IN LATE MAY 1952, HAVING fully recuperated from her appendectomy and having set the record straight on her Little Orphan Annie past, Marilyn Monroe arrived for a brief stay in New York before continuing on to Buffalo, where, in June, she would star in Niagara, a suspense drama with a cast that included Joseph Cotten and Jean Peters. Marilyn’s role as a young, sultry, oversexed wife called for her to wear a dress that, in the words of one film critic. was “cut so low you can see her navel.” In anticipation of her stay in New York, Joe DiMaggio temporarily vacated his quarters at the Elysée Hotel and moved into a large suite at the Drake. He filled the suite with several bouquets of fresh roses.
Marilyn’s first order of business in New York entailed visiting Yankee Stadium to watch DiMaggio—immaculately attired in a pinstripe suit—suffer through one of his pre- and post-game WPIX-TV broadcasts. Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto, DiMaggio’s interview subject that day, recalled how elated Joe seemed when Marilyn complimented him on his performance. “I don’t know whether she meant it or not,” said Rizzuto, “but Joe lapped it up. She told him how well he’d done—‘You’re doing swell,’ she said, ‘just relax’—and he broke into an ear-to-ear smile. And whenever Joe DiMaggio smiled, he’d reveal those horse-sized buck teeth of his. Needless to say, they weren’t his best feature. In any event, they didn’t seem to bother Marilyn. I once read that she felt attracted to men who wore glasses and had bad teeth. Joe didn’t wear glasses, but he certainly qualified so far as his choppers were concerned.”
Rizzuto remembered how, once the broadcast ended, the tiny TV studio filled up with Yankees ballplayers eager to catch a firsthand glimpse of Monroe “There were maybe a dozen of us in the room,” said the shortstop, “all vying to get close to Marilyn, badgering her for an autograph. Even old Casey Stengel, the skipper, shoved his way in. And Marilyn was very accommodating, very sweet about everything, posing for pictures with some of the players and so forth. Everyone knows how glamourous she looked, so I won’t go into that. Let’s just say that in person she looked even more scrumptious than she did on the silver screen, and I guess some of the guys were maybe getting a little too familiar with her, because all at once Joe began to lose it. He became agitated, no doubt equally pissed off because he was being ignored. He suddenly grabbed Marilyn rather forcefully and started pushing her toward the door. ‘C’mon, you fuckers, you’ve seen enough,’ he said. And then a moment later they were gone.”
That week, DiMaggio squired Marilyn to all his usual haunts. They visited the Stork Club, the Copacabana, El Morocco, the Colony, the Jockey Club, and Toots Shor’s. And wherever they turned up, they were in the spotlight. Fellow diners and drinkers looked and whispered. They tapped each other on the shoulder and pointed with their eyes. Marilyn adored the attention. She told Joe she loved New York and hated Hollywood. “There’s no place like New York,” she said. At Toots Shor’s, they encountered Dario Lodigiani, an old wartime crony of Joe’s, a former bunkmate who’d grown up with Joe in San Francisco and then found himself in the same World War II unit as Joe. Dario, who’d played second base for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Chicago White Sox, regaled Marilyn with stories related to DiMaggio’s military service, including one about how in 1944 (after Joe had spent time at a number of training bases on the mainland), the Seventh Army Air Forces flew him to Honolulu to play baseball with the troops.
“So here’s Staff Sergeant Joseph Paul DiMaggio, without the familiar number five on his back, and the instant he arrives,” said Dario, “they pile him into a jeep and drive him to Honolulu Stadium and shove a baseball bat into his paws. His Yankee teammate Charles ‘Red’ Ruffing is pitching. There are twenty thousand fans, mostly military personnel, in the stands, and he steps to the plate and belts Ruffing’s first pitch a country mile, way over the left-field bleachers, out of sight and onto the street, and everybody goes nuts. And the next time up he stretches a double into a triple and slides into third so hard you’d think he was Ty Cobb. But that’s how he played the game. I’m glad we were on the same team. I mean, we’re not fighting the Nazis, but we’re at least entertaining the boys. And then after a couple of months, Joe’s duodenal ulcer kicks up, and he spends the rest of the war in and out of military hospitals.”
“Right,” responded DiMaggio, “and when I’m not playing ball or convalescing in a hospital bed, I’m playing pinochle and poker with four- and five-star generals. It was boring as hell, but it’s not my fault they didn’t ask me to drop bombs on the enemy. I’d have gladly obliged.”
“Like Ted Williams,” said Dario. “Now, there’s a war hero for you.”
“Listen,” said DiMaggio, “Pee Wee Reese and Johnny Mize played exhibition ball for the navy during the war, and nobody said a word. It’s not my fault they handed me a bat and mitt instead of a machine gun.”
Marilyn liked the give-and-take. And she enjoyed the stream of men that flocked to Joe’s table to shake hands with the Clipper and ogle his date. Nor did she mind the autograph collectors with their ever-ready supply of pens and notepads. For them it was a double bonanza: the baseball immortal and the Hollywood glamour queen. Approaching DiMaggio when he sat alone (or with his coterie of followers) would have been out of the question, but in Monroe’s presence, he became more serene and more human. Joe took immense pride in having this utterly beautiful woman on his arm, knowing that every man in the room envied him, wanted to be him. It was true. Let them covet their secret dreams of what it must be like to fall into bed with her. Let them gaze upon her and wonder. Look but don’t touch. For once he wasn’t even distressed by the omnipresence of the press, the loathsome scribes who tailed them from place to place, reporting on their daily doings as if they were the two most vital personages on the planet. He smiled for the paparazzi—as well as the legitimate lensmen—who hovered round like flies at a beach resort. This was the new DiMaggio. It was different from the stardom he’d enjoyed as a ballplayer. It was love, and he loved it.
