At two in the morning on a Manhattan street corner in September 1954, a film crew set up a camera over a subway grate and several thousand people gathered to watch. Marilyn Monroe stood on that grate in a white dress and did the take again and again while the crowd roared. Somewhere in that crowd, her husband of eight months was watching, and his face had gone completely still. What happened in a hotel room a few hours later is the reason that marriage lasted 274 days.
To understand why this particular marriage went the way it did, you have to understand what both of these people were before they met. Because they were, in their own very different ways, two of the most damaged famous people in America. Norma Jeane Mortenson was born in Los Angeles on June 1st, 1926. Her mother, Gladys, worked as a film negative cutter and suffered from serious mental illness, and was institutionalized when Norma Jeane was a child.
Her father was absent and effectively unknown to her, a blank space she spent a good deal of her life speculating about. She spent portions of her childhood in an orphanage and in a series of foster homes, moving between households repeatedly, and she later described that period in terms that were consistently quietly bleak rather than dramatic. She was married for the first time at sixteen to a neighbor’s son named James Dougherty, in part because her foster family was relocating out of state, and marriage was the arrangement available to keep her out of the orphanage. What she built out of that material was extraordinary and strange.
Marilyn Monroe was a character she constructed deliberately and with considerable intelligence, a persona of breathy, luminous, apparently defenseless sexuality that she could switch on and off at will. Friends and photographers described the same phenomenon repeatedly. She could walk down a crowded street entirely unnoticed and then, on request, do something almost imperceptible with her posture and her breathing and her face and become instantly, chaotically recognizable, stopping traffic. The persona worked.
It worked faster and harder than almost anything in the history of the studio system. By 1952, after *Niagara*, *Gentlemen Prefer Blondes*, and *How to Marry a Millionaire*, she was one of the most famous women in the world. It also came at a price that almost nobody around her was accounting for. She was profoundly anxious.
She struggled badly with sleep, with chronic lateness that came from something closer to panic than carelessness, with performance nerves severe enough to require multiple takes of simple lines, and with a deep and entirely reasonable fear that she was being valued as an object rather than as a person. She wanted to be taken seriously as an actress. Almost nobody in the industry was prepared to do that. And then she met a man who took her extremely seriously and who wanted her to stop.
Joe DiMaggio was in 1952 arguably the most admired man in American sport. He had retired from the New York Yankees the previous year after thirteen seasons, nine World Series titles, three Most Valuable Player awards, and a 56-game hitting streak in 1941 that has never been broken, and that is still regarded as one of the most remarkable records in professional sport. He was the son of Sicilian immigrants, the eighth of nine children of a San Francisco fisherman, and he had become a national symbol of a particular kind of quiet, dignified, unshowy American excellence. He was the subject of a hit song.
He was, in the popular imagination, the opposite of a celebrity. He was also intensely private, intensely proud, and by every account from people who knew him well, extremely controlling. He had been married once before, to an actress named Dorothy Arnold, with whom he had a son, and that marriage had ended in 1944 amid reports of precisely the same set of problems that were about to repeat themselves. Arnold had wanted to continue working.
He had wanted her at home. It had not been resolvable then either. He had a set of expectations about what a wife was and did, and those expectations were entirely conventional for an Italian American man of his generation and background. A wife stayed home.
A wife did not work. A wife was certainly not photographed in a swimsuit by several million men. The two of them were introduced in the spring of 1952 on a blind date arranged by a publicist at a restaurant in Los Angeles. She had not particularly wanted to go.
By her own account, she had assumed he would be a loud, self-satisfied athlete in a garish suit, and she was not interested in spending an evening on it. He turned out to be quiet, reserved, well-dressed, and almost entirely uninterested in discussing himself, which she found genuinely disarming. He barely spoke. They were together on and off for nearly two years before they married, and it was not a smooth two years.
They broke up more than once, and in that time almost everyone close to either of them could see the fundamental problem, which was that he had fallen in love with a woman whose entire existence depended on doing the one thing he could not tolerate. There is one episode from just before the marriage that demonstrates exactly what kind of operator Marilyn Monroe actually was, and therefore exactly what DiMaggio was up against. In March of 1952, a story broke that threatened to end her career entirely. Four years earlier, in 1949, when she was broke and behind on her car payments, she had posed nude for a photographer named Tom Kelley for a fee of fifty dollars.
Those photographs had been sold on and turned into a calendar. And in 1952, with Monroe now a rising star at Fox, somebody worked out who the woman on the calendar was. The studio panicked. The standard playbook of the era was absolute denial.
