Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book)

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  Still, he couldn’t understand—or walk away. Sidney Skolsky was terrified to receive a summons to Joe’s room at the Knickerbocker Hotel. Sidney told his wife, Estelle, as she dropped him off for the interview: “If I get hit over the head with a bat . . . you know where you delivered me.”

  But as Skolsky wrote in his memoir, Joe didn’t have any rage left in him: “It was about noon when I entered Joe’s room. He pointed toward the bed and asked me to sit down on the edge of it. He drew his chair up close to me.

  “ ‘You know everything. 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, 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.

  “ ‘Can I give you a ride anywhere?’ he offered, knowing I couldn’t drive.

  “I told him I had to go to my office at Twentieth Century Fox. Joe drove me there. Later I went on the set of The Seven Year Itch but didn’t tell Marilyn about my meeting with Joe.”

  A couple of days before the court date, Brad Dexter walked into a restaurant called the Villa Capri for dinner with Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was already at a table, with a private detective named Barney Ruditsky, and Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio immediately apologized for his suspicion of Dexter the first time they’d met. (“Jesus Christ, I’m sorry about the other night. I didn’t know who you were or what sort of guy you were . . .”) Sinatra said to Dexter: “You gotta help Joe out.” He explained that Marilyn was sleeping in her dressing room on the Fox lot, and Joe couldn’t even get a call through to her. They’d dreamed up a scheme where Dexter would drive through the studio gates, with DiMaggio under a blanket in the back seat. Dexter didn’t think much of the idea. But Joe was pleading, almost in tears: “I’d just like to talk to her . . .”

  So Dexter walked into the kitchen of the restaurant (where, he knew, there was a wall phone), and called the Fox lot. He got Marilyn on the phone right away. “I said, ‘Marilyn, I’m here at the Villa Capri with Sinatra and Joe, and he’s a pretty unhappy guy. He’d like very much to talk to you.’ And she said, ‘Brad, I really don’t care to talk to him.’ I said, ‘Well, if that’s your desire . . . ’ ” Dexter went back to the table, and told DiMaggio, he couldn’t help.

  So, two days later, Marilyn told a Santa Monica court (and the world) that Joe DiMaggio’s cruel indifference had driven her to divorce. “Your honor,” she told the judge, “my husband would get in moods where he wouldn’t speak to me for five to seven days at a time—sometimes longer, ten days. I would ask him what was wrong. He wouldn’t answer, or he would say, ‘Stop nagging me!’ I was permitted to have visitors three times . . . on one occasion, it was when I was sick. Then, he did allow someone to come and see me.”

  She told the court she had offered to give up her work—but even that didn’t help. “I hoped to have out of my marriage love, warmth, affection and understanding. But the relationship was mostly one of coldness and indifference.”

  Inez Melson was called to corroborate: “Mr. DiMaggio was very indifferent and not concerned with Mrs. DiMaggio’s happiness,” she testified. “I have seen him push her away and tell her not to bother him.”

  After eight minutes, Judge Orlando H. Rhodes granted Marilyn her interlocutory decree. Her divorce would be final in one year. From San Francisco City Hall to that courtroom in Santa Monica, the famous marriage had lasted two hundred and eighty-six days.

  AND THEN, STRANGELY, things got easier—at least for her. She knew she could always call on Joe when she needed something, or someone. Ten days after her appearance in divorce court, Marilyn was admitted to the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital for a gynecological operation. (She was diagnosed with endometriosis.) So, Joe DiMaggio drove her to the hospital, sat and held her hand, filled her room with roses, and (at her request) talked to the newsmen who had invaded the lobby.

  Three months after she testified to Joe’s cruel indifference, Marilyn had to go from New York to Boston to talk to a potential investor in Marilyn Monroe Productions. So, Joe drove her to Boston, and took her to stay at brother Dom’s house. (That was easy for her, though not necessarily for the Dominic DiMaggio family. One of Dom’s sons reported to a playmate that things were kinda tight around the house. “Aunt Marilyn never comes out of the bathroom!”)

