Page 41 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

FOX PRESS AGENT Harry Brand is the first to know.

Marilyn calls Brand in tears, saying that her marriage of less than nine months is over. Within minutes, a press release citing “conflicting demands of their careers” goes out to the newspapers and the all-powerful gossip columnists.

Her charge is “mental cruelty.”

Marilyn denied the claim, saying, “It’s not like I’m giving up my career. I’m simply starting a new one.”

“There is no other man,” Sid Skolsky reports in his column.

DiMaggio isn’t convinced. He’s going to have her investigated.

“Shock waves swept round the world,” the New York Mirror emotes. MARILYN TELLS JOE: YOU ’ RE OUT AT HOME the Chicago Sun-Times cries.

Now what? To find out, nearly a hundred reporters descend on the front lawn of 508 North Palm Drive.

Marilyn’s lawyer, Jerry Giesler, spins an unlikely domestic scene. His client is sick “with a virus” and her soon-to-be-ex is at her bedside, having “brewed a pot of soup for his ailing wife.”

Two days later, Giesler orchestrates what the Associated Press describes as “an exit worthy of an Academy Award.” Joe emerges first, bags packed. With a terse announcement that he’s heading “home” to San Francisco, he drives away in his dark blue Cadillac.

Then it’s Marilyn, walking between Giesler and Harry Brand. “Miss Monroe has nothing to say to you this morning,” Giesler dismisses the press, thinking, The girl is only twenty-eight years old . How much longer can she endure this life?

At least until tomorrow, when Marilyn is due back on set to continue principal photography for The Seven Year Itch. After all DiMaggio’s outrage, the flying-skirt footage from New York is unusable. It will have to be reshot on the Fox lot, away from noisy crowds.

“The show must go on,” the Fox press office insists.

“Why?” asks a reporter. “Why now?”

“We’re fifty thousand dollars and three days behind production on the picture already.”