Deny it was her, threaten the publisher, bury it, and hope. Monroe overruled them. She gave an interview and admitted it. She explained plainly that she had needed the money, that she had been hungry and behind on rent, and that she did not think there was anything shameful in it.
She was warm, funny, and entirely unembarrassed about it in public. The scandal evaporated within weeks. More than that, it reversed. The public sided with her almost immediately, in large numbers and in letters.
Her popularity went up rather than down, and the calendar itself became a collector’s item rather than a liability. The episode is now studied as one of the more remarkable pieces of instinctive crisis management in the history of celebrity, executed by a twenty-five-year-old with no advisers telling her to do it and every professional around her telling her to do the opposite. Here was a woman who could look at the single most potentially humiliating fact about herself, decide in public that it was not humiliating, and then persuade an entire country to agree with her inside a month. And then she married a man who spent nine months telling her that her job was humiliating.
That was the one argument she could not win. Not because he was more persuasive than a nation, but because she was sleeping in the same house as him, and because some part of her had always suspected he might be right. On January 14th, 1954, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were married at San Francisco City Hall in Judge Charles Peery’s chambers. It was meant to be a quiet civil ceremony with a handful of witnesses.
Within a short time of the news getting out, the corridors of the building were jammed with reporters and photographers, and the couple had to push their way through a genuine crush to get out. The photographs from that day show two people who look genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy. She wore a dark brown suit with an ermine collar. He wore a blue suit and a polka dot tie.
Asked afterward how long they expected it to last, he reportedly said he did not know, but that he intended it to be for a good while. The honeymoon went to Japan, where DiMaggio had a series of baseball commitments, and where he was, if anything, more famous than he was at home. And it was on that trip that the single most quoted exchange of the entire marriage took place. The United States military asked Monroe whether she would travel to Korea to perform for the troops still stationed there in the months after the armistice.
She went, leaving her husband behind in Japan. Over four days in February 1954, she performed ten shows in freezing weather on open-air stages in a cocktail dress, for an audience that has been estimated at around 100,000 servicemen across the run. The reception was extraordinary, something close to hysteria, with men climbing on rooftops and scaffolding to see her. She came back to Japan exhilarated, ill from the cold, and by the account she gave repeatedly afterward, she told her new husband that he had never heard anything like it, that he could not possibly imagine cheering like that.
He replied that yes, in fact, he had. That exchange gets retold constantly as a charming anecdote, usually with a laugh attached. What it actually describes is a woman returning from the single most affirming experience of her life and a man declining immediately and flatly to let her have it. It was also, in fairness to him, entirely true.
He had heard cheering like that. He had heard it for thirteen years at Yankee Stadium. That is precisely what makes the exchange worth pausing on, because it was not a lie or even really an insult. It was two people discovering about five weeks into a marriage that they were competing rather than sharing, and that neither of them had any idea how to stop.
The nine months that followed are documented mostly through the recollections of the people around them, and the picture those accounts produce is consistent and not pleasant. DiMaggio wanted her to stop working. This was not a subtle campaign or a matter of dropped hints. He made it explicit, and he made it repeatedly, and by several accounts he believed she had agreed to something along those lines before the wedding, which, if true, would explain a good deal of the anger that followed.
He disliked her clothing and told her so. He disliked her friends and the people she worked with, particularly the coaches and advisers she relied on. He objected to the publicity that was the entire operating mechanism of her career, which put him in the position of objecting to her job while she was doing it. He was, by the accounts of everyone who spent time around them, consumed by jealousy, and it was not a jealousy that responded to reassurance or evidence.
There were the silences. People who saw the couple during that year described him going quiet for days at a stretch, refusing to speak to her at all, an approach to conflict that a number of her friends found considerably more frightening than shouting would have been. She had spent her childhood in houses where affection could be withdrawn without warning, and she was now married to a man who did it as a matter of technique. And there was violence.
This is the part that the romantic version of the story tends to leave out, and it should not be left out. Multiple people in her professional circle, including the makeup artist and the hairdresser who worked with her daily and who therefore saw her body and her face before anybody else did each morning, later described seeing bruises. The accounts are specific. They are consistent with one another, and they came from people with no particular motive to invent them and a good deal of loyalty to her.
Nobody is relying on rumor or on a tabloid. These were named employees on the record, describing marks they saw on a woman they were physically closest to. By the autumn of 1954 she was in a marriage that was frightening her while simultaneously making a film that required her to stand on a subway grate in front of 5,000 people in a white dress. Those two facts were about to collide on a street corner in Manhattan.
In September of 1954, the production of *The Seven Year Itch* moved to New York to shoot exteriors, including the scene that would become the single most reproduced image of the twentieth century. The setup was simple enough. Monroe’s character steps onto a subway grate on Lexington Avenue at 51st Street after leaving a cinema. A train passes underneath, and the updraft catches her white halter dress.
