WHAT JOE IS TO ME is a man whose looks, and character, I love with all my heart.” Marilyn Monroe’s words, as recorded in the pages of her personal memoir, were countered by a more cautionary reflection in the same document. “We knew,” she wrote, “it wouldn’t be an easy marriage.” It wasn’t.
The first public rumblings of trouble in the DiMaggio-Monroe union coincided with the start of rehearsals for There’s No Business Like Show Business in mid-May 1954. Earl Wilson ran an item in his newspaper column suggesting that all was not what it should be at 508 North Palm Drive. Louella Parsons followed with a similarly ominous item.
Jimmy Cannon, Joe’s sportswriter pal in New York, called the ballplayer to get his side of the story. DiMaggio denied that he and Marilyn were having marital problems, yet he described his life in Hollywood as “dull.” He claimed he tried not to interfere with his wife’s work. “I don’t resent her fame,” he insisted. “Marilyn was working long before she met me—and for what? What has she got after all these years? She works like a dog. She’s up at five or six in the morning and doesn’t get through until seven at night. We have a bite to eat, watch a little television, and go to bed.” Their meals, he hastened to add, consisted primarily of frozen dinners or take-out Italian.
Whatever domestic fantasies DiMaggio might have entertained when he first married Marilyn had long been dashed. When he complained to her that they no longer spent a lot of time together, she reminded him that he’d been the one who pressured her to sign on for the film. She’d been willing to hold out and return with him to San Francisco, but he’d advised her to get on with it. It wasn’t her fault she had to spend the entire day in rehearsals. She also reminded him that Natasha Lytess was still coaching her, and since he detested Lytess, she felt compelled to work with her at the studio rather than to invite her back to their house.
Technically speaking, Marilyn wasn’t incorrect. It wasn’t so much that DiMaggio wanted her to do the film, rather that he had simply given up hope of convincing his wife to walk away from the entire Hollywood scene. He felt lost, trapped by his own jealousy and insecurity. Marilyn had invaded his bloodstream like a virus. She wasn’t Dorothy Arnold, a woman willing to trade in her identity and personal aspirations to be supported and bolstered by her celebrity spouse. And then, too, DiMaggio could no longer claim title to be what he’d once been, the star center fielder for the New York Yankees. He could proclaim himself “the greatest living ballplayer,” but he no longer played ball. While Marilyn, for her part, had been unofficially crowned Hollywood’s reigning queen. Even if she had married “a commoner,” she had no intention of abdicating the throne.
For the most part, DiMaggio passed his days at home, glued to the TV set, nervously smoking his way through one pack of cigarettes after another, waiting for Marilyn to come home. When she arrived after work, she and Joe invariably argued. He demanded a minute-by-minute account of how she’d spent the day. What had she done? With whom had she spoken? DiMaggio wouldn’t stop. Weary as she was, he kept at her. When she didn’t respond the way he wanted her to, he became physical; on one occasion he ripped an earring from her lobe and scratched her face. The tension between them made Marilyn increasingly resort to sedatives. Yet despite the sedatives, she couldn’t sleep at night. The insomnia that had previously dogged her grew worse. To augment her sleeping pill regimen, she began drinking more heavily than usual—and not just champagne but straight, hard shots of vodka and gin. Still unable to sleep and in somewhat of a drunken stupor, she and DiMaggio kept at each other long into the night.
Whitey Snyder recalled that once they started shooting Show Business, Marilyn would arrive at the studio half asleep because she hadn’t slept in days, and he would walk her around the dressing room for an hour or two to get her blood circulating and work the cobwebs out of her brain.
“They assigned her Betty Grable’s old dressing room, and she’d come in all groggy and disoriented,” recalled Whitey. “She couldn’t remember her lines, or if she did she’d slur them. And because it took me time to get her going in the morning, she’d invariably be late on the set. She apologized, but it didn’t do much good. Walter Lang, the film’s director, wasn’t sympathetic. The worst criticisms came from some of the other cast members. Veterans like Ethel Merman and Mitzi Gaynor began picking on her. Merman, who could belt a song in her sleep, criticized her singing ability. And this made matters even worse. Marilyn collapsed on the set and then developed bronchitis and had to be hospitalized. The delays cost the studio a small fortune.”
