IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING THAT Joe DiMaggio and George Solotaire never did get to Hawaii that year. George returned to New York, while DiMaggio spent the next few weeks in Los Angeles with Marilyn Monroe. When David March called Marilyn to find out how she and the ballplayer had fared after leaving the Villa Nova together, she told him, “Your friend struck out.” The truth of the matter is that he’d hit a home run, but Monroe hoped to avoid unnecessary publicity so early in their relationship. She knew full well that if she leveled with March, the press would be at their doorstep in no time at all.
Naïve in certain respects but uncommonly savvy in others, Marilyn also understood that in the eyes of the general moviegoing public, a sex symbol is always sexier if romantically unattached. The powers that be at Twentieth Century–Fox, with which Marilyn had signed a seven-year contract, couldn’t have cared less how many lovers she took so long as their identities remained a matter of private concern.
During Marilyn’s and Joe’s time together, she spent her working hours at the studio on the set of Monkey Business, while he played golf at the Brentwood Country Club and on other days visited the racetrack to bet on the horses. One afternoon Joe joined Frank Sinatra for lunch at the Polo Lounge. He and Sinatra had known each other since Skinny D’Amato, a former Mob figure turned nightclub operator, had introduced them in New York. In June 1946, accompanied by Toots Shor and Marlene Dietrich, Sinatra and DiMaggio attended a Joe Louis–Billy Conn heavyweight fight at Yankee Stadium. DiMaggio spent the night with Dietrich, who was thirteen years his senior, reporting afterward that while she “wasn’t a bad lay, she had the foulest breath I’ve ever inhaled.”
By far the two most recognizable Italian American celebrities of their generation, DiMaggio and Sinatra had formed an immediate bond. A music critic of the day compared Sinatra’s vocal style to the sight of DiMaggio swinging a bat. “They both make it look so easy,” he wrote. Although they both enjoyed the benefits of their respective fame—and everything that came with it, including financial reward and beautiful women—there were essential differences between them. While Sinatra bathed in the glory of his renown, DiMaggio resisted the attendant intrusions into his personal life. When approached by an aggressive autograph hound at the Polo Lounge that afternoon, Sinatra obliged, whereas DiMaggio refused. “Can’t you see we’re eating lunch?” Joe snapped. The intruder retreated, pleased to have copped at least one signature for his trouble.
“How do you stand it?” DiMaggio asked.
“It comes with the territory,” said Sinatra. “And if publicity bothers you, wait till they hear about you and Marilyn.”
To forestall the inevitable, DiMaggio and Monroe spent their evenings hidden away in his suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel. They ordered their meals from room service and paid a bellhop to buy wine for them from a nearby liquor store. Their secret remained intact until Marilyn called her old buddy and confidant, Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, to ask him what he thought of Joe DiMaggio. “He has a big name,” said Skolsky. “You could do a hell of a lot worse.” The next day he ran an item on Joe and Marilyn in his newspaper column.
DiMaggio didn’t know about the item until later that day when he received a telephone call from Toots Shor.
“Is it true?” he asked.
“About you and Marilyn Monroe? It’s in Sid Skolsky’s column.”
Although DiMaggio ordinarily might have denied the story, he and Shor had been friends since Joe’s earliest days with the Yankees. On one occasion, overhearing a deprecating comment about Joltin’ Joe at a Yankee baseball game, the saloonkeeper had punched out the irreverent spectator, thereby proving his everlasting allegiance. On those occasions when the Yanks lost at home, Toots would soothe Joe by taking long walks with him down Fifth Avenue. And when they won, which was usually the case, Toots would stand rounds for everyone in the house.
“It’s true about Marilyn,” DiMaggio admitted. “We’re like a good double-play combination. It’s just a matter of two people meeting and something clicks.”
Despite the amusing baseball analogy, Joe DiMaggio wasn’t amused.
In her memoir, Marilyn described what was to be the first of a number of “frank and often vociferous discussions” between them.
“I don’t know if I can take all your crazy publicity,” Joe told her. She tried to explain that Sidney Skolsky had betrayed her, that it didn’t serve her purpose any more than Joe’s to have the story go public. But it wasn’t the Skolsky item that bothered DiMaggio. What displeased him was another story about Marilyn that had just surfaced in the press, namely her admission that several years earlier she’d posed in the nude and that one of the resultant photographs had been used as the basis for a calendar that had become a piece of Americana, a frozen image of female sensuality.
