The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson [Patterson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornerstone
Published: 2025-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 40

EMERGING FROM AN advance screening of The Seven Year Itch, Fox’s Darryl Zanuck has never felt such optimism. He jots a memo and dates it May 19, 1955. “This is great house count and projection room was really in roar most of the time. There was no doubt at all but what this picture is packed with is entertainment. Tommy Ewell does a terrific job. Marilyn Monroe looks better than ever and plays her role most convincingly. Direction wonderful. It should be smash box office. Impatient for New York Opening date.”

But ambitious promotional plans are derailed as film censors and advertising partners begin to weigh in. Some are pushing for the flying-skirt scene to be cut entirely.

Telegrams fly between producer Zanuck and producer Charles Feldman. “They’re replacing a big cutout of Marilyn outside Loew’s Theatre in Times Square. It was showing Marilyn with her skirts blowing above her waist. Not good taste … Some papers refuse to accept the wind blowing ad because of Kefauver investigation and pressure groups … this is a very delicate situation.”

The Seven Year Itch premieres on June 1, 1955, Marilyn’s twenty-ninth birthday. She is radiant in a white dress and a white stole—and on the arm of Joe DiMaggio.

Despite their divorce, she has not cut him out of her life entirely.

When he’s in New York, he takes her to his favorite Italian restaurant in the Village, and to celebrity clubhouse Toots Shor’s. He writes her letters, all addressed to Mrs. Joe DiMaggio. “Dear Baby,” he wrote last October as the end of their marriage loomed. “I love you and want to be with you. There is nothing I would like better than to restore your confidence in me.” Marilyn keeps the letter, reading and rereading the postscript scribbled in pencil. “Please forgive me, my perfect girl. I love you.”

“No, we’re not getting back together,” she tells reporters at the premiere, smiling through bright red lips. “We’re just good friends. Very good friends.”

Innuendo delights the press, but not the censors.

Director Billy Wilder telegrams the Catholic Legion of Decency: “I do not have the reputation of ever being connected with pictures of lascivious character. Obviously, the picture deals with a man’s temptations but they are very human and utterly harmless.”

The film is a phenomenal success.

“Miss Monroe brings a special personality and a certain physical something or other to the film,” says the New York Times in its review.

Marilyn appears at an even more important premiere on September 29, 1955, when she attends the Broadway opening of Arthur Miller’s newest play, A View from the Bridge, a one-act drama written in verse and based on stories from his Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn—and on his own internal conflicts.

Also at the Coronet Theatre premiere are his parents, Isidore and Augusta Miller. Miller introduces them to Marilyn, though he keeps from them the nature of their relationship—as he’s still married to Mary Slattery, his wife of nearly sixteen years and the mother of his two children, eleven-year-old Jane and eight-year-old Robert.

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