Whitey suspected that Marilyn’s marriage to DiMaggio had begun to unravel, but he didn’t know to what extent. “Marilyn realized my wife and I were fond of Joe, so when talking about him to either of us, she chose her words carefully. Then one day in June, Joe called and asked me to meet him for lunch and not to say anything to Marilyn about it. So we met, and Joe seemed upset. And this was a man who very rarely revealed his inner feelings. After going through his usual harangue about the horrors of the studio system and a recitation of his expectations as to a proper wife’s domestic role, he started complaining that he saw less and less of Marilyn, that she spent far too much time away from home and on the set. And then out of the blue he asked if I knew Hal Schaefer, Marilyn’s voice coach on the film. I told him I did and that Hal had previously coached her on both Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and River of No Return. And I knew he’d taken it upon himself to help her with an album of songs she planned to record for RCA. DiMaggio evidently hadn’t met him on the set of River of No Return. ‘What does he look like?’ he asked. ‘Does he have a wife? Is he a ladies’ man?’ And so on. At the time, I had no idea what he was getting at. Why all the questions? I soon found out.”
What Whitey Snyder “soon found out” was that Marilyn and Hal Schaefer were having an affair. Schaefer was twenty-nine, a year and a half older than Marilyn. He had dark hair and eyes and a soft, melodic voice. Though he felt Marilyn never reached her potential as a singer, he worked hard to improve her voice. He was gentle, patient, and encouraging. She told friends he reminded her of an earlier voice coach, Fred Karger, with whom she’d also fallen in love.
“She claimed she loved me,” said Hal Schaefer, “but I’m not sure she knew what that meant. In a sense, I think our relationship represented an escape for her from a marriage that had gone bad. I believe she’d simply outgrown DiMaggio. He wanted a homemaker, and she hoped to become a serious actress. She cultivated certain tastes, which he didn’t share. After he found out about us, he called me up and said he knew I was in love with Marilyn and she was in love with me. He said I should be a man and come face him and discuss it with him at the house. Like an idiot, I said I would. I could hear Marilyn in the background. ‘Don’t come here,’ she pleaded, ‘he’ll kill you. He’ll beat you up. Don’t be foolish.’ I absolutely believed her, because she’d mentioned how crude and controlling he was. She’d said he was very severe and had a short fuse. He had a violent streak. He physically abused her at times, slapped her around. I think she put up with it because she lacked self-esteem. She wasn’t grounded, the result of her terrible childhood, constantly being shifted around from here to there.”
Hal Schaefer acknowledged that despite the menacing presence of Joe DiMaggio, his affair with Marilyn became serious. “We discussed marriage,” he said. “Marilyn would have converted to Judaism, which is what she eventually did when she married Arthur Miller. After he learned of the affair, or maybe before, I’m not sure which, DiMaggio hired a private detective to follow us around. He bugged my car, my phone, and my apartment. He bugged Marilyn’s car as well. I guess the work was done by the detectives he hired.”
Harry Hall and Sugar Brown, a pair of former “mob-connected fixers,” often did favors for Joe, as did Abner “Longie” Zwillman, Frank Costello, and Paul “Skinny” D’Amato of Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Over the years, DiMaggio often turned up at Mafia-controlled nightspots and restaurants. They picked up his tabs, gave him expensive presents—even set up a trust account for him at the Bowery Savings Bank into which they made regular deposits. He was their man, the Italian Stallion, the dago with the bat of steel. If DiMaggio needed something done, they did it for him. If he wanted a wire planted in somebody’s car, they were only too happy to oblige. If he wished to have some “Jew-boy punk of a voice coach” at Twentieth Century–Fox rubbed out—well, that could no doubt also be arranged.
Hal Schaefer began to conjure the most extreme possibilities. By early July, he’d reached his breaking point. As rumors of his romantic involvement with Marilyn Monroe spread, he tried to kill himself by swallowing sleeping pills and a lethal concoction of rum and typewriter-cleaning fluid. Marilyn rushed to his bedside at Santa Monica Hospital. The press followed.
In an effort to downplay the affair, Schaefer offered reporters the following explanation: “It’s ridiculous Mr. DiMaggio should be any more jealous of me than he is of other people working with his wife. Marilyn’s one of my voice pupils. As a homework assignment, I gave her Ella Fitzgerald’s latest record albums and asked her to study them. She fell in love with Ella’s voice and has gotten to know her personally. Marilyn and I are no more than friends.”
