IN JUNE 1955, SEVERAL WEEKS after their public spat at Toots Shor’s, Joe DiMaggio wrote Marilyn Monroe a letter inviting her to join him at Cooperstown, New York, in July for his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. His letter went on to say, “There’s no reason that two people who love each other can’t live together in marital bliss. It happens all the time.” Joe’s timing was unfortunate. Not only was Marilyn still dating Marlon Brando, she had also at long last reunited with Arthur Miller. It seemed as if, having been wed to one of America’s greatest athletes, she now wanted to experience one of its most renowned intellectuals. The switch from DiMaggio to Miller could be viewed as symbolic of her desire to transform herself from a glamourous Hollywood star into a respected artist endowed with integrity and earnest commitment.
Still married and living with his wife and children on Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights, Miller succumbed to temptation by indulging in an affair he felt he should probably have initiated when he first encountered Marilyn in Hollywood four years earlier. Making up for lost time, Arthur and Marilyn quickly became involved. Miller followed her wherever she went: the Greene residence in Connecticut, Norman Rosten’s summer cottage in Port Jefferson, Long Island, the Strasberg vacation retreat on Fire Island, and Marilyn’s posh suite at the Waldorf.
He rehearsed scenes with her that she then performed at the Actors Studio. Often accompanied by Sam Shaw (acting as beard), they took Arthur’s basset hound Hugo for long walks in Prospect Park, sat at coffee houses in Greenwich Village, strode across the Brooklyn Bridge, fished for striped bass in Montauk, went boating at City Island, attended a Goya exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and cruised around in Marilyn’s black convertible Thunderbird, bought for her by Milton Greene with MMP funds. With Eli Wallach and his wife, Anne Jackson, fellow members of the Actors Studio, they drove to Far Rockaway Beach where they picnicked and played badminton. At other times they met in small, obscure Manhattan restaurants.
They lunched at Childs in Times Square with Robert Whitehead, the producer of Miller’s plays. They rode their bikes through Central Park and along the bike path that ran parallel to the Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. Miller accompanied Marilyn to a photo shoot in connection with an advertising campaign she undertook for a lipstick manufacturer. He joined her, the Strasbergs, and the Rostens at dinner in the Sheraton-Astor Hotel following a fund-raiser for the Actors Studio. The couple visited friends of his in New Jersey and smoked pot. A two-minute color film of Marilyn dragging on a joint that afternoon was auctioned in 2009 for $275,000.
Monroe told Truman Capote that she and Arthur did weed together “quite often.” And when they did, she said, he delighted in watching her perform her wink-wink, come-hither rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It turned him on. And no wonder.
In Timebends, the playwright’s 1987 autobiography, Miller wrote: “I no longer knew what I wanted—certainly not the end of my marriage, but the thought of putting Marilyn out of my life was unbearable. My world seemed to be colliding with itself, the past exploding under my feet.”
Marilyn’s nicknames for Miller, eleven years her senior, were “Popsie-Wopsie,” “Poppy,” and “Pa.” She described him to Lotte Goslar as a serious man, but one with a wonderful sense of humor. “We laugh and joke all the time,” she told Goslar. “I’ve always been alone,” she continued. “I felt alone when I arrived in New York. Now, finally, I have Arthur. He’s going to make my life better, a lot better.”
Lotte Goslar had come to New York that summer to visit relatives and found Marilyn in an exuberant frame of mind. “I don’t think I’d ever seen her happier,” said Goslar. “She was so radiant she practically glowed. For starters, she’d taken steps to advance her career. She’d replaced her talent agency, Famous Artists, with MCA and had hired Arthur P. Jacobs and his New York public relations firm to handle her publicity. She’d also replaced Joe DiMaggio—to whom she now referred as ‘Mr. D.’ or ‘My ex ex’—with Arthur Miller. She felt absolutely taken with him, and he felt the same about her. The only problem was that Miller still had a wife, but that fact didn’t seem to deter Marilyn.
“Arthur and Marilyn had more in common than Marilyn and Joe. As a playwright, Miller understood the exigencies and extremes of an actor’s mind. He comprehended the subtle nuances of Marilyn’s complex nature. And since she was intellectually driven, she and Miller seemed well suited. I’m not sure how they matched up in the bedroom. Sexuality had obviously been the most important factor in her relationship with DiMaggio. I’m not certain that was the case with Miller. I imagine that what attracted her to him was his intellect and his creative spirit. One might even say that Arthur Miller did with a pen what Joe DiMaggio accomplished with his bat and baseball mitt.”