The shoot was scheduled for the early hours of September 15th, partly to control the noise and partly in the hope of controlling the crowd. It controlled nothing. Word had got out days in advance, and the studio publicity department had done very little to discourage it. By the time the cameras rolled at around two in the morning, a crowd estimated at somewhere between 1,500 and 5,000 people had assembled behind the police barricades, along with a very large press contingent.
And every time the dress went up, there was a roar from the street. The take was repeated over and over. Reports vary on exactly how many times, but it was a great many over several hours, in front of a crowd that got louder with each one. She was standing on a grate in the middle of the night in September, doing the same three seconds again and again, while several thousand men shouted at her.
Whatever the photographs suggest, it was not a glamorous evening. It was cold, tedious, technically difficult work performed under conditions that would be considered unmanageable today. The studio publicity department were delighted, and in a purely commercial sense, they were right to be. This was, in a sense, the entire point of shooting it in the street at all.
The footage captured that night was largely unusable because of the crowd noise and had to be reshot later on a closed sound stage in Los Angeles. But the photographs taken by the press that night went around the world within days, and they did something no advertising budget could have bought. Joe DiMaggio was standing in that crowd. He had been brought along by the columnist Walter Winchell.
The director, Billy Wilder, was working a few feet away and saw his face. He described that expression afterward in terms that other people present agreed with. It was not embarrassment, and it was not sulking. It was something considerably colder.
DiMaggio left before the shoot finished. What happened later that night at the St. Regis Hotel is one of the better documented incidents in Marilyn Monroe’s life, for the unglamorous reason that hotel walls are thin, and a number of people heard it. There was a violent argument.
It was loud enough that people in adjacent rooms heard it clearly and remarked on it, and accounts from those staying in the hotel that night described shouting that went on for some considerable time. The following morning, the people whose job it was to prepare her for work saw the results. Her hairdresser, Gladys Whitten, and her longtime makeup artist and close friend, Whitey Snyder, both later described bruises on her shoulders. Snyder is worth pausing on.
He was the man who had done her makeup since her first screen test in 1946, who she trusted more than almost anyone in the industry, and who she would eventually ask to prepare her for her own funeral, which he did. These were not tabloid sources or people selling stories. These were the two people who looked closely at her body every morning as a matter of employment. Production continued.
She finished the film, and on October 4th, less than three weeks after that night on the subway grate, it was announced that the marriage was over. She filed for divorce on October 27th, 1954, on the grounds of mental cruelty. The marriage had lasted 274 days. The announcement itself was made outside the house on North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills to a press corps that had assembled in numbers usually reserved for elections.
Her lawyer read a statement about a conflict of careers. She stood beside him in dark glasses, said almost nothing, and then had to be helped back inside. There is newsreel footage of that moment, and it is genuinely difficult to watch. She is unable to get through a sentence.
She was twenty-eight years old, and the entire apparatus that had spent nine months celebrating the marriage of America’s most famous sportsman to America’s most famous actress was now standing on her lawn, filming her crying. But the strangest chapter of the whole business happened nine days after she filed, and it involved a broken door, a private detective, and Frank Sinatra. On the night of November 5th, 1954, a group of men broke into an apartment in West Hollywood. The background is this.
DiMaggio, by now separated and reportedly convinced that his estranged wife was involved with someone else, had hired private investigators to follow her. That is not an allegation. It came out in sworn testimony years later. On that particular night, the investigators believed she was inside an apartment building on Waring Avenue, and they had told him so.
DiMaggio went to the building, and he was not alone. Frank Sinatra, a friend of his, was present along with several other men, including at least one private detective, and there was a camera. The plan, as far as anyone can reconstruct it, was to kick the door and photograph whatever was inside, presumably for use in the divorce. They forced the door of an apartment, and they had the wrong one.
The woman inside was a complete stranger named Florence Cotz, who was asleep in bed and who woke up in the middle of the night to a group of men breaking into her home with a camera. She screamed. They fled. Monroe was in fact in the building.
She was in a different apartment upstairs visiting a friend, and she left shortly afterward. The incident became known as the Wrong Door Raid, and it did not quietly go away. Cotz eventually sued, and the matter was settled. And in 1957 the whole business was dragged into a California state Senate investigation into the practices of private detectives in Los Angeles, where it was examined in public under oath, with the participants giving accounts that flatly contradicted one another.