An embittered Joe DiMaggio appeared unannounced and uninvited on the Show Business movie set. When he saw Marilyn, he scoffed at her scanty costume. As she approached him, he walked away and spoke to Ethel Merman, whom he knew from New York. He agreed to pose for a photograph with Merman but declined to do likewise with his wife. Marilyn became so perturbed that she tripped over an electrical cable and sprawled to the ground. The next day she contacted Darryl Zanuck and asked him to ban her husband from the set. A week later, when Joe drove to the studio, a security guard at the front gate turned him away. That evening, Joe and Marilyn had words. He asked her why she’d had him banished from the set. She evidently let loose with a tirade of pent-up emotions, calling him a has-been and accusing him of attempting to damage her career. For the first time in many months, DiMaggio spent the night at the Knickerbocker Hotel.
The following day when Joe returned home, he found a note waiting for him. Written on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt, it read: “Dear Joe, I know I was wrong! I acted the way I did and said the things I did because I was hurt—not because I meant them—and it was stupid of me to be hurt because actually there wasn’t enough reason—in fact no reason at all. Please accept my apology and don’t, don’t, don’t be angry with your baby—she loves you. Lovingly, your wife (for life), Mrs. J. P. DiMaggio.”
For what it was worth, DiMaggio folded the letter and placed it in his wallet for safekeeping. It remained there for the rest of his life.
“To some degree, I felt sorry for Joe,” said Whitey Snyder. “Marilyn had betrayed and humiliated him. The press exploited the scandal and ran daily stories on Marilyn’s affair. I invited Joe over for dinner one night. He looked like a beaten dog. At first he didn’t want to discuss Marilyn, but once he began he couldn’t stop. He described the note she’d written him and everything that had preceded it but said he didn’t see how he could ever trust her again. Yet he still loved her. Maybe he loved her too much. Maybe that was the problem. I said I felt sure Marilyn still loved him as well and that a marriage could succeed even if one or the other partner had cheated. ‘This is Hollywood,’ I said, ‘land of the unfaithful.’ Joe winced.”
Marilyn continued her affair with Hal Schaefer. “We used a friend’s apartment,” he remarked. “But I hasten to add that sex wasn’t the focus of our relationship. We found solace and comfort in each other’s company. It isn’t that Marilyn wasn’t a wonderful lover, but essentially she regarded sex as her function. She almost felt it was expected of her to have sex with a man, because that’s something she could do, something she could give to make a man feel good. I’m afraid she was less successful in terms of her own fulfillment.”
• • •
Marilyn had barely completed work on There’s No Business Like Show Business when, on August 10, shooting began in Los Angeles on The Seven Year Itch. A comedy/spoof directed by Billy Wilder and coproduced by Wilder and Charles Feldman (Marilyn’s agent), the film succeeded commercially and at the same time won wide critical acclaim. Not quite as impressed as the film critics, Marilyn insisted she’d once again been cast as a “dopey blonde” in a “crummy movie.”
A month after filming began, the cast and crew flew to New York to shoot the exterior street scenes. As Marilyn disembarked, she found herself surrounded by reporters. “No Joe?” one of them asked. “Isn’t that a shame?” said Marilyn. He joined her a day later in an eleventh-floor hotel suite at the St. Regis Hotel on Central Park South. From all outward appearances their relationship seemed to be back on track.
Jim Haspiel, a teenaged fan of Marilyn’s who’d been writing to her for several years, learned the location of the actress’s suite and decided to pay her a surprise visit. “I was with a friend,” he said, “and the two of us entered the lobby of the hotel and climbed the stairs to the eleventh floor. We knocked on the door of her suite and a man opened it. I asked if we could meet Miss Monroe. He said she wasn’t available and shut the door. Well, we weren’t about to use the stairs again so I rang for the elevator and it came up and Joe DiMaggio stepped out. He looked at us, and we looked at him. I told him we were there because we wanted to meet Marilyn Monroe. He couldn’t have been more gracious. ‘Wait here,’ he said. He disappeared into the suite and two minutes later came back out with Marilyn. He left her with us. We’d brought a camera, and she posed for pictures with us and chatted and was perfectly delightful. And then she kissed me, and I was in seventh heaven.”
Given the events that unfolded a week later, Haspiel (who went on to write a book on Marilyn) detected none of the apparent tensions that had beset the couple in Los Angeles. Yet Haspiel, for all his youthful exuberance, was nothing more at the time than a casual observer. Evelyn Keyes, a cast member of The Seven Year Itch, became friendly with Marilyn and witnessed the relationship at close range.
“They were civil in public,” she said, “but behind closed doors they were at each other’s throats. DiMaggio couldn’t accept it that she wasn’t totally domesticated and devoted to him. She wasn’t a housewife. She was Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn told me DiMaggio had certain expectations for people, such as herself and his son, and if they didn’t live up to his expectations, he became disappointed and took it out on them.”
