The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

As it happened, Marilyn had a habit of not wearing clothing around the house. Everyone who knew her well knew that this was the case. She always said she would rather be naked; her friends and staff were used to seeing her au naturel. When she stayed with Frank during this time, she did not change that behavior. One morning, according to one friend of Sinatra’s, he awakened, went into the kitchen wearing just his shorts, and found Marilyn standing in front of the open refrigerator with her small finger in her mouth, trying to decide between orange juice and grapefruit. She was naked. “Oh, Frankie,” she said, probably feigning embarrassment, “I didn’t know you got up so early.”

“That was the end of anything platonic between the two of them,” reported Jimmy Whiting. “He told me that he took her right there in the kitchen, up against the closed refrigerator. ‘Man,’ he told me, ‘I never had sex like that. She is one fantastic woman.’

“Actually, Frank had been going through this whole impotency trip at this time. Way too much sauce [liquor]. The booze was completely ruining his sex life. He was getting too old to drink like that and then expect to also perform in the sack. He was frustrated by it because one thing Sinatra always prided himself on was his ability to satisfy a woman.”

Apparently, Marilyn cured Sinatra of his impotency, at least for a while. She said that she didn’t care how long it took; she was determined that he was going to acquit himself in bed with her. They were sexually innovative. For instance, according to Sinatra’s friends, he and Marilyn engaged in intimacies one night on the roof of the Sands Hotel, above the Las Vegas strip. Interestingly, a memo dated May 30, 1959, from Jack Entratter to the hotel’s security staff, confirms as much. It reads, “Please be advised that Mr. Frank Sinatra is permitted twenty-four-hour access to the roof of the Sands Hotel. Mr. Sinatra will use his own discretion in choosing to entertain any guest on those premises. Thank you.”

“What I heard around the office was that Marilyn and Frank had an argument when she drunkenly confessed to him that while she was attempting to cure him of his impotency, she had been ‘faking it,’ not achieving sexual satisfaction herself,” recalled Wesley Miller from Wright, Wright, Green & Wright. “Frank was upset about that revelation and, apparently, said, ‘Jesus Christ, if I can’t satisfy her, then what the hell am I doing with her? Why’d she even have to tell me that? Did I have to know that? Hell, no, I did not.’ ” (While Frank took Marilyn’s confession as an affront to his masculinity, others who knew her well said that she rarely felt satisfaction during sexual relations and that this problem was the consequence of her many psychological problems.)

Despite any problems with her, Frank always felt that Marilyn was intelligent, witty, sexy, and exciting. “Frank said that Marilyn was like a shooting star,” observed actress Esther Williams, “and you couldn’t help but be fascinated by her journey. While you knew she was going to crash and burn, you didn’t know how. However, you knew it was going to be a merry ride. The only reason Sinatra wouldn’t allow himself to become more serious about Marilyn, he had said, was because he was still so wracked with pain about Ava. It was too soon. Also, he would never end up with another actress. He had made that promise to himself.”

As much as they got along, Marilyn and Frank did argue from time to time. Once, she almost absentmindedly walked naked into a poker game he was having with friends, which infuriated him. “Get your fat ass back in your room,” he scolded her, always the charmer. However, he could never stay angry at her for long. He truly loved Marilyn—though he was not in love with her—and he understood her frailties. Obviously, she was weak and delicate, traits he was usually not fond of in a woman. He would never allow any of his women the luxury of vulnerability, but with Marilyn it was different. She was special.

After that poker-game incident, when his friends had departed, Sinatra went back into her bedroom, as Marilyn later remembered it, “kissed me on the cheek, and made me feel like a million. From then on I always dressed up for him, whether or not anyone was coming over.”

