Day: January 14, 2004

More Marilyn and Joe

Sometimes the nature of blogging puts things out of sequence. NewMexiKen suggests you read the item below before reading the rest of the story.

By 1961 according to Richard Ben Cramer, after Monroe’s marriage to Arthur Miller had ended, she and DiMaggio had reconciled—the Kennedys notwithstanding. By 1962 they planned to re-marry. The wedding was set for Wednesday, August 8, 1962. Very private, very hush-hush.

Five days before the wedding date, on Saturday night, August 3, Marilyn died, a presumed suicide. (According to Cramer no coroner’s inquest was held.) Marilyn Monroe’s funeral was August 8, 1962.

Marilyn and Joe

NewMexiKen’s readers may all know this but I had to do some research to find out what happened to Marilyn and Joe who, as noted below, were married 50 years ago today.

It seems the catalyst for their divorce stemmed from the famous scene in The Seven Year Itch where Marilyn’s skirt billows to show her bare legs. As Richard Ben Cramer tells it in Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life:

The scene they went to witness would produce one of the most famous screen images in history—Marilyn Monroe, in simple summer white, standing on a subway grating, cooling herself with the wind from a train below. But what sent Joe DiMaggio into a fury was the scene around the scene. Fans were yelling and shoving at police barricades as the train (actually a wind machine manned beneath the street by the special effects crew) blew Marilyn’s skirt around her ears. Each time it blew, the crowd would yell, “Higher!” “More!” Her legs were bare from her high heels to her thin white panties. Photographers were stretched out on the pavement, with their lenses pointed up at his wife’s crotch, the glare of their flashbulbs clearly outlining the shadow of her pubic hair. “What the hell is going on here?” Joe growled. The director, Billy Wilder, would recall “the look of death” on DiMaggio’s face. Joe turned and bulled his way through the crowd—on his way back to the bar—with the delighted Winchell trotting at his heels.

That night, there was a famous fight in Marilyn and Joe’s suite on the eleventh floor of the St. Regis. It was famous because none of the guests on that floor could sleep. And famous because Natasha Lytess was so alarmed by Marilyn’s cries that she went next door to intervene. (Joe answered the door, and told her to get lost.) It was famous because the following morning Marilyn told her hairdresser and wardrobe mistress that she had screamed for them in the night. (“Her husband got very, very mad with her, and he beat her up a little bit,” said the hairdresser, Gladys Whitten. “It was on her shoulders, but we covered it up, you know.”) And famous because Milton Greene’s wife, Amy, came to visit at the suite the following day (to try on Marilyn’s mink), and was appalled to see bruises all over her friend’s back.

And that fight would stay famous—as the end of Joe and Marilyn’s famous marriage.

Years later, Marilyn would tell another hairdresser, Sidney Guilaroff, that she’d warned Joe clearly the first time he beat her up. “Don’t ever do that again. I was abused as a child, and I’m not going to stand for it.” But, as Guilaroff would write in his memoir:

“Nevertheless, after watching her film a sexy scene for Seven Year Itch, Marilyn said, ‘Joe slapped me around the hotel room until I screamed, “That’s it!” You know, Sidney, the first time a man beats you up, it makes you angry. When it happens a second time you have to be crazy to stay. So I left him.’ ”

She would file for divorce in Los Angeles, three weeks later.

The famous marriage lasted 286 days.

Still America’s Finest News Source

From The Onion

Grandmother Can’t Believe They Let People With Tattoos On Price Is Right
GREAT BEND, KS—Grandmother of nine Sadie Grunfelder, 71, expressed surprise Tuesday when a tattooed contestant was allowed to play “Buy Or Sell” on the long-running game show The Price Is Right. “I can’t believe that Bob Barker would let someone with a tattoo up on stage,” Grunfelder said from her recliner. “I would think they’d at least make him cover up that terrible thing. What if there are children somewhere, home sick from school, watching this show?” Luckily, Grunfelder’s two other means of access to the outside world—the AARP newsletter and reruns of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman—remain tattoo-free.