  And eight months after her date in divorce court—on her twenty-ninth birthday, June 1, 1955—Marilyn had no one to squire her to the New York premiere of The Seven Year Itch. (Her boyfriend at the time was both famous and married—which made him unsuitable for duty as an escort.) So Joe DiMaggio put on a headwaiter’s suit and bravely walked her up the red carpet, into the Loew’s State Theater (where, of course, he’d be treated to a replay of the subway grating scene). Joe also knew that after a premiere, there should be a party. So he took her to Toots Shor’s, where the boys at the bar sang a rousing chorus of “Happy Birthday to You.”

  But it wasn’t ever easy for Joe. Not when he was with her—and never when he wasn’t. And when he thought she was with someone else . . . well, watch out for DiMag. Just a few days after the divorce, for example, Joe was once again in the Villa Capri with Sinatra and some of Frank’s cronies. That’s when Barney Ruditsky, the detective, called to say that his man who was tailing Marilyn had tracked her to an apartment house in West Hollywood. Ruditsky was working for Sinatra. He had a man keeping tabs on Marilyn as a favor from Sinat to DiMag . . . . If there was one man in the country who understood DiMaggio—understood what it was to be a Dago poor-boy who was (all of a sudden, the very next day) the toast of the nation and the target of a million eyes—that was Sinatra. Frank also understood how it was with Joe and broads. Frank had his own too similar troubles with Ava Gardner. His jealousy about her almost killed him—and maybe it still would, if he didn’t kill her first.

  So, when Ruditsky called the Villa Capri to say that Marilyn was holed up in an apartment at Waring Avenue and Kilkea Drive, Sinatra and Joe were on their way in a hurry. Frank was trying to calm Joe down. The landlady would later testify that she saw Sinatra and DiMaggio arguing outside the apartment house. At about eleven-fifteen P.M., everybody in the building heard a splintering crash, as Sinatra’s men broke down the door to one apartment. The noise was most fearsome for Mrs. Florence Kotz, a fifty-year-old woman who was asleep, alone, in that apartment. When the door crashed down, strange men rushed in, taking pictures, shooting off flashbulbs—but their pictures would only show Mrs. Kotz sitting up in bed, clutching her bedclothes about her, her mouth open to loose an ear-splitting scream . . . . Meanwhile, through a door just a few yards away, Marilyn Monroe and Hal Schaefer left the apartment of the actress Sheila Stuart (another of Schaefer’s clients)—and they got away clean.

  Everybody almost got away clean. The cops wrote it up as an attempted burglary—and so did the papers. Mrs. Kotz brought suit for $200,000 against Sinatra and DiMaggio—but Sinatra’s attorney, Mickey Rudin, worked out a quiet settlement for $7,500. The “Wrong-Door Raid” only came to light two years later, in a Confidential Magazine exposé. After that, a committee of the California State Senate launched an investigation, forcing Sinatra and the detectives to testify. Joe DiMaggio never had to tell his story. He sent a note of regret to the members of the Senate committee—he was, alas, unable to attend their hearings—and stayed in New York, or out of the country, out of the range of their subpoenas.

  By that time, D
iMaggio was hard for anybody to find. He spent a lot of time overseas. When he came to New York, he’d slip in quietly. He could always stay (just as quietly) in Georgie Solotaire’s suite—which had moved to the Hotel Madison, and then the Mayflower. (Later, Joe got a deal of his own to keep a place at the Hotel Lexington.) But he was very seldom seen around town—even at Shor’s. He didn’t like to go out to eat—his ulcers were killing him. He looked thin, and haggard around the eyes. (Like a man under pressure—but what was he doing?) . . . And he’d never stay for long.

  By that time, Joe had resumed his habitual rhythm of itinerancy, that was the life in which he’d come of age—a few days, maybe a week, at some home base, and then a pal would have to drive him to the airport: he was on his way to some other town, to some date, an appearance, or a golf tournament—some payday for being Joe DiMaggio . . . where another subnetwork of pals would spring to alert, to take care of the Clipper. The old Chicago Bears quarterback Sid Luckman (and his friends) would host DiMag, drive him around, and entertain him in Miami Beach. Eddie Liberatore, a scout for the Dodger organization, took care of everything for Joe in Philadelphia; Sam Brody, a clothing manufacturer, ran an arm of the network out of Chicago; a couple of mob-connected fixers, Harry Hall and Sugar Brown, would take care of anything Joe needed in Los Angeles; across the country—and across the great legal divide—Joe’s lawyer and friend (an old Toots Shor pal), Edward Bennett Williams, was his host in Washington. But even at Williams’s commodious home, Joe wouldn’t be at ease for long. It seemed like he couldn’t stay anywhere—and New York was the worst.