Given the enormity of DiMaggio’s ego, it is easy to imagine the thrill he experienced at the end of the day when he and Marilyn returned to his hotel suite to spend the night together. And she, too, took great pleasure in being with Joe at a point when everything still seemed so simple, so wonderful. She was a person with human relations problems, worries, fears, inadequacies, and insecurities, but everything she was beginning to feel for Joe—trust, gratitude, admiration, even adulation—helped combat her shortcomings and frailties. And then too, as she later informed Truman Capote, DiMaggio, with his amazing physique and staying power, had all the makings of a superb lover. She called him “Daddy” and “Pa” as well as “Slugger,” and in extolling his sexual prowess to Capote, she remarked, “Joe’s biggest bat isn’t the one he used at the plate.”
Yet from the beginning of their relationship, there were moments and incidents that must have raised red flags in Marilyn’s mind. One of these incidents took place the night they celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday with George Solotaire at Le Pavillon, then New York’s finest (and most expensive) French restaurant. On being introduced to Solotaire, whom Marilyn hadn’t as yet met personally, she said: “So you’re the fellow who runs interference for Joe and pries the girls loose when they become inconvenient.”
“I guess that’s me,” agreed the Broadway ticket broker.
Comparing notes, it developed that Solotaire, like Marilyn, had spent several years of his childhood in an orphange. Their shared experience created an immediate and lasting bond between them. Of DiMaggio’s pals, Solotaire remained the one to whom she always felt closest.
During the meal, an elderly gentleman approached them from another table. His name was Henry Rosenfeld. A wealthy clothing manufacturer, Rosenfeld had known Marilyn since 1949, when she arrived in New York to help promote Love Happy, a Marx Brothers comedy in which she’d been handed a small role—one of her first—as the dumb blonde. From the way Marilyn and Rosenfeld spoke to each other, it became obvious to DiMaggio that the pair had once been on intimate terms.
Rosenfeld’s brief appearance at the table sent DiMaggio into a tailspin. He stopped speaking. Matters grew worse when Solotaire, making idle conversation to fill the void, told Marilyn he’d known Johnny Hyde, the powerful William Morris Agency vice president and agent largely responsible for launching Monroe’s film career by landing her roles in The Asphalt Jungle, directed by John Huston, and All About Eve, directed by Joe Mankiewicz. Her skillful performances in these projects led to a studio contract and more vital roles in future films.
Hyde noticed several minor cosmetic imperfections in Marilyn’s face and paid to have them corrected, most notably the removal of a sliver of cartilage from the actress’s nose and a slight enhancement of her chin and cheeks to improve her close-ups. It can be said that without Johnny Hyde, whom she’d met at the Racquet Club in Palm Springs in 1949, there would have been no Marilyn Monroe. More than twice her age, he fell passionately in love with her, fled his family (including a wife of long standing), and set up a household with Marilyn on North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills. Repeatedly, persistently, he’d asked her to marry him, but, just as persistently, she declined, insisting she loved him but wasn’t in love with him. He nevertheless wooed her by being kind, talking to her openly about his intimate life, and listening to her stories about hers. Above all, she stayed with him because she felt he really needed her. Then in December 1950 Hyde suffered a massive heart attack and died. Once again a father figure had vanished into thin air.
The mere mention of Johnny Hyde’s name by Solotaire brought tears to Marilyn’s eyes and concomitantly caused DiMaggio to explode in a fit of anger of the sort that was fast becoming all too familiar to Monroe.
“Do we need to discuss all of her fucking ex-lovers?” he yelled. “This Hyde jerk sounds like just another Hollywood vulture out to get laid.”
Marilyn had heard enough. Now it was her turn to vent. “Johnny Hyde was a lovely, warm, caring man,” she said. “He gave me more than his kindness and love. He was the first man I’d ever known who tried to understand me. How dare you question his integrity?”
Then, with neither malice nor regret, Marilyn embarked on a lengthy account of the men in her life that had played instrumental roles in her personal and professional development. The list—from Joseph Schenck, cofounder and chairman of the board of Twentieth Century–Fox, to Fred Karger, her former vocal coach and lover—seemed endless to DiMaggio, but having been properly and thoroughly chastised by Marilyn for his outburst, he sat there and listened. “He took it like a man,” George Solotaire later told his son. “Then again,” he added, “what choice did he have?”
As her most intense liaisons—and even some of her nonsexual interludes—demonstrated, Marilyn usually sought out older, stronger, more distinguished, and powerful male figures as opposed to those who were solely interested in debauching her. These were the very qualities she found so appealing in Joe: his quiet strength, his resoluteness, his seeming desire to love and protect her. Equally important, through her association with DiMaggio, she could transport herself to new heights of popular acceptance. The Yankee Clipper, after all, was no ordinary citizen. Even if he hadn’t flown bombing missions during the Second World War, Joe DiMaggio was regarded as nothing less than a national hero. That Ernest Hemingway had mentioned him in his latest novel, The Old Man and the Sea, only seemed to confirm DiMaggio’s status as a notable personage on the American landscape.
Marilyn spent most of June and July commuting back and forth between Buffalo and New York, seeing Joe on nonproduction weekends and shooting Niagara during the week. One Saturday night they drove to Coney Island for a dinner of hot dogs, corn on the cob, and clams on the half shell. Another time, when the Yankees were out of town, she accompanied him to a golf club in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where he rented an extra set of clubs and attempted to introduce her to the game. And then there was the day they visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. DiMaggio described the latter outing (for George Solotaire’s benefit) as “excruciating.” “Art,” he proclaimed, “bores me to tears.”