In addition to the problems that already existed, there was the question of Marilyn’s affair with Hal Schaefer. His ego all but shattered, DiMaggio went on a siege against Marilyn consisting of daily outbursts of anger and rage. Perpetually late on the set—so much so that the film ran behind schedule and over budget—Monroe told Evelyn Keyes that Joe kept her up all night, every night, yelling and screaming at her. He’d become an erupting volcano, spewing out lava and ash on a nightly basis.
“Marilyn described one particularly nasty fight,” said Keyes. “It seems she’d bought a new dress, and she put it on to go out, and DiMaggio accused her of going off to meet a man, and he tore the dress to shreds with her in it. She ran into the bedroom and locked the door. He pounded on the door. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you another dress. Ten dresses.’ He continued pounding until Marilyn, wearing a negligee, finally relented and let him in. He apologized. Then he sat next to her on the bed and attempted to slip her negligee down off one shoulder. She pulled it back into place. He tried to kiss her and she pulled away. He attempted to push her down on the bed, and she stood up. ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘I’m your husband, but you won’t sleep with me?’ ‘You’ve got it,’ she answered. He rose and left the room. Marilyn relocked the door and tried to sleep.
“The next day she arrived on the set three hours late. Billy Wilder had a fit. He told me privately Marilyn lit up the screen like nobody’s business, but he couldn’t take all the bullshit that went with it. He contended that Marilyn thought the way she looked entitled her to certain privileges. ‘But it doesn’t work with me,’ he added, ‘because I look at her not as a man but as a director.’ ”
Joe and Marilyn made peace long enough to go out to dinner one evening with George and Robert Solotaire. Joe Nacchio, a Panamanian friend of DiMaggio’s, joined them in the middle of the meal. “We went to the Palm restaurant,” reminisced Robert Solotaire. “Marilyn and I discussed art most of the evening, while the two Joes talked baseball. What I remember best is that when Joe went to the men’s room, Marilyn started complaining about him. And then when Marilyn got up to go to the ladies’ room, Joe returned the favor. It wasn’t like him to disparage Marilyn. I took it as a sign of his unhappiness. He called her a narcissist and said she tried to please everyone but him.”
If Marilyn and Joe’s marriage could be considered to have been a theater piece, the curtains were about to part for the final act. On September 15, at two in the morning, a mob of two thousand men, including dozens of photographers, gathered at Lexington Avenue and Fifty-Second Street to watch the famous skirt-blowing scene involving Marilyn Monroe and her Seven Year Itch costar Tom Ewell. As word spread that La Monroe was standing over a subway grating, her skirts whirling round her neck, her creamy thighs and peek-a-boo knickers in full view, the crowd grew in size and volume. Walter Winchell located Joe DiMaggio at the St. Regis’s King Cole Bar nursing a drink and insisted he come watch his wife perform the climactic scene of the film. There were numerous takes (and camera flashes) as the wind machine underneath the grating lifted Marilyn’s low-cut white dress, recreating the effect of a passing train. Marilyn’s gushy line as “the train” passed and the wind blew was a whimsical “Isn’t it delicious?”
Joe DiMaggio watched in horror as again and again his wife’s panties were exposed. He had “the look of death on his face,” Billy Wilder would later claim. Cries of “Take it off!” and “Let’s see more!”—intermingled with a chorus of shrill wolf whistles—pierced the hot night air. Wilder suddenly stopped the shoot and ordered Marilyn to don a less transparent pair of panties. The diaphanous pair she had on revealed far more than any movie censor would allow to be seen. Marilyn retreated to her trailer to change. By the time she returned to the set, DiMaggio had stormed off. Forlorn and embittered, he headed for Toots Shor’s to drown his sorrow in drink. His wife, he told Toots, had just performed a striptease act on Lexington Avenue.
It’s unclear exactly what transpired later that night in Marilyn’s suite at the St. Regis. The following afternoon when she arrived on the set, both of her eyes were red and swollen.
She told Evelyn Keyes that Joe had repeatedly struck her, inadvertently confirming a press story alleging that guests on the eleventh floor at the St. Regis had heard loud noises coming from Marilyn’s suite. She’d told Joe she couldn’t help it, that she did what the director told her to do. It was good for the picture. “Bullshit!” he’d yelled by way of response. “It’s good for Darryl Zanuck. Good for his fucking wallet, that’s all.”
