FIVE MONTHS AFTER JOE DIMAGGIO’S death, his son Joe DiMaggio Jr. died of an asthma-induced heart attack in Northern California, ending, finally, a two-decade struggle with alcohol, drug abuse, and homelessness. After his death at the age of fifty-seven, a cousin, Maria Amato Goodman, said of him, “He had a brilliant mind. He was one of the intelligentsia. But he lived in the shadow of his father and could not rise above that.” Unlike his father, the son went to eternity without pomp and circumstance. No church service attended his leaving, and no richness of mourners paid their respects. Joe Jr. was simply cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea. “He marched to a different drummer,” Amato said of him. “He was sensitive to the people close to him. He was not a bad boy. He was confused about a lot of issues in his life.”
Perhaps the deep sensitivity, the superior intellect, the marching to his own beat were what so endeared Joe Jr. to Marilyn Monroe, who adored him. It was their love for the free-spirited Monroe that proved the only commonality between father and son, and one likes to think that perhaps in death, somewhere on the other side, they have all found one another and have made peace at last.