THE THREE WEDDINGS OF MARILYN MONROE
With her misfortunes, her little joys and her failures, Norma Jean's three marriages allow us to guess the real person behind the greatest icon of the 20th century and, still, today. Today she would have turned 94 years old.
Her first wedding was that of a girl who seeks to survive, the second that of a consecrated star and the third that of a woman who fights for her freedom. Marilyn Monroe's three marriages, with her misfortunes, her little joys and her failures, allow us to guess the real person behind the greatest icon of the 20th century and, still, today.
"I stopped being an 'orphan' at 16 because I got married." In these crude words Marilyn Monroe summed up the end of Norma Jean's childhood, the girl who was, in My story, the autobiography that she wrote with screenwriter Ben Hecht in 1954 and that would not be published until 20 years later. The star's unfortunate childhood is always spoken of as an explanation for the many emotional shortcomings she suffered, an origin that is now an indissoluble part of the myth. And, as is often the case with such famous stories, reality merges with legend and there is a vague idea of what happened, although hardly anyone can pinpoint the details. Listening to the protagonist narrate her own life is as shocking as it is moving. Norma Jean never knew her father, and it is not true that her mother told him that she was Clark Gable; She showed her a single photograph of a man who looked like the actor, and since she had no more images of her father, the girl began to collect photos of the star because it was the most similar to a father's reference to her. Norma never had a regular home: her first memories are of going from here to there, with adoptive families who took care of her in exchange for an allowance, poor people who had children of their own for whom the girl had to work, clean and growing up giving few problems and knowing that she was always the last on the scale of the house. "I lived in and out of the orphanage," she says herself. “Most of the time I was placed with a family that received five dollars a week to take care of me. They sent me to nine families before my legal orphanhood ended ”. He also lived for seasons with his mother, Gladys Baker, who worked cutting celluloid at Hollywood studios (the destination well marked from the beginning), but a relapse into his mother's schizophrenia, which his grandmother and great-grandfather had also suffered, led to her being committed forever to a mental hospital, in the days when they were still called asylums and had even more sinister resonances. Norma Jean witnessed how the shrinks took her mother, who was screaming and laughing at the entrance of the house that she had tried to build for her (the only daughter of which she had custody, since her previous husband had kept her first two children), and all the stability she had enjoyed for a short time was gone. Grace, a friend of her mother's, became her legal guardian, but she was also poor, so Norma continued to go through foster families until her 16-year-old “aunt” Grace suggested that she marry their son. neighbors, Jim Dougherty. The reason was as simple as that the family she lived with at that time was going to move, and the girl would have to return to the orphanage and another uncertain destination. In Blonde, the novel inspired by the character, by Joyce Carol Oates, the wedding is an arrangement by the adults to prevent the father of the house where the girl resides from ending up harassing her, because the women present have realized that who looks at her with desire. Real life had been harsher: in her memoir, Marilyn tells how at the age of nine the tenant of a house she lived in abused her and then threw her a nickel to make her buy something and stop crying .
The wedding took place on June 19, 1942; she wore a classic white wedding dress with a veil and a bouquet of white roses symbolizing innocence, a “girl bride”, in her own words. The images seem to be those of one of so many young couples who the Second World War had urged to marry because there was no time to lose. "It was like retiring to a zoo," says Marilyn. “Our marriage was a kind of friendship with sexual privileges. Later I discovered that marriages tend to be that, and that husbands tend to be good lovers only when they cheat on their wives. " Immediately, Jim entered the navy and Norma began to work in a parachute factory, where, due to her spectacular physique, they would take some photos of her for the military propaganda department that would be the germ of her career. And as soon as the war was over and her husband returned home, it became clear that this couple was pointless. “My marriage brought me neither happiness nor suffering. I hardly spoke with my husband. It's not that we were angry, it's that we had nothing to say to each other. The most important thing I achieved was to end my orphan status for good. I am grateful to Jim for it. "
