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 h
e 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.”
Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love Page 20