The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

The importance the studio placed on the film is evident in the care it gave the production artistically, assigning the studio’s top composer to create the score, multiple Oscar winner Alfred Newman. The script was adapted by Daniel Taradash, who would be awarded an Oscar in 1954 for his screenplay of From Here to Eternity, the year’s Best Picture Academy Award winner. Future Oscar winner Lucien Ballard was named director of photography; he had gained industry recognition as the creator of the Obie, a camera on which was mounted a key light, designed to eliminate any skin flaws on the face. Formerly married to Merle Oberon, he came up with the idea to disguise the imperfections on her skin that resulted from a serious car crash. The camera was named for her.

Marilyn was extremely nervous about the screen test. She knew that Zanuck wasn’t a fan. She and Natasha Lytess spent hours working on the script. “I have to say that I didn’t think she was ready to take on a role of this magnitude,” Natasha later said. “I may have underestimated her talent in that regard. Or, at the very least, I underestimated her resolve. The time we spent on the script—two days, nonstop and I don’t even remember sleeping!—was very dramatic and passionate and filled with angst, very much like Marilyn all the time. In the end, she did such a great job on the screen test that Zanuck saw fit to write her a note to congratulate her, which surprised—and thrilled—her to no end. She was so insecure and unsure of her ability, any validation at all was considered high praise.”

However, Zanuck would say of her performance in the film, “She’s a dumb tomato and half-crazy to boot. She’s a sex pot who wiggles and walks and breathes sex, and each picture she’s in she’ll earn her keep, but no more dramatic roles.”

Marilyn’s friend John Gilmore quoted Montgomery Clift, who said it best about Marilyn’s relationship with Zanuck and Fox at this time: “Fox wanted to keep a tight grip on her and drain her dry. That’s what they were after. The best talents, the other artists, they saw that differently and understood Marilyn had a right to make the choice of not demeaning herself. But the boss wouldn’t let her. They didn’t want an actress. That’s what they agreed upon. They’d sit at their round table and decide that Marilyn wasn’t capable of making a relevant decision.”

While some critics of the day were dismissive of Marilyn’s emotive skills—giving Fox’s Zanuck ammunition to use against her—others would praise her, including Daily Variety: “[Marilyn Monroe] gives an excellent account of herself in a strictly dramatic role which commands certain attention.” Studio decision makers were encouraged, and after filming concluded in January 1952, they had another film ready for her (Monkey Business, which began its eight weeks of production on March 5).

Over time Marilyn’s acting in Don’t Bother to Knock has been reassessed and her notices when the film was released in 2002 as part of a DVD boxed set were uniformly excellent. As film noir, the film has stood the test of time, and gives an inkling of what the future superstar would do with a highly emotional, offbeat role a year later—that of Rose Loomis, an adulterous wife, in the splashy 1953 Technicolor hit Niagara. When Marilyn’s psychological problems eventually became known, many overanalytical parallels would be made between her and her screen character, Nell Forbes; but these parallels are unwarranted, and unfairly diminish her talent as an actress. She came to the set prepared, and though coached by Natasha Lytess, she delivered a great performance.

Still, after Don’t Bother to Knock, the bad movies continued for Marilyn. In fact, the next year—1952—would start off on a difficult note when in March, Marilyn began work on Monkey Business, in which she played, much to her dismay, a stacked and dumb secretary to Cary Grant’s scientist. Also at around this time, she made a movie called We’re Not Married, which starred Ginger Rogers, Mitzi Gaynor, Eve Arden, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Because the film is centered on three self- contained stories, there is no interaction between most of the various players, so we are denied the pleasure of seeing Zsa Zsa and Marilyn lock horns. This was another dead-end movie that added nothing much to her resume. It was also the year O. Henry’s Full House was released, consisting of five self-contained mini-movies, each with a separate cast, separate writers, and separate directors, all based on famous short stories by O. Henry, the acknowledged master of the literary form that always bore a touching and unexpected irony in its denouement and became the author’s signature. It received a first-class production and starred some of the Fox lot’s most popular actors, but there wasn’t much for Marilyn to do in this one and most people don’t even know she was in it.

