Page 38 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

FIFTEEN HOURS LATER, the newlyweds emerge.

A newsman from the local Telegram-Tribune is finishing his meal when the couple takes a corner table.

“You’re kind of lost, aren’t you?” he asks them. “Nobody seems to know where you are between here and San Francisco.”

“No,” DiMaggio says, “but it won’t take them long to catch up.”

The newsman calls in the chance celebrity sighting to his editor, who sends a photographer over to the Motel Inn.

The cameraman takes a sympathetic approach. “I would like to shoot your picture but I know you’re on your honeymoon. You name it.”

“My wife doesn’t have any makeup. I’d really rather not,” DiMaggio says, rejecting the photographer’s idea to shoot Marilyn with her back to the camera.

“We’ve had so much of this,” the new husband pleads. “I’ll appreciate it very much if you don’t shoot us at all.”

Remembering the Yankee great as being generous and decent with the press, the photographer lowers his camera.

Two hundred miles to the south, 20th Century-Fox has issued a fresh round of stern correspondence with its star actress.

“You are hereby instructed to report … on January 25, 1954 … for the purposes of rendering your services in connection with our motion picture tentatively entitled Pink Tights, in respect to which you have heretofore been assigned to portray the role of Jenny.”

Mrs. Joe DiMaggio, now sporting a new platinum eternity band set with thirty-six baguette-cut diamonds, has other plans. As she told reporters outside San Francisco’s City Hall yesterday, she’s an actress who’s “looking forward to being a housewife too.”

At San Francisco International Airport, the B-377 Stratocruiser, Pan American’s “flying hotel,” is preparing for its January 29 flight to Tokyo.

On the passenger list are Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe, and baseball ambassador Lefty O’Doul.

Marilyn’s never traveled as far as Japan, but DiMaggio has, in 1950 and 1951, as a member of Larry O’Doul’s American exhibition team, the All-Stars.

The baseball pros are embarking on a three-week junket for the Japanese professional baseball league, which will double as a honeymoon trip for Joe and Marilyn.

Marilyn arrives with a splint on her thumb. What’s happened to her hand? Reporters’ concerned whispers swell into pointed questions that Marilyn is finally forced to answer.

“I bumped it,” she says, gingerly holding up her bandaged hand as she wraps her black fur coat more tightly around her. “I have a witness. Joe was there. He heard it crack.”

“Joltin’ Joe” doesn’t know his own strength, she tells herself. He didn’t mean to push her away as she came to hug him, interrupting a conversation with his friend George Solotaire, but the force had been powerful enough to break her thumb.

By the time the Stratocruiser touches down for a fueling stop in Honolulu a few hours later, thousands of fans on the tarmac are all screaming Marilyn’s name.

“How are you, Marilyn?”

“Do you like Hawaii, Marilyn?”

“Are you happy to be here, Marilyn?”

“Are you pregnant, Marilyn?”

“Are you going to have a baby?”

The questions come thick and fast. The flashbulbs are blinding. She shields her eyes and smiles.

“What’s next for you, Marilyn?”

“What are your plans?”

Though World War II tensions were not long past, DiMaggio had previously arrived in Tokyo every inch the living legend.

“That half a million Japanese turned out in Tokyo to shout ‘banzai’ for Joe DiMaggio and Lefty O’Doul,” the New York Times reported in 1951, “keeps up our hope for some eventual international understanding.” A military band welcomed the baseball players with “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

By February 1, 1954, the tune has changed. It’s Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s sexy songstress, who’s captivating global imagination.

On the descent into Tokyo, Major General Charles W.

Christenberry poses an important question.

“How would you like to entertain the soldiers in Korea?” American troops have been stationed in Seoul as part of a UN occupation force.

Though the Korean War ended in July of 1953, the boys still stationed there could do with a morale boost.

“I’d like to,” DiMaggio is quick to answer, “but I don’t think I’ll have time on this trip.” He’d also missed the chance in 1951, when a delegation of O’Doul’s All-Stars had visited troops serving at the Kumsong front, then an active war zone.