In May 1949, when the photo was taken, Marilyn was just another Hollywood hopeful without a studio or a job, a simple but imaginative young woman with small-town good looks and a figure that took one’s breath away. Columbia Pictures had dropped her, she claimed, because she’d refused to sleep with Harry Cohn, the studio’s tyrannical boss. She later told Truman Capote that though she’d thwarted Cohn’s awkward advance, she’d accepted cash from occasional businessmen “who could well afford” her favors. “It made them happy, and it paid the rent,” she mused, “so what the hell.” But now she was broke and behind on her monthly car installment. Photographer Tom Kelley had once asked her to pose au natural, and she had declined. Recalling Kelley’s offer, she called him and asked if the offer still stood. It did. They arranged to meet on May 27 at Kelley’s Sunset Boulevard studio. Also present at the studio was Tom’s wife, Natalie, who acted as her husband’s assistant. The photographer spread a red velvet drop across the floor and put an Artie Shaw record on the turntable. Marilyn disrobed. Over the next two hours Kelley shot two rolls of film, twenty-four shots per roll. He gave Marilyn one of the developed rolls as a gift. Marilyn signed a release form using a pseudonym. Kelley paid her $50. After the session, the three of them celebrated by going to a coffee shop and ordering chili.
Kelley subsequently sold two of the nude shots of Marilyn for a total of $1,000 to John Baumgarth, a calendar publisher from Chicago, who used one of them as the centerpiece of what became known as the “Golden Dreams” calendar. The remaining twenty-two exposures mysteriously disappeared, purportedly stolen from Kelley’s file cabinet. The “Golden Dreams” calendar grossed millions of dollars and could be found hanging in nearly every bar, gas station, and barber shop in the States, to say nothing of its prodigious sales abroad. So popular an item was it that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, though rumored to be gay, displayed it on the wall of his recreation room in the privacy of his home. By strange coincidence, Marilyn met Hoover in the early 1950s when she attended a Department of Justice reception in Washington with comedian Milton Berle. Marilyn and Uncle Miltie had briefly been lovers in the late 1940s, a period in the actress’s life when nearly every man she met became a bedmate, provided he could help advance her career. There were exceptions—such as Harry Cohn—but more often than not, Marilyn allowed herself to be exploited. Hollywood, she quickly learned, wasn’t a place where an ambitious starlet could afford to be a prude.
About the time Marilyn met Joe DiMaggio—with the “Golden Dreams” calendar selling better than ever—a wire service reporter named Aline Mosby received a tip that the nude calendar girl was none other than Marilyn Monroe. Mosby called the publicity department at Fox and asked for a confirmation. In a state of near panic, studio executives contacted Marilyn, who readily admitted that she had indeed committed “the unforgivable sin” of posing in the nude. Darryl Zanuck, head of Fox and instrumental in helping to launch Monroe’s career, ordered her to “deny everything.” Nice girls, he told her, don’t take off their clothes for money. Marilyn told Zanuck she wasn’t ashamed of what she’d done and therefore saw no reason to lie. Zanuck threatened to invoke the morals clause in her contract and cut her loose, a course Monroe didn’t believe he would pursue. Harry Brand, Fox’s publicity director, ultimately supported her decision and arranged a luncheon between Marilyn and Aline Mosby, at which the actress tearfully described the two-hour photo session with Kelley, insisting that at the time she’d been broke and frightened. She made clear the only funds she’d collected for the session were the $50 she’d received from the photographer.
Mosby’s scoop became front-page news. The nude calendar shot, airbrushed to comply with censorship requirements, received wide publication in newspapers and magazines. Joe DiMaggio didn’t object to the fact that she’d posed for the photo, but rather that she’d admitted it when there was no particular need to do so. “Joe doesn’t mind being written about,” Marilyn noted in her memoir, “but he is against doing anything to encourage or attract publicity.” He applied the same standards to Monroe and condemned her for manipulating the media in order to create a news story. When he told her he didn’t know if he could deal with her voracious appetite for public exposure, she replied, “You don’t have to be part of it.”