During one three-day stretch in mid-July, Joe joined Marilyn on location at Niagara Falls. They ate dinner together each night at a corner table in the Red Coach Inn. It was there that Monroe introduced DiMaggio to Natasha Lytess, her personal drama coach. Lytess had initially coached Marilyn in 1948 when she was under contract to Columbia Pictures and had been given a small part in Ladies of the Chorus. They had worked together since then and even lived together for several months. Marilyn convinced Twentieth Century–Fox to pay Natasha’s salary, a major concession on the studio’s part considering that Monroe hadn’t as yet attained star billing.
Lytess, an out-of-the-closet lesbian, made no secret of her feelings for Marilyn, more than once letting her pupil know she’d fallen in love with her. “Don’t love me, Natasha,” Marilyn cautioned her, “just teach me.” Lytess voiced her disapproval of Marilyn’s personal involvements with men. She particularly disliked Joe DiMaggio, who seemed to be usurping her own role as Marilyn’s close advisor. “You’d have been better off with Joan Crawford than the baseball player,” Lytess told Monroe, referring to the time in 1951 when Crawford all but propositioned Monroe and got turned down. When DiMaggio and Lytess encountered each other on the set of Niagara, they traded insults. It appeared that as Marilyn’s relationship with Joe deepened, her bond with Natasha deteriorated. Joe tried to convince Marilyn that her drama coach was living off her—her salary exceeded Marilyn’s, and the studio now wanted Monroe to contribute her own money to support Lytess. Like everyone else in the film business (according to DiMaggio), Lytess was using Marilyn, enhancing her own reputation at Monroe’s expense. And who the hell is this woman, anyway? What are her credentials? The next time DiMaggio spoke to George Solotaire, he referred to Lytess as a “goddamn bull dyke.” “She thinks,” he said, “that she’s Marilyn’s husband. And she’s convinced that since they’re filming at Niagara Falls, they’re on their honeymoon.”
In July Marilyn attended the New York premiere of Don’t Bother to Knock. Portraying a lonely, emotionally disturbed babysitter, Monroe gave one of her best and most underrated dramatic performances. “The role is right up my alley,” she told her costar Richard Widmark. “I modeled myself after my mother.”
Unfamiliar with Marilyn’s familial background, Widmark had no idea what she meant. “I must have given her a blank look,” he said, “because she explained that her mother suffered from schizophrenia and had spent years in a mental hospital. I knew Marilyn’s childhood had been difficult, but I didn’t realize just how difficult it must have been. In any case, she did a first-rate job with her role. I always felt she had talent, but had been misused by Hollywood because of her good looks. I told her I thought she’d do well in a dramatic role on Broadway, and she seemed deeply appreciative of the compliment.”
Joe DiMaggio wasn’t in town for the premiere, having traveled to Chicago to appear in a magazine ad for the Buitoni pasta company, the sponser of his television show. In light of his friend’s absence—and after clearing it with DiMaggio—George Solotaire offered to take Marilyn for drinks after the movie. They met in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel.
Over drinks and a late dinner they discussed Marilyn’s future acting obligations. She revealed that she’d been offered the part of Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which would be directed by Howard Hawks and would start shooting in mid-November. Jane Russell had also been signed to appear in the film, and Marilyn had heard good things about her. She could hardly wait to begin.
Not unexpectedly, Solotaire brought up her relationship with Joe DiMaggio.
“Joe’s crazy about you, but I suppose you know that by now,” he said.
“And I’m crazy about Joe,” answered Marilyn.
“Trouble is, he’s Italian,” said Solotaire. “He’s jealous of every man you’ve ever known—and half the men you never met.”
“Do you want to know something?” said Marilyn. “When I lived with Shelley Winters, I made a list one night of the men I most wanted to sleep with. At the top of my list was Albert Einstein. If I ever told Joe about it, I’m sure he’d make Einstein duke it out in an alley someplace.”
“Either that or he’d challenge him to a home run hitting contest,” Solotaire countered.
“Exactly,” said Monroe. And yes, she conceded, she’d availed herself of the casting couch syndrome to further her career. She’d earned her kneepads. “It was part of the job,” she explained. “They aren’t making all those sexy movies just to sell popcorn. They want to sample the merchandise. If you don’t play along, there are a thousand other girls who will.”
Changing the subject, Solotire asked Marilyn whether she’d been introduced to “Little Joey—Joe’s ten-year-old son.”
Monroe looked perplexed. “Little Joey?” she inquired. “I didn’t know Joe had a son.”
Now it was Solotaire’s turn to look perplexed. “How about Dorothy Arnold, the boy’s mother? Did he mention her? They’ve been in and out of court for years quibbling over child support.”
“Never mentioned her either,” said Marilyn. “But then that’s so typical of Joe. Let’s face it: he doesn’t like to talk about himself.”
• • •
What wasn’t typical of Joe DiMaggio is that late in 1936, following his first year with the New York Yankees, he agreed to accept a small film role in Manhattan Merry-Go-Round, a frothy musical designed as a showcase for Cab Calloway and his Cotton Club Orchestra. Playing himself, DiMaggio delivered a self-conscious monologue on baseball and even sang a lyric or two. During filming in Astoria, Queens, the ballplayer happened to meet a young actress, Dorothy Arnold, whose name didn’t appear in the credits but who was one of the girls in the chorus line. “The thing I do is never fall in love,” DiMaggio had boasted to a reporter for the New York World Telegram. “I just talk a good game with women.” Despite his claim, Dorothy Arnold soon became Joe’s first serious love interest.
