liking me. This is what I’ve always wanted.”
“And now I’m flying back to the most important thing in my life—Joe,” she told the troops at the end of her last show. “And I want to start a family. A family comes before a career.”
When the DiMaggios returned to America on February 24, 1954, it was business as usual—meaning one problem after another. It hadn’t been going that well between them. There was still a sense that DiMaggio could not reconcile himself to Monroe’s stardom. For instance, when talking about her tour of Korea, she exclaimed, “You’ve never heard applause like that!” He responded, “Yes, I have.” He seemed to always want to remind her that she wasn’t the only star in the family. He definitely didn’t want her to become any bigger a celebrity than she already was, he said, because he didn’t believe she could handle it. So they fought about their future—about her career and how it fit into their plans as a married couple. Still, Marilyn tried to stay optimistic. “I love you till my heart could burst,” she wrote in a love note to Joe in March 1954. “I want someday for you to be proud of me as a person and as your wife and as the mother of the rest of your children. (Two at least! I’ve decided.)”
At around this time, during a trip to Los Angeles, Joe telephoned his friend the agent Norman Brokaw who had first introduced him to Marilyn in 1950. Joe said he needed to see him. They met at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. As the two took a back booth, DiMaggio seemed very unhappy. “I don’t know what to do, Norm,” he said, according to the agent’s memory of the conversation. “I love her. But I can’t accept her career. I want her to quit, but she won’t do it.”
Norman mulled over his friend’s problem for a moment and said, “Joe, let me explain something to you, as an agent in this town. There’s no actress in this business who is going to give up Clark Gable or Tyrone Power or Spencer Tracy for any man. In fact, I don’t know any actress who would be willing to give up her career when she’s on her way to the top any more than you would have given up your baseball career before its time.” He continued, “What if when you were shooting to break the record of fifty-seven hits, a girl came into your life and said, ‘No, you need to stop at fifty-six. You can’t go for fifty-seven because I won’t allow it.’ How would you have handled it?”
DiMaggio thought about it for a second. “I never looked at it that way,” he said. “That makes sense to me.”
“Well, that’s the way it is, Joe,” Norman concluded. “That’s the field you’re playing on, my friend. She’s not going to give up her career any more than you would have before you were ready to do it. So you have to get used to it, Joe. Or, honest to God, you’re going to lose her.”
Joe thanked Norman for his advice. He would try to follow it… but it wouldn’t be easy. Not long after this meeting with Norman, Joe wrote in his personal journal about Marilyn, “No jealousy.… Don’t forget how lonesome and unhappy you are—especially without her.”
Marilyn began work on
To lift a line from the film’s title song in describing the movie, “Everything about it is appealing.” It clocks in at 117 minutes and with sixteen musical numbers, at least half of them so elaborately staged, it’s hard to imagine that anything comparable would be possible today—even with CGI (computer graphics and imaging). The film chronicles the saga of the Donahue family, both on and off the stage, from 1919 to 1942. As evidenced by a whole slew of successful movie musicals, from Hollywood’s Golden Age up to the mid-sixties, stories about showbiz families were audience favorites—from the Cohans and the Foys to Gypsy Rose Lee and the von Trapps—and it didn’t seem to matter if the stories were true or not.
Terry and Molly Donahue (Dailey and Merman), vaudeville headliners, incorporate their three kids, one by one, into their act from toddlerhood to teenager. The first time we see all five Donahues performing together is at the New York Hippodrome in an overwrought and overlong production of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” We are soon treated to the sight of Marilyn in an abbreviated French maid’s costume as she makes her first appearance—as Victoria Hoffman, a nightclub hat checker. Two minutes later, she is auditioning for producer Lew Harris, singing and dancing to “After You Get What You Want (You Don’t Want It).” Dressed in a white, see-through, skin-revealing gossamer gown, with embroidered, jewel-studded appliques strategically placed on the slit-to-the-hip, formfitting costume, and wearing a crown of snowy egret hackle feathers, Marilyn is breathtakingly beautiful.
The film unfolds as complex relationships evolve between Victoria and the Donahues. Tears and heartbreak give way to reconciliation and apologies all around—and then a big number for the Five Donahues, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” That number segues into “There’s No Business like Show Business,” with the Five Donahues and Vicky descending an imposing staircase, marching in unison and singing in harmony. Merman is in a draped, strapless white evening gown. Gaynor is gorgeous in a slinky red floor-length gown. And Monroe is elegant in a silver-sequin-spangled, powder blue number with a modest decolletage. Of course, she is—as always on film— dazzling. There is much to admire in this film, with Marilyn more than holding her own with old pros Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, and Donald O’Connor.
However, the shoot was fraught with problems, mostly from Marilyn. She was ill with bronchitis for part of it and was also diagnosed with anemia. Moreover, her growing addiction to sleeping pills and barbiturates had become a real issue in her life, affecting her performance. She was sluggish and unhappy most of the time. Naturally, she was also late very often.
Natasha Lytess—who was on the set with Marilyn every day, of course—later claimed that Joe was beating Marilyn during this period and that Marilyn had confided in her details of the terrible confrontations. It would be difficult to trust Lytess’s word given her animosity toward DiMaggio, but others close to Marilyn concur—and even some close to Joe. “He was smacking her around, yes,” said one of his closest friends. “He didn’t seem too ashamed of it, either. He said that she brought the worst out in him, that he wasn’t usually that kind of man. He said she was spoiled and very self-centered and it drove him crazy. He told me he was sick of coddling her, tired of her ‘woe is me stories,’ as he put it. I said, ‘Joe, maybe you two should get divorced.’ He looked at me as if I was crazy. ‘I ain’t letting her go,’ he said. ‘Hell if I’m letting her go.’ ”
In marrying Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn may have repeated a pattern in her life of becoming fixated on a man who would not support her desires or her ambitions. The concensus is that he was physically abusive to her. He also could be insensitive and dense. For instance, Marilyn once gave him a gold medal as a gift that she’d had inscribed with a quote from
“When he came onto the set of