  By that time, New York was Marilyn’s town—she had made her great escape . . . and announced that New York would be her home ever after. With her photographer friend, Milton Greene, she had formed Marilyn Monroe Productions . . . and she had brought Twentieth Century Fox to its knees. Now she was the highest paid actress in the world—a hundred thousand dollars per picture!—with a new seven-year contract that only required four pictures for Fox, and guaranteed her control of script, director, cinematographer, choreographer, drama coach, singing coach, costumes, makeup man, and hairstylist. Still, most of the time, she preferred to stay at the small apartment rented by Marilyn Monroe Productions, just off Park Avenue, in the Waldorf Towers.

  (The door of that building was often staked out by the rabid members of her local fan club. And the most rabid of them—a boy named Jimmy Haspiel—used to stand on that street for hours, just for a glimpse of her. Sometimes, Haspiel would notice another lurker—across the street, in the shadow of an entryway . . . there was Joe DiMaggio, also watching that door.)

  By that time, Marilyn had been adopted by New York (as she never had been in Los Angeles). She had taken up studies with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio—in fact, she had become Strasberg’s most famous pupil, his personal project, his frequent houseguest, and a favorite among his circle of acquaintance—actors, directors, and playwrights . . . one playwright in particular.

  By that time, late 1956, Joe had watched, with the rest of the nation, as the celebrated dramatist Arthur Miller blew up the latest congressional commie-hunt . . . by asking for the return of his passport, so he could travel to London with Marilyn Monroe—“to be with the woman who will then be my wife.”

  Edward Bennett Williams recalled for Maury Allen, in Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? . . . “I was with Joe when Arthur Miller was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Joe and Marilyn had been divorced but, of course, Joe was still carrying the torch.

  “ . . . Marilyn volunteered to testify for Miller at the hearings. She got up before the committee, defended Miller vigorously, and said, ‘Arthur Miller is the only man I ever loved.’ I knew that would hit Joe like a brick wall. I figured he would cancel our dinner date that evening. He didn’t. He went straight ahead with it and never said a word about Marilyn all night.”

  EVERYBODY IN THE network knew, you couldn’t bring her name up, or the Clipper would be gone—maybe gone for good. It seemed like Joe was always walking out in those days, like there was nowhere that was his—and he was drinking pretty hard, too. Didn’t do any good for his ulcers. Didn’t do much good for his mood, either. He liked a guy to stay with him, belt for belt. But you couldn’t get sloppy and say something wrong. It wasn’t just her name you couldn’t bring up—but things about her . . . and how were you supposed to know?

  Roses, for example, could set Joe off. One time, a pal told the Clipper—this didn’t have anything to do with broads, it was about a stupid dinner in Cleveland—anyway, the pal says, “Joe, sometimes, you oughta just smell the roses.” And DiMaggio goes nasty, his face gets dark, he says: “What the fuck do you know about roses?”

  Movie stars—it was better not to talk about them. You never knew when you’d step on a mine. Clark Gable: how’re you supposed to know, Marilyn loved Clark Gable? She dreamed her father looked like Gable. Or Brando—bad name. Marilyn’s picture was in the papers with Brando, and they were in the columns. (“MM, Marlon ‘That Way’ It Sez Here . . .”)

  That was part of the problem. She was always in the papers. Marilyn turns Jewish to marry Arthur Miller, that’s in the papers. They go to England, they’re back from England, they get an apartment, she shows up at his play . . . there’s always something. Chrissake, she’s on the cover of Time magazine. How’s the Dago supposed to forget her? Sometimes you couldn’t even mention the names of the papers. That would start Joe thinking, what they said about her—or about him. Some headline had burned into him from the time when she dumped him: “The Clipper Strikes Out” . . . “Joe Out at Home!” . . . They made him a public joke. And any mention of that paper now could bring back his shame.

