Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (24 page)

The first page presents a list of guidelines for what to do and what not to do in Marilyn’s presence: reminders to himself
to avoid being critical, to be humbler and to share his true feelings and show affection, to practice patience, and to refrain from jealousy.

The other journal page devoted to Monroe recounts details of a conversation between Joe and Marilyn, where, in making a date to see each other, Marilyn requested time to apply makeup because, she averred, “You like me in makeup.” He says he told her, “You look good anytime, made up or not. You have natural beauty.”

Their late-evening date took place on February 9. Joe stayed overnight with Marilyn at the Gladstone, where their room service breakfast consisted of champagne and caviar. They met again a few weeks later, when he invited her to accompany him to a private birthday party for Jackie Gleason at Toots Shor’s.

Jane Duffy, a guest at the Gleason party with her husband, remembered being introduced to Marilyn. “Mike Duffy, my husband, was a good friend of George Solotaire,” said Jane. “Joe DiMaggio and George were staying in a two-bedroom suite at the Hotel Madison. Later they moved into the Mayflower. At any rate, the four of us went to dinner quite often, usually at ‘21.’ You couldn’t get through a meal without a dozen strangers approaching the table to ask DiMaggio for an autograph, including the waiters and busboys. He wasn’t a rocket scientist, and he didn’t strike me as terribly deep, but there was definitely something special about him. Let’s face it: he was as renowned as they come. I mean, here’s a guy who partied with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Truman, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Dietrich, Sinatra, Orson Welles, and the Rockefellers. Yet, for all his fame, he exuded a real shyness. He wasn’t aloof or stuck up, but he was exceedingly private. He almost never mentioned Marilyn.

“So anyway, we were at Jackie Gleason’s birthday party and Joe introduced me to Marilyn. She had a voluptuous figure, naturally, but she was small boned, which added to her beauty. She was smaller in person than she looked on-screen, which I suppose is true of most movie stars. I could understand what DiMaggio saw in her. She had what Billy Wilder once called a kind of ‘elegant vulgarity.’ On a personal level, she seemed polite but distant. She didn’t say much. I asked if I could bring her a glass of Piper-Heidsieck, which is the champagne they were serving, and she said, ‘No thanks, I don’t drink.’ An hour later she had a glass of champagne in her hand and looked half-crocked. The next time my husband and I dined with George and Joe, I asked DiMaggio whether Marilyn drank alcohol. ‘Does a bear shit in the woods?’ he answered. Coming from Joe DiMaggio, that made for quite a statement.”

•  •  •

For reasons that Joe DiMaggio could never understand, Marilyn suddenly disappeared from his life. She took his phone calls and continued to seek his advice, but she was always too busy to see him in person. For one thing, she found herself enmeshed in legal discussions with Twentieth Century–Fox.

To avoid a costly legal battle with the studio, Marilyn Monroe and Milton Greene agreed to let her attorney Loyd Wright work out a compromise with Fox. The renegotiated agreement called for Marilyn to star in four Fox films over the next seven years. However, she would have director approval and the right to veto “substandard” screenplays. She would receive $100,000 per film and a percentage of the profits. Most important, she retained the right to make one film each year for a studio other than Fox, which cleared the way for the operation of Marilyn Monroe Productions. Milton Greene estimated that, with any degree of luck, MMP stood to make a minimum of $1 million a year for the next seven years and far more thereafter. With this figure in mind, he agreed that the production company would underwrite all of Marilyn’s living expenses.

In addition to her involvement with MMP, Marilyn had begun taking acting lessons with Lee Strasberg, director of the Actors Studio. Born in Budaniv, in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1901, Strasberg rapidly emerged as one more in her never-ending list of surrogate fathers. “He became my coach, friend, advisor, mentor, hero, champion, and savior,” said Marilyn. Strasberg compared Marilyn’s talents favorably to those of Marlon Brando, the most esteemed of his acting students.
“I saw that what Marilyn looked like was not what she really was,” noted Strasberg. “And what was going on inside was not what was going on outside, and that always means there may be something there to work with. It was almost as if she had been waiting for a button to be pushed, and when it was pushed, a door opened, and you saw a residue of gold and jewels.”