“This is where the story of Norma Jean ends. Jim and I got divorced. I went to live on my own in a room in Hollywood. I was 19 years old and I wanted to find out who he was ”. The young woman she moved to that neighborhood not by chance; she sought to follow the only clear thing that she had, her vocation as an actress. Like her mother too, she was dazzled by the brilliance of the stars she had grown up with, like her admired Jean Harlow, of unfortunate fate. She was unaware that in Hollywood's collection of horror stories, hers was going to be the most famous, the most paradigmatic, the saddest. "When I said 'here ends Norma Jean' I blushed, as if I had been caught telling a lie," she said in My story. “Because that sad and bitter girl who grew up too fast is hardly ever out of my heart. With success surrounding me, I can still feel her scared eyes staring through mine. She keeps saying "I never lived, they never loved me" and I often feel confused and think I'm the one saying it. "
When she married the second time, she was already Marilyn Monroe, blonde, famous, a box office star and a sex bomb. Her dream had come true and she had discovered that instead of giving happiness and meaning to her existence, she was still as unsatisfied and fragile as before. Famous are her words "Hollywood is a place where you get paid $ 1,000 for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul. I know this because I turned down the first offer quite often and always charged 50 cents." This time, her husband was still more famous than her: it was Joe DiMaggio, the most famous baseball player in the United States and, still today considered one of the best of all time. Marilyn was vaguely familiar with the name when mutual friends suggested that they go to dinner together at Chasen restaurant. She wasn't too keen on meeting him: "I don't like men in gaudy suits, with double-breasted blazers and big muscles and pink ties. They make me nervous." Luckily (or unfortunately) for him, DiMaggio He did not respond to the stereotype of a successful athlete. He was a very serious and reserved man who had, without demanding her, the attention and respect of everyone present. "The men at the table did not brag or tell their stories to call my attention. It was DiMaggio they courted. This was a first. No woman has ever overshadowed me so much before. " Joe and Marilyn started dating and within a few months they decided to get married for practical reasons. “We couldn't go on forever like a pair of lovers going from one place to another. It could start to hurt our careers, ”she explained. So it was he who proposed in the end: “You have all these problems with studying and you are out of work, why don't we get married now? I have to go to Japan for some baseball business and we could take advantage of the trip for the honeymoon. " That's Joe, always cool and practical. "
Marilyn and DiMaggio were married on January 14, 54 in San Francisco. Perhaps this is her most iconic wedding dress, although it is the least classic, a very simple and sober brown wool suit with a fur collar. In 1999 it would be auctioned for $ 33,350, and in the movie Young Prodigies, the following year, the jacket had its own script line. “I still don't know what I look like to Joe. He is a man who finds it difficult to speak. What Joe is to me: a man whose looks and character I love with all my heart, ”she wrote shortly after getting married. According to the book Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love, by C. David Heymann, Marilyn told a reporter, "Except for Joe's, I have sucked my last cock." This relationship is often spoken of as a very romantic love story. It is always mentioned that DiMaggio continued to bring flowers to the grave of her last wife until her end, and that he was the only man who truly loved her. "That's love", the media still write today. Of course, the marriage was a publicity boom for Marilyn's already hyper-publicized career. The retired player was the closest thing to an American hero, he had even parked his career to enlist in the army during the war, and belonged to the typical Italian-American extended family that could give her, in the words of a 63 documentary, “the warm family ties that she had lacked as a child.” They were also two symbols of well-being. and the economic, cultural and social strength of the United States of the time. But they also represent something darker, the male inability of that moment to deal with the success and the implications of being a star like Marilyn Monroe. And if it is a story of love, it is also one of possession and violence. As soon as he arrived in Japan for the honeymoon, DiMaggio found that despite the fact that baseball was a very popular sport there and they were in the country to that he did business, the press and the public acclaimed even more than him, his wife. When she was invited to go to Korea to perform on the American bases, he accepted because then she would have something to do while he spent the day in meetings. Marilyn's performances in front of 60,000 soldiers became a pop culture milestone that would be emulated hundreds of times later (see Marta Sánchez in the Gulf War) and filled DiMaggio with jealousy and some envy. He did not like that the actress attracted such constant interest, but that interest was key in his career. "We'll see how this turns out," she says her husband told her. “There were a good number of things that had to 'turn out'. One of them was the neckline of my dresses and jackets. I gave in on this. I no longer wear low-cut dresses. Instead they have a kind of neck. The neckline reaches a few inches from my chin ”.