  It wasn’t like he didn’t have honor. Nobody wrote bad about him now—anything but. When they put him into the Hall of Fame, the papers wrote about him as the All-Time Great—maybe the best ever. He was a legend. (But after that one time he went to Cooperstown to get his plaque, he hardly ever went back.) He’d show up, once a year, for Old-Timers’ Day at the Stadium, and people treated him like God. They’d always introduce him last, and the fans would go crazy. And the papers were filled with the memories of him—all the writers wanted to interview him. He could have been in the papers every day, if he wanted. (When Hemingway put Joe in that old fisherman book, they wrote about people writing about him!) . . . But Joe didn’t seem to want any of it—or said he didn’t. He’d give a laugh like a snort, and say it was time for him to get out of town.

  A lot of times, he got into the papers with some girl. In those years, that was his reputation—the big lover—like something sexy from Marilyn had rubbed onto him. Or maybe the papers were just in the habit of writing his love life—he was such big news with Marilyn, they didn’t want to miss out on the next chapter. But there was something to the reputation, because in those years, more than ever, women just fell all over him. That was partly about Marilyn, too. Every female of a certain age in America had wondered what it would be like to be Marilyn Monroe. (A lot of ’em were willing to try it for a night.) But it was something about Joe, too—because he was so publicly, famously hurt . . . it gave him a softer edge, a vulnerability, that drew women in, like bears to honey—a lot of volunteers to fix his broken heart.

  For instance, there was one girl—Lola Mason—she wasn’t half Joe’s age. She was, at that time, one of many girls in New York who wanted to get into show business. But she wasn’t really tough enough to make it in that racket. So she ended up working in nightclubs, and publicity. She was just a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl, with soft blond hair and a soft sweet voice. Anyway, she was dancing one night at El Morocco, and the friend who took her (a male friend, but not a boyfriend) was asking why a lovely girl like her didn’t have a steady man in her life. And she told him—she remembers—that the only man she really wanted to date was Joe DiMaggio . . . though she’d never met him, he was just the ideal man. Anyway, they finished a dance, sat down at their table—and wh
o’s at the next table? DiMag. And he was just as she’d imagined, so distinguished (with a bit of gray in his hair), handsome and quiet, courtly and perfect. He was there with the former Miss America, Lee Meriwether—but he wasn’t with Lee for long. Lola he was with, on and off (whenever he cared to call), for the next five years. Of course, that didn’t make much hay in the papers. Lola wasn’t in it for her own publicity . . . and Joe never stuck with the ones who made the papers.

  The dates that made ink were with girls who were names themselves—a lot of Miss Americas. Lee Meriwether was a perfect example. She was Miss California (in fact, she came from San Francisco), and then was crowned Miss America of 1955. She had just given up her title—she had crowned the next queen and had become (as the ladies of the Pageant say) “a former”—when she and her mother went back to Atlantic City to visit Lee’s brother, who was working in a hotel. They were at the front desk of that hotel when they saw Joe DiMaggio. It was Lee’s mother who started talking to him: “I don’t know if you remember my husband, but he used to come into your brother’s restaurant.” Joe couldn’t have been nicer—it was possible he remembered Mr. Meriwether, but it was certain that Mr. Meriwether’s daughter was on Joe’s radar screen. He invited the whole family to dinner. But as it turned out, Lee’s brother had to work, and her mother got too much sun on the Boardwalk. So Lee and Joe went out to dinner that Saturday night—as only a former would point out—“unchaperoned.”

  Joe took her to the 500 Club, which was the mob’s best nightclub and headquarters in Atlantic City. “I’ve got to be interviewed there,” Joe explained. “Is that all right?” (Of course, it was.) . . . Joe was going to be a guest on the radio show that was broadcast from the 500 Club—as a matter of promotion. He agreed to the interview as a favor to Paul “Skinny” D’Amato, who ran the 500 Club and its hyper-profitable backroom gambling—high stakes for big players. (Skinny was very close to Joe’s old pal from Newark, Longy Zwillman.) . . . And for his part, Skinny would show himself appreciative of Joe’s favor—by doing Joe the favor of handing him a grand or two, in cash.