She was born Dorothy Arnoldine Olson on November 21, 1917, in Duluth, Minnesota. Her mother, a schoolteacher, was of Norwegian descent. Her father, an official with the Northern Pacific Railroad, was half Norwegian and half Swedish. Eager to make a name in show business, Dorothy was only fifteen when she signed up to travel on the Balaban & Katz vaudeville circuit as a singer and dancer. At age eighteen, she moved to New York, where she took acting lessons while performing on the radio and in nightclubs, modeling for ladies wear ads, and working at NBC as a staff singer. Her good looks—she was blond and cuddly—attracted a talent agent who suggested the name change and then talked Universal Studios into offering her a stock contract at $75 a week, plus moderate expenses. She made her acting debut in Manhattan Merry-Go-Round. Like Marilyn Monroe after her, Dorothy Arnold had never heard of Joe DiMaggio, though when she met him, he’d been in the majors for only two seasons.
Prior to Dorothy Arnold and even while dating her, DiMaggio socialized mostly with showgirls and club hostesses. Dom DiMaggio, his younger brother, recalled how Joe lost his virginity. “There was a brothel in North Beach,” he said, “and all of us, all the DiMaggio boys, frequented the place at one time or another. Being de-virginized in this locale became a kind of family ritual. I remember Mike taking Joe the day after his fourteenth birthday. The woman must have been around forty-five, and, believe it or not, was the same one I wound up with two years later. A buxom brunette, her claim to fame was her expertise in the French arts. She could swallow anything in the room, if you know what I mean. After he had her, Joe told me, ‘You can be with a million broads, but you never forget the first one.’ ”
Besides the showgirls and club hostesses he met in New York, Joe DiMaggio’s chief source of women were the young ladies he encountered when the Yanks were on the road. When the ball club traveled, Joe roomed with Vernon “Lefty” Gomez, the ace Yankees pitcher. “Lefty had created a name for himself as the team clown,” said Dom DiMaggio. “My brother felt comfortable around him. Lefty would act out the goofy things Joe could never permit himself to do. Joe liked to read comic books, for example, and he’d send Lefty out to the newsstand to pick them up for him because he didn’t want to be seen buying them. Anyway, Lefty and Joe had this groupie thing going for them. As soon as the team checked into a hotel, the phone would start ringing in their suite. There’d be a couple of girls in the lobby, and they’d want to come upstairs to meet Joe and Lefty. The desk clerk would send them along, and if they were decent-looking, Joe would grab one and Lefty the other. Joe would disappear into the bedroom with his chick, while Lefty entertained his in the sitting room. They were like rock stars. Not that this sort of behavior was unheard of in the world of baseball, but Joe made a science of it. He had a dozen groupies in every port of call. He led the league in groupies. The bad thing is he carried on in this fashion long after he married Dorothy Arnold.”
During their two-year courtship, DiMaggio continued to compile Herculean statistics on the ball field while Dorothy Arnold toiled away with little success in her chosen career. Between 1937 and 1939, she appeared in no fewer than fifteen films, the most noteworthy of which were The Phantom Creeps and The House of Fear, but her roles were often uncredited and always minor. Joe DiMaggio made it known that if she wished to marry him, she would have to give up her present livelihood and agree to become a housewife, his housewife. Unlike Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy was only too happy to comply. It was she, for that matter, who proposed—not the other way around.
The couple married on November 19, 1939, at the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in San Francisco. Dorothy (Joe called her “Dottie”) was about to turn twenty-two; DiMaggio was three years older. With fifteen thousand screaming spectators clogging the streets surrounding the North Beach cathedral, and two thousand spectators crammed into the cathedral itself, it was almost certainly the biggest wedding ever to take place in San Francisco. Or so claimed Joyce M. Hadley, the bride’s younger sister, in a 1993 account of Dorothy’s life. Irene, her other sister, was maid of honor; Tom DiMaggio served as best man. The press turned out in force. Dozens of policemen and security guards patrolled the cordoned-off streets. According to one San Francisco newspaper, the “bride entered the cathedral like a queen. She was so utterly beautiful in her white satin designer wedding gown, it hurt to look at her.”
It didn’t seem to bother Dorothy that her moment of glory was owed almost exclusively to the renown of the stone-faced man who awaited her at the altar. Nor did it matter to her that she had been brought up Protestant and, in order to marry Joe, had been forced to convert to Catholicism. In her Dorothy Arnold biography, Joyce Hadley describes the groom, North Beach’s favorite son, as “tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, rich, and fabulously famous.” He was also “uneducated, very insecure, painfully shy, wary of strangers, and practically inarticulate.” But Dorothy, Joyce insists, was “going to fix all that.”
Joe’s parents, his brothers and sisters, Dorothy’s parents and sisters, and assorted uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, and cousins representing both families, to say nothing of friends and associates—nearly five hundred guests in all—gathered for the postceremony reception at the Grotto, an Italian restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf owned and operated by the DiMaggios. (For commercial reasons, the name of the establishment would eventually be changed to Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto). Three four-foot-tall ice sculptures of baseball players in midswing celebrated Vince, Joe, and Dom, the ballplaying brothers, all of whom had invested money in the restaurant. The guests consumed twelve turkeys, fifteen chickens, six capons, eight hams, five sides of beef, six pounds of caviar, multiple cases of scotch, bourbon, gin, wine, and champagne. Dessert consisted of gallons of ice cream and six wedding cakes circled by friezes of crossed miniature baseball bats to signify Joe’s success with the Yankees.