The “secret” romance soon began hitting the press. “Joe must have read about Miller and Marilyn in the columns,” said his golfing pal Paul Baer. “I saw him in late June, and he looked like shit. He’d lost about twenty pounds. He claimed his ulcers were acting up, and he couldn’t eat. He said he was having trouble sleeping at night, and this is a guy who could literally fall asleep standing up. In addition, he was drinking heavily, but he refused to blame his troubles on Marilyn. He didn’t want to talk about her, but you knew that her liaison with the playwright must have dimmed any hope he might have retained of getting back with her. The only negative comment I heard him utter—and it was an indirect comment at that—occurred when I told him I’d read a magazine article entitled ‘Never Marry an Actress.’ ‘Tell me about it,’ he responded. But in general, you couldn’t bring up her name, because if you did, you were dead meat. I recall one fellow at Toots, a sportswriter, telling him he didn’t think Marilyn could act, and he shot back, ‘What the fuck do you know about acting—or about Marilyn, for that matter?’ He never spoke to the guy again.”
Like others in Joe’s inner circle, Paul Baer recognized that Joe “carried a torch brighter and heavier than the one held by the Statue of Liberty. Marilyn Monroe was the one person in the world who seemed able to make Joe come alive. One evening my brother and I went to a Midtown Manhattan movie theater to catch a John Wayne flick. We each bought a bag of popcorn and climbed the stairs to the balcony. And I’ll be damned if Joe DiMaggio wasn’t seated up there by himself in the last row looking lost and unhappy. I invited him to join us. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but nobody will bother me back here and I’d rather be alone tonight.’ By the time the movie ended, he’d vanished into thin air.”
For the most part, Joe stopped going out at night, choosing instead to hibernate in his hotel suite, watching television, smoking cigarettes, and ordering his meals from room service. It was his usual means of escape. Very occasionally, when the mood struck, he’d drop into Toots Shor’s, where he’d drink to excess and catch up on the news. Jackie Gleason saw him there one night and asked him, “Where the hell have you been?” “To hell and back,” he answered. On another occasion he had dinner at Toots Shor’s with Earl Wilson and his wife. In uncharacteristic fashion, Joe poured out his grief to the couple, asking where he’d gone wrong with Marilyn, and what could he do to get her back.
“He seemed rather desperate,” recalled the columnist, “and looking back, I probably offered him bad advice. I told him I didn’t think it was hopeless, that Arthur Miller didn’t offer much in the way of competition, that he represented a passing infatuation on Marilyn’s part, nothing more. Besides, there was talk Miller was being investigated by HUAC—the House Un-American Activities Committee—and would probably wind up either in Mexico or prison. I wanted to ease his pain, but essentially I think I infused him with a false sense of optimism. The next thing I heard was that he was stalking Marilyn, convinced that he could rekindle her interest and win her back.”
Jim Haspiel, still exultant over his previous year’s brief encounter with Marilyn outside her hotel suite at the St. Regis, passed his days that summer camped in front of the Waldorf. “I used to sit on the stoop of a building opposite the front entrance of the hotel,” he said. “I was there with a friend one afternoon, and my friend suddenly spotted this fellow lurking in the shadows, and, upon closer examination, it turned out to be Joe DiMaggio. He couldn’t have been more than ten yards from us. And like us, he was focused on the hotel, hoping to catch a glimpse of Marilyn.”
Fueled by his enduring jealousy, DiMaggio employed a variety of methods in his efforts to ascertain the actress’s whereabouts. Wearing a fake beard, he’d spend hours seated in the Waldorf lobby, pretending to read a copy of the New York Times. He bribed a doorman to keep tabs on Marilyn’s visitors. In time he became more aggressive, tipping the elevator operator to take him to Marilyn’s floor, so he could confront her in person.
“Marilyn would phone my father at three in the morning to complain that Joe DiMaggio was harassing her, following her around, pounding at her door at all hours,” said Susan Strasberg. “She wouldn’t let him in, but she also refused to call the police because she didn’t want him to be arrested. In early July he hired a private detective, and the man broke into her Waldorf suite and took one of her address books. Initially, I couldn’t understand what Marilyn saw in him. They were compatible in bed, but you don’t marry someone just because the sex is good. She told me he was very rigid in his beliefs. He wanted her for all the reasons any man would want her—she was gorgeous. He found her beautiful and sexy, but he didn’t want any other man to see in her what he saw.”
