Page 50 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn, who typically wears no underclothing, tonight dons two pairs of white underpants beneath her billowing skirt. But even that’s not enough to protect her modesty in the glare of the set lights and the flashbulbs, which reveal more than she intends—and more than her husband can stand.

DiMaggio is incandescent with rage. “What the hell is going on here?” he demands as the crowd chants “More!” and “Higher!”

He barrels off the set and back to the hotel bar.

That night at the St. Regis, he erupts. The argument is so intense and prolonged that the shouting, the screaming, and the thudding of thrown objects is overheard by cast and crew also staying at the hotel.

Marilyn turns up on set the following morning, hurting and humiliated. Her back and shoulders are covered with bruises that the hair and makeup department work to cover up.

“Exposing my legs and thighs, even my crotch—he said that was the last straw,” Marilyn says. His behavior is the last straw for her as well.

Marilyn tells her hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff that when DiMaggio first got rough with her, she’d told him, “Don’t ever do that again. I was abused as a child, and I’m not going to stand for it.”

So that night at the St. Regis, she informs Guilaroff, “Joe slapped me around the hotel room until I screamed, ‘That’s it!’ You know, Sydney, the first time a man beats you up, it makes you angry. When it happens a second time, you’d have to be crazy to stay. So I left him.”

CHAPTER 37

FOX PRESS AGENT Harry Brand is the first to know.

Marilyn calls Brand in tears, saying that her marriage of less than nine months is over. Within minutes, a press release citing “conflicting demands of their careers” goes out to the newspapers and the all-powerful gossip columnists.

On October 4, 1954, United Press reports: “Marilyn Monroe revealed today that she will file suit to divorce baseball great Joe DiMaggio tomorrow, and her attorney reluctantly agreed: ‘Joe has struck out.’”

Her charge is “mental cruelty.”

When the couple wed on January 14, Louella Parsons had made a stern prediction. “They must resign themselves to the fact that it can’t ever be a completely normal union,” Parsons wrote in her influential column. “Marilyn will remain in show business and Joe will not be able to take it.”

Marilyn denied the claim, saying, “It’s not like I’m giving up my career. I’m simply starting a new one.”

“There is no other man,” Sid Skolsky reports in his column.

DiMaggio isn’t convinced. He’s going to have her investigated.

“Shock waves swept round the world,” theNew York Mirroremotes.MARILYN TELLS JOE: YOU’RE OUT AT HOMEtheChicago Sun-Timescries.

Now what?To find out, nearly a hundred reporters descend on the front lawn of 508 North Palm Drive.

Marilyn’s lawyer, Jerry Giesler, spins an unlikely domestic scene. His client is sick “with a virus” and her soon-to-be-ex is at her bedside, having “brewed a pot of soup for his ailing wife.”

Two days later, Giesler orchestrates what the Associated Press describes as “an exit worthy of an Academy Award.” Joe emerges first, bags packed. With a terse announcement that he’s heading “home” to San Francisco, he drives away in his dark blue Cadillac.

Then it’s Marilyn, walking between Giesler and Harry Brand. “Miss Monroe has nothing to say to you this morning,” Giesler dismisses the press, thinking,The girl is only twenty-eight years old.How much longer can she endure this life?

At least until tomorrow, when Marilyn is due back on set to continue principal photography forThe Seven Year Itch.After all DiMaggio’s outrage, the flying-skirt footage from New York is unusable. It will have to be reshot on the Fox lot, away from noisy crowds.

“The show must go on,” the Fox press office insists.

“Why?” asks a reporter. “Why now?”

“We’re fifty thousand dollars and three days behind production on the picture already.”

CHAPTER 38

DARRYL ZANUCK AND Charles Feldman exchange rapid-fire set memos.

On October 22, 1954, Feldman lobbies for his client. For context, he compares Marilyn’s recent work onThe Seven Year Itchwith what he experienced onA Streetcar Named Desire,the 1951 picture he produced for Warner Bros.

“There have been tough days—immediately after the divorce proceedings, the 18-takes have only happened on rare occasions with the girl … for the last two weeks this girl has worked as hard as anyone I have known in my life. Incidentally I don’t know how Kazan worked with you but I can tell you that on STREETCAR, it was a daily occurrence for us to have 25 to 30 takes with Brando and Vivien Leigh. This has not been happening on ITCH.”

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