Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (33 page)

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In the summer of 1957, Joe DiMaggio made his annual pilgrimage to Cooperstown, New York, to attend the Baseball Hall of Fame’s induction ceremony. The event that year held more significance than usual for Joe, considering that Joe McCarthy, his first manager with the Yanks, was being inducted. Directly after the ceremony, Joe flew to San Francisco. While in the Bay Area, when he wasn’t at the DiMaggio family eatery, Joe could be found at Liverpool Lil’s, devouring honey-roasted peanuts and ice-cold bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.

The patrons at Liverpool Lil’s regarded him as visiting royalty, always attired in a crisp white dress shirt, well-cut blue blazer, burgundy tie, sharply cut slacks, and spit-shined shoes. He could be pleasant enough, but he usually chose to be gruff and cranky. If anyone mentioned Marilyn Monroe to him, he rose and left. Later that summer, he accompanied
Ernest Hemingway to a middleweight boxing championship at Madison Square Garden. A fan came over and asked Joe for his autograph. The fan stared at the bearded gentleman seated next to DiMaggio. “Hey, aren’t you somebody too?” he asked. “You bet,” replied Hemingway. “I’m Mr. DiMaggio’s personal physician.”

The Hemingway story found its way into the
New York Post,
and Marilyn showed it to Arthur Miller. “He became annoyed,” said Kurt Lamprecht, who maintained his friendship with Marilyn. “What the hell was the baseball player doing with the world’s leading writer of fiction? I think Miller always had a kind of vague resentment toward
his predecessor. Strangely enough, the two men weren’t all that different. Naturally they excelled in completely different fields, but Arthur Miller, like Joe DiMaggio, could be very jealous when it came to Marilyn. The difference was that Miller tended to internalize his feelings, and DiMaggio didn’t. If somebody danced with Marilyn at a nightclub or party and held her a little too close or whispered into her ear, Miller got nervous. He tried not to show it, but you couldn’t miss it. Of course, Joe DiMaggio, under similar circumstances, would’ve probably gone over and sent Marilyn’s dance partner on his way. From what Marilyn told me about him, he could be pretty intimidating.”

DiMaggio brought along a date the night he and Ernest Hemingway attended the fights. Her name was
Lola Mason, and she was all of nineteen. A future television starlet, she worked at that time in publicity and took acting lessons on the side. She had soft blond hair and a voice to match. She and Joe met one night at El Morocco. He was there with Lee Meriwether. Lola was with a male friend. The friend asked Lola why she didn’t have a steady man in her life. “Because,” she said, “the only man I
really
want is Joe DiMaggio. I’ve never met him, but he seems ideal.” Lola’s friend said, “Well, now’s your chance. He’s sitting behind you a few tables away.” Lola mustered her courage, walked the short distance to Joe’s table, and introduced herself. DiMaggio took her phone number and two days later asked her out. Sure enough, he was just as she’d imagined him: handsome, debonair, quiet, refined, and earnest. The problem was, there were dozens of other women in Joe’s life now that Marilyn wasn’t in it. Joe and Lola dated on and off for several years. What DiMaggio appreciated about their affair was that it didn’t make the papers. She wasn’t well enough known and wasn’t in it for her own publicity. There was something refreshing about it. “If only I were ten years younger,” Joe told Paul Baer, “I’d probably marry the girl.”

•  •  •

In mid-June 1957 Marilyn Monroe said,
“A man and a woman need something of their own. A baby makes a marriage. It makes a marriage
perfect.” She’d just learned she was pregnant again. Coming as it did at the same time as Arthur Miller’s ongoing problems with the Washington contempt hearings, the pregnancy struck a positive note.
“The very idea of her as a mother,” observed the playwright, “ultimately swept me along . . . There were moments of a new kind of confidence, a quietness of spirit around her, or so it seemed. If a child might intensify anxieties, it would also give her, and hence myself, a new hope for the future.”

With three new homes (one of them leased) and a baby on the way, the Millers appeared to have overcome a number of their previous obstacles and seemed headed along a promising path. Then, on the morning of August 1, while staying at their Amagansett cottage, Marilyn awoke with a violent pain in her belly. Arthur called an ambulance. They arrived at Doctors Hospital in Manhattan at noon. Doctors Bernard Berglass and Hilliard Dubrow examined her. They informed Arthur Miller, nervously pacing in an adjacent waiting room, that Marilyn had an ectopic (tubular) pregnancy, which would have to be surgically terminated as soon as possible.

Initially elated over the prospect of having a child of her own, the loss of the baby—her second failed pregnancy with Miller—sent Marilyn into a tailspin. She remained at Doctors Hospital for ten days following the surgery, and when she left on August 10, she found herself surrounded by a brigade of reporters. “If there’s all this clamor because I lost my baby, I hate to think how much publicity I would have generated had I given birth,” she commented bitterly.

