retakes needed to completeRiver of No Return.On December 9, a letter goes out by registered mail to the Famous Artists Corporation, where Charles Feldman now represents Marilyn following the end of her contract with William Morris. “You are hereby notified and instructed to report immediately to the studio,” it begins, rattling off a list of her contractual obligations.

She’s a no-show.

“Marilyn Monroe is a stupid girl and is being fed some stupid advice” declares theHollywood Reporter. The piece headlined20TH STANDS PAT ON MONROEcharacterizes “industry opinion” as the certainty that she’s “picked herself a fight that she’ll have a tough time winning.”

Fox dangles a relatively unknown actress named Sheree North—a blonde with measurements identical to Marilyn’s—as her replacement.

Marilyn won’t relent. She has Joe DiMaggio’s backing. And that’s enough.

She spends Christmas 1953 in San Francisco with the DiMaggio family. After giving Marilyn a Maximilian “Black Mist” mink coat, Joe proposes to her—without an engagement ring.

The gesture is neither romantic nor passionate, tender noramorous. She’s having trouble at work. He has a practical solution.

The couple has been “talking about getting married for some months,” Marilyn says. “We knew it wouldn’t be an easy marriage. On the other hand, we couldn’t keep on going forever as a pair of cross-country lovers. It might begin to hurt both our careers.” Marriage, they decide, is “the only solution to our problem. But we had left time and place in the air.”

Rumors of a Las Vegas wedding now swirl.

At the city’s Hotel El Rancho, the couple schedules a ceremony for January 4, 1954—then cancels it.

The press spiral into a frenzy. Their only lead, from one of DiMaggio’s four sisters, is that the couple is on “a motor trip.”

That same day, Fox officially suspends Marilyn.

On January 5, theLos Angeles Timesspeculates, “It could be that she was having so much fun up north with Joe DiMaggio, the former Yankee baseball star, that she simply didn’t feel like coming back to work.”

CHAPTER 33

“I MET HIM two years ago on a blind date in Los Angeles,” Marilyn tells reporters, “and a couple of days ago we started talking about this.”

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