First-Generation American’s Job Taken By His Father
READING, PA—Miguel Martinez, 48, who immigrated to the U.S. 30 years ago, last week lost his leather-cutting job at GST AutoLeather, Inc. to his 66-year-old father Roberto. “I came to this country in 1974 to make a better life for my family,” Martinez said Monday. “But in December, they moved the factory where I’ve been working for 22 years down to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. I love my father, but that goddamn beaner stole my job.” Martinez’s $18-an-hour duties will now be performed by his father for $7 a day.

Returning calls important

From the Los Angeles Times

Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark on Monday accepted a minor endorsement that was as much a dig at Dean as it was support for Clark.

Vermont’s Abenaki Nation Indian tribe — which clashed with the former governor over official state recognition — announced its support of Clark at an event in Concord, N.H. The 6,000-member tribe tossed its endorsement to Clark because he isn’t Dean, tribal leaders said, and because the Clark campaign was the only one to return their calls and messages.

Endangered places

The National Parks Conservation Association today named 10 parks particularly threatened by air pollution, development, insufficient funding and Administration policies.

Parks on this year’s list, in alphabetical order with their biggest threats, are:

  • Big Thicket National Preserve (Texas): Sale of private lands and increased efforts to drill for oil and gas could fragment and destroy wildlife habitat by promoting haphazard development along park borders; dam proposals could alter much of the preserve’s unique wildlife habitat;
  • Biscayne National Park (Florida): Important fish and coral populations are threatened by overfishing, destructive use, and pollution; sensitive coastline slated for wetlands restoration is being developed, impeding the restoration of the fresh water flows necessary to restore the estuary;
  • Everglades National Park (Florida): Failure to emphasize ecological recovery in the restoration plan guidelines, a lack of action to acquire a critical portion of wetland, and insufficient funding threaten this park;
  • Great Smoky Mountains National Park (North Carolina/Tennessee): Pollution from coal-fired power plants threatens the health of park visitors, plants, and wildlife and diminishes scenic views; administration rollbacks of clean-air protections compounds threats;
  • Joshua Tree National Park (California): Development along park borders threatens to fragment critical wildlife corridors, degrade already poor air quality, and deplete critical aquifers;
  • Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (Arizona): Insufficient funding leaves the Park Service unable to address extensive damage to the border park’s extraordinary array of Sonoran Desert plants and wildlife;
  • Shenandoah National Park (Virginia): Pollution endangers plants, animals, and scenic vistas; non-native invasive plants and insects damage native vegetation, and insufficient funding undermines the park;
  • Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program (26 states and Washington, D.C.): Without adequate funding, the program is losing the opportunity and ability to create a comprehensive collection of sites, stories, and artifacts, depriving future generations of perhaps the best illustrations of an important aspect of American history;
  • Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve (Alaska): Irresponsible ATV use is scarring the park; a harmful administration policy could allow more than 1,700 miles of proposed roads through the park; and
  • Yellowstone National Park (Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming): Ongoing pressure to continue snowmobile use that Park Service studies have determined threatens the health and enjoyment of visitors and staff, diminishes air quality, and jeopardizes wildlife; inadequate funding for day-to-day needs cripples Park Service capabilities; and the park’s iconic bison are harassed by snowmobiles and killed by Montana officials when the animals wander off parklands in search of food.

The Meek Finally Inherit Something

Easterblogg on the Bush immigration plan.

Whatever else you think of the George W. Bush immigration plan, just focus on this: It will make life better for millions of the disadvantaged. How often does any government action achieve this? And shouldn’t a better life for the needy be among the first goals of government policy? Surely it should be among the first goals of liberal government policy. That a conservative president has done something to help millions of people with money problems, little power and an anxiety-filled life–the meek, in New Testament terms–seems such a departure from the script that the anti-poverty aspects of the Bush initiative are simply being ignored.