Susan Strasberg eventually figured out why Marilyn tolerated Joe’s odd behavior and why she never completely severed their connection. According to Strasberg, Marilyn always knew where she stood with Joe. She knew she could count on him. She knew he was always there for her. No matter what the circumstance, she could always call on him. He was the one person—the only person—she could depend on. She could always lean on him, and he asked for little in return other than to be with her. For a woman whose existence was so unsettled, there was great relief and comfort in that notion. In a life marked by so much turmoil, he was her one constant: a lover, a father figure, and a friend.
The main problem for DiMaggio was that when he wasn’t with Marilyn, he was visited by demons. In late July he drove up to Cooperstown by himself to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The annual three-day event always drew thousands of rabid baseball fans and other Hall of Famers who’d already been inducted. The ballplayers were housed gratis at the Otesaga, a majestic five-star hotel bedecked by sprawling verandas overlooking a large, pristine lake and the rolling countryside of upstate New York. An eighteen-hole golf course was located a half mile away. When the old-timers weren’t attending banquets and the official induction ceremony, which included a motorcade through the streets of Cooperstown, they would fish, golf, hobnob, and drink.
The owner of a baseball memorabilia shop in town remembered the ’55 induction ceremony. “DiMaggio came up with his fishing rod and set of golf clubs,” she said. “It was the first of many visits. He’d come up every year for the ceremony, and because he was the Great DiMaggio, he’d be given the best suite at the hotel and shown every courtesy. I can tell you from personal experience that he was a miserable character, a real jerk.”
The shop owner went on to say she knew a bellhop at the Otesaga who could attest that DiMaggio never tipped. “My friend would carry his luggage up to the suite and be dismissed with a mere nod of the head,” she said. “He didn’t tip the hotel waiters, the hotel bartender, the golf course caddies, or the restaurant personnel who served him in town. In ’55, he was particularly annoying. He refused to give autographs and even snubbed the kids that came up with their parents to watch him get inducted. He had a bug up his ass, and I suspect the bug’s name was Marilyn Monroe.”
In early August, following his return from Cooperstown, DiMaggio received a telephone call from Horace Stoneham, owner of the New York Giants. As reported by Leonard Lyons in the New York Post, Stoneham made Joe an incredible offer for that time: $40,000 for just one time at bat for the Giants in an upcoming game against their archrival, the Brooklyn Dodgers. DiMaggio turned down the offer on grounds that he still considered himself a New York Yankee. To don another team’s uniform, even once, constituted high treason.
When George Solotaire asked him why he’d refused Stoneham’s offer, DiMaggio responded, “Aside from the fact that I’m a Yankee, there comes a time in every ballplayer’s life when his brain tells him to do one thing and his body says, ‘You must be shitting me.’ The last thing in the world I want to do is go down on strikes in front of sixty thousand screaming spectators. And that’s exactly what would happen.”
• • •
In the spring of 1951, Joe DiMaggio’s final season with the Yanks, Look ran a profile of the Clipper, portraying him as nothing less than the Don Juan of the baseball diamond. “Joe is a heart-throb,” read the piece, “a lady-killer, and the ideal male from a feminine point of view. Just bashful enough to be effective . . . Joltin’ Joe is so attractive to women he has to wait in the clubhouse after each game to avoid being mobbed.”
Joe’s amorous adventures, so prolific in the past, all but ended during his years with Marilyn Monroe. With Marilyn by his side, there had been little need (or desire) on his part for outside stimulation. Yet without her—and concomitantly without baseball—his life lacked purpose.
In the first weeks following Marilyn’s disappearing act, hidden away in his Mayflower Hotel suite, DiMaggio had attempted to escape the tedium of his pain and isolation by turning to New York’s girl services for entertainment and relief. “It’s like being back in the majors,” he later told Robert Solotaire, his roommate’s son. “Most of [the girls] were groupies, others you paid for . . . After a while, the girls all looked alike.”
After weeks of sampling his share of high-priced escorts, DiMaggio received a telephone call from Frank Sinatra. The crooner wanted to introduce him to “a friend,” a Las Vegas showgirl and burlesque queen named Liz Renay. Blond, boisterous, and buxom, Liz bore a distinct resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, so much so that in 1952 one gossip magazine declared her “the girl who looks more like Marilyn Monroe than Marilyn Monroe.” But Liz had more in common with Marilyn than mere good looks.
Born in 1926, the same year as Monroe, Liz, like Marilyn, had endured a traumatic adolescence. By the age of eighteen, she had run away from home, married twice, and had two children. By twenty-nine, her list of lovers ran the gamut from film impresario Cecil B. DeMille to gangster Mickey Cohen. Judging from the title of one of her autobiographies—My First 2,000 Men—Renay wasn’t shy about displaying an all but insatiable appetite for sex.