The Millers returned to Monroe’s East Fifty-Seventh Street apartment. Paula and Susan Strasberg were among her first visitors. “Arthur Miller, no great fan of my parents, turned to them following the loss of the baby,” said Susan Strasberg. “He didn’t know what to do with Marilyn. She was utterly miserable. She stuffed herself with Nembutals. She took pills to sleep, pills to wake up, pills for constipation, pain pills, diet pills, pills to clear her skin, and a dozen other medications all washed down with scotch or Dom Pérignon, followed by Binaca mouth spray in a failed effort to mask the odor of alcohol. She was full
of guilt, self-loathing, resentment, and anger. After we left, my mother said, ‘Susan, she had abortions. I’m not sure how many. God forgives her, but I’m not sure she forgives herself.’ ”

The next day Marilyn collapsed on the sofa from an apparent overdose of barbiturates. Arthur Miller succeeded in rousing her. But later that week he found her unconscious in bed, an empty bottle of Nembutal on the nightstand. Describing the scene to Lee Strasberg, Miller revealed how he tried to revive her by lifting her into a sitting position and massaging her shoulders. When that failed he half carried, half dragged her into the bathroom, placed his leg on a stool, and bent her over his knee with her face directly over the toilet bowl. He then tried to jam his fingers down her throat, but he couldn’t pry her mouth open, so he pinched her nose shut and her mouth opened. He could hear her gagging as he stuck two fingers deep into her mouth. She began to vomit, disgorging scotch, pills, bile, and putrid-smelling particles of half-digested food. He led her back to bed and called emergency services. The following day, speaking from a hospital bed, Marilyn told Lee Strasberg, “I didn’t try to commit suicide. I just took too many pills.”

Despite her denial, a posthumously published diary entry, written by Marilyn just after the loss of her baby, provided a true indication of her mind-set at the time. “I wish that I were dead,” she wrote, “absolutely nonexistent—gone away from here—from everywhere . . .”

John Strasberg, then still in his teens, recalled being “too shy” to approach Marilyn but acknowledged freely that his parents, Lee and Paula, always “hovered protectively” around her, presumably making it more difficult for him (or anyone, for that matter) to get close to her. “I remember feeling,” he writes in
Accidentally on Purpose
, his somewhat disjointed but compelling memoir, “that everybody used Marilyn; they said that they only wanted to help, but they devoured her energy. Damaged and desperate as she was, she mistook this attention for love. As a needy child grasps for affection, Marilyn . . . tried to reach out for help.”

John Strasberg points out that “as part of the family,” Marilyn would
occasionally stay with the Strasbergs, particularly “when she was suffering through some emotional crisis.” Such was the case not long after the surgical termination of her pregnancy and her would-be suicide attempt.

Although Arthur Miller had very likely saved her life, he seemed (to Marilyn, a least) incapable of providing her with the warmth and understanding she so drastically craved. In defending his seeming lack of support at such critical moments, Miller would proclaim that he was “only human—Marilyn required some kind of Superman-like creature to look after her needs.” In Marilyn’s mind, Lee Strasberg represented not a Superman figure but something more akin to Clara Barton, Sigmund Freud, and Florence Nightingale all rolled into one.

When Marilyn stayed with the Strasbergs, as she did on this occasion, she slept in sixteen-year-old John’s bedroom while he took over the living room couch. Late one night, according to his written account, “she came half-crawling into the living room where I was asleep . . . She groped along the wall in an effort to stand up. She wore a wrinkled white slip of a nightgown . . . ‘Johnny, I can’t sleep,’ she whispered in her unique woman-child voice. She floated over to where I was now sitting up and slumped down next to me. Her body odor was heavy with the drugs that she was taking . . . ‘Do you mind if I just sit here awhile?’ she asked. We looked at each other. I didn’t know what to do. The situation that millions of men fantasized about terrified me . . . At that moment, she was so doped up that I wasn’t sure she knew where she was. She was semilucid, but she faded in and out without even moving.”

Though he may have imagined otherwise, Marilyn wasn’t on the teenager’s couch for anything other than conversation and solace. She didn’t want to awaken his parents. “We talked,” he writes, “or rather she rambled on senselessly while I half-listened, wondering when she would calm down or tire out. She finally did go back to sleep.” John’s encounter with the sparsely clad actress evidently continued to haunt him: “I often pondered, later on in life, what might have happened if either one of us had reached out in that thick, smoky air. Would we
have held one another in the embrace of a man and a woman, or would it have been the desperate embrace of longing to love and be loved that is known to children of all ages who cannot bear to be alone?”