But there were moments when Marilyn couldn't stop playing the role of sex symbol that she had been awarded or that she herself had helped to build. During the filming of the most famous scene in The Temptation Live Above, her character stood on a subway entrance and the current lifted her white pleated dress, exposing her legs. On the early morning of September 15, 54, she gathered a crowd of photographers and up to 2,000 fans at the intersection of Lexington Avenue and 42nd Avenue, in New York, to record the scene. In the end it would end up filming on a set, but the photos and the echo of that night were excellent publicity. DiMaggio was present at first, but the whistles, compliments, and profanity from the audience caused him to walk away, furious. He couldn't bear to see Marilyn waddling up to show off her white panties to a crowd. "My wife just did a striptease on Lexington Avenue," he said. They repeated the number three times. That night the couple got into a shouting match at the St. Regis Hotel where they were staying, and the next day Marilyn appeared with puffy eyes. She said that her husband had beaten her. It was not the first time. Joe Junior, DiMaggio's son, tells in C. David Heymann's book that during a visit to his father (in which he usually ignored him and left him in charge of his wife), a night listening to the couple arguing, and when he looked out the window he saw Marilyn fleeing in a robe through the garden until DiMaggio grabbed her by the hair and dragged her inside the house. That the couple had serious problems was an open secret. Confidential magazine reported that DiMaggio had contacted Sinatra (who would also be Marilyn's lover) to help him prove his wife's infidelity with his voice coach Hal Schaefer. In October 54, just nine months after the wedding, they announced their separation. "It is due to a conflict of professional careers," declared the lawyer before the microphones with a heartbroken Marilyn. It was not the end of their romance, far from it. In fact, at the premiere of the movie Temptation lives upstairs they went together, and DiMaggio never fully accepted the breakup; They resumed their relationship, and even he had hopes of remarrying. In a creepy episode that escapes official narration, Heymann's book captures the testimony of a very Marilyn-like flight attendant who dated DiMaggio a year after the divorce and to whom the star showed a life-size porcelain and rubber doll replica of the star's body and face: “It's Marilyn the Magnificent. She can do everything Marilyn does except talk, ”DiMaggio told the stewardess. "Can she make love?" She asked. "Absolutely. Would you like to see a demonstration?
Marilyn's third and last marriage is perhaps the most symbolic of all. It's easy to link the turn in her career whereby she left Fox as a fugitive to settle in New York and take acting classes at the Actor's Studio to her affair with one of the most respected artists and intellectuals of her day, playwright Arthur. Miller. This love caught many by surprise and jokes were made at her expense along the lines of "beauty and the beast" or "the silly blonde gets smart." From the Hollywood luminary, pure sex and pure vulgarity, to the most introspective theatrical scenarios, in search of respect and self-fulfillment. Marilyn's dissatisfaction was long overdue, because as she herself wrote, "What good is being a star if you are forced to interpret something that you are ashamed of?" During Christmas '54, shortly after her breakup with DiMaggio, Marilyn left Hollywood with her friend, photographer Milton Greene. She was looking for independence and wanted more money. She was the highest grossing star of the moment and she considered - rightly so - that she was not being paid a fair salary. Nowadays, when a woman fights for her salary and a contract at her height is considered something laudable and applaudable, to be vindicated, but when Marilyn did it in the 50s, she became the object of criticism from all the tabloids, who called her ungrateful. and ambitious, "the whore who did not know how to act." The plan was to found a production company with Greene with which to access more substantial roles in better films. Meanwhile, the blonde star would live with the family as one more, along with his wife Amy and his son Joshua. That was a happy and strangely harmonious time for Marilyn, welcomed as a friend, a daughter and a partner in the home, but that had to disappear when Arthur Miller appeared.