That afternoon Joe DiMaggio flew back home to San Francisco—alone. Marilyn and the rest of the cast headed for Los Angeles the following day to put the finishing touches on the film, a process that ran on until early November. According to Lotte Goslar, Marilyn called Joe after she returned home. “Why are you calling me?” he asked. She answered, “Because I’m unhappy when you’re hurt, Joe.” She wanted to give it one last shot. He resisted, said Goslar, “perhaps because he needed to end up on top somehow. But she persisted until he agreed to fly down to see her. He took her to dinner at the Villa Nova, ‘for old time’s sake.’ He wanted to save the marriage, though he’d lost face because of the way Marilyn had treated him and because of her affair with Hal Schaefer, which, by the way, she’d resumed. Joe and Marilyn spent several days together and never stopped haggling. Marilyn moved out of her house and into Building 86, called the Stars’ Building, on the Fox lot. DiMaggio followed her around, spying on her. She’d be in a restaurant eating dinner with a friend, and he’d burst in and sit down with them. He hired detectives, which Marilyn told me he’d done with his first wife when he served in the armed forces during World War II. This gentleman of grace and dignity had become something of a psychopath. Somehow he didn’t frighten Marilyn.
“She knew how to sidestep him, knew his limitations, and, I think, knew he loved her too deeply to do her real bodily harm. Still, he hit her, and no woman should have to endure such treatment. It made her nervous, though in some strange way, she didn’t mind it as much as she should have. It kind of validated her and confirmed for her just how much he cared about her. Her insomnia never abated. But it certainly didn’t help her insomnia. Dr. Lee Siegel, Fox’s resident physician, gave her a new prescription for sleeping pills. When she finally decided to end the marriage, it was Harry Brand, the head of Fox publicity, who introduced her to attorney Jerry Giesler.”
A prominent criminal attorney, Jerry Giesler had nevertheless represented such public figures as Shelley Winters and Ingrid Bergman in divorce proceedings. Marilyn retained Giesler and signed a two-page complaint against Joe DiMaggio, citing “mental cruelty” as the cause of her divorce action. The press located DiMaggio in New York, where he’d gone to take in the 1954 World Series classic between the New York Giants and Cleveland Indians. Refusing to comment on the status of his marriage, he chose instead to talk about the spectacular catch at the Polo Grounds by Giants center fielder Willie Mays of a towering drive by Vic Wertz in game one of the Series. Mays had caught the ball while racing full speed with his back to home plate. “I’d have made the catch, too,” claimed DiMaggio with deadpan candor, “but unlike Willie, I wouldn’t have lost my baseball cap.”
Joe and Marilyn were legally separated on October 5. The following day, a hundred reporters and photographers jammed onto the lawn in front of 508 North Palm Drive. At ten o’clock in the morning, Joe DiMaggio and Reno Barsocchini emerged from the house carrying Joe’s luggage. They loaded it into the trunk and backseat of DiMaggio’s Cadillac. Climbing into the passenger side of the car, the former slugger couldn’t hide his disappointment. “He looked as grim and gray as if he’d just made the third out in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded and the Yanks down by a run,” wrote Sheilah Graham in a subsequent column. Asked what he planned on doing, Joe said, “I’m going to San Francisco. It’s my home and always has been. I’m never coming back here.”
According to Marilyn Monroe biographer Donald Spoto, DiMaggio didn’t return to San Francisco at once but instead remained in seclusion in the Los Angeles home of Dr. Leon Krohn, Marilyn’s gynecologist. The couple had consulted with Krohn on a number of occasions because of Marilyn’s seeming difficulties in becoming pregnant.
Dressed in black as if for a funeral, Marilyn appeared on the lawn an hour later. With her were Jerry Gielser and Sidney Skolsky. Supporting herself on Giesler’s arm, Marilyn slowly approached a bank of press microphones. But it was Giesler who spoke: “Miss Monroe will have nothing to say to you this morning. As her attorney, I am speaking for her and can only say that the conflict of careers has brought about this regrettable necessity.” In response to a barrage of questions, Marilyn, in a quiet voice, hardly more than a whisper, remarked, “I can’t say anything today. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Resting her head on Giesler’s shoulder, she began to cry. As she dabbed her tears with a white handkerchief, she turned away, and with Giesler’s help, walked back to her house.
