In 1954, Marilyn Monroe married baseball star Joe DiMaggio. It was a marriage made in heaven for the press, but not so much for the two stars, as from the very beginning, it was a depressing and often abusive affair. DiMaggio had just retired from baseball and was quite content becoming a family man with the woman he loved. Marilyn, on the other hand, was at the peak of her career and any fantasies of settling down, ironing her husband’s shirts and bearing his children were just that – fantasies.
The marriage dragged on for nine months, during which time Marilyn entertained the troops in Korea and made There’s No Business Like Show Business with Ethel Merman. Joe was not happy about his wife working so hard but he went along with it anyway, though he often refused to accompany her to red-carpet events and parties, preferring to stay at home instead. Unfortunately, while Marilyn was shooting The Seven Year Itch in New York, DiMaggio decided that on this occasion he would actually go along and see what his wife was doing, just in time to observe her standing on a subway grating, her skirt flying into the air and panties on full display.
The jealous and insecure DiMaggio was furious and a huge argument broke out that evening, which some say turned particularly violent on the baseball player’s part. It was at that moment that Marilyn decided she no longer wished to be married to Joe, and once they were back in Los Angeles, she moved out of their North Palm Drive house and into 8338 De Longpre Avenue, where she intended to stay until her divorce was organized.
During this time the actress began a romance with her voice coach, Hal Schaefer. The two had been great friends for several years and during the marriage to DiMaggio they had been so close that the baseball player had started to have suspicions they were having an affair. It is true that Schaefer was in love with the actress and in the months just before separating from her husband, Marilyn cooled her friendship with him to such an extent that he attempted suicide. This shocking event sent Marilyn straight to her voice coach’s bedside, and DiMaggio was once again enraged.
However, by the time a true romance began for the pair, Marilyn was on her way to becoming divorced and it proved to be a comfortable, carefree relationship, the complete opposite to what she had endured with the volatile and moody DiMaggio. For Monroe the romance was fun, but for Schaefer it was true love, as he said in an interview for the book, Marilyn Monroe: Private and Undisclosed: “We became lovers and were going to get married,” said Schaefer. “She wanted to convert to Judaism because I was a Jew. She was still legally married to DiMaggio but had already moved out and had started divorce proceedings.”
It is doubtful that Marilyn wanted to rush straight from one marriage to another, but she did enjoy Schaefer’s company and their new romance nevertheless. Unfortunately, DiMaggio was not about to give up on his wife that easily, especially as he was still in love and hopeful that Marilyn would one day forgive the mistakes he had made within the marriage, and move back in with him.
DiMaggio disliked Schaefer intensely as a result of the friendship his wife had shared with him during their marriage, and on hearing that Marilyn might actually be involved with the man, he took the questionable decision to hire private detectives from the City Detectives and Guard Service to follow the couple around Hollywood. The company began surveillance on 20 October 1954, and trailed both Marilyn and Schaefer between various Los Angeles neighbourhoods, witnessing her picking up friends, visiting her attorney and calling on her acting coach, Natasha Lytess.
They even followed Schaefer alone to a nightclub, where they reported that he looked “very dopey”, though he was not drinking. Bizarrely, the detectives claimed to witness him “doing something to his arm”, and wondered if he was “shooting up”. All of this was written down in their reports, though if the detectives thought they were inconspicuous they were very wrong, as Marilyn and Hal were very much aware they were being followed.
“It was a sick and hostile situation because of DiMaggio”, remembered Schaefer. “He hired private detectives and bugged Marilyn’s car, my car, and my apartment. We were followed everywhere and it was very scary. Marilyn was terrified.”
When she appeared at Santa Monica Court House for her divorce on 27 October, Marilyn did not mention the surveillance, even though it was ongoing. Instead, she leant on the arm of her business manager, Inez Melson and told how her dream of marital bliss had turned into a nightmare of “coldness” and “indifference”. She added, “My husband would get into moods where he wouldn’t speak to me for days at a time – a week, sometimes longer, maybe ten days. If I tried to coax him to talk to me, he wouldn’t answer at all, or he would say, ‘Leave me alone, stop nagging me!’”
