Page 49 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“I am crazy!”

Her lack of sleep is taking its toll. After Joe DiMaggio goes to sleep, she calls friends, hoping someone, anyone, will pick up at one or two o’clock in the morning.

It’s often Natasha Lytess on the other end of the line, but one night Marilyn reaches Brad Dexter, a fellow cast member fromAsphalt Jungle.“I’m extremely unhappy,” she tells him. “I married Joe with love. I thought I was going to have a good life. I thought we were going to have a decent marriage. I thought we were going to have a relationship as a husband and as a wife. And all the things that are entailed in a good marriage. And I’ve discovered that the man is absolutely obsessed with jealousy and possessiveness … He doesn’t want to know about my business. He doesn’t want to know about my work as an actress. He doesn’t want me to associate with any of my friends. He wants to cut me off completely from my whole world of motion pictures, friends, and creative people that I know.”

The arguments with DiMaggio are becoming angrier, more physically intense, as his dream of making her a dutiful housewife dies by the day.

Even DiMaggio’s good friend George Solotaire can see that his pal fundamentally misunderstands his new bride. “Like, here’s this young, beautiful woman on the verge of becoming one of the most successful and famous actresses in the world, and she’s going to give it all up to make lasagna for Joe and spend her days changing diapers?”

On set, Whitey Snyder hovers over her, covering up bruises on her arms and shoulders, though never on her face.

Fox executives are only interested in the PR opportunities the superstar marriage affords. “We haven’t lost a star, we’ve gained a center fielder,” one said after Marilyn’s City Hall wedding, and the studio is holding that line.

Except the center fielder loathes the star’s playbook. He complains that “she brings out the worst in him,” that “she’sspoiled and self-centered,” and he’s fed up with “coddling her” and listening to her “woe-is-me stories.”

One afternoon in Marilyn’s dressing room, Lytess confronts DiMaggio. Their mutual dislike has only intensified since the wedding. But when the acting coach suggests that divorce might be the best option, DiMaggio shouts in her face, “Hell if I’m letting her go.”

He’s never enjoyed watching Marilyn perform for the camera, but on August 27, the studio convinces him to attend the production of “Heat Wave,” one of the dance numbers inThere’s No Business Like Show Business.

“We’re having a heat wave”—Marilyn sings Irving Berlin’s lyrics as male dancers carry her onto the stage in a litter festooned with flowers and bird cages. “The temperature’s rising, it isn’t surprising.”

She is dressed in a black bikini embellished with sequins, along with a black-and-white palm print flamenco skirt slit up the front to reveal tiers of pink ruffles on the inside. She also wears a floppy white straw hat bedecked with flowers. It’s costume designer Billy Travilla’s nod to Spain, but DiMaggio cares nothing for artistic authenticity.

When, between takes, Marilyn rushes over to embrace him, he recoils with revulsion, his rejection so complete that she is unable to continue. She’s lost the music and the lyrics and the dance beat. While she takes a break in the makeup chair, he storms off set.

In another stage on the Fox lot, the production ofDésiréeis wrapping ahead of its November release. Marlon Brando, who’s generating Oscar buzz for his star turn in this summer’sOn the Waterfront,is playing Napoleon.

Marilyn doesn’t know Brando well, but when he sees a bruise on her arm, he asks, “What’s happened? That looks painful.”

She laughs and runs her hands through her hair. “Can you believe I bit myself in my sleep?”

“No, I can’t,” he replies, shaking his head. “I’m afraid I don’t believe that at all.”

On September 1, 1954,The Seven Year Itchbegins filming in New York City.

Darryl Zanuck has authorized a two-month shoot and is pleased with the initial rushes. He telegrams Marilyn’s agent, Charles Feldman, who’s also producing the film: “Monroe was particularly outstanding. Keep up the tempo of the dialogue … I’m really impressed by everything I saw.”

Working with Tom Ewell, who’s reprising his Broadway role of Richard Sherman, and Marilyn as “The Girl,” director and screenwriter Billy Wilder amplifies the sexual energy of this screwball comedy about a bookish married man who becomes infatuated by his beautiful upstairs neighbor.

In the predawn hours of September 15, the movie crew gathers at the corner of 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue to film a scene described in the script as the “flying-skirt sequence.”

To create excitement for the movie, word has gone out to hundreds of press and public to come witness the scene being shot.

Joe DiMaggio doesn’t plan to be among them. He’d rather go for a couple of drinks at the hotel bar with his friend George Solotaire while Marilyn works. “It would make her nervous,and it would make me nervous, too,” he tells reporter Walter Winchell.

“Oh, come on, Joe. You have to be there. It might make some copy for me,” the newsman wheedles.

The scene they walk into is mayhem. The two co-stars are meant to be walking out of a movie theater during a heat wave, but the crowd’s raucous enthusiasm keeps drowning out the actors’ lines.

“Ooh, can you feel the breeze from the subway?” Marilyn’s character asks Ewell. “Isn’t it delicious?”

“Sort of cools the ankles, doesn’t it?” Ewell answers, while visibly admiring her legs.

They’re standing on a subway grate. Air is forced from below to simulate a passing train, blowing the skirt of Marilyn’s white halter-neck dress up over her knees, over her thighs, over her hips, even over her head.

Billy Wilder intends the scene as a sight gag, and Marilyn plays it to comedic perfection.

The action is captured by the film cameras and by Sam Shaw, Fox’s special still photographer on set. Shaw, who previously met Marilyn on the Fox lot—on the set of the 1952 Fox filmViva Zapata!starring Marlon Brando and directed by Elia Kazan—makes a daring pitch to the studio.Promote the film using stills of Marilyn in her levitating skirt.

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