The Wrong Door Raid

Marilyn’s time at Frank Sinatra’s did not last long. They could never really connect romantically, though they did love each other. She soon moved out of his apartment and was on her own again. At around this time, another gentleman came into her life as a potential suitor, but this too would not work out for her. He was Hal Schaeffer, the musical coach of her recent films. He actually arranged the highlight of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn’s stunning routine of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The two had a flirtation going on for some time. Schaeffer, who sounds as if he had his own emotional issues, was so distraught that Marilyn did not want to take things any further with him, he reacted by trying to kill himself. Schaeffer may have been hoping Marilyn would rush to his side if he tried to do himself in, and of course she did. However, the time she spent at his bedside in the hospital was just more time for Joe to act out in a jealous rage. Now that he clearly no longer had a hold on Marilyn and Sinatra was also out of the picture for the time being, she was adrift emotionally, and she turned to Hal. It’s difficult to imagine that what the two of them shared was serious for her, though it was to him. It was brief and definitely a diversion for her. By this time she had become so dependent on sleeping pills—freely given to her by the studio’s physician—it’s likely her judgment was impaired. That said, Schaeffer was kind, gentle, and understanding, and he was also creative—about as opposite to DiMaggio as possible.

When Joe DiMaggio heard about Hal Schaeffer in Marilyn’s life, he simply could not accept it. How dare his estranged wife replace him so quickly? What right did she have to move on without him? For a couple of weeks, he and his best friend, Frank Sinatra, did what best friends often do when faced with love lost in their lives—they began to commiserate about it. “We dagos gotta stick together,” Frank told Joe. “So let me take care of this thing. Let me come up with something that’ll screw with the divorce. Then she’ll see the light and you’ll be in like Flynn.”

The next day, Frank made a few telephone calls and was eventually referred to a company called City Detective and Guard Services. Joe Dougherty (no relation to Jim Dougherty) was one of the detectives working for the company. He recalled, “The divorce hearing was set for October 27. Sinatra hired us about a week earlier. He said, ‘I want you to follow Marilyn and this bozo she’s screwing—Schaeffer somethin’ or others—and take pictures of them in the act. Then, Joe DiMaggio is gonna use it against her and get that broad back in his life.’ I was thinking, ‘If this doesn’t piss off his wife, I don’t know what will. So how’s he going to get her back doing this thing is beyond me.’ But a job is a job and so, fine, we signed a deal and got right to work.

“We did what we were paid to do. We followed Marilyn Monroe all over the goddamn city waiting for her to hook up with this guy. She knew we were on her tail, too, which must have rattled her because once she almost crashed her car into a tree trying to evade us. Another time, she ran a red light and almost hit an old woman walking across the street with a shopping cart. When she got out of the car and started apologizing to the woman, we started snapping away thinking, well, at least we got some good pictures of Marilyn Monroe maybe we can sell or something later on. Looking back on it now, it was a dirty business. We bugged her car. We bugged her apartment. We bugged his car. We bugged his apartment. I don’t know what they had going on but I can tell you that we didn’t get one goddamn thing to use against her. If they were hooking up, I don’t know where they were doing it.”

Hal Schaeffer confirms, “We were followed everywhere. It was sick and twisted. She was absolutely scared to death. How a man could do that to a woman, I don’t know. It just confirmed to her that she had made the right decision in letting him go.”

On October 27, Marilyn—again in all black except for white gloves and pearls—stood before a judge and detailed her reasons for her divorce petition. “Just the night before, Joe had shown up at her house to try to talk her out of it,” said Marybeth Cooke. “Jerry [Geisler, her attorney] couldn’t believe his nerve, and was especially surprised that Sidney Skolsky had arranged the meeting. That made no sense. Everyone who cared about Marilyn wanted it over—not extended. But, luckily, Marilyn stood her ground. She told Joe it was over. He left, angry as ever.”

In court, Marilyn said that DiMaggio was “cold and indifferent” to her and that days would go by when he wouldn’t speak to her. “Cold and indifferent”? That wasn’t DiMaggio. The problem was that he was just the opposite, a hothead who was furious because he couldn’t have her in his life the way he wanted her.

The stress of being married to him had made her sick on numerous occasions, Marilyn continued. She said