Page 40 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn plays Vicky Parker, a hatcheck girl whose aspirations for a career on the stage ignite when she meets Tim Donahue and convinces him to break away from his family vaudeville act, the Five Donahues, so that the couple can perform a show on their own.

Fox is spending big on this first romantic comedy to be filmed in both CinemaScope and DeLuxe color, with a screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, costumes by William Travilla, and Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor, and Mitzi Gaynor among the accomplished cast.

But Marilyn may have contracted influenza, or possibly even pneumonia, while performing outdoors in Korea, and is now fighting bronchitis. She arrives to set late, so sluggish from the effects of sleeping pills that she can barely remember her lines.

Travilla, who’s worked with Marilyn on numerous pictures, declares his designs “an act of love” for her.

Yet even Travilla’s dazzling array of jewels and furs, exquisitely tailored day dresses and spangled showgirl garb, can’t disguise Marilyn’s mounting anxiety.

After every take, she looks to the wings, where only the black-clad Natasha Lytess seems capable of coaxing a performance from the ailing star.

Walter Lang, an accomplished director of musical motion pictures, sets up a sequence that requires three pages of the script to be filmed in a single take. Hair and makeup and wardrobe have been preparing since 4 a.m. Hundreds of extras are on standby, a jazz band poised to play.

Marilyn has one line, which she fluffs. Repeatedly.

To break the mounting tension, Lang announces they’ll wrap the scene without her.

Shaking with tears of humiliation, Marilyn takes refuge in her dressing room.

Travilla rushes after her, discovering Marilyn sitting in front of the mirror, crying at her own reflection.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “It happens to the best of us.”

“Oh, Billy!” she howls, tears flowing down her pale cheeks. “I’m losing a piece of my mind each day. My brains are leaving me. I think I’m going crazy, and I don’t want to be seen this way. If I go crazy, please take me away and hide me. I don’t want to be locked up like my mother.”

“You’re talking yourself into the idea of being mad. Don’t be crazy!” he laughs.

“I am crazy!”

Her lack of sleep is taking its toll. After Joe DiMaggio goes to sleep, she calls friends, hoping someone, anyone, will pick up at one or two o’clock in the morning.

It’s often Natasha Lytess on the other end of the line, but one night Marilyn reaches Brad Dexter, a fellow cast member from Asphalt Jungle.

“I’m extremely unhappy,” she tells him. “I married Joe with love. I thought I was going to have a good life. I thought we were going to have a decent marriage. I thought we were going to have a relationship as a husband and as a wife. And all the things that are entailed in a good marriage. And I’ve discovered that the man is absolutely obsessed with jealousy and possessiveness …

He doesn’t want to know about my business.

He doesn’t want to know about my work as an actress.

He doesn’t want me to associate with any of my friends.

He wants to cut me off completely from my whole world of motion pictures, friends, and creative people that I know. ”

The arguments with DiMaggio are becoming angrier, more physically intense, as his dream of making her a dutiful housewife dies by the day.

Even DiMaggio’s good friend George Solotaire can see that his pal fundamentally misunderstands his new bride.

“Like, here’s this young, beautiful woman on the verge of becoming one of the most successful and famous actresses in the world, and she’s going to give it all up to make lasagna for Joe and spend her days changing diapers? ”

On set, Whitey Snyder hovers over her, covering up bruises on her arms and shoulders, though never on her face.

Fox executives are only interested in the PR opportunities the superstar marriage affords. “We haven’t lost a star, we’ve gained a center fielder,” one said after Marilyn’s City Hall wedding, and the studio is holding that line.

Except the center fielder loathes the star’s playbook. He complains that “she brings out the worst in him,” that “she’s spoiled and self-centered,” and he’s fed up with “coddling her” and listening to her “woe-is-me stories.”

One afternoon in Marilyn’s dressing room, Lytess confronts DiMaggio. Their mutual dislike has only intensified since the wedding. But when the acting coach suggests that divorce might be the best option, DiMaggio shouts in her face, “Hell if I’m letting her go.”

He’s never enjoyed watching Marilyn perform for the camera, but on August 27, the studio convinces him to attend the production of “Heat Wave,” one of the dance numbers in There’s No Business Like Show Business .

“We’re having a heat wave”—Marilyn sings Irving Berlin’s lyrics as male dancers carry her onto the stage in a litter festooned with flowers and bird cages. “The temperature’s rising, it isn’t surprising.”

She is dressed in a black bikini embellished with sequins, along with a black-and-white palm print flamenco skirt slit up the front to reveal tiers of pink ruffles on the inside.