“I could never understand what Marilyn had that I didn’t have,” said Liz, “but she obviously had something. In any case, Frank Sinatra called me one evening and asked if I wanted to meet Joe DiMaggio. He said, ‘Joe’s very lonely.’ I told him to give Joe my phone number. A few days later, I heard from him. We went out to dinner, got drunk, and stumbled back to his suite at the Mayflower. I figured if he turned on Marilyn, he must be pretty good in the sack. I decided to try and make him forget Marilyn. I must have done something right, because he came back for more.”
Liz Renay found Joe “a bit aloof but still a nice guy, a good man, sweet and refined. He was a romantic. He used to send me bouquets of red roses. And yes, he was wonderful in bed. He acknowledged I looked like Marilyn, but that’s all he said about her. I had a feeling the memories were still too raw. Mostly, he spoke about his childhood and how his father had been a fisherman. And of course he talked about baseball. He told me his brother Dom held the Boston Red Sox record for hitting safely in consecutive games, whereas Joe held the major-league record. In 1949 Dom DiMaggio hit safely in thirty-four straight games. When the thirty-fifth game rolled around, it was Joe who ended his brother’s streak by catching a sinking line drive in the eighth inning in a game between the Yanks and Red Sox. ‘He never forgave me,’ said Joe. ‘Talk about sibling rivalry,’ I remarked. He laughed.”
Liz noted that publishers and producers constantly besieged DiMaggio with book and film offers. “They could’ve given him ten million dollars, and he wouldn’t have given in,” she noted. “His privacy meant too much to him. He was the American hero that nobody knew. Some people claimed he didn’t say much because he had nothing to say. That wasn’t the case. He wasn’t a chatterbox, but he had his moments. He talked about what it meant to be famous and the pressures that came with fame. He discussed his baseball career, the overbearing need he felt to get a hit even in an insignificant game before a few thousand spectators—after all, there might’ve been one fan that had never seen him play before. Another topic that enthused him was money. He advised me to invest in real estate. The next time we met he brought along a dozen brochures and spent hours going over them with me. On his recommendation, I put funds into a Florida motel chain and over the next five years made more than three times my original investment.”
Surprisingly, as Liz learned, Joe liked to gossip. “He wanted to know all about my previous lovers, especially the well-known ones. I told him Alfred Hitchcock liked to be hog-tied and flogged with a dog leash. Cecil DeMille had a foot fetish and loved sucking women’s toes. Joe knew I’d been with Frank Sinatra and wanted to know if he was good in bed. ‘He’s okay,’ I said. ‘Is he better than me?’ Joe wondered. I said, ‘Sinatra can’t carry your jock strap, and he certainly can’t fill it.’ Of course, Frankie asked me the same question about Joe. And I gave him more or less the same response—‘You’re the best, Frankie.’ That’s what all men want to hear, even if it’s total bullshit.”
Liz Renay’s relationship with DiMaggio encompassed a dozen dates spread over a ten-week period. “I realized mine wasn’t the only name in his little black book,” she said. “A drugstore delivery boy told me every time he brought an order to the suite, Joe would have a different woman with him. That didn’t bother me because I saw a good deal of him in August, and I thought we might one day get married.”
In late August, accompanied by George Solotaire, Joe took a break from Liz and flew to Italy to visit Isola delle Femmine, the Sicilian fishing village where both his parents were born and where he still had several distant cousins. According to Solotaire, they were treated like a couple of visiting potentates. Everywhere they went the crowds applauded the Clipper. DiMaggio thought the Italian fishing village looked and felt like Martinez, his birthplace, and began to understand why his parents had felt at home in California. A local teenager handed Joe a bat and softball, and the villagers watched in awe as DiMaggio belted the ball out of sight and into the sea.
After touring the rest of Sicily, Joe and George set out for Venice and that city’s annual film festival. While in Venice, DiMaggio met French actress Anne-Marie Mersen, and their photo appeared prominently in the press. Joe and George then traveled to Rome and took a tour of the Vatican. Joe met Swedish actress Anita Ekberg at a Roman nightclub, and the two danced the night away. Joe and George spent a day in Paris and ended their European sojourn in London. Sir Cedric Hardwicke, the venerable British actor, drove them around the city. He offered to take them to a cricket match, but only if they had “six months or more to spare.”
