Page 39 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“MARILYN MONROE, RITA HAYWORTH, and Lana Turner all fired me on the same day,” Charles Feldman jokes every chance he gets.

But with The Girl in Pink Tights shelved and the latest dustup with Fox archived in Hollywood’s past, Feldman has found a new project.

Adapting the Broadway hit The Seven Year Itch for film is generating so much enthusiasm, Feldman tells Marilyn, that it’s considered “a plum by every studio in the business.”

Wilder, who won Oscars for directing and co-writing the screenplay for The Lost Weekend, lobbies Zanuck that Marilyn “is an absolute must for this story … nothing would make up for her personality.”

Fox agrees to cast Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch . There’s one catch—Marilyn must also join the ensemble cast of the Irving Berlin musical revue There’s No Business Like Show Business .

It’s a beautiful summer evening, the perfect occasion for Charles Feldman to put on one of the dinner parties he so enjoys hosting. Though Feldman and his MGM-starlet-wife Jean Howard divorced in 1947, they continue to host gatherings at their Coldwater Canyon house.

Tonight’s guests are three newlywed couples.

Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio live nearby at 508 North Palm Drive.

British actor Peter Lawford and Patricia Kennedy Lawford, who married in April, have invited their houseguests, Pat’s brother Jack Kennedy, a first-term US senator from Massachusetts, and his chic wife of less than a year, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

Jackie Kennedy dazzles in a cocktail dress with a triple strand of pearls around her neck.

But they’re nothing compared to the Mikimoto pearls with a diamond clasp that Marilyn was gifted by Japanese emperor Hirohito.

When Marilyn arrives late, as usual, the commotion interrupts the conversation over hors d’oeuvres, screwdrivers, and champagne.

With her white dress and halo of white-blond hair, she glows like a comet hurtling across the cosmos. Jack Kennedy can’t take his eyes off her.

“Senator,” she coos, giving him her hand, which he holds for a little too long.

“Miss Monroe,” he replies. “I believe we’ve met before.”

“Mrs. DiMaggio,” corrects Joe, standing protectively close to his wife.

Over an elegant multicourse dinner, Kennedy stares at Marilyn with an intensity that it’s impossible for DiMaggio and Feldman to ignore, much less the new Mrs. Kennedy. The senator asks Marilyn about her film career and compliments the patriotism she showed in entertaining American troops in Korea.

“What a very brave woman you are, performing in front of so many men,” he declares, refilling her champagne flute.

DiMaggio has had enough. “Let’s go,” he hisses in Marilyn’s ear. “We’re leaving.”

“That would be rude. Anyway, I don’t want to.” She juts her chin out at him.

“I don’t care what you want,” he says.

He snatches her stole and they’re out the door without saying good-bye to the others.

Marilyn later calls her old friend Bob Slatzer in Ohio and tells him about the dinner party with Jack Kennedy.

“I may be flattering myself,” she says, “but he couldn’t take his eyes off me.”

Could it be that she felt something more?