At a somewhat later date, confiding in Susan Strasberg, John’s sister, Marilyn admitted adding amphetamines to her already toxic mixture of drugs and pharmaceuticals. “The slightest upset brought on new forms of terror,” said Susan. “I used to see Marilyn crawling half-naked on all fours along the hallways of our apartment. She would crawl to my parents’ bedroom and scratch at the door. To help her fall asleep, my father would cradle her in his arms and sing, ‘Go to sleep, little baby . . . and dream of angels.’ It was the same lullaby he used to sing to me when I was a little girl. My father paid more attention to Marilyn than he did to either of his own children, and we began to resent her for it.”

After starting with the amphetamines, Marilyn began hallucinating and having phantasmagoric dreams. She dreamt of monsters, sometimes friendly but usually not. In another dream, reported to Susan Strasberg, Marilyn encountered her long-lost birth father at a cocktail party. He didn’t recognize her, so she seduced him, and after doing the dirty deed, she said to him: “You just fucked your own daughter, you miserable son of a bitch.”

Marilyn also told Susan about the day she went shopping for a new dress at Bonwit Teller, having swallowed a handful of pills for breakfast. “Marilyn walked into the department store and looked around,” said Susan. “And that’s when she began to hallucinate. She suddenly found herself surrounded by all sorts of wild animals: lions, tigers, elephants, water buffalo, apes, giraffes, rhinos, and hippos. There were clusters of tall, dark trees and hanging foliage. Knee-high yellow grass filled the aisles. A huge king cobra dangled from an overhead tree branch. Small yattering monkeys rode the vines, swinging from tree to tree. Exotic birds sang menacing songs. Thorny black spiders and giant red ants scurried across varnished countertops. A swarm of blood-thirsty mosquitoes enveloped Marilyn’s head. She turned and ran. Once outside on Fifth Avenue, she felt safe. But as far as I know, she never returned
to Bonwit Teller. I can only imagine how real that impenetrable jungle must have seemed to her.”

•  •  •

To handle the hundreds of film scripts that arrived regularly at her Manhattan apartment, Marilyn hired May Reis, and soon asked her to replace Hedda Rosten as her private secretary. Lena Pepitone, another new household employee, was hired in 1957 to serve as Marilyn’s New York maid and wardrobe mistress.

“I think the reason Marilyn hired me,” said Pepitone, “was because of my Italian heritage. The first time we met, she told me, ‘I love Italians. My second husband was Italian.’ ‘I know,’ I responded. ‘You were married to Joe DiMaggio.’ ‘Hey,’ Marilyn laughed, ‘you know about him?’ ‘Of course,’ I answered. ‘Everybody knows about Joe DiMaggio.’ ”

Marilyn asked Pepitone if she knew how to cook Italian food. “I’m an Italian food fanatic,” she said. “Joe used to take me for the greatest Italian dinners.”

Monroe paid Pepitone $150 a week. “Aside from my salary,” she recalled, “Marilyn constantly gave me little presents and large Christmas bonuses. She did that with all the household employees. She gave Florence Thomas, her housekeeper, a small fortune. She was enormously generous. That Christmas she gave a Chagall drawing to Susan Strasberg. She gave Paula Strasberg the string of pearls she’d received from the emperor of Japan during her 1954 honeymoon with Joe DiMaggio. She gifted Lee Strasberg with hundreds of dollars’ worth of books, records, clothes, and cases of champagne. She turned over her black Thunderbird to John Strasberg on his eighteenth birthday. She gave Joe DiMaggio Jr. his first car as well. Arthur Miller received a leather-bound edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
for Christmas. I had the feeling her generosity stemmed in part from a desire to be loved, like the little girl that thrusts a bunch of daisies into her mother’s hand.”

Instead of daisies, Marilyn presented her mother with a new Christmas wardrobe. She sent Inez Melson (whom she’d named her mother’s
conservator) money with which to buy Gladys Baker an assortment of slips, vests, pants, gowns, hose, sweaters, shoes, boots, and a raincoat. In return, Melson sent Marilyn a packet of four dinner place mats that Gladys had made in occupational therapy. In an accompanying letter, Melson wrote that when she last visited Gladys at Rockhaven,
refreshments had been served in the garden, and Gladys “presided over the coffee urn. She also arranged all the cookies and sandwiches on the trays.” The letter, Lena Pepitone attested, reduced Marilyn to tears. She said to Lena, “My mother lost her memory, and I can’t forget anything except for my lines. It’s all there, all the time, buzzing around in my brain. That’s why I’m afraid I’ll end up going as crazy as my mother and her mother.”