Dorothy had gone to great lengths to endear herself to Joe’s parents, learning Italian so she could converse with them and spending hours with his mother learning how to prepare his favorite food. Joe, on the other hand, showed no such consideration for his parents-in-law. During his single premarital visit to Duluth, he reportedly barely spoke to them. A family friend accused him of being rude to the Olsons, who seemed to the friend to be unsure of what to make of their future son-in-law.
In late February 1940 the newlyweds drove cross-country from San Francisco to Yankees spring training camp in St. Petersburg, Florida, stopping briefly in Duluth for a visit with Dorothy’s parents. “On this occasion,” recalled an Olson family friend, “DiMaggio seemed totally hostile toward the Olsons. They were all having drinks in the living room when he suddenly rose and bolted out of the house, after telling Dorothy he’d wait for her in the car. As far as I know, he never offered an explanation, never said a word.”
Regardless of his personal demons, DiMaggio’s cosmos had certain undeniable advantages, and Dorothy Arnold managed to fit in. She never missed a game and was quickly accepted by the coterie of veteran wives who each day sat in the section of Yankee Stadium reserved for the families of players. Her closest ally was June Gomez, Lefty’s bride, but she soon also befriended Vi Dickey, the wife of catcher Bill Dickey, and Pauline Ruffing, pitcher Red Ruffing’s wife. In a New York Daily Mirror profile of Dorothy, the reporter wrote: “Being Joe DiMaggio’s wife carries a responsibility all its own. No one in baseball ever demonstrated more grace than Joe. No one ever looked as good in a uniform, his fitting him as if it were a Savile Row suit. In public he is a man of great dignity. He is proud, possessive, and a trifle old-fashioned. In Dorothy Arnold, a former actress and model, he has found the perfect companion.”
What the profile didn’t say, and what Dorothy Arnold came to see, is that under the public posture there lurked an entire catalogue of less admirable traits, several of which Joyce Hadley had already noticed. Joe DiMaggio exhibited unaccountable moments of anger and distrust, black moods, idiosyncratic behavior, parsimony, self-adulation, indifference, egocentricity, and an overwhelming urge to control the actions of others.
Several months into the marriage, it became apparent that Joe and Dorothy didn’t see domestic life in quite the same way. Whereas she enjoyed playing the effervescent hostess to family and friends, Joe’s notion of fun hadn’t changed appreciably from what it had been throughout the duration of his days (and nights) as a “gay” bachelor. He would leave home around ten each morning to work out at the stadium before the game. At game’s end, he would wend his way to Toots Shor’s for drinks and a steak dinner with his pals, a clique that most often included George Solotaire, Walter Winchell, Jimmy Cannon, Walter “Red” Smith, Jackie Gleason (on occasion), and even Toots himself. The group would gather at “Joe’s table”—table number one—to pick apart the day’s action or to commiserate with DiMaggio on those infrequent occasions when the Yankees lost or Joe happened to go hitless. Attractive women were a welcome addition to the scene but were discouraged from contibuting anything to it other than their looks. Joe would usually return home long after his lonely wife had gone to bed. To add to their growing inventory of problems, he held it against her when she made her own plans for the evening. Dorothy had several friends in the entertainment field, including Bud Abbott and Lou Costello (Abbott and Costello), and whenever she invited them over or went out with them to a movie or for a drink, he became surly. He resented all her friendships, but especially those with men. He encouraged her to appear in a print media ad for Swift’s Premium Franks but only because it brought in money with a minimum of exposure.
Such were the vagaries of being married to baseball’s leading participant. A fairly inattentive suitor to begin with, Joe was an even worse husband. On those evenings he chose to remain at home, he would gobble down a quick dinner with Dorothy and then affix himself to the television or radio set for a night of cowboys and Indians, detectives and anything else, in which Dorothy took no interest. He would chat with Dorothy only when their talk concerned his profession. Once, for instance, he asked her whether she’d noticed any subtle changes in his swing. She had, in fact, seen something and, being a good athlete in her own right, proceeded to demonstrate the slight shift she’d discerned in his batting stance. He made the adjustment.
Yankees right fielder Tommy Henrich, Bill Dickey, and Bill’s wife, Vi, accompanied Joe and Dorothy to dinner one night. “I remember the occasion very clearly,” said Henrich, “because it was one of the few, if not the only time I socialized with DiMaggio. He simply wasn’t one of the guys. Except for Lefty Gomez, he kept pretty much to himself. I didn’t know him that well on a personal basis, only as a ballplayer, and as a ballplayer he was in a league by himself, very likely the best all-around player in the game. I never knew him to make a mental mistake on the field. To err is human, not to err is divine. Mr. DiMaggio was divine. That, at any rate, was his baseball persona. As a human being—well, that was something else again. The night we all went to dinner—we dined at a small Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village—he behaved like a real prick, particularly toward his wife. I mean, he totally ignored Dorothy—didn’t look at her, didn’t talk to her, didn’t interact with her in any way. Somehow she managed to keep the conversation flowing. She told several amusing stories about her experiences as an actress. Bill and Vi laughed, and I tossed in an occasional aside. DiMaggio looked the other way, never so much as cracked a smile. It made for one hell of an uncomfortable evening.”
Henrich recalled an anecdote related to him by Lefty Gomez. That same summer, during an off day when the Yanks weren’t playing, Joe and his wife went to Jones Beach with Lefty and June Gomez. They drove out to Long Island in Joe’s car. They’d packed a picnic lunch prepared by the ladies. They spread out their beach blankets, and Dorothy removed her skirt and blouse, under which she wore a black-and-white-striped two-piece bathing suit. DiMaggio took one look at his wife and exploded.