Three weeks later, on October 27, 1954, Marilyn Monroe, America’s pinup girl, marched into Santa Monica Superior Court and won an uncontested divorce from Joe DiMaggio. Again wearing black, the tearful twenty-eight-year-old star was accompanied into court by Jerry Giesler, Sidney Skolsky, Mary Karger (Fred Karger’s sister), and her business manager Inez Melson. Her voice breaking with emotion, her makeup running, Marilyn told Superior Court Judge Orlando Rhodes (and a packed courtroom) that DiMaggio had often been testy and even refused to allow her to have friends in their home.
“I voluntarily gave up my work in hopes that it would solve our problems,” she said, “but it didn’t change his attitude. I hoped to have out of my marriage love, warmth, affection, and understanding, but the relationship was one of coldness and indifference. My husband would get into moods when he wouldn’t speak to me for periods of sometimes ten days. If I would try to reproach him, usually he wouldn’t answer me at all. When he would, he would say, ‘Leave me alone.’ If I would say, ‘What’s the matter?’ he would say, ‘Stop nagging me.’ ”
Inez Melson, Marilyn’s corroborating witness, confirmed her employer’s testimony, pointing out that DiMaggio “would push Marilyn away when she tried to show affection for him and would say, ‘Don’t bother me.’ ” Because she’d been on excellent terms with Joe, Melson informed him prior to the hearing that she’d been asked to testify against him, a gesture the ballplayer appreciated. They remained friendly long after the divorce.
Some of Marilyn’s recitations of her husband’s shortcomings sounded startlingly similar to Dorothy Arnold’s condemnations of DiMaggio during their divorce trial. To her credit, Marilyn never mentioned the episodes of physical abuse she’d suffered at Joe’s hands. Such testimony would have been redundant. Twenty minutes into the proceedings, Judge Rhodes brought his gavel down, terminating the 286-day Joe DiMaggio–Marilyn Monroe marriage, granting an interlocutory decree that would become final one year after issuance.
An intriguing footnote to the hearing is the disappearance of the entire courtroom record pertaining to the divorce. It disappeared for good after being transferred several years later to the trial records archive in Los Angeles. Following the hearing, DiMaggio wrote to Judge Rhodes requesting that the file be sealed. Rhodes denied the request. According to a clerk of the court, “The trial record, including Marilyn Monroe’s complete testimony, was available to anyone who wanted to see it. My guess is that one of DiMaggio’s friends, acting on his behalf, came in, requested the file, and then walked out with it. No doubt embarrassed by Monroe’s testimony, DiMaggio wanted to make the file disappear. That’s only a guess, but in light of everything that transpired following their divorce, it’s probably pretty close to the truth.”
• • •
The first Saturday following the divorce hearing, Marilyn went to see Joe DiMaggio Jr. “She picked me up at Black-Foxe and took me to lunch at Chasen’s,” said Joey. “We sat way in the back so nobody could see us. I’d heard all these news reports as to how she’d given an Oscar-winning performance at the hearing, but I could tell the divorce saddened her. She didn’t look well. She told me how sorry she was it hadn’t worked out with my father, that he’d called her the night before the hearing and asked her to reconsider. ‘I adore your father,’ she said, ‘but we just can’t seem to live together.’ Then she told me that even though she and my father had gotten divorced, she hadn’t divorced me, and she planned on staying in touch and would that be all right? And of course I said ‘Yes.’ After that we took a long drive. We headed south and wound up in San Diego, more than two hours from Beverly Hills. Marilyn didn’t say much. I guess it was a kind of therapeutic exercise for her. We ate dinner at some lobster shack on the beach in San Diego, and then we drove back. And when we reached Black-Foxe that night, Marilyn told me to open the glove compartment. Inside, on top of a bunch of road maps, I found a small gift-wrapped package. ‘It’s for you,’ she said. ‘I missed your thirteenth birthday. Open it.’ It was a leather billfold with my initials engraved on it. Inside was a crisp hundred-dollar bill and a wallet-sized photo of Marilyn with an inscription that read, ‘For Joey—Love, your forever step-mom.’ ”
Joe DiMaggio had moved out of Dr. Krohn’s house and into a room at the Knickerbocker Hotel. A week after the divorce, he called Sidney Skolsky and asked him to come over. He wanted to talk with him. As Isabella, Sidney’s wife, drove him to the hotel, the journalist said, “If I get hit over the head with a bat, you know where you delivered me.”
Skolsky needn’t have worried. By the time he saw the ballplayer, DiMaggio’s rage had melted away.
“It was about noon when I entered Joe’s room,” Skolsky wrote in his autobiography. “He pointed toward the bed and asked me to sit down. I sat on the edge of the bed. He drew his chair up close to me.