One of Lee Strasberg’s standard suggestions—practically a requirement—was that students enhance their reservoir of primal memories and emotions (what he called “sense memory”) by entering psychoanalysis. He and Paula were undergoing analysis, and both felt, among its other advantages, that it had strengthened their marriage. Turning to Milton Greene for advice on the subject, Marilyn was soon given a referral. Greene himself had been in therapy for several years with Dr. Margaret Herz Hohenberg, who, like Lee Strasberg, had come to the United States from Hungary to escape the concentration camps of the Third Reich.

A follower of the Viennese school of psychoanalysis founded by Sigmund Freud, Hohenberg, at fifty-seven, was a tall, heavy woman with white hair that was often braided and wrapped around her head. She lived at 11 Riverside Drive and worked out of an office located at 155 East Ninety-Third Street, off Lexington.

On Milton Greene’s recommendation, Marilyn met with the analyst. By March 1955, she was seeing Hohenberg five times a week. Monroe’s presence on the block did not go unnoticed; Hohenerg’s neighbors would frequently stop her on the street and inquire, “How is Miss Monroe doing today?”

During their sessions, for which Marilyn invariably arrived late, they dealt with the traumas of Monroe’s chaotic childhood, her lack of self-esteem, her lust for approval, her dread of rejection, her obsessive search for a father figure, her need to satisfy “everybody,” and her fear of abandonment.

To facilitate the analytic process, the actress recorded her thoughts and dreams in a series of binders that, in 2010, were posthumously published as a single volume called
Fragments
, which seemed an appropriate title considering Hohenberg’s pronouncement, made soon after she met Marilyn, that the actress possessed “a fragmented mind.”

Typical of Marilyn’s nightmarish notations in
Fragments
is one that reads:
“For Dr. H—Tell her about that dream of the horrible, repulsive man—who is trying to lean too close to me in the elevator—and my panic and then my thought despising him—does that mean I’m attached to him? He even looks like he has a venereal disease.”

After six months of treatment, Hohenberg diagnosed Monroe as suffering from borderline personality disorder, a psychological condition characterized by intense turmoil and instability in relationships and behavior.
Marilyn demonstrated two of the conditions commonly associated with BPD: dissociation and depersonalization. Under stress, her mind and body would literally shut down, which helped explain (at least to Hohenberg) why Marilyn was always late for appointments and had difficulty remembering her lines when appearing in films.

Strangely enough, Hohenberg also determined that Marilyn had a hearing dysfunction in her right ear. She sent her to Dr. Eugen Grabscheid, an audiologist, who confirmed that she had a mild case of Ménière’s disease, a permanent buildup of fluids in the inner ear, a potentially dangerous, difficult-to-treat ailment that led to hearing loss and bouts of dizziness.

“Marilyn took it as a sign of aging,” Hohenberg told Iselin Simon, a bridge partner and sometime companion, one of the few people the therapist spoke to about her famous patient. “She was panicky about growing old. She took two bubble baths a day and lathered herself
with all sorts of lotions. My office was located a few doors down from a Whelan’s Drug Store, and she spent hours walking the aisles searching for beauty ointments and creams, anything and everything to help stave off the inevitable aging process. She could never have grown old. Never!”

Confirming Dr. Hohenberg’s summation, Amy Greene remembered Marilyn’s telling her, “I’m going to die young like Jean Harlow.” Marilyn, said Greene, yearned to be Harlow. “All of Marilyn’s men were disasters—like Harlow’s. She based her life on Jean Harlow and often spoke of playing Harlow in a biographical film. In later years, I believe she even went to visit Jean Harlow’s mother.” Amy went on to say that though Marilyn claimed she needed to master her craft and become a serious actress, “I never bought it.” Marilyn, she asserted, “loved being all tits and ass. She invented tits and ass. She wanted to be a movie star, not an actress. Tits and ass were at her very core.”

Amy Greene grossly underestimated Marilyn’s resolve to improve her acting skills and perform in films she deemed worthy of those skills. “I’m tired of being a symbol,” she told Dr. Hohenberg.

Under Lee and Paula Strasberg’s influence, she became an earnest devotee not just of Method acting but also of Freudian analysis. She took an interest in all things Freud. She delighted in learning that Dr. Grabscheid, the audiologist, had once been Sigmund Freud’s physician. Through Grabscheid, she became acquainted with
Harry Freud, a New York cousin of Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter, at the time living and practicing psychiatry in England. After meeting with Monroe, Harry Freud wrote to Anna: “I was surprised that today’s most glamorous and sexy film star has the intellectual capacity to be interested in Freud.” Harry’s evaluation of Monroe stood in stark contrast to the tongue-in-cheek self-appraisal put forth in Marilyn’s personal memoir: “I try to hide it, but I’m quite dumb.”