High Plains Drifter

Reviewer Terry Castle is enamored with the new Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote.

So the best thing to say up front, perhaps, is get hold of Don Quixote and make time for it. It will be worth the television sitcoms you skip, the thirty or so quiet evenings you spend on it. Edith Grossman actually makes it easy for you, O frazzled reader, because she has produced the most agreeable Don Quixote ever. Don’t be put off by Harold Bloom’s introduction (major windbag alert in effect); go right to the thing itself. Don Quixote, famously, is the first major work of Western literature to take ordinary human life for its subject—specifically, a life that is replete with accidents, fiascoes, and indignities—and make it over into something luminous with meaning. It does so without pomp or sententiousness—it’s the friendliest and least formal of all the Great Books—yet will overwhelm you, in the end, with its moral and imaginative splendor….

I confess that I wasn’t especially looking forward to my second reading of the work—so shopworn, at this point, was much of my existing mental Quixote imagery (think cheap Picasso posters, Man of La Mancha, a groggy Frank Sinatra singing “The Impossible Dream”). But the book quite staggered me with its charm, beauty, and profundity. Once you enter (or re-enter) its expansive, ruminative, deeply nourishing world, the literary equivalent of eating “slow food,” it’s hard not to become a bit of a bore about how stupendous it is.

Al Franken Was Right

Also from Primary Sources in the January/February issue of The Atlantic

“After discovering that Saddam Hussein was both actively supporting Al Qaeda and deploying WMDs, the United States, with the full support of the international community, invaded Iraq in March, 2003.” This largely inaccurate statement was not torn from a premature draft of the official Bush history of the Iraq War. Rather, it was what roughly 60 percent of Americans believed—in sum or in part—in the aftermath of the war. According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland, during and immediately following the Iraq War more than half of Americans believed that Saddam was a major supporter of al-Qaeda. Roughly a third believed that Iraq had deployable or deployed WMD and that most of the world supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The first and the third statements are known to be false; the second is widely accepted to be. So how did so many people get so much wrong? Part of the answer, obviously, is politics: Bush backers, according to the study, were much more likely to believe at least one of the three points than Bush bashers. But the media—and in particular one well-known “fair and balanced” news outlet—seem to have played a part in promoting false beliefs. Whereas only 23 percent of those who relied on NPR or PBS for information about public affairs believed one or more of the propositions, 55 percent of those who relied on CNN did—and 80 percent of those who relied on Fox News did. One might speculate that Bush supporters are more likely to watch (and believe) Rupert Murdoch’s news outlets than either Ted Turner’s or public broadcasting’s. But viewers’ preconceived political notions are clearly not the whole story: the Maryland researchers found that whereas 78 percent of Bush supporters who watched Fox were misinformed, only 50 percent of Bush supporters who got their news from PBS and NPR were.

“Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,” Program on International Policy Attitudes/Knowledge Networks

Hell Is for Other People

From Primary Sources in the January/February issue of The Atlantic

Americans mix belief in spiritualism and reincarnation with traditional Christian teachings about the afterlife, according to a new survey from the Barna Research Group. The survey finds that nearly 20 percent of Americans (including 10 percent of “born-again Christians”) believe that people are reincarnated after death, and 34 percent think that it’s possible to communicate, Crossing Over-style, with the recently departed. But doctrines of a more traditional nature still have widespread appeal: 76 percent of those polled stated that heaven exists, and nearly as many (71 percent) expressed a belief in hell. Hell isn’t necessarily perceived as teeming with fire and brimstone—in fact, only 32 percent of adults called it “an actual place of torment and suffering,” whereas 40 percent called it “a state of eternal separation from God’s presence.” Either way, though, if Americans are right, the Inferno’s population growth will be slow: 64 percent confidently predict that they themselves will find their way to paradise, whereas only .005 percent expect that they will be sent to hell.

“Americans Describe Their Views About Life After Death,” Barna Research Group