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Pink Champagne. Marilyn's publicity clippings began to arrive in bales. Her next three pictures (Niagara, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire) were box-office blockbusters. At the end of 1953, according to the trade press, she had made more money for her studio than any other actress in Hollywood. She also won the Photoplay Award as the year's most popular actress.
This was pink champagne, and Marilyn loved it. But there was an emotional hangover. What she needed, Marilyn felt in a confused way, was not success so much as salvation. She developed a passion to put her life in order, and her vague longings to find a meaning in it took stronger direction. She had already enrolled in an extension course in literature at U.C.L.A. and had started a collection of classical records. Now she plowed deeper into her problem through psychoanalysis, got in touch with lettered people, e.g., Poetess Edith Sitwell, whenever she had the chance, began to read more serious books.
As a result of all the heavy thinking, Marilyn began to nag her studio for better parts, and to wonder if she really should not marry baseball's Joe DiMaggio, with whom she had been keeping company for more than a year. When Fox told her flatly that she could have Betty Grable parts or nothing, Marilyn walked out of Pink Tights. She and Joe were married in San Francisco on Jan. 14, 1954. Laughing for the cameras, they took their trip to the Far East, where Japanese crowds smashed doors, mobbed cars and fell in fish ponds to get a look at the "Honorable Buttocks-Swinging Actress." When Marilyn sang and danced for the troops in Korea, she got a wilder reception than the news of peace in Seoul.
Back home, the DiMaggios sat under their expensive thatch in Beverly Hills night after night with almost nothing to say to each other. They had fights, and on Oct. 4, 1954, nine months after the wedding, they announced that they would be divorced.
Desperate Attempt. Marilyn took the failure of her marriage hard. As soon as she was through with The Seven Year Itch, she walked out on her contract, went to New York in "an absolute, desperate attempt," says a friend, "to find out what she was and what she wanted."
Almost at once Marilyn found friends in the theater—Cheryl Crawford, Elia Kazan, the Strasbergs, Arthur Miller, Norman and Hedda Rosten, Maureen Stapleton. "For the first time," she says, "I felt accepted, not as a freak, but as myself." She showed a nice talent for painting (watercolors), and she read aloud from poems she could hardly understand. Friends sent her to the Actors Studio. After about six months of study and exercise, she finally worked up courage to do a 20-minute scene from Anna Christie before the other students, many of them practiced professionals. They praised her work in extravagant terms.
A Real Actress? All at once Marilyn could talk without any stutter at all. She could hardly stop talking. She was gay, and her wit ran free. She leaned less on her friends, stood more on her own feet. Her health was better. The rashes, the sweats, the psychosomatic colds came less often. The old fears were still there, but now there was a way to transform them. "I never dared to think about it," says Marilyn, "but now I want to be an artist. I want to be a real actress."