“I am,” he said, “and it bothers me.”
“It’s part of my career,” Marilyn pointed out.
What irked DiMaggio even more than the Hollywood gossip mongers—the columnists and reporters—were the press photographers constantly in pursuit of Marilyn, waiting for her on every street corner, ready to pounce the moment she appeared.
“When you were a baseball idol,” she remarked, “you didn’t duck photographers.”
“Yes. I did,” he answered.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Don’t I know it.”
“Do you want me to hide in a basement?” she asked. “Movie stars aren’t born, they’re created. Publicity is part of the manufacturing process.”
“We’ll see how it works out,” he said.
On April 7, 1952, Marilyn was the subject of a Life magazine feature article, making her first appearance on the cover of the periodical. The publication of the Life piece only weeks after her nude calendar disclosure indicated that the latter hadn’t damaged her reputation in the least. If anything, the “Golden Dreams” calendar shot increased her star power and made her a more valuable commodity. Yet when Marilyn showed DiMaggio a copy of the April 7 issue, he dismissed it with a wave of his hand.
“I’ve been on the cover of Life myself,” he said “What does it prove?” Then, answering his own question, he remarked, “Absolutely nothing. It’s all vanity.”
In April 1952 Joe DiMaggio returned to San Francisco and several days later flew to New York to begin a new job. He’d ended his thirteen-year baseball career in 1951, due to the grind of the road and an accumulation of injuries, not least of which was a surgically removed three-inch bone spur in the heel of his foot. At the time of his retirement, he’d been making $100,000 per year, one of the first major leaguers to reach the six-figure plateau. The Yankees currently had a new center fielder, a kid from Oklahoma named Mickey Mantle. Neither as graceful nor as polished a ballplayer as DiMaggio, Mantle would nonetheless develop into a great outfielder in his own right. He would also remain a source of ongoing annoyance to DiMaggio, who too easily became jealous of any ballplayer whose skills rivaled his own. Even Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams, often said to have had the “best eye” in baseball, would refer to Joe as “the Prima Donna of Prima Donnas.”
DiMaggio’s new job, which paid just about the same salary he’d earned during his last years with the Yanks, seemed at odds with his personality. He’d become the host of a television talk show that was broadcast from a cramped studio located in the basement tunnel behind the home-team dugout at Yankee Stadium. The show involved five minutes of pregame commentary on his part, followed by a postgame interview with either a Yankees player or a member of the visiting team. The producers of the show were responsible for choosing the interviewee and writing out the postgame questions. DiMaggio hated doing the show almost as much as he’d despised working on his father’s fishing boat. He felt insecure about appearing before the cameras and was convinced he wasn’t doing a good job. He was right.
Richard Ben Cramer, one of DiMaggio’s biographers, reported one instance when the Yankee Clipper threw an absolute fit, spewing curses and refusing to go on, because somebody had misplaced the first cue card. The program director eventually calmed him down and saw to it that they wrote out a new cue card in block letters:
HI, I’M JOE DIMAGGIO.
WELCOME TO THE JOE DIMAGGIO SHOW.
He was once again sharing a suite with George Solotaire at the Elysée Hotel in Manhattan. Also staying with them was Robert Solotaire, George’s twenty-two-year-old son. “Joe would rush back to the hotel after his TV spot and call Marilyn Monroe in Hollywood,” recalled Robert. “He was nuts about her. Following their daily phone conversation, the three of us would head out for dinner, either at Toots Shor’s, where Joe had his own table, or the Stage Deli, on Seventh Avenue. Although Joe usually let others do the talking, these days he’d blabber nonstop about Marilyn. From the very beginning, he wanted to marry her. He’d construed an image of her that seemed totally unrealistic. I remember one night at Toots Shor’s when he told sports reporter Jimmy Cannon that ‘Marilyn’s nothing but a fun-loving little kid.’ She’d give up her acting career if he asked her, he said. She’d quit making movies to start a family, have babies.
“My old man never said anything to him, but he thought Joe misunderstood Monroe. Like, here’s this young, beautiful woman on the verge of becoming one of the most successful and famous actresses in the world, an international superstar, and she’s going to give it all up to make lasagna for Joe and spend her days changing diapers. It didn’t compute. The main problem was that Joe’s triumphs belonged to the past, and he lived on them, while Marilyn’s great success lay just ahead of her.”
