The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Sinatra

One of the people Marilyn Monroe did trust during this time was Frank Sinatra. Lena Pepitone, her maid and sometimes seamstress, once recalled that while Marilyn’s divorce from Joe DiMaggio was being finalized, she went to live with Sinatra for a couple of weeks so that she could regain her emotional bearings. Much of what Pepitone recalled in a book she wrote with William Stadiem titled Marilyn Monroe—Confidential has been called into question. However, this memory of hers is in fact true.

It’s difficult to determine when Frank and Marilyn first met. She had always been a fan of Sinatra’s. His friend Joey Bishop recalled the time Marilyn went to see Frank at the Copacabana, “sometime in the fifties. I’m doing my act, and in the middle of it in comes Marilyn Monroe walking into the room like she owns the joint,” Bishop remembered. “Of course, I lost the crowd. Who’s gonna pay attention to me when Marilyn Monroe walks in? There wasn’t an empty seat in the house, so they pulled a single chair up for her to sit in and stuck it ringside, about four feet away from me. I looked down at her and I said, ‘Marilyn, I thought I told you to wait in the truck.’ ” Like many people’s memories of their star-crossings with Marilyn, Joey’s is a little off. What actually happened was that Marilyn was with a group of friends in New York when she decided she wanted to see Sinatra perform at the Copa. However, the show was sold out. “So?” she asked her friends. “What does that have to do with me? Of course we can get in.” Marilyn and her group then took a cab to the nightclub. As soon as the management saw her, they made quick arrangements. They brought a table into the packed club—Sinatra was already onstage, not opening act Bishop—as the Copa staff put white linens on the table and moved it right to the front of the nightclub in an empty corner. Frank stopped his song, winked at Marilyn, and continued with the show.

At this time—in 1954—Frank Sinatra was miserable about the slow erosion of his marriage to actress Ava Gardner, said to be the love of his life. Now the two consoled each other over their losses: Frank’s over Gardner and Marilyn’s over DiMaggio. Another friend of Frank’s, Jimmy Whiting, recalled, “Marilyn was real dependent on Frank. There were many late-night phone calls to him. She used to say, ‘If I have any problem in the world about anything, there’s only one person I know can help: Frankie.’ Frank’s feeling was hey, if I can help out the dame, I will. She’s a good kid.”

Jim Whiting has a funny memory regarding Sinatra. “He heard that Marilyn’s… you know what… was visible underneath her panties in that scene in The Seven Year Itch where her dress blows up. So he got an early ‘screening copy’ of the film and invited a whole bunch of guys over to see her… you-know-what. We all sat in his darkened screening room watching the film and waiting and waiting and waiting for this one scene. Finally, the dress starts blowing up and every neck and head in the room craned forward. The dress is up and up and up… nothing… no you-know-what. You couldn’t see it! Frank said, ‘Goddamn it! If she wanted to sell tickets to this movie, all she had to do was show her… you-know-what.’ Except he didn’t say ‘you-know-what.’ ”

After they began living together, Frank and Marilyn both admitted to still being in love with their estranged spouses. Therefore, for a time there was nothing sexual going on between them. They were just sharing a vast, common loneliness. Frank wasn’t interested in anything more, though it was difficult for his friends to fathom that he had one of the most beautiful and sought-after movie stars living in his apartment with him and was not intimate with her.

As it happened, Marilyn had a habit of not wearing clothing around the house. Everyone who knew her well knew that this was the case. She always said she would rather be naked; her friends and staff were used to seeing her au naturel. When she stayed with Frank during this time, she did not change that behavior. One morning, according to one friend of Sinatra’s, he awakened, went into the kitchen wearing just his shorts, and found Marilyn standing in front of the open refrigerator with her small finger in her mouth, trying to decide between orange juice and grapefruit. She was naked. “Oh, Frankie,” she said, probably feigning embarrassment, “I didn’t know you got up so early.”

“That was the end of anything platonic between the two of them,” reported Jimmy Whiting. “He told me that he took her right there in the kitchen, up against the closed refrigerator. ‘Man,’ he told me, ‘I never had sex like that. She is one fantastic woman.’

“Actually, Frank had been going through this whole impotency trip at this time. Way too much sauce [liquor]. The booze was completely ruining his sex life. He was getting too old to drink like that and then expect to also perform in the sack. He was frustrated by it because one thing Sinatra always prided himself on was his ability to satisfy a woman.”

Apparently, Marilyn cured Sinatra of his impotency, at least for a while. She said that she didn’t care how long it took; she was determined that he was going to acquit himself in bed with her. They were sexually innovative. For instance, according to Sinatra’s friends, he and Marilyn engaged in intimacies one night on the roof of the Sands Hotel, above the Las Vegas strip. Interestingly, a memo dated May 30, 1959, from Jack Entratter to the hotel’s security staff, confirms as much. It reads, “Please be advised that Mr. Frank Sinatra is permitted twenty-four-hour access to the roof of the Sands Hotel. Mr. Sinatra will use his own discretion in choosing to entertain any guest on those premises. Thank you.”

“What I heard around the office was that Marilyn and Frank had an argument when she drunkenly confessed to him that while she was attempting to cure him of his impotency, she had been ‘faking it,’ not achieving sexual satisfaction herself,” recalled Wesley Miller from Wright, Wright, Green & Wright. “Frank was upset about that revelation and, apparently, said, ‘Jesus Christ, if I can’t satisfy her, then what the hell am I doing with her? Why’d she even have to tell me that? Did I have to know that? Hell, no, I did not.’ ” (While Frank took Marilyn’s confession as an affront to his masculinity, others who knew her well said that she rarely felt satisfaction during sexual relations and that this problem was the consequence of her many psychological problems.)

Despite any problems with her, Frank always felt that Marilyn was intelligent, witty, sexy, and exciting. “Frank said that Marilyn was like a shooting star,” observed actress Esther Williams, “and you couldn’t help but be fascinated by her journey. While you knew she was going to crash and burn, you didn’t know how. However, you knew it was going to be a merry ride. The only reason Sinatra wouldn’t allow himself to become more serious about Marilyn, he had said, was because he was still so wracked with pain about Ava. It was too soon. Also, he would never end up with another actress. He had made that promise to himself.”

As much as they got along, Marilyn and Frank did argue from time to time. Once, she almost absentmindedly walked naked into a poker game he was having with friends, which infuriated him. “Get your fat ass back in your room,” he scolded her, always the charmer. However, he could never stay angry at her for long. He truly loved Marilyn—though he was not in love with her—and he understood her frailties. Obviously, she was weak and delicate, traits he was usually not fond of in a woman. He would never allow any of his women the luxury of vulnerability, but with Marilyn it was different. She was special.

After that poker-game incident, when his friends had departed, Sinatra went back into her bedroom, as Marilyn later remembered it, “kissed me on the cheek, and made me feel like a million. From then on I always dressed up for him, whether or not anyone was coming over.”