The first time the writer saw the actress was during the filming of a movie called The Great Imposter, released in 1951. "I have forgotten but he says I was crying," she said. The next time would be with Elia Kazan as a witness, on visits to the sets of moguls like Jack Warner and Harry Cohn (who had a mania for her because when she was an anonymous young aspiring actress he had invited her to spend a day with him at his yacht in exchange for professional support and she had turned him down), already got Miller into the movie business as an adapter and screenwriter. "Marilyn's face seemed puffy and not particularly beautiful," writes Miller's memoir of her Time Turns, "but she could barely move a finger without her heart rapt at the beauty of her curves." The sexuality that the woman emanated from her, even in spite of her, is a constant in the men's descriptions of her make of her, including the eagerness that was born in some of her to protect her from her. Miller says that on a visit to a bookstore where they went because she wanted to read Death of a Salesman, “I saw out of the corner of my eye that a man, Chinese or Japanese, was staring at her from the adjoining corridor while he masturbated over his pants. . She hadn't noticed her and I immediately pushed her away from the individual. She was wearing a normal blouse and skirt, not at all provocative, but even in a place like hers, with her attention drawn away from herself, the air around her was electrified. "
In his memoirs, Miller does prodigies with the language to explain his guilt over being married to his high school sweetheart Mary Slattery and being attracted to another woman. After his first farewell to him, at the airport, he narrates: “A retreat towards the bulwark of morality and good manners, of course, but not necessarily towards the truth. I was flying home with the feminine perfume still in my hands and I realized that my innocence was exclusively formal, a discovery that saddened me, although with it the certainty emerged that, after all, I was capable of immersing myself in it. sensuality up to the head ”. He does not mention the numerous phone calls that were made or at what time and circumstances they became lovers, but the fact is that they did, and that brought the end of his marriage to Mary, all at a time of maximum tension as Miller was being investigated by the Committee of anti-American activities, accused of communist. Those were the harsh times of the witch hunt, of the blacklist, one of the blackest episodes in the United States and Hollywood in particular, something that he himself had captured in a brilliant way in The Salem Witches. With the certainty that they were going to call him to testify to give names of some of the Communists he had met in meetings in the past - as Elia Kazan had done - Arthur Miller realized that he needed a coup against Public opinion. And he had it in his hand. He announced that he was going to marry Marilyn Monroe and that they would hold a press conference to discuss the matter. The point is that Marilyn herself found out that they were going to get married from the press. The appearance took place on June 21, 56; A few minutes before it began, Mara Scherbatof, a correspondent for the Paris Match, was killed in a car accident. Her bloodied corpse of hers was thrown on the road and Marilyn saw it all, in what seemed like a sinister omen for a day when she had to be happy. During the event, the couple announced their future plans (including a move to London to shoot The Prince and the Showgirl), Marilyn appeared in love and proud of her husband and his fight against McCarthy. She always was, even when executives assured her that supporting such a dangerous element would cause her to fall from grace. Rather it was the other way around, that she stayed by her side helped Miller to come out unscathed despite refusing to name names, contrary to what happened with other artists. Miller had taken advantage of the fame of his partner to get the sympathy of the media towards his noble cause, but his dazzling by her was real: “Marilyn was for me at that time a whirlwind of light, all of her paradox and tempting mystery, vulgar at times and others elevated by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain after adolescence ”.
They had two wedding ceremonies, a civil one on June 29, 56 and a religious one on July 1, at the home of Kay Brown in Westchester (the legendary scout who bought the rights to Gone with the Wind and Miller's agent). . Marilyn appeared dressed in a simple and tight white suit with a neckline and veil. Then they all set off for London, accompanied by Paula Strasberg, Lee's wife and Marilyn's tutor in the method, the Greenes, and Marylin's psychoanalyst. The filming of The Prince and the Showgirl was hell, partly because it increased all the insecurities of the star, partly because of the lack of connection with his partner Laurence Oliver (a staunch enemy of Strasberg and the method, whom he considered a sect ), partly because of the constant delays and absences of the actress, partly because of the tensions between Milton Greene and Arthur Miller. Too many reasons. Miller had set out on a mission to vindicate Marilyn as what she wanted to be, a serious actress, and she wanted to take charge of her career and give her the respect she lacked: “In all the articles that talked about her, even in For the laudatory, there was hardly a phrase that was not at best condescending, and almost all of them seemed to have been written by slobbering cretins who used to pretend their stimulating eroticism made them little less than a whore, and therefore subnormal. addition". Amy Greene is skeptical about Miller's role in the star's professional life, as she recounts in a documentary on the matter: “He was a stranger in a strange world. He was always totally on the sidelines because he couldn't contribute anything. Then she began to understand that she, once again, had made a mistake in her private life. And the pills appeared. She had gone back to taking sleeping pills because she couldn't sleep, stimulants because she couldn't wake up, and to drinking champagne. A disaster". Donald Spoto, Marilyn's biographer, confirms: “Like all the stars of the time, Marilyn received pills from her to wake up. It was something that did not help to establish clear and effective business agreements or calm and serene personal relationships ”. Added to the general malaise was that Miller was convinced her wife was having an affair with Milton Greene, forcing her to choose between maintaining her relationship and his or her professional arrangement. Marilyn chose her husband, of course. Amy Greene is blunt on the subject: “Milton never had an affair with Marilyn, never. Because I trusted Marilyn. All the women of America will understand what I mean; she, as a friend of mine, had so many moral principles that she would never in her life have gone to bed with Milton. " Miller does not mention any of this in his autobiography, but accuses the photographer of tampering with the actress's accounts for her benefit; when she realized this, the breakup occurred. In the end, the production company Marilyn Monroe Productions disbanded after two films, Bus Stop and The Prince and the Showgirl. They were two of the best of her filmography and, especially in the case of Bus Stop, in which she shines the most as an actress.