Back in the States, Joe appeared as the “mystery guest” on What’s My Line?, the television game show hosted by John Daly, an occasional drinking partner of Joe’s at Toots Shor’s. Liz Renay accompanied DiMaggio to the TV studio and sat in the green room while four blindfolded panelists tried to guess the name of the guest. “When he stepped out on stage,” said Liz, “the live audience went nuts. I mean, here was Joe DiMaggio on a television game show. It was so unlike him. And when it was Arlene Francis’s turn to guess, she said, ‘My goodness, only President Eisenhower and Marilyn Monroe would get that kind of reception.’ The panel quickly established Joe’s identity. But the mention of Marilyn’s name jolted Joe. It was a painful reminder of just how savagely she’d injured him. I think it also pointed to the vast ego problem that had always existed between Joe and Marilyn. Before meeting her he was looked up to by millions. But after marrying her, a whole new generation of journalists arrived on the scene, some of whom thought of Joe as ‘Marilyn’s man.’ He couldn’t stand that. I mean, this is the guy they had to sneak out of Yankee Stadium after ballgames, so he wouldn’t be mobbed and trampled by his army of fans.”
After DiMaggio’s return from Europe, he continued to date Liz Renay, creating the expectation in her mind that he might even propose to her. “I convinced myself that he would ask me to marry him,” she said. “But one day the phone stopped ringing. I waited and waited, and nothing happened. Not a word. Tired of waiting, I dialed Joe’s private number. An operator came on and said the number had been disconnected and the new number was unlisted. That ended that! I’d been unceremoniously dumped. I was heartbroken, primarily because Joe hadn’t had the balls to break up with me in person.”
Joe DiMaggio sought refuge in other Monroe look-alikes, not always with positive results. When told by a burlesque house proprietor that she looked like Marilyn, exotic dancer Dixie Evans retorted, “Everybody in Hollywood looks like Marilyn Monroe.” She nevertheless tailored her act in imitation of Marilyn, walking, talking, and gyrating like the original. Joe DiMaggio checked out her act at Place Pigalle, an upscale burlesque house in Miami. He’d gone to Florida to visit Sid Luckman, the onetime quarterback for the Chicago Bears. Dixie joined Joe at his table at closing time. He walked her home and made a date to see her the following day. She’d forgotten she had scheduled a court appearance that day and, unable to reach Joe at the Fontainebleau Hotel, where he was staying, inadvertently stood him up. She never heard from him again.
More successful was his relationship with Gregg Sherwood Dodge, a former New York chorus girl at the Latin Quarter and a girlfriend of Dean Martin. Born Dora Fjelshad in Beloit, Wisconsin, Gregg had changed her name after competing in the Miss America Pageant. Joe first met her while playing for the Yankees. Her then husband, Walter Sherwin, held the position of box office treasurer for the team. After Sherwin and Gregg divorced, she later married aging motorcar scion Horace Dodge II.
“I knew Joe via our mutual connection to the Yankees,” said Gregg, “but I didn’t know him in the biblical sense until after his divorce from Marilyn. Our affair began in the back seat of a limousine in Palm Beach, Florida. He told me I looked like Marilyn, and I suppose that’s what did it for him. As for me, I’d always liked him. He was regarded as the greatest ballplayer since Babe Ruth. I found him sexy. Having once been married to Marilyn Monroe made him seem even sexier.
“Regarding Monroe, I soon learned you never spoke of her to him, not even if he brought her up first. In that case, you merely listened. It was clear from the way he spoke that he’d been profoundly hurt by her. He was obsessed with her to the extent that for several years he couldn’t work. All he did was play golf, drink, and move around from place to place, attempting to find solace in the arms of other women, a number of whom looked like Marilyn Monroe. For a while, he did the nightclub circuit. His photo would pop up in the papers with a different girl every few days. He had no difficulty meeting women. One young lady I knew went to bed with him and then divorced her husband with the expectation Joe would marry her, which of course he didn’t.
“Another woman, about to be married, was so taken with Joe she went to bed with him and then informed him he was her ‘last fling.’ The only good that came of his divorce from Marilyn is that it softened him somewhat. He’d always been a bit of a hard-ass, but after Marilyn he became more human, more understanding. All in all, Joe and I dated on a sporadic basis for a period of approximately three years. And after that, we remained friends, occasionally talking on the phone or meeting for dinner. Although he never said it directly, I concluded that he was smart enough to have ultimately figured out that Marilyn Monroe simply wasn’t good wife material. She was what she was: a delightful companion and bed partner, but not a wife.”