Sinatra testified that he had stayed in the car. It is, depending on your temperament, either a farce or something considerably more disturbing. A retired national sporting hero had hired men to follow his estranged wife, then arrived at what he believed was her door in the middle of the night with a photographer and a group of men, intending to break it down and take pictures of whatever was on the other side, nine days after she filed for divorce. Either way, the marriage was over.
And what happened to her career over the following five years is the part of this story that almost nobody gets right. The DiMaggio marriage did not end Marilyn Monroe’s career. Her career took off after it, not in spite of the timing but immediately and unambiguously after it. *The Seven Year Itch*, the film she was shooting the night of the subway grate, was released in June 1955 and was an enormous commercial success, one of the highest-grossing films of the year, and the picture that cemented the image most people still carry of her sixty years later.
Two months after filing for divorce, in December 1954, she did something almost unheard of for a contract actress in that era. She announced the formation of her own production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, in partnership with the photographer Milton Greene, at a press conference in New York. And then she went on strike against 20th Century Fox. She refused to work.
She refused scripts. She left Los Angeles entirely and stayed in New York for the better part of a year, living relatively quietly, while the studio publicly suggested she was finished. Think about the position she was actually in when she did that. She was twenty-eight.
She had just come out of a nine-month marriage that had left her frightened. She had no formal education, no financial cushion of any significance, a mother in an institution, and a public image built almost entirely on not being taken seriously by anybody. And she chose that exact moment to take on the biggest studio in Hollywood over creative control. It was an extraordinarily risky thing to do, and it very nearly cost her everything.
Fox suspended her. Columnists wrote her off. The general assumption in the industry was that a blonde comedian with no leverage would fold within a few months and come back on worse terms than she had left on. She did not fold.
She stayed in New York for the better part of a year, living in a hotel and then an apartment, being seen at the theater and at the Actors Studio rather than at premieres, deliberately and visibly rearranging what she was. It worked. In December 1955, Fox capitulated and signed a new contract that gave her director approval, script approval on certain projects, a substantially higher fee, and the right to make films outside the studio through her own company. Those terms were essentially unprecedented for an actress of that period, and she had won them by refusing to move for twelve months.
During that year in New York, she also began studying at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, which was mocked relentlessly in the press as a starlet’s pretension, and which produced immediate visible results on screen. Strasberg himself said afterward that she was among the most talented people he had ever worked with, which, from a man who taught Brando and Pacino, is not a small remark. In 1956 she made *Bus Stop*, playing a shabby, exhausted saloon singer with a bad accent and no glamour whatsoever. And the reviews were the best of her career.
Critics who had spent five years treating her as a walking joke wrote about her seriously, several of them with evident surprise at themselves. In 1959 she made *Some Like It Hot*, which is still regularly ranked among the greatest American comedies ever made, and won a Golden Globe for it. So no, he did not destroy her career. She did the best work of her life in the five years after she left him, and she did it having taken control of it herself in public, against an industry that had every reason to stop her.
What he tried to destroy, and what he did genuine and lasting damage to, was something else entirely. The honest version of this story is not that a man ruined a woman’s career. It is that a man spent nine months trying to convince one of the most talented performers of her generation that the thing she was best at was shameful. That is a different injury and in some ways a worse one, because it landed on a person who was already inclined to believe it.
Monroe spent her entire adult life fighting the sense that she was a body rather than a person, that the industry valued her for something she had constructed rather than for anything real underneath it. She was in analysis for years. She read constantly and was privately embarrassed about her lack of formal education to the point of hiding books. She kept lists of things she wanted to improve about herself.
She built a production company specifically so that she would be treated as a professional in meetings. And for nine months she was married to a man who confirmed the worst possible version of it every day at home. Who was humiliated by her work rather than proud of it. Who did not want her to be looked at.
Who, on the night that produced the single most famous photograph ever taken of her, stood in the crowd and looked at her with an expression that the director remembered for the rest of his life. She left him, but she did not leave the argument. It stayed with her. Her third marriage, to the playwright Arthur Miller in June 1956, was in some ways an attempt to answer exactly that charge.
He was an intellectual, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a serious man in a serious field, and the marriage was mocked in the press as the egghead and the hourglass, which tells you a great deal about what she was still up against four years after the calendar. She converted to Judaism for him. She stood by him publicly when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, at genuine risk to her own career, which is not a small thing and is almost never mentioned. That marriage lasted just under five years and ended in January 1961, and it brought its own considerable damage.
It included an incident where she came across his private written misgivings about her, which, by the accounts of people close to her, wounded her badly and permanently, and which was in its own way the same wound again. The serious man had also privately been embarrassed by her. By 1961 she had been through three marriages. She was thirty-four years old.