The couple settled in Connecticut and for a time, with neither of them working, they pretended to lead the stable life of a conventional couple. Among her goals, have children. "To her, a child of her own was a crown of a thousand diamonds," Miller writes. Already in '54, she herself had expressed her desire for motherhood, and she said “I know how I am going to educate him: No lies! No lies about Santa Claus or about a world full of noble and honest people willing to help others and do good. I will tell him that there is honor and goodness in the world, in the same way that there are gold and diamonds ”. Marilyn became pregnant, but her pregnant woman was tubal and had to be miscarried, according to some, among provoked and involuntary, the thirteenth of her life. During her intervention, says Arthur Miller, “his helplessness for her reached almost unbearable extremes: she was going to abandon her, traumatized and everything; a fear that seemed inconceivable to me. Returning home one night after visiting him, I realized that this might be a good opportunity to show him what he meant to me. But I couldn't think of anything ”.
The following year, Marilyn suffered another miscarriage during the filming of With Skirts and Crazy. In her next film, the actress had an affair with her French partner, actor Yves Montand, and she resumed her relationship with DiMaggio, although her shaky marriage continued. Fiction and reality were mixed again when filming began on Rebel Lives, directed by John Huston from a script by Arthur Miller. In it, the writer put in the words of Clark Gable (Roslyn's partner, Marilyn's character in the film and let's not forget, close to a father figure for her), a phrase that he himself had once said to her: “You are the saddest woman I have ever known ”. The filming of the film was on the verge of being suspended. Marilyn complained of aches and pains, much to the anger of the director and of her own husband, and her dependence on barbiturates from her was exacerbated, just as she had from Paula Strasberg. Miller began an affair with Inge Morath, the film's photographer, who would become his next wife. Marilyn was admitted after a collapse. In her memoir, Miller writes of those confused days: “What if she couldn't already be a great actress? Could we lead a normal and stress-free life, with our feet on the ground? As an ordinary person, who barely knew how to read and write well, what would become of her? I was suddenly struck by the crushing selfishness of this occurrence: because her stardom was her victory, the culmination of her existence. How would I feel if my marriage was conditioned on the domestication and disenchantment of my art? The naked, simple, and deadly truth was that there was no difference between her and the actress. She was Marilyn Monroe, and this was what destroyed her. " At the end of the film, Miller ended up in Reno, right where Roslyn's character in Rebel Lives began as the city where you could get a quick divorce. In 62 he married Inge, who would be his wife for 40 years. Some time after the divorce, Marilyn appeared in what had been her house in common with her and when she said goodbye she showed him a bandage on my chest: “They operated on my pancreas. That's why I always complained ”. "I knew he hadn't meant to say that to me as if it were a reproach," explains Miller. “All he was trying to tell me was that her behavior was not due to meanness or bad temper or drug addiction. But she made me wonder if even in those moments she didn't realize how close she was to the end she had been looking for. "
Rebel Lives was the last film by Marilyn Monroe –and also by Clark Gable–, because the next one, Something's Got to Give, was fired for its continuous delays and lack of professionalism, and the film was left unfinished. On August 5, 1962, she was found dead after an overdose of barbiturates. The news shocked the world. Marilyn's last days have been the subject of endless speculation, mixing the Kennedys, unscrupulous doctors, vested interests and a confusing chain of events in what is still unknown today whether it was suicide, accident or murder. With chilling lucidity, she herself had said to Ben Hecht in '54: "I was the kind of girl who is found dead with a bottle of pills in hand." Joe Di Maggio was in charge of paying and organizing the funeral. According to John Springer, the actress's publicist, her ex-husband "took the list of important people invited to her funeral from her, and said" no, no, these are the people who killed her. " In the end they organized a very intimate funeral and DiMaggio, as we have already said, took care of bringing her fresh flowers until her own death. Her first husband, Jim Dougherty, gave several interviews after her death recounting the few years they had spent together. In 64 Arthur Miller premiered After the Fall, the play about a Jewish intellectual haunted by the memory of his ex-wife, who has committed suicide. Interestingly, he already had most of the play written when he received the news that Marilyn had died. "To survive she would have had to either be more cynical or to have been further from reality," writes Arthur Miller. “Marilyn, on the other hand, was a street poet who had wanted to recite her verses to a crowd eager to rip her clothes off. There are people so alive that they do not seem to go extinct when they die ”.