And then there was Francie (a pseudonym), an airline stewardess he encountered in the late summer of 1955 while visiting his pal Joe Nacchio in Panama City, Florida. “We met at a nightclub,” she recalled. “I happened to be there with a girlfriend, and he came over and asked me to dance. I knew of him because I grew up in Boston, and my father, an avid Red Sox fan, used to take me with him to the ballpark. I’d met Ted Williams on one occasion, and when I told Joe about it that evening, he became quite animated. Williams batted .406 the same year [1941] that Joe hit in fifty-six consecutive games. Joe told me there had been talk between the owners of the Yanks and Red Sox to set up a trade: Williams would go to the Yanks, and Joe would play for the Red Sox. And his brother Dom DiMaggio, Boston’s center fielder, would be moved to right to make room for Joe.”
From the beginning, Francie, a raven-haired version of Monroe, realized that any romance with DiMaggio had its limitations. “I’d been engaged and had broken it off shortly before I met Joe,” she said. “I needed to recuperate and sort things out. Joe’s marriage to Marilyn had ended badly. Neither of us wanted a serious relationship. We were happy to see each other only now and again. We’d meet in different cities, depending on my flight schedule. Joe had a friend in Philadelphia named Eddie Liberatore, a scout for the Dodgers, and he’d put us up. And there was a man in Chicago, Sam Brody, a clothing manufacturer, and he’d do the same. And when I had a layover in New York, I’d sometimes stay with him at the Hotel Lexington.”
Meanwhile, Marilyn’s liaison with Arthur Miller had become a matter of public record. At the end of September 1955, she accompanied him to the opening night of his latest play, A View from the Bridge, at New York’s Coronet Theater. The play, which in part depicts a vile and violent Sicilian family engaged in the business of commercial fishing, may well have been fueled by Marilyn’s representations to Miller concerning the physical abuse visited upon her by Joe DiMaggio. In any case, Arthur’s wife, Mary, had learned of the affair and had ordered her husband out of their Brooklyn Heights apartment.
Soon after October 17—his fortieth birthday—Arthur Miller (following a telephone session with his onetime psychiatrist, Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein) moved into the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-Third Street and then into an elegant West Side brownstone. Marilyn moved as well. Her six-month sublet at the Waldorf having ended, she took over a sublet on an apartment at 2 Sutton Place, with views of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge. Then, on October 31, 1955, she appended her signature to the final decree of divorce, legally and irrevocably terminating her marriage to Joe DiMaggio.
Joe was with his flight attendant Francie in New York a month after the filing in the California court system by Monroe’s lawyer of the final set of divorce papers. “It was only a technicality,” Francie noted. “The actual divorce proceeding had taken place the year before. Still, Joe seemed rather despondent over the phone. I didn’t realize how despondent until I reached his hotel suite. There, atop his bed, he’d placed a life-sized porcelain-and-rubber doll made up to look exactly like Marilyn Monroe. The platinum hair looked real. It had lifelike arms and legs. The coloring, including makeup, was hers. The finger- and toenails of the doll were coated with red polish. The figure had obviously been constructed with great attention to detail and at considerable expense. There was an almost indecent authenticity to the breasts and other erogenous zones.”
Francie’s first reaction was disbelief, followed by confusion. Her plane, a night flight from Los Angeles, had arrived at eleven o’clock, and she’d taken a cab straight to Joe’s hotel only to be confronted by the macabre mannequin.
“How do you like her?” asked DiMaggio.
“I don’t,” she said.
“I like her,” remarked DiMaggio. “She’s Marilyn the Magnificent. She can do anything Marilyn can do except talk.”
“Can she make love to you?” asked Francie.
“Absolutely,” answered DiMaggio. “Would you like a demonstration?”
As the onetime Yankee Clipper began to unbuckle his belt, Francie the flight attendant, still clutching her overnight bag, made her exit.
“It had to be one of the weirdest experiences I ever had,” she said. “It absolutely and totally creeped me out. It goes without saying I never again spoke to Mr. DiMaggio.”