Her health was poor. Her dependence on prescribed medication was serious. And the person who came back for her was Joe DiMaggio. He came back in February of 1961, shortly after the Miller divorce.
Monroe was admitted to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York. The circumstances were genuinely difficult. She had gone in expecting rest and had instead been placed in a locked ward, and she was, by her own written account afterward, in a long and lucid letter to her analyst, extremely frightened by the experience and unable to get anyone to listen to her. She managed to get a message out to DiMaggio.
He flew to New York, went to the clinic, and, by the accounts that have come down from people involved, made it entirely plain that he would take the building apart, brick by brick, if they did not release her. They released her. It is worth sitting with that scene for a second, because it is the hinge of this whole story. The man who had spent nine months trying to make her small was, seven years later, the only person she could call from a locked ward, and he came and he got her out.
Both of those facts belong to the same man. He moved her to another hospital, and then, when she was discharged, took her to Florida, where he was working at spring training, and she stayed with him for several weeks. They did not remarry, but the relationship resumed in some form, and it lasted. He was, over the following eighteen months, a consistent presence in her life, and in the accounts of the people around her during her final year, he stands out as one of the very few people who wanted nothing from her professionally.
He was not trying to cast her, represent her, treat her, or photograph her. There are reports from multiple sources close to both of them that the two had discussed remarrying and that a date had been under consideration for early August 1962. On August 4th, 1962, Marilyn Monroe died at her home on Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She was thirty-six years old.
The death was ruled a probable overdose of barbiturates, and it has been the subject of speculation, theory, and argument more or less continuously ever since. DiMaggio was in San Francisco. He came immediately. What Joe DiMaggio did after her death is, in the end, the part of this story that makes it impossible to file him simply as a villain, and it is the single biggest reason the popular version of the marriage is so forgiving.
He claimed her body and arranged the funeral, and he arranged it deliberately and pointedly small, roughly thirty people. He barred essentially the entire Hollywood establishment from attending. The studio heads, the stars, the people who had, in his view, used her and damaged her and then arrived wanting to be photographed grieving, were kept outside the gates of Westwood Memorial Park, and he was entirely unapologetic about it. He is reported to have blamed the industry for her death in blunt and unrepeatable terms to anyone who raised it with him.
He then arranged to have half a dozen red roses delivered to her crypt three times a week. He continued that arrangement for twenty years, which works out at something in the region of three thousand deliveries. He never spoke publicly about her again in any substantial way. He turned down very large sums of money to write about the marriage repeatedly over decades, at a time when every other person who had known her was selling a book.
He refused interviews on the subject for the rest of his life, which ran another thirty-seven years, and he was known to simply stand up and leave a room if her name came up in a way he did not like. He never married again. He died in March of 1999 at eighty-four, and the account given by the people at his bedside is that near the end he said he would finally get to see her again. That is a genuinely moving story, and it should not be dismissed.
It is also the story that has, for sixty years, done most of the work of softening what actually happened in 1954. The difficulty with Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio is that both versions of the story are true at the same time, and people tend to want to be handed only one of them. There is the version where a great American athlete loved a woman for the rest of his life, buried her properly when nobody else would, kept the people he blamed for her death away from her funeral, sent flowers to her grave twice a week for twenty years, never spoke about her for money, never married again, and died with her name in the room. Every single part of that happened, and none of it was performed for an audience, which is rather the point.
He did it for decades after anyone stopped watching. There is also the version where a controlling man married a woman whose work he found humiliating, spent nine months systematically trying to make her stop doing it, went silent for days as a method of control, left bruises that two separate professionals saw on her body and later described, hired detectives to follow her after she left, and broke down the wrong door in the middle of the night with a camera and a group of men. All of that happened too, and most of it is on the record under oath. The marriage lasted 274 days.
The grieving lasted 37 years. It is not a contradiction exactly, and it is certainly not a redemption. Men who behave that way in a marriage are frequently the same men who grieve extravagantly afterward. And the second thing does not cancel the first.
It is just a fairly ordinary piece of human awfulness that happened to be attached to two of the most photographed people on Earth, which is why it is still being argued about seventy years later. As for the career, the record is not ambiguous in the slightest. She left him in October 1954 and then made the best films of her life. She took on the biggest studio in Hollywood and beat it.
She got the contract. She got the production company. She got the reviews, and she got the performances that people are still watching now. What he damaged was never the work.
It was the part of her that had already been half convinced the work was shameful, the part she had been fighting since she was a teenager in a foster home, the part she had beaten in public over a calendar in 1952 and could not beat at home in 1954. That was the one part of Marilyn Monroe that could not really afford the hit, and she took it at twenty-eight, from the one person who was supposed to be on her side.