“ ‘There’s one thing I must know,’ he said as softly as a torch singer squeezing the pathos out of every note. ‘Is there another man? Why did Marilyn divorce me?’
“I felt awful. No man should be confronted by an idol on his knees, begging to have his clay feet examined. And I had no balm for them.
“How could I tell him he’d bored her? How could I tell a man his ex-wife became ex because she found him dull?
“I spoke all around it, saying that Marilyn wasn’t mature enough to be a wife, that she had failed before, that Marilyn’s ever bigger ambition didn’t call for a husband, and that she didn’t want to cater to Joe’s likes and dislikes.
“Joe thanked me. I honestly don’t believe he had the slightest inkling of what I had avoided saying.”
Whatever Sidney Skolsky did or didn’t think of Joe DiMaggio, he wasn’t the ballplayer’s only source of information regarding Marilyn. Joe went to see Inez Melson at her home in the Hollywood Hills, where, as a hobby, she raised and trained parakeets. Inez had helped Joe pack his belongings the day before he left North Palm Drive and had agreed to store a number of cartons in her own home. When he visited her after the divorce, they sat on her porch at dusk and watched the deer dart in and out of the woods surrounding her property. Joe, usually the picture of poise and dignity, had to be consoled and soothed while he spoke about his “baby” and all that had gone amiss in the marriage.
Among other things, he concluded that he’d never been able to relax with Marilyn. In her company, he’d come to expect the unexpected. He never knew what might happen next, who might come along and try to whisk her out of his grasp. If he was too controlled and controlling, she was uncontrollable. She could be cold, calculating, and manipulative. Yet she could also be warm, loving, zany, offbeat, and comical. These were the traits—combined with her physical beauty and an underlying sadness of soul—that had so completely bound him to her.
And then there was Frank Sinatra. Winner of that year’s Academy Award for his work in From Here to Eternity, Frankie suddenly reemerged in DiMaggio’s life. Sinatra and DiMaggio shared one important credential: they’d both lost women they loved. DiMaggio had lost Monroe; Sinatra and his wife since 1951, actress Ava Gardner, had recently separated. Sinatra hired private investigator Barney Ruditsky to keep an eye on Ava. Ruditsky had spotted Ava with a young Mexican beach boy on one occasion and a female dance instructor on another. Frank and Joe commiserated with each other over drinks, usually at the Sunset Club on Sunset Boulevard, at other times at the Villa Capri, an Italian restaurant owned by Pasquale “Patsy” D’Amore, a pal of Frank’s.
As a favor to Joe, Sinatra instructed Ruditsky to keep tabs on Monroe as well as Gardner. Even though Marilyn and the Yankee Clipper were legally divorced, Joe wanted to catch Marilyn with Hal Schaefer, whom he suspected she was still dating. He had convinced himself that if he did catch Marilyn “in the act,” the interlocutory decree would be voided and the divorce action reversed.
“In those days, in California,” said Hal Schaefer, “to finalize a divorce, you had to go through a one-year waiting period before it became absolutely final. If you could prove that your partner was having an affair, you could have the proceedings made null and void, and you would have to start over again. It was a ridiculous, antiquated, uncivilized law, which was almost never invoked. But DiMaggio knew about it and kept trying to find Marilyn in some compromising situation so he could halt the inevitable.”
On the night of November 5, DiMaggio, Sinatra, and a couple of Sinatra’s cronies, Hank Sanicola and Billy Karen, were drinking and eating a late dinner at the Villa Capri when Barney Ruditsky called and said that Marilyn and a man who looked like Hal Schaefer had entered an apartment building at 8112 Waring Avenue in West Hollywood. He believed he knew which apartment they were using. Minutes later a car screeched to a halt in front of the building. DiMaggio, Sinatra, Karen, and three other people jumped out and were met by Barney Ruditsky and Phil Irwin, a private investigator with whom Ruditsky often worked.
On the drive over, Sinatra had tried to quell DiMaggio’s rage, but by the time they arrived, the ballplayer was “ready to kill.” Fearing what DiMaggio might do if he caught Schaefer with Monroe, Sinatra and Ruditsky tried to convince him to wait in front of the building while the rest of the crew went inside. Joe refused.
The squadron of seven entered the building and, with Rudisky leading the way, located the suspected apartment. At approximately eleven thirty, the tenants of the building heard a thunderous crash as DiMaggio and his gang broke down the front door and invaded the apartment.