• • •
Matters grew worse for Joe long before they got better. There seemed no way he could escape Marilyn. She was perpetually in the news. She’d agreed to return to Hollywood to begin shooting Bus Stop. She and Arthur Miller planned to get married. She wanted to convert to Judaism and have his babies. Miller was the first man she ever loved. Joe heard the latter declaration while watching television with Edward Bennett Williams, the prominent attorney he’d known since 1951 and at whose Washington, DC, home he stayed from time to time. (Williams was also TV game show moderator John Daly’s father-in-law.) Marilyn’s photo appeared on the covers of Life and Time, to say nothing of a dozen lesser publications. Joe couldn’t avoid her image or erase the memory of the humiliating headlines they’d run when she left him, how the Great DiMaggio had “Struck Out” with the actress—headlines all too reminiscent of those published in Japan during their honeymoon, when they’d referred to him as “Mr. Marilyn Monroe.” The indignity and shame he suffered from the most recent onslaught of news items dogged his every waking hour. His face would darken at the mere mention of her name. How could he begin to get over her if her image and words appeared everywhere all the time? And how dare “they” treat an American idol, one of history’s greatest ballplayers, as if he were nothing more than a minor leaguer?
In early 1956 Paul Baer convinced Joe to “get away from it all” by accompanying him on a Florida golfing junket. “Joe wasn’t a bad golfer,” said Baer. “As one might expect, he had a beautiful swing. He just couldn’t putt. On a good day he’d shoot in the midseventies. I recall one round we played in Tampa. I believe his pal Charlie Rubaleave, a commercial photographer, was with us that day. This was about the time the press was crowing about Marilyn Monroe’s affair with Arthur Miller. One of our caddies had a copy of the local newspaper with Marilyn’s photo in a swimsuit on the front page. We were on the fifth or sixth hole, a par three, and we had to wait at the tee for the foursome ahead of us to finish up and get off the green. So while we stood there, the caddie with the paper starts to glance at the front page, and the other caddie sees the photo of Marilyn, and he emits a loud wolf whistle. And Joe peers over between practice swings and figures out what it’s all about. The poor caddie didn’t mean anything by it, but Joe took it the wrong way. He grabbed the paper out of the first caddie’s hands, rolled it up, and swatted the second caddie over the head with it. He then tore up the paper and stalked off the course. So much for our round of golf.”
Paul Baer never saw the notorious Marilyn Monroe look-alike mannequin but heard about it from George Solotaire. “Evidently Joe paid some toy manufacturer ten thousand dollars to custom-produce this life-size, one-of-a-kind doll,” said Baer. “It could fold up to fit into a leather carrying case that came with it. Supposedly he took it along when he traveled. George Solotaire told me that at some point in 1957, Joe destroyed it, which I took to be a promising sign.”
DiMaggio may have longed for Marilyn, but in reality there was never a shortage of women to choose from. Aside from the more obvious Monroe imitators, Joe dated a number of starlets and actresses such as Gloria DeHaven, Diana Dors, Gina Lollobrigida, and Jayne Mansfield (often billed as “the poor man’s Marilyn Monroe”). Francie was only one of several airline hostesses in his post-Marilyn life. The gossip columns played up his romances with TWA stewardesses in addition to “glamour girls” Myra Dell and Philadelphia Main Liner Peggy Deegan. Elsa Maxwell, the celebrated society hostess, took Joe under her wing and began inviting him to her many well-publicized parties. Through Elsa, DiMaggio met and dated a whole new crop of performers, including Cleo Moore, Shirley Jones, and Linda Darnell. Another actress, nineteen-year-old Italian sensation Georgia Moll, purportedly received a chinchilla bikini and a diamond pin from DiMaggio, a publicist’s claim that he vehemently denied.
Publicists, press agents, and gossip scribes tended to make more of DiMaggio’s social pursuits than they were worth. Lee Meriwether was a case in point. A former Miss California from San Francisco, Meriwether was crowned Miss America in 1955. In 1956 she returned to Atlantic City to crown her successor. With the twenty-year-old “former” beauty queen were her mother and brother. As Richard Ben Cramer relates the story in his DiMaggio biography, Joe chanced upon the trio in the lobby of an Atlantic City hotel. Lee’s mother approached Joe and said to him, “I don’t know if you remember my husband, but he used to come into your family’s restaurant.” The Clipper couldn’t have been more polite. “It’s possible,” he responded, “I’m not sure.” Taking stock of Mrs. Meriwether’s daughter, he invited the whole family to dinner that night. Lee’s mother and brother couldn’t make it, so Lee went alone. Joe took her to Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club, the Mob’s favorite Atlantic City hangout. Joe was more than a little familiar with the place; whenever he came to town, he stayed in a small, private apartment that D’Amato let him use on the second floor of the building. Not only did Skinny regularly play host to DiMaggio, but he also often slipped him a couple grand to appear at his club. The Clipper’s presence in any drinking establishment created more publicity and thus more foot traffic. On this particular night, Joe had agreed to be interviewed on the weekly radio show that broadcast each Sunday from the club, a “favor” D’Amato repaid by giving the Daig twice the usual handout.