“You can’t be serious!” he yelled. “You’re not going to walk around in that goddamn bathing suit, are you?”
“But I just bought it,” said Dorothy. “It’s French, and it was expensive.”
“I don’t give a damn,” answered DiMaggio. “Your midriff’s showing. Put on your blouse.”
June Gomez came to her friend’s defense. “Joe,” she remarked, “stop being so puritanical. There’s nothing wrong with it. A lot of women are wearing them this summer.”
“She’s not wearing it without a blouse,” DiMaggio thundered.
With tears welling in her eyes, Dorothy slipped the blouse over her shoulders. But it was too late. Still seething, DiMaggio stood, grabbed his belongings, returned to the parking lot, and drove off, leaving all three to ponder how they were going to get back to New York.
The more Mrs. DiMaggio tried to please her husband, the more distant he became. Dorothy went along with the Yankees on a road trip to Chicago, where she’d arranged to meet for dinner at the Del Prado Hotel with her sisters, Irene and Joyce, and Joyce’s husband, Les Hadley. Although Joe had promised to join them for dinner, he never showed up. Dorothy carried on without him, but Joyce discerned her sibling’s underlying disappointment at what had clearly become an undeniable pattern in a marriage that seemed destined for failure.
Convinced that having a baby might provide a solution to their troubles, Dorothy underwent a delicate gynecological procedure in mid-October 1940. They spent Christmas in Duluth with her family. Les Hadley’s boss and a coworker, devout baseball fans, wanted to meet DiMaggio. Les invited them over for cocktails. More aloof than ever, Joe mumbled a few words and after several minutes rose and left the house without excusing himself. Dorothy tried to cover for his rudeness by explaining that he hadn’t felt well of late. Les later found him alone in a bar. Joe said, “They were not my friends. They seemed perfectly happy to be entertained by Dottie.”
The remainder of their stay went smoothly enough. The town had a minor-league baseball team, and Joe was asked to attend a meeting of the team’s owners to discuss their plans to build a new stadium. The manager of the team invited Joe and Dorothy to go ice fishing at a nearby frozen lake. Otherwise the couple played cards and took long drives into the surrounding countryside. One evening the family went bowling, and Dorothy outscored everyone, including Joe. Though not pleased with the results, he managed a good-natured smile. She also trounced him at billiards and ping-pong. On their next-to-last day, Dorothy’s mother took her aside and complained that the entire household could hear her and Joe making love at night. “Well, Mom,” Dorothy responded, “you know how that works. You get to the point where you don’t care. If the bed squeaks and bangs, that’s just the way it has to be. We’re sorry if we disturbed anyone’s sleep. Aside from everything else, we’re trying to have a baby.”
In April 1941 Joe and Dorothy moved into a penthouse apartment at 400 West End Avenue at Seventy-Ninth Street in Manhattan, three blocks from Lefty and June Gomez’s apartment. Graced by a wraparound terrace, which Dorothy covered with houseplants, tubs of flowers, and gilded garden furniture, the three-bedroom flat had a view of the Hudson River, the Palisades of New Jersey, the West Side Highway, and, in the distance, the George Washington Bridge. Dorothy installed a grand piano in the wood-paneled living room. Learning that she was pregnant, she transformed one of the bedrooms into a nursery, purchasing a complete set of matching baby furniture and installing wallpaper adorned with nursery rhymes.
For a while, the couple seemed to get along better than they had in the past. During his wife’s pregnancy, DiMaggio spent more time at home and less at Toots Shor’s. In the evening, the couple would stroll hand in hand along Riverside Drive. They went to the movies and took in several Broadway plays. They sponsored a party for thirty-five kids from the poorer neighborhoods of New York at which they served ice cream and chocolate cake; Joe was particularly attentive to the children, signing and handing out baseballs and bats that had been donated by the New York Yankees. Dorothy must have begun to believe that having a baby with Joe was indeed the right way to go. He certainly seemed more cheerful than usual. How could he not be? It was the year he hit safely in fifty-six consecutive games, finishing the season with a .357 batting average and leading the ball club to a resounding World Series victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers.
On October 22, 1941, Dorothy entered Doctors Hospital and the following day gave birth to a baby boy, Joseph Paul DiMaggio III (Joey Jr.)—seven pounds, eleven ounces—who, even as a newborn, bore a striking resemblance to his father. Joe celebrated his son’s arrival by handing out cigars at Toots Shor’s and belting down a couple of drinks with the boys. “Hey, Daig,” said Tootsie, proposing a toast, “here’s to a second slugger in the house.” Photographs of the proud, beaming parents cuddling their two-month-old infant appeared in every major American newspaper. What Dorothy hadn’t counted on was that once the initial thrill wore off, her husband would revert back to his former indifferent self.
Emerald Duffy, whose mother Bertha Dorothy had hired as a live-in baby nurse, recalled the events of those days. “We needed the money,” she said, “so my mother hired herself out as a nanny. She and I shared a bedroom in the DiMaggio apartment on West End Avenue. I was fourteen. Domestic life in the apartment was anything but peaceful. Little Joey was a crier, and this disturbed the baby’s father no end. He claimed he couldn’t sleep with the infant wailing away half the night, so he insisted on having the nursery soundproofed. This in turn upset his wife. ‘He’s a baby, he’s supposed to cry,’ she told him. ‘That’s what babies do.’ I never saw Joe DiMaggio hold the baby, no less change a diaper. Once when the baby got sick, he checked into a hotel. He couldn’t deal with any of the difficulties associated with fatherhood. He had zero parenting skills. The same can be said for his shortcomings as a husband. When his wife did or said something that displeased him, he’d shut down—he wouldn’t talk to her for days on end. Or if she started to argue with him about something or other, he’d tell her if she didn’t like it, she could move out.”