Joe, meanwhile, insisted that he still wanted to be friends with Marilyn, though in truth he was verging on the obsessive. On 5 November it came to a head when a private detective tailed her to 754 Kilkea Drive, the apartment block of Sheila Stewart, a friend of Marilyn and ex-student of Schaefer. Bizarrely Joe DiMaggio was tailing the detectives (an amusing fact that they later recorded in their report); determined to catch Marilyn “in the act” with Schaefer, he stormed the apartment, along with the detectives and DiMaggio’s friend, Frank Sinatra.
Aside from the fact that this was a ludicrous and illegal act, it was made even more absurd when it was discovered that the foursome had broken into the wrong apartment – that of Florence Kotz, who later described it as a “night of terror”, adding, “I was terrified. The place was full of men. They were making a lot of noises and lights flashed on. They broke a lot of glasses in the kitchen getting out of there.”
Frank Sinatra later claimed that he had stayed in the car and smoked a cigarette during the proceedings, and when the case went to court in March 1957, Joe DiMaggio backed him up (though Sinatra was not in court himself). Private detective Phil Irwin, however, insisted that Sinatra was an active participant in the raid and had most certainly stormed into Miss Kotz’s apartment that evening.
Active or not, the “Wrong Door Raid” shook every inhabitant of the apartment block, including Marilyn and Hal Schaefer, who were together in the flat upstairs. At the time, both parties denied all knowledge of being in the building, but some fifty years later, Schaefer came clean:
The apartment belonged to an ex-student of mine who had become a friend. She knew about Marilyn and I, and when she went out of town, she gave me the key to the apartment so that we could use it. It was just Marilyn and me in the apartment when the raid took place and Marilyn was terrified. I don’t believe I’d be around today if they’d found me in the apartment. They almost wrecked the building – rammed the door down of the wrong apartment and the woman ended up suing. Marilyn and I managed to get out the back door.
The relationship between Schaefer and Marilyn ended soon afterwards when she moved to New York at the end of 1954. However, despite the fact that DiMaggio had followed her, hired detectives to spy on her and stormed an apartment block to find her, Marilyn was eventually prepared to forgive him. The two remained good friends throughout the years and were seen together to such an extent that reporters started to believe they might get back together again. “Is this a reconciliation?” they asked when the couple were spotted at the theatre. “Just think of it as a visit,” replied Marilyn, though the look on Joe DiMaggio’s face made it clear that he wanted the visit to turn into a permanent arrangement.
Still, Marilyn was adamant that they would not get back together again, with the Wrong Door Raid being more than a little fresh in her mind. She married playwright Arthur Miller in 1956, although when that marriage broke down and she suffered a nervous breakdown, it was DiMaggio who came to her aid. After making The Misfits in 1960, Marilyn was exhausted and, encouraged by her doctor to stay in a hospital for a rest, she agreed, although she had no idea that the hospital to which she was admitted was actually a psychiatric clinic and not somewhere to relax for a few weeks in peace. From the confines of the clinic, she telephoned Joe DiMaggio who turned up and threatened to take the building apart “brick by brick” if they did not release her into his care.
The hospital did indeed release her and the two became firm friends again, with memories of their failed marriage and the Wrong Door Raid fading into the past. There was talk once again about reconciliation but it was not to be. When Marilyn died mysteriously at her Brentwood home on the night of 4–5 August 1962, it was once again Joe DiMaggio who tried to come to her rescue. He may have been too late to stop her death, but he did claim her body and help to organize the private funeral.
The baseball player never stopped loving his ex-wife and for the next twenty years ordered flowers to be delivered to Marilyn’s grave every week. He never remarried, nor did he ever talk publicly about his lost love, preferring to live his last years quietly in Florida, alone with his memories and mementoes of their time together.
Their marriage had been painful; the break-up led to scandal, private detectives, threats, intrusion and a law suit; but his love for Marilyn never ended. When Joe DiMaggio passed away in 1999, his last words were reported to be, “At last I’ll get to see Marilyn . . .”