She also wears a floppy white straw hat bedecked with flowers.

It’s costume designer Billy Travilla’s nod to Spain, but DiMaggio cares nothing for artistic authenticity.

When, between takes, Marilyn rushes over to embrace him, he recoils with revulsion, his rejection so complete that she is unable to continue. She’s lost the music and the lyrics and the dance beat. While she takes a break in the makeup chair, he storms off set.

In another stage on the Fox lot, the production of Désirée is wrapping ahead of its November release. Marlon Brando, who’s generating Oscar buzz for his star turn in this summer’s On the Waterfront, is playing Napoleon.

Marilyn doesn’t know Brando well, but when he sees a bruise on her arm, he asks, “What’s happened? That looks painful.”

She laughs and runs her hands through her hair. “Can you believe I bit myself in my sleep?”

“No, I can’t,” he replies, shaking his head. “I’m afraid I don’t believe that at all.”

On September 1, 1954, The Seven Year Itch begins filming in New York City.

Darryl Zanuck has authorized a two-month shoot and is pleased with the initial rushes. He telegrams Marilyn’s agent, Charles Feldman, who’s also producing the film: “Monroe was particularly outstanding. Keep up the tempo of the dialogue … I’m really impressed by everything I saw.”

Working with Tom Ewell, who’s reprising his Broadway role of Richard Sherman, and Marilyn as “The Girl,” director and screenwriter Billy Wilder amplifies the sexual energy of this screwball comedy about a bookish married man who becomes infatuated by his beautiful upstairs neighbor.

In the predawn hours of September 15, the movie crew gathers at the corner of 52nd Street and Lexington Avenue to film a scene described in the script as the “flying-skirt sequence.”

To create excitement for the movie, word has gone out to hundreds of press and public to come witness the scene being shot.

Joe DiMaggio doesn’t plan to be among them. He’d rather go for a couple of drinks at the hotel bar with his friend George Solotaire while Marilyn works. “It would make her nervous, and it would make me nervous, too,” he tells reporter Walter Winchell.

“Oh, come on, Joe. You have to be there. It might make some copy for me,” the newsman wheedles.

The scene they walk into is mayhem. The two co-stars are meant to be walking out of a movie theater during a heat wave, but the crowd’s raucous enthusiasm keeps drowning out the actors’ lines.

“Ooh, can you feel the breeze from the subway?” Marilyn’s character asks Ewell. “Isn’t it delicious?”

“Sort of cools the ankles, doesn’t it?” Ewell answers, while visibly admiring her legs.

They’re standing on a subway grate. Air is forced from below to simulate a passing train, blowing the skirt of Marilyn’s white halter-neck dress up over her knees, over her thighs, over her hips, even over her head.

Billy Wilder intends the scene as a sight gag, and Marilyn plays it to comedic perfection.

The action is captured by the film cameras and by Sam Shaw, Fox’s special still photographer on set.

Shaw, who previously met Marilyn on the Fox lot—on the set of the 1952 Fox film Viva Zapata!

starring Marlon Brando and directed by Elia Kazan—makes a daring pitch to the studio.

Promote the film using stills of Marilyn in her levitating skirt.

Marilyn, who typically wears no underclothing, tonight dons two pairs of white underpants beneath her billowing skirt. But even that’s not enough to protect her modesty in the glare of the set lights and the flashbulbs, which reveal more than she intends—and more than her husband can stand.

DiMaggio is incandescent with rage. “What the hell is going on here?” he demands as the crowd chants “More!” and “Higher!”

He barrels off the set and back to the hotel bar.

That night at the St. Regis, he erupts. The argument is so intense and prolonged that the shouting, the screaming, and the thudding of thrown objects is overheard by cast and crew also staying at the hotel.

Marilyn turns up on set the following morning, hurting and humiliated. Her back and shoulders are covered with bruises that the hair and makeup department work to cover up.

“Exposing my legs and thighs, even my crotch—he said that was the last straw,” Marilyn says. His behavior is the last straw for her as well.

Marilyn tells her hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff that when DiMaggio first got rough with her, she’d told him, “Don’t ever do that again. I was abused as a child, and I’m not going to stand for it.”

So that night at the St. Regis, she informs Guilaroff, “Joe slapped me around the hotel room until I screamed, ‘That’s it!’ You know, Sydney, the first time a man beats you up, it makes you angry. When it happens a second time, you’d have to be crazy to stay. So I left him.”