Nothing had changed. With his old-fashioned Victorian view of family and marriage, Joe wanted Dorothy to be his personal cheerleader, his admirer and supporter. He encouraged her to root for him at home games, pack his bags when the team went on the road, cook for him when he felt like eating dinner with her, be his sex partner when he wasn’t in bed with someone else, run his errands, manage the household, and look after the kid. It didn’t seem to occur to him that Dorothy might have her own list of needs. DiMaggio wanted a hausfrau, an obedient pinup, a mate who would perform on cue and do whatever he asked of her. Instead, he found an intelligent, high-spirited woman who expected him to be a full-time husband and father, whereas he expected her to wait around for him at home while he gallivanted about town and partied with select members of New York’s café society. As sportswriter Roger Kahn put it: “The marriage never had a chance.”
Tommy Henrich noted that in 1942 DiMaggio batted only .305, his lowest average since reaching the majors and well below his first six seasons. The Yankees center fielder’s home run and RBI totals dipped as well, to 21 and 114, respectively. “He blamed it all on his failing marriage,” said Henrich, “and on a baby that wouldn’t stop crying. Now, there’s an explanation for you. Bear in mind that half the guys on the team had little kids, and nobody I knew ever used them as an excuse. And then there was the time Dorothy brought the baby to the ballpark and everyone clustered around them in the clubhouse after the game—everyone, that is, except for the baby’s father. DiMaggio flew out of there like a bat out of hell.”
The family vacated their West End Avenue residence and moved to an equally spacious apartment at 241 Central Park West. They had just moved in, wrote Joyce Hadley, when Dorothy hired a private investigator to follow her husband. The investigator returned with photographs of Joe checking into a Manhattan hotel with a redhead on his arm. The photos substantiated Dorothy’s suspicions. She took Joe Jr. and, after visiting her parents in Duluth and hiring an attorney, checked into the Riverside Hotel in Reno, Nevada, in order to initiate divorce proceedings. Joe followed and begged his wife to try again, promising to amend his ways. Their reconciliation was short lived. With DiMaggio serving in the armed forces, Dorothy took the baby and the nanny and moved into a two-bedroom suite at the Hotel Adams, announcing to the press that she and the Yankee Clipper were terminating their marriage.
On October 11, 1943, Dorothy filed divorce papers in Los Angeles Superior Court on grounds of “cruel indifference.” “Joe never acted like a married man,” she testified. “I had a child with him, thinking that would make him realize his responsibilities . . . but even the baby’s arrival didn’t change him. He became ill tempered; refused to talk to me for days at a time. And several times asked me to get out of our home.” Dorothy asked for and received a lump sum payment of $14,000 in cash, $500 a month in alimony payments, and $150 a month for “the care and maintenance” of Little Joe, in addition to “any and all future medical and educational fees incurred by the minor.” Joe was likewise ordered by the court to create an irrevocable trust in his son’s name “for no less than ten thousand dollars,” payable “immediately following Mr. DiMaggio’s death.” The decree of divorce, uncontested on DiMaggio’s part, was handed down on May 15, 1944. Dorothy retained full custody of the child. Joe was granted alternating weekend visitation rights, an improbable arrangement considering he was currently in the military and at war’s end would resume his baseball career. He was also ordered to pay all legal costs in connection with the divorce, including those accrued by his former wife.
Encouraged by Hollywood talent agent Mort Millman, Dorothy Arnold (having resumed use of her professional “screen” name) decided to reenter the world of show business, not as an actress but primarily as a vocalist. Millman reasoned, not incorrectly, that as “the former Mrs. Joe DiMaggio,” Dorothy could draw a crowd—more out of curiosity perhaps than anything else. By mid-1945, she had contracted to appear nightly with Nat Brandwynne and His Orchestra in the Starlight Room at the Waldorf-Astoria.
“My mother had stayed on as Little Joe’s nanny,” said Emerald Duffy, “and when Dorothy began singing with the band, we all moved into a large residential suite at the Waldorf Towers. Incredibly, Joe DiMaggio was still courting Dorothy, hoping to remarry. He’d come by to retrieve his son and take him back to his own suite at the Hotel Edison or the Elysée, where they’d sit around and watch TV all evening. Then he’d have somebody drop the boy off in the morning. At some point he suggested they try living together again. She had no intention of going back to him. She told my mother that he would never change, that he was immersed in cement, that he had no regard or respect for women. Besides, she’d started dating somebody else, and she was evidently crazy about him.”
Her new love interest was George Schubert, a former Wall Street investment broker who soon took over as Dorothy’s manager. They were married on August 1, 1946. As Joyce Hadley saw it, he was more talkative than Joe DiMaggio but otherwise shared many of Joe’s characteristics. “Schubert,” she wrote, “was stiff . . . and controlled in everything he said and did.” Like DiMaggio, he was domineering, demanding, narcissistic, and full of himself. As she’d done with Joe, Dorothy rationalized his behavior, oblivious to the reality of the situation. Life with her new husband consisted largely of dining, drinking, dancing, and attending wild parties—a radical change from her previous lifestyle. But unlike DiMaggio, Schubert had little of his own money. “I’m afraid,” she told her sister Joyce, “I’m attracted to all the wrong men.”
