The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

The Seven Year Itch

In August, Marilyn began work on The Seven Year Itch in New York. Like no other of her films before or after, The Seven Year Itch established Marilyn’s iconography as the world’s number one sex symbol and burnished her image as a contemporary love goddess, much as Rita Hayworth had been a dozen years earlier.

The film’s roots were planted on the Broadway stage at the Fulton Theatre on November 20, 1952, and flourished for 1,141 packed-house performances. The play was written by George Axelrod and starred Tom Ewell, who won the year’s Best Actor Tony Award. It was originally acquired by Paramount as a Billy Wilder project, but when Wilder left the studio he took the screenplay with him to 20th Century-Fox, where he became the picture’s director, cowriter, and coproducer.

In the movie, Ewell is Richard Sherman, a thirty-eight-year-old publishing executive, left alone in his New York apartment while his wife of seven years and son spend the summer in Maine. Subleasing the upstairs, non-air-conditioned apartment is a gorgeous blonde, a television pitchwoman identified only as “The Girl” (Monroe), who soon becomes the object of Sherman’s fantasies. A couple of brief encounters with her is enough to set Sherman off on a Walter Mittyish, wild-goose chase in which he imagines himself romantically involved with The Girl in a series of improbable situations. The “relationship” becomes so serious in Sherman’s mind that he becomes paranoid that his vacationing wife, Helen (Evelyn Keyes), is aware of his imagined infidelity. The rest of the plot doesn’t really matter—the movie falls apart halfway through. Suffice it to say, Marilyn is stunning in every scene.

Filming commenced on September 1, 1954, at Fox’s L.A. studio. The first location scene in New York was the “flying-dress sequence” on September 15, at 1 a.m. The shot of Monroe in the Travilla-designed ecru halter-top dress, standing on a subway grate, the accordion-pleated skirt a-flying as she gleefully but vainly tries to anchor it, is firmly imprinted on the collective cerebral cortex of moviegoers for all time. Five thousand onlookers watched the filming of it at 52nd and Lexington near the Trans-Lux Theatre. Unfortunately, Joe DiMaggio was one of them.

Prompted by Walter Winchell, who, it would seem, was trying to get a good reaction from Joe for his column, Joe found himself on the set that night. Watching his wife perform in such a provocative—even if very obviously staged—moment infuriated him. Billy Wilder described the look on DiMaggio’s face as “the look of death.” Even though Marilyn wore two pairs of panties for modesty, under the klieg lights there was still more visible than what Joe would have been comfortable with. James Haspiel was present for the filming, and he recalled, “I must confess I had no trouble seeing through Marilyn’s sheer panties. Most of the published photographs from that night do not illustrate this intimacy. I think they shot the scene fifteen times so it was a very exciting, intimate situation being played out over and over again before my eyes. Nonetheless, I could fully appreciate DiMaggio’s anger. Indeed, Joe stood there sour-faced. In defense of Monroe, I am reasonably convinced that in her dressing room she did not see what the powerful klieg lights then put on display.”

DiMaggio rushed back to the St. Regis Hotel and waited for his wife to join him there at the end of her workday. Then he took out his rage on her, slapping her around the room. The altercation was so noisy, in fact, that other hotel guests reported it to the hotel’s management, afraid that someone was getting badly hurt. Natasha, in the room next door, was alarmed enough to pound on the door to the DiMaggios’ suite. “Is everything okay in there?” she shouted out, knowing, of course, the answer. The door swung open and there was Joe, eyes blazing, face reddened. “Get outta here,” he told her brusquely. “Mind your own business, for once.” Later that night, Milton and Amy Greene had dinner with Joe and Marilyn. They noticed bruises on Marilyn’s back. The next day, Gladys Witten, a studio hairdresser, noticed bruises on Marilyn’s shoulders, “but we covered them with makeup,” she said.

“That was the last straw,” recalled Stacy Edwards, who met Joe in New York earlier in that day. “The way I heard it, Joe let her have it. It was pretty bad. After he hit her, she told him she’d had enough and wanted out of the marriage. I spoke to Joe maybe three weeks later and asked him about that night. He said, ‘Things got out of hand, I admit it. But she pissed me off so much. She didn’t care what I thought about anything, she just wanted to do what she wanted to do.’ That was DiMaggio. He could be a sweetheart if everything was going his way. If not, he was pretty mean. To tell you the truth, I lost a lot of respect for Joe when I found out he hit Marilyn Monroe. I thought to myself, ‘How could any man hit such a beautiful creature?’ ”

Years later, Marilyn admitted to her hairdresser, Sydney Guilaroff, very famous in his time for his work with Hollywood stars, “Joe beat me up twice. The first time, I warned him. ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ I’m not going to stand for it. Then, after he witnessed me filming a sexy scene for The Seven Year Itch, he slapped me around the hotel room. I finally screamed at him, ‘That’s it.’ I don’t know what makes a man beat a woman—vulnerable and weak—I just don’t understand it.”

The DiMaggios left New York on September 16. The next day, Marilyn did not show up for work at the studio. Her doctor said she was home in bed with the flu. It would be four days before she could return to work. Even Darryl Zanuck—arguably a cruel man himself, with his comments about his star Monroe—felt badly about what was going on in her private life. He sent a note over to Billy Wilder assuring the director, “Others could give a good performance, but nothing could make up for Marilyn’s personality in this film.”

Billy Wilder summed up Marilyn’s appeal best when he told her biographer Donald Spoto, “She had a natural instinct for how to read a comic line and how to give it something extra, something special. She was never vulgar in a role that could have become vulgar, and somehow you felt good when you saw her on the screen. To put it briefly, she had a quality no one else ever had on the screen except Garbo. No one.”

What’s most stunning about Marilyn’s performance in The Seven Year Itch is that she was able to rise to the occasion despite the misery of her private life. That’s what real movie stars do—they give all they have when on camera, even when they seemingly have nothing left to give. She inhabited the role of The Girl as if born to it. With her arresting beauty, she is totally aware of the effect she has on men, even joking about it. But the jokes are on her, not the men. Melissa Anderson of the Village Voice wrote, “So arresting is Monroe’s presence that when she’s not on-screen, we wait impatiently, wondering, ‘Where have you gone, Mrs. DiMaggio?’ ” She wears white throughout most of the film, appearing in a pastel pink shorts outfit briefly and in a slinky evening gown in one of Sherman’s fantasy sequences. It is apparently meant to point out the character’s virginal purity and her total lack of guile. Her short, curly hairdo by Helen Turpin is timeless and the one most closely associated with Marilyn for the rest of her life.

That said, Marilyn’s emotional problems took their toll during filming. This, along with her tardiness and ill-preparedness—by one report as many as forty takes for a single scene—was said to have added over a million dollars to the film’s $3.2 million budget. It still managed to earn a nice profit, taking in $12 million at the box office for Fox. The still shot of the famous billowing-dress scene that so infuriated Joe became the film’s graphic signature, and Fox’s marketing team decreed that it be blown up to a height of fifty-two feet. The enormous Monroe image was then cut out and placed in front of Loew’s State Theatre in Times Square when the movie opened. It caused a sensation.