“Marilyn was anything but dumb,” said Whitey Snyder, “but I never agreed with her decision to move to New York. Milton Greene lured her there by making all sorts of promises. He was a wily, manipulative,
conniving man who saw Marilyn as little more than a commodity on whose shoulders he could ride in his bid to become a successful and wealthy film producer. However, I have to add that to some extent he put his own ass on the line. To raise initial capital for the venture, he mortgaged his house and took out loans. Of course, in the back of his mind, he was convinced he’d make a fortune off Marilyn. But at least he made an effort to aid the cause, which is more than I can say for the Strasbergs. If you ask me, Marilyn put the Actors Studio on the map rather than the other way ’round. The majority of Lee’s pre-Monroe students, with the notable exception of Montgomery Clift and Brando, were in the theater; the big film names, like De Niro and Pacino, became involved long after Marilyn made the place famous.”

The worst of it, from Whitey’s perspective, concerned Paula Strasberg. “Lee’s wife was an absolute disaster,” said Snyder. “Marilyn hired her to replace Natasha Lytess as her ‘on-location’ acting coach. She was known in the trade as the ‘black witch.’ Obese and obnoxious, she perpetually wore black and knew absolutely nothing about acting. She robbed Marilyn blind. And so, for that matter, did Lee. They charged her immense sums of money for their so-called services, and Marilyn, in her naïveté, and with her insecurities, paid. Lee Strasberg took credit for creating Marlon Brando. I knew Brando, and I once asked him what he thought of Lee Strasberg. Marlon said, ‘Lee Strasberg popularized, bastardized, and misused Method acting. He’s an ambitious, selfish, untalented man who used and exploited his students. I have no respect for him. The only reason I attended the Actors Studio is that it was a good place to pick up women.’ ”

The Strasbergs had two teenaged children, Susan and John, both of whom in time turned to acting as a profession. Describing Marilyn’s dealings with his parents, John Strasberg told author Anthony Summers,
“People took advantage of Marilyn . . . even my father, in a way. They glommed on to her special sort of life—her special characteristics—when what she needed was love. My parents did give her some love, but it was inextricably linked with the acting.”

Susan Strasberg provided an equally blunt explanation when she said, “My dad fell in love with Marilyn, while she in turn regarded him as a father figure. Despite his amorous feeling toward her, he did want to improve her acting skills. He used to tell her she lacked discipline and technique, and while he could impart the latter, she had to develop the strength to discipline herself. Regarding my mother, when she looked at Marilyn, she saw dollar signs, a means to an end. I’m certain she liked Marilyn, but it was more a question of what Marilyn could do for her. And I’m also sure she considered Marilyn a threat to her marriage, which is one reason she kept such a close eye on her. As for me, I suppose I represented a kind of kid sister to Marilyn. When I turned eighteen, she sent me to a gynecologist and paid for a diaphragm. She gave me a birthday card, which said, ‘I want you to be free, but I don’t want you to get pregnant.’ ”

•  •  •

Joe DiMaggio Jr., still in Los Angeles attending Black-Foxe Military Institute, heard from Marilyn on a regular basis even after she moved to New York. “She’d promised to keep in touch with me, and she did,” he said. “She used to write all the time. I recall her sending me a photograph of a beautiful female cat somebody had given her. The cat became pregnant, and she had to give away the kittens. She named one of them ‘Joey,’ after yours truly. Then she had to give the mother cat away because Sydney Guilaroff, the Hollywood hairdresser, gave her a couple of parakeets, Butch and Bobo. She sent me a snapshot of the birds. She sent me another photo of herself atop a pink elephant that she rode in Madison Square Garden at the 1955 opening of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. She was scantily attired in sequins and spangles, and I remember hearing that when the press ran the picture, my father called her up and excoriated her for appearing in public ‘practically in the nude.’ She shut him up by explaining that the day’s proceeds were being donated by Ringling Brothers to a charity [the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation]. She also reminded him
that they were no longer married, and she didn’t have to account to him for her actions.”