“The real victim in all this was Little Joey,” said Emerald Duffy. “His mother had nicknamed him Butch, though I never knew exactly why. To be honest, his parents simply weren’t there for him. After she married George Schubert, Dorothy absented herself almost completely from her son’s life. Between her marriage and her show business career, she was never around. And the boy was virtually invisible to his father. Joe DiMaggio appeared to like little kids, constantly gave them his autograph and a few kind words, but he seemed oblivious to his own son. Occasionally he’d take him along to the ballpark. I went with them only once. Joey was about six, and he wore his little Yankee baseball uniform, pinstripes and all. And he had his own baseball mitt, the Joe DiMaggio children’s signature model. He looked really cute. He kept asking me if I thought his dad would play catch with him on the sidelines before the game. ‘I don’t see why not,’ I told him. But when we reached Yankee Stadium and after DiMaggio suited up, he asked one of his teammates to toss a ball around with his son. He couldn’t be bothered.”
Emerald recalled the day a sports magazine needed a photo of DiMaggio and Joe Jr. for their front cover. DiMaggio sent a limo to collect Joey and drive him to the photographer’s studio, where they posed together for a few shots, after which the boy was driven home. His father didn’t say two words to him. He had a dinner date that night with Peggy Deegan, his “girlfriend of the moment.” He didn’t have time for his son.
Emerald Duffy went on to describe Little Joey’s early childhood years as an “abysmal period,” during which he had little emotional contact with either parent. In addition, he had few friends his own age. At school, when he told classmates his name was Joe DiMaggio, nobody believed him. “You’re full of shit,” they’d say. “His best pal,” Emerald noted, “was an elderly elevator operator at the Waldorf, whose name was Max. Max had no family of his own, so he kind of adopted Joey. They adopted each other. Joey spent hours riding up and down with Max, chatting away with him, unburdening himself. It seemed sad in a way. My mother tried to be there for Joey, but she was being paid to look after him—it wasn’t the same thing.”
Then in late 1950, following her divorce from George Schubert, Dorothy Arnold became convinced that her career opportunities would be brighter in California. With Joey in tow, she left New York and moved to Los Angeles. There, once again bereft of companionship and left to his own devices, Joey eventually found a new “best pal.” Her name was Marilyn Monroe, and in January 1954 Marilyn would evolve into something far more vital than a “best pal”—she would become Joey’s stepmother.
• • •
It wasn’t that Joe DiMaggio hadn’t wanted to tell Marilyn about his four-year marriage to Dorothy Arnold—it wasn’t that at all. Rather, it had been a question of finding “the right time and the right place.” That, in any case, is how he phrased it when he finally got around to conveying the sordid details, many of which Monroe had already heard from George Solotaire the night they dined together at the Plaza. As a result, Joe’s long-awaited “confession” came as no great surprise.
By late July 1952, Marilyn had finished shooting Niagara and had flown to Los Angeles, leaving Joe behind in New York to plod on with his television sports show. But at the beginning of September, she returned to the East Coast to attend the New York premiere of Monkey Business, and to serve as grand marshal for the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Twentieth Century–Fox’s publicity department had arranged Monroe’s participation in the pageant and had booked her into a luxury suite at the Ritz-Carlton, directly on the Boardwalk. In conjunction with her appearance as grand marshal, a US Army photographer was deployed to take pictures of the actress for an upcoming recruitment drive.
The day before the pageant DiMaggio joined Marilyn at her hotel. That evening they ate a late dinner at the Merry-Go-Round Bar, off the Ritz lobby, and it was during their meal that he brought up the subject of his previous marriage. The following day Marilyn dressed for the event in a low-cut black chiffon gown, which displayed a good deal more of her than Joe thought it should have.
In his biography of Joe DiMaggio, Richard Ben Cramer refers to Marilyn’s comment on the outfit. It was “an entirely decent dress,” she insisted. “You could ride in a streetcar in it without disturbing the passengers. But there was one bright-minded photographer who figured he would get a more striking picture if he photographed me shooting down. I didn’t notice him pointing his camera from the balcony.”
The “bright-minded” photographer in this case happened to be the one sent by the army, and while his pictures revealed too much of Monroe’s very ample cleavage to be utilized for recruitment purposes, they appeared (somewhat retouched) in the next day’s press. If there were anybody who hadn’t as yet seen Marilyn’s nude calendar shots, they could familiarize themselves with her body by taking in the Atlantic City pictorials. Letters poured into newspaper offices from church groups and ladies’ clubs condemning Monroe for her lack of decorum and good taste.
Predictably, Joe DiMaggio became infuriated when he saw the published photos. For him it was Dorothy Arnold and her “scandalous” Jones Beach two-piece bathing suit all over again. “He was screaming at Marilyn,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer. “Like she’d done the whole thing to embarrass him. She tried to explain. It was publicity. It was part of her job. She had to show herself.”
They’d been through all this before, and DiMaggio remained as adamant as ever. “You don’t need to show them anything. Not a damn thing. You look like a fuckin’ whore in that outfit.”
But that was the gown the studio had given her to wear.
“Wear your own goddamn clothes, not theirs.”
She didn’t have any clothes worth wearing.
“Well then, buy them,” he snapped. “Or maybe you do have them, and they’re in the backseat of your car along with everything else you own. Can’t you see that those Hollywood swine are using you? You’re nothing to them but a piece of meat.”
Marilyn agreed and Joe calmed down. He apologized for yelling, and she accepted his apology. That was the pattern they’d established. She’d do something that would set him off. He’d scream. She’d retreat. He’d feel contrite and offer an apology. They’d embrace and make up. And then, without fail, something else would come along, and they’d begin all over again.