“I wasn’t asking you, Mr. DiMaggio,” Christenberry says. “My inquiry was directed at your wife.”

Marilyn doesn’t hesitate. “I’d love to do it.” She pauses then and says, “What do you think, Joe?”

“Go ahead if you want,” DiMaggio grins. “It’s your honeymoon.”

Cary Grant, Marilyn’s co-star in Monkey Business, had written encouraging her to visit the soldiers if she had an opportunity.

He and his wife Betsy had recently done so, and “in practically every ward Betsy and I visited you were, I am delighted to tell you, a happy and prevalent topic of conversation. ‘Monkey Business’ had just been shown over here and my principal claim to fame, and their interest, seemed to be in the fact that I had made a picture with you; it helped our conversation at each bedside immeasurably.”

It’s arranged that Marilyn will go to Korea for four days next week. First, she and her new husband visit Tokyo. But though her official Department of Defense ID is issued under the name “Mrs. Norma Jeane DiMaggio,” it rankles her new husband that the press refers to him as “Mr. Marilyn Monroe.”

In an open convertible thronged with adoring fans, the ten-mile drive from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to the Imperial Hotel takes six hours.

Hundreds of police link arms to stop the crowd surging forward with shouts of “Marilyn!” and “Mon-Chan!” (the Japanese word for “sweet little girl”). Some fall into the hotel fishpond, others jam its revolving door, and someone smashes a plate-glass window.

It’s after 10 p.m., but the crowd refuses to disperse until Marilyn appears on the couple’s hotel room balcony. She waves self-consciously, fighting the feeling that she was “a dictator.”

At the promotional press conference for the baseball tour, the sports legend is once again overshadowed in favor of the white-hot film star.

“Marilyn! Marilyn!” reporters begin. “Is it true you don’t wear underwear?”

“I’m planning to buy a kimono tomorrow,” she says with a slight grimace.

“Marilyn! Do you sleep naked?”

“No comment,” she replies.

“What kind of fur are you wearing right now?”

“Fox,” she smiles. “And not the Twentieth Century kind.”

Joe DiMaggio is the only person in the room not laughing at the disrespectful questions. Reporters have no questions for him. All the photographers have their lenses trained on Marilyn. Her new nickname, “Honorable Buttocks-Swinging Madam,” makes the front pages, but not Joe’s picture.

The attention is so intense that for the first week in Japan, they rarely leave the Imperial Hotel.

“No shopping, Marilyn,” DiMaggio warns. “The crowds will kill us.”

She accepts a Mikimoto “pearl necklace with a diamond clasp” from Emperor Hirohito and Empress Kojun, but when she does venture out to shop for a kimono, photographers angle their cameras up her skirt.

Gossips speculate that it must be too cold in Japan for even the “Honorable Buttocks-Swinging Madam” to go without underclothes.

Luis Miranda is serving on a Korean army base when a helicopter touches down and out steps Marilyn Monroe. The dreary winter atmosphere changes in an instant when Monroe poses for a photo with him.

“To me she has a good personality,” Miranda observes of the “happy lady” who “didn’t mention anything about her private life—she was attending the troops.”

From February 16 to 19, Marilyn tours Korea by plane and helicopter, performing ten shows and entertaining more than one hundred thousand soldiers and thirteen thousand marines. Stars and Stripes reports that fans wait for seven hours to claim front-row seats.

“Gosh, I’ve never seen so many men in my life,” Marilyn says when she takes the stage, having changed out of her fur-collared flight jacket and combat boots into a sparkly purple cocktail dress and gold stiletto heels in the makeshift changing room draped with military canvas.

She’s decided to sing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” “Bye Bye Baby,” and the Gershwin song “Do It Again.”

One of the generals had questioned her choice of material. “It’s too suggestive to sing to soldiers. You’ll have to do a classy song instead.”

