Storybook Romance

At the 20th Century-Fox studio one day last week, Publicist Boss Harry Brand answered his telephone. Marilyn Monroe, the studio's No. 1 star, was calling from San Francisco. "I promised to tell you," said Marilyn, "when I was going to get married, so you can tell all my friends.

I'll be married at city hall at 1 p.m." Then she hung up. Brand wasted no time in calling every friend he could think of--including the A.P., U.P. and I.N.S.

An hour later, when Marilyn and former New York Yankee Slugger Joe DiMaggio, 39, arrived at San Francisco's city hall, their secret was known to a milling crowd of fans jammed in the third-floor corridor. Newsmen and photographers kept the couple busy for half an hour. "Hey Joe," they shouted, "kiss her again!" (He did.) "How many children you going to have?" Joe: "We expect one; I guarantee that." Marilyn: "I'd like to have six." The ceremony, before Municipal Court Judge Charles Peery, lasted only three minutes. Then the bride & groom dashed unwittingly down a dead-end corridor, pushed their way back, finally drove off in Joe's blue Cadillac. Muttered Judge Peery glumly: "I forgot to kiss the bride." The Los Angeles Herald Express was dewy-eyed: "It could only happen here in America, this storybook romance . . .

Both of them . . . had to fight their way to fame and fortune and to each other; one in a birthday suit, as a foundling and later as a calendar girl; the other in a . . . baseball suit." To Hollywood know-it-alls, the news came as something of a surprise, even though the happy couple had been going steady for two years. But Marilyn herself is a girl who is full of surprises. At 27, she is the most talked-about new star since Jean Harlow. Her figure (5 ft. 51 in., 118 Ibs., bust 37 in., hips 37 in., waist 24 in.) inspires admiring whistles across the land. But she has sustained interest in herself not only as a pretty blonde, but also as a shrewd one capable of self-expression (i.e., on avoiding excessive sunbathing: "I like to feel blonde all over"). She has also proved, to the surprise of many critics, that she can sing, dance and act (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire). Now seriously concerned about her career, she walked out on her studio a fortnight ago, just before she was to begin work on a musical called Pink Tights, a remake of Betty Grable's Coney Island (1943). The studio suspended her, but two days after the wedding announced that all was forgiven if Marilyn would only come back to work.

On their wedding night, the honeymooners did their best to dodge newsmen, finally hid out at a $6-a-night motel in Paso Robles, Calif. Seventeen hours later, they disappeared again in Joe's blue Cadillac. When she is settled down Marilyn plans to commute between her studio and San Francisco, where Joe is a public-relations executive for a spaghetti firm. Cracked a Fox official: "We didn't lose an actress; we gained an outfielder."

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