“This is not easy,” Marilyn would tell Berniece when speaking of her career. “I don’t know how many bad movies an actress can make before she just becomes known for… bad movies!”

Joe DiMaggio

Joltin’ Joe. The Yankee Clipper. No matter the nickname, few major-league baseball players in history had as much of an impact on our culture as the famous Joe DiMaggio. In the view of some historians, though, he may be as well known for his relationship with Marilyn Monroe as for his skill as a New York Yankees center fielder (for his entire professional career, 1936 to 1951).

Born Giuseppe Paolo (Joseph Paul) DiMaggio Jr. on November 25, 1914, Joe was the eighth of nine children of Sicilian immigrants in the small town of Martinez, California. When he was a year old, the family moved to San Francisco. He was raised with strict Catholic values in a household that stressed a strong work ethic and, above all, pride in their Sicilian heritage. At the same time, like most children of immigrants back then, the DiMaggio children were taught by their parents that nothing was more important than successfully merging into the American culture and being thought of as American. When he was a young boy, around six, he was forced to wear a leg brace due to a congenital weakness in his ankles. When the brace came off after two years, he was shy and withdrawn but also determined to excel at some physical activity. His brothers Vincent and Dominic played baseball—both went on to the pros—and he was thus inspired to also play the game. Joe dropped out of high school in the tenth grade—like Marilyn. His father, Giuseppe, had wanted him to be a fisherman—crab fishing had been a family trade for generations—but Joe couldn’t stand the smell of fish and cleaning them made him sick to his stomach. For many years, his father would view him as “good for nothing” as a result of his decision to do something other than fishing for a living. Joe’s brother Vince played for the San Francisco Seals, and it was he who persuaded the team’s management to bring Joe, then eighteen, on as a shortstop in 1932. He wasn’t such a great shortstop but he could definitely hit. By the age of twenty-one, he was batting .398. It wasn’t long before he became known as a reliable hitter for the team. He made his major-league debut with the Yankees in 1936, batting ahead of Lou Gehrig. From the start, he was a wonder on the field. It had been four years since the team had been in the World Series, but thanks in large part to DiMaggio, the Yankees would find themselves winning the next four fall classics. Joe joined the team in 1936 amid a great deal of publicity and attention. He was viewed as the greatest thing to happen to the sport in a long time. Paid $15,000 a game, he used the money to set his family up in a nice home as well as to invest in his own seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf called Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto. He had a fifty-six-game hitting streak, from May 15 to July 16, 1941, that is thought of as the greatest in baseball history. Then, after going hitless for one game, he bounced back and hit in the next sixteen games for a total of seventy-two out of seventy- three.

Joe DiMaggio was more than just a baseball player, though. He was a cultural icon during the Great Depression, a desperate time in our history during which Americans sought out public figures for inspiration and motivation. He elevated the sport, but he also elevated the country. Watching DiMaggio in action was a thrill because of his grace and agility, but also it felt like a validation of the American dream. Injuries got the best of him, though, and by the late 1940s there were times when he could barely walk, let alone play the sport. Still, in 1949, he signed a contract with the Yankees for $100,000—an enormous amount of money in the sport at that time. He was deeply depressed after surgery on his foot and the breakup of a marriage—his first, which brought forth one child, a son named Joe Jr. So his heart wasn’t really in the sport at this time. Still, even in his darkest hours, he was an amazing player. That year he had four home runs in three games and was rejuvenated. He went on for another year or so playing the game in historic ways as the country watched, mostly amazed by his exploits: He played in 139 games in 1950, scoring 114 runs and three home runs in a single contest! By 1951, though, his injuries (as well as persistent ulcers and painful arthritis) began to take a toll on him. He announced his retirement at the end of