“But ‘Do It Again’ is a classy song,” Marilyn insisted. “It’s a George Gershwin song!”

There was no use arguing about it, she realized.

I’d been up against this sort of thing before.

People have a habit of looking at me as if I was some kind of a mirror instead of a person.

They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts.

Then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.

“If I change the phrase ‘do it again’ to ‘kiss me again,’ will that be all right?”

The compromise is allowed. But she is warned, “Try not to put any suggestive meaning into it.”

Many among the crowds are huddled in blankets, but they give her a warm welcome, their deafening applause punctuated by wolf whistles. In the biting cold, Marilyn sings and dances and blows kisses to the boys as she dances in high heels. The exhausted troops don’t know what has hit them.

As they wave and cheer and shout her name at the top of their lungs, Marilyn glows with confidence. There’s no critical acting coach, no demanding studio head, no grumpy husband. Just Marilyn. And just Marilyn, it turns out, is enough.

It has started snowing. But I felt as warm as if I were standing in a bright sun, she thinks.

I have always been frightened by an audience, any audience.

My stomach pounds, my head gets dizzy, and I am sure that my voice has left me.

But standing in the snowfall facing these yelling soldiers, I felt for the first time in my life no fear of anything. I felt only happy.

“The sky kept lighting up from the constant flashing of bulbs as cameras clicked,” writes one journalist at her show for the 7th Division, to the point that “the Reds probably thought the 7th Infantry Division was on night maneuvers.”

Marilyn impresses her handlers with how open and easygoing she is.

“She was unspoiled to the nth degree,” says First Lieutenant George H.

Waple III. “She gave us the feeling she really wanted to be there,” says Ted Cieszynski, a photographer for the public information office of the Army Corps of Engineers.

“She took her time, speaking with each of us about our families and our hometowns and our civilian jobs. It was bitter cold, but she was in no hurry to leave. Marilyn was a great entertainer. She made thousands of GIs feel she really cared.”

Even after she spots a copy of her infamous “Golden Dreams” calendar, Marilyn’s only response is “I’m very pleased to have my picture hanging in a place of honor.”

Her visits are recorded and played on newsreels all over the world.

The beautiful star, surrounded by our boys.

“I’d say the highlight of my life has been playing for the soldiers,” Marilyn says.

“I stood out on an open stage and it was cold and snowy, but I swear it didn’t feel a thing except good. ”

This is what I’ve always wanted, I guess. I never really felt like a star. Not really, not in my heart. I felt like one in Korea. It was so wonderful to look down and see all those young fellows smiling up at me. It made me feel wanted.

Just before climbing aboard a helicopter after her last performance, for the 45th Division, she waves and blows kisses to the audience.

“This is my greatest experience with any kind of audience,” she declares.

“It’s been the best thing that ever happened to me.

I’ll never forget my honeymoon—with the 45th Division. ”

She returns to the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo—and a cold welcome from her husband.

“Joe,” she says, as she lies in bed, shivering with a chill that feels like the beginnings of the flu. “I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. Have you heard such cheering? Tens of thousands.” She smiles. “Have you ever heard such cheering, Joe?”

“Yes, I have,” he replies curtly. “Seventy-five thousand at a time. Just miss the ball once and you’ll see they can boo as loud as they cheer.”

The bittersweet honeymoon ends on February 24, when the couple returns to Los Angeles and a rented house in Beverly Hills.

On March 7, at her first public appearance since marrying Joe, Marilyn arrives at the Beverly Hills Hotel on the arm of another man. Alan Ladd and Marilyn are the Gold Medal couple for the evening, as Photoplay magazine honors them as most popular actor and actress of the year.

Wearing a new platinum-blond hairstyle and a daringly low-cut white satin sheath with an ermine stole, Marilyn is a sensation.

MARILYN MONROE MOST POPULAR STAR , Movietone headlines its newsreel.

Joe DiMaggio, cast in the role of jealous husband, plays the part with feeling.

“It’s no fun being married to an electric light,” he complains.