To be sure, Joe DiMaggio had a very “old school” view of women: a woman should be reserved and, it went without saying, should respect and honor her man. Proud of Marilyn’s beauty, he loved that she was admired but preferred that she be admired from afar. According to Joe, there was no better career for a woman than being a homemaker and mother. He and Marilyn had discussed this issue during their time together. And while she had refused to promise anything concerning her own intentions, she had assured Joe that starting a family was her dearest wish. DiMaggio convinced himself that he would prevail in the end and would convince her to give up her acting career in exchange for the sanctity of a domestic partnership. Until that time was at hand, he would help her attain the public acclaim she so desperately sought.
On April 27, some three weeks after DiMaggio’s departure from Hollywood, Marilyn suffered an appendicitis attack. Taken to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, she had her appendix removed the following day. “If I die,” she told Joe DiMaggio over the phone prior to the surgery, “I want you to put roses on my grave every week, just as William Powell did for Jean Harlow.” Actually, Marilyn wasn’t afraid that she would die—it wasn’t a dangerous surgical procedure—but that she would be left with a lower abdominal scar. “You never know when I might want to pose for another nude calendar shot,” she joked with Shelley Winters, who’d shared an apartment with her when both actresses were first breaking into the film business.
“When it came to surgery,” said Shelley, “Marilyn’s greatest fear was that some doctor would accidentally remove her ovaries, eliminating the possibility of having a child. I learned later that prior to her appendectomy, she’d taped a note to her abdomen reminding the surgeon not to tamper with her ovaries. When I heard this, I told her an appendectomy has nothing to do with a woman’s reproductive organs. ‘I know,’ said Marilyn, ‘but when they have you strapped to an operating table, they just love to carve you up.’ I believe her fear stemmed from the fact that she suffered from a condition that had been diagnosed as endometriosis, a gynecological disorder that caused extremely painful menstrual periods, for which she underwent some half dozen surgical procedures during her life. I have no idea why, but her gynecologist, Dr. Leon Krohn, was also in the operating room when she had her appendectomy, so perhaps she thought he might remove her ovaries.”
Unable to join Marilyn after her operation because of his television commitment, Joe telephoned her at all hours. He sent letters and telegrams and several bottles of champagne, which the head nurse confiscated for the duration of her stay. He arranged for a local florist to deliver a fresh bouquet of roses twice a day until she left the hospital. He also asked David March, who’d introduced them, to visit her after the surgery. To DiMaggio’s dismay, March brought along a reporter. DiMaggio never spoke to the publicist again.
After Marilyn’s release from Cedars, Joe telephoned her nonstop at the Bel Air Hotel, where she’d rented a suite to convalesce. He dispensed advice and counsel on how she should handle the public relations aspect of her profession. He’d gone through it in his own career, he said, and he’d learned from bitter experience how to deal with “all those vultures,” most of them only too willing to take advantage of her. Nobody in Hollywood could be trusted. They were all fakes and charlatans. She must be wary of reporters and agents, producers and photographers. And among the worst were the studio executives. They were using her. They were exploiting her beauty and talent for their own purposes. It was because of this, he told her, that the only film role they would ever offer her would be that of the bombshell, the buxom blonde, the wiggling, giggling, ass-grinding sexpot, a fantasy figure whose inclusion in the script was solely a moneymaking proposition. And the only bank accounts they were interested in enriching were their own. They were about to make millions off Monroe, and they were paying her thousands. The only way to fight them, insisted DiMaggio, was to do what he’d done with the New York Yankees: hold out. “Hold out,” he said, “until they pay you what you’re worth.”
Joe would continue to offer Marilyn this kind of frank, earnest, fatherly guidance for the rest of her days. It was one of the traits she most admired in him, which drew her to him as both a friend and a lover. He became one of the few devotees who gave her more than he took, a man who, in his own way, came to love her unconditionally. Yet somehow, even his all-abiding love couldn’t begin to heal all the wounds she’d suffered in her childhood, a period so dark and dismal it had left her emotionally scarred for life.