Hearing movement coming from the bedroom, they rushed in, breaking furniture along the way, turning on lights, and taking snapshots as photographic evidence to document their findings. The only problem was, they’d entered the wrong apartment. The bedroom was occupied all right, but not by Hal Schaefer and Marilyn Monroe. Instead they came upon Mrs. Florence Kotz, a fifty-year-old woman who’d been asleep and was now cowering in her bed, her eyes wide as saucers, her mouth agape as she let loose a bloodcurdling shriek. Marilyn and Hal Schaefer happened to be in the same building but on a floor above Mrs. Kotz’s flat.
“Now and again Marilyn and I used an apartment that belonged to actress Sheila Stuart, one of my voice students,” said Hal Schaefer. “We were in her apartment the night of November 5, when I heard a commotion in front of the building. I peeked out the slats of the window and saw Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra standing across the street with a bunch of tough-looking characters. I knew they’d come looking for us, and I also knew if DiMaggio ever got his hands on me I’d be in trouble. He blamed me for the divorce, though Marilyn would’ve left him with or without me. DiMaggio lived in a bubble. He was a man who’d had everything he ever wanted in life with one exception—and that exception was Marilyn Monroe. He needed to blame somebody other than himself. At any rate, we managed to sneak out of the apartment and down a back stairwell. I never saw Marilyn again after that night. It just became too scary. You can just imagine. We were both torn up about it.”
The building’s landlady called the police. The police report cited the episode as an “attempted burglary,” without mentioning the names of any of the key players. In May 1957 Florence Kotz filed suit against DiMaggio, Sinatra, et al., for $200,000, but Mickey Rudin, Sinatra’s attorney, managed to settle the suit out of court for $7,500. And then matters became complicated.
Confidential magazine got wind of the story, called it the “Wrong Door Raid,” and ran a lengthy exposé. The California State Senate launched its own investigation into the raid, calling Sinatra and friends to the witness stand. They attempted to subpoena DiMaggio as well but couldn’t locate him. Sinatra brought in a battery of lawyers and testified he’d been nothing more than an innocent bystander. Billy Karen said he didn’t remember any details of the event. Hank Sanicola claimed he’d remained behind at the Villa Capri. Barney Ruditsky was excused from testifying due to a heart ailment. When the press finally found DiMaggio and asked him about the Wrong Door Raid, he insisted he hadn’t been part of it and had nothing to say.
The day after the raid, Charles Feldman and Billy Wilder gave a party for Marilyn at Romanoff’s, attended by Hollywood’s Royal Guard. Among the guests were Clark Gable, Daryl Zanuck, Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gary Cooper, Doris Day, Jimmy Stewart, William Holden, Claudette Colbert, Susan Hayward, and Irving “Swifty” Lazar. Life featured the gala in its next issue.
Charles Feldman toasted Marilyn, calling her “the eighth wonder of the world.” She drank champagne and danced with Gable, Zanuck, and Bogart. She sang a duet with Mrs. Billy Wilder and apologized to Billy for her constant tardiness during the filming of The Seven Year Itch. Photographer Sam Shaw saw her home at the end of the evening. A new acquaintance, Shaw had been hired by Fox to shoot a set of publicity stills of Marilyn. In his spare time he’d been teaching her how to use a camera that Joe DiMaggio had given her as a present.
Two days after the Wrong Door Raid and a day after her “coming out” party, Marilyn entered Cedars of Lebanon to undergo corrective surgery for her ongoing gynecological condition. She hoped the procedure would enable her to have children. Joe DiMaggio drove her to the hospital. Dr. Leon Krohn performed the operation on November 8. Marilyn remained at Cedars for five days, DiMaggio by her bedside. He stayed with her after she returned to North Palm Drive. On November 25, still recuperating from her surgery, she celebrated Joe’s fortieth birthday by taking him to the Villa Capri for dinner. Joe used the occasion to ask her to come back and start again. It was the one birthday present she wasn’t able to give him.
Joe DiMaggio returned to San Francisco the next morning. Reached at his Beach Street home by a local reporter, he offered a brief comment blaming the film industry and Twentieth Century–Fox for their sexploitation of Marilyn Monroe, ruining her reputation and in turn their marriage.
When Roy Craft, a leading member of Fox’s publicity department, read DiMaggio’s unflattering characterization of the studio, he decided to issue his own statement to the press: “Marilyn Monroe had a flamboyant reputation when Joe DiMaggio married her. The point is, if you build a home behind a slaughterhouse, you don’t complain when you hear the pigs squealing.”