Dinner with Lee went well, as did Joe’s radio interview. He reminisced about his days as a Yankee. The second radio guest that evening was Walter Winchell. The columnist spent several minutes at the microphone telling the listening audience that he’d always been a “huge” admirer of Joe DiMaggio. “And do you know who he’s with tonight?” Winchell added. “He’s with the former Miss America, Lee Meriwether. I hear they’re quite a team. Are there wedding bells in their future? Stay tuned.”
After the radio show, Winchell insisted Joe and Lee accompany him to the Cotton Club, where there was a dance act that “couldn’t be missed.” In the cab on the way to the Cotton Club, the columnist turned to the couple and said, “Thanks for the scoop.”
“Ah, Walter, come on,” DiMaggio said. “You realize how long I know this girl? Maybe three hours.”
Winchell remarked, “Are you saying you deny it?”
“Stop it, Walter. You’re beginning to bug me.”
Winchell knew enough to let it drop. But two days later, in the New York Mirror, he ran a full-page picture of DiMaggio and Meriwether taken at the 500 Club—the photo ran under a boldfaced headline: “TO WED?”
Meriwether, at the time the women’s editor for NBC-TV’s Today show, hosted by Dave Garroway, was asked by the program’s producer if she wanted to deny the story on air. The next morning, Miss America 1955 informed ten million viewers that she barely knew Joe DiMaggio and had no intention of marrying him, now or ever.
Lee Meriwether didn’t hear from DiMaggio until roughly six months later when, at two in the morning, the telephone rang in her bedroom, rousing her out of sleep. “It’s Joe DiMaggio,” said a voice at the other end. “I need to see you.”
As her mind began to clear, she could hear that DiMaggio had been drinking. “Where are you?” she asked.
“Please, I need to talk to you. Can I come over?”
“What time is it?”
“What’s the difference?” he said. “I’m coming over.”
Lee felt uncomfortable. “How do you know where I live?” she inquired.
The caller hung up.
Despite the awkward content of their telephone conversation, Lee Meriwether occasionally dated Joe DiMaggio, accompanying him to New York nightspots, but only as a platonic friend and nothing more. There were other Miss Americas who found themselves in the same position. Marian McKnight, Miss America 1957, didn’t look very much like Marilyn Monroe but nevertheless did an impersonation of the Hollywood star during the talent phase of the pageant competition. Attired in a tight satin gown, long silk scarf, and a Yankees baseball cap with the number 5 on it, McKnight, a South Carolinian, warbled a cute new song she’d written about DiMaggio and Monroe in which, while making love, the ballplayer looks up and asks, “What’s the score?” The Clipper caught the act while attending a dress rehearsal and was quoted in the press as saying, “That’s my wife, all right. Miss McKnight does a good imitation.” He and Marian had dinner together. Some time later she told the press, “Joe DiMaggio’s a very sweet, down-to-earth man. We’re friends, not very close friends, but we manage to keep in touch.”
Yolande Betbeze, Miss America 1951, was likewise nothing more than Joe’s friend, whose occasional dates were well covered by the press. The Stork Club would pay them to drop in and lend the place a bit of glamour. One reason the pair never connected on a deeper level had to do with Yolande’s awareness that Joe, in the months following the dissolution of his marriage to Monroe, was emotionally incapable of sustaining anything approximating a real relationship.
Yolande had seen quite enough of DiMaggio stumbling from one Manhattan nightclub to another, wanting to touch the bright lights of the city without getting burned, a feat he could seemingly accomplish only when semipolluted. She witnessed DiMaggio at his worst while both were visiting Paris, France. As Yolande related the story, she had brought along a female friend to help the friend get over a romantic involvement. In Paris, at the Hotel George V, where all three were staying, they ran into Joe.
One evening the trio went drinking, first at the Club Lido on the Champs Elysées, then at Au Lapin Agile in Montmartre. When they arrived back at the George V, DiMaggio, “totally shit-faced,” put the make on Yolande’s friend. Yolande was treated, as she put it, to the sight of DiMaggio sitting on an upper-floor staircase of the hotel very late at night, trying to talk Yolande’s girlfriend into bed. The problem was that Joe had put away so much booze he could barely get out a coherent word. He was so smashed, in fact, he wasn’t aware that his pants were wide open and his member was fully exposed. “And that,” Yolande recalled, “was the biggest thing you ever saw.”