In a seven-page letter that Marilyn addressed to Dr. Ralph Greenson on March 2, 1961, she described the harrowing experience in all too graphic detail, including her failed efforts to get out. For hours she had begged them to release her. She had stripped naked and stood in the middle of the room screaming. They threatened to put her in a straitjacket. She went into the bathroom and turned on the water faucet and let it run until she’d created a flood. They entered her room and locked the bathroom door, at which point Marilyn reportedly picked up a chair and slammed it against the bathroom mirror. As she explained in her letter to Greenson, “If they were going to treat me like a nut, I’ll act like a nut.” She then threatened to do herself harm, which, she is reported to have said, “is the furthest thing from my mind . . . since you know . . . I’m an actress and would never intentionally mark or mar myself. I’m just that vain.”
When an earlier broken-glass suicide attempt failed to elicit the desired reaction, Marilyn went on a hunger strike; she began to eat only after they advised her that if she didn’t eat, they would have to give her intraveneous nourishment. When she refused to bathe, she was carried face-up into a shower room and was hosed down, after which she was made to sit in a bathtub. She cursed the nurses when they tried to force her to go to occupational therapy. When she again insisted they release her from the hospital, they informed her that only Dr. Kris could sign her out.
Unable to reach Kris by phone (she was permitted one call per day), she decided to write to Lee and Paula Strasberg: “Dr. Kris has had me put into the New York hospital . . . under the care of two idiot doctors. They both should not be my doctors . . . I’m locked up with all these poor nutty people. I’m sure to end up a nut if I stay in this nightmare, please help me, Lee, this is the last place I should be . . . I love you both. Marilyn. P.S. . . . I’m on the dangerous floor! It’s like a cell.”
As with Dr. Kris, Marilyn couldn’t reach the Strasbergs by telephone. And probably for good reason: as she eventually learned, it had been Lee who’d first suggested to Dr. Kris that Marilyn, “for her own good,” be sent to Payne Whitney for observation. When she finally learned of the Strasbergs’ involvement in the “plot” to put her away, Marilyn accused them (in her words) of “treason and treachery.”
On her third day at Payne Whitney, Marilyn asked the nurse to place a long-distance call to Joe DiMaggio in Florida. Nearly hysterical, Marilyn implored Joe to help her get out. He promised to be there the following day.
At six in the evening on Friday, February 10, Joe DiMaggio stood in front of the nurses’ station on the sixth floor of the hospital and asked to see his wife. A nurse’s aide recalled the occasion: “I immediately recognized Mr. DiMaggio,” she said. “He was a tall, handsome, imposing figure in a double-breasted dark blue suit, French-cuffed shirt, hand-painted tie, spit-polished shoes, and a designer overcoat on his arm. He was powerful-looking, with streaks of gray in his dark hair. I wondered how he’d gained access to the floor, since it was a locked ward. I soon found out. I went and located the head nurse, and she asked him how he’d gotten in. ‘I was let in by the chief of security for the hospital,’ he responded. ‘We’re buddies. He used to work security at Yankee Stadium.’ Then he repeated his request regarding Marilyn Monroe. She’d registered under a different name, but we all knew her true identity. The head nurse balked. She stated that the only person who had jurisdiction over Miss Monroe was Dr. Kris, her psychiatrist. In a very low, controlled but threatening voice, DiMaggio said to her, ‘I’ll give you five minutes to get her out here, or I’ll tear this fucking place apart brick by brick.’ So the nurse went and brought back Marilyn Monroe. ‘Now get me everything she had on when she checked in,’ ordered DiMaggio. The nurse said she would, but if he wanted her released, they needed Dr. Kris’s signature. He gave her Dr. Kris’s phone number. She answered. It seems DiMaggio had already spoken to her, because she said she’d be right over to sign the papers. DiMaggio told the nurse he’d send Dr. Kris upstairs when she arrived but, in the interim, he and Marilyn would wait in the lobby. Marilyn changed into her street clothes, and they left.”
Realizing that Dr. Kris’s signature would be required, DiMaggio had made prior arrangements with Ralph Roberts to pick up the psychiatrist by car and drive her to the hospital. Roberts remembered how upset Kris seemed on the way over: “She was crying. ‘I did a terrible thing,’ she said. ‘My God, I didn’t mean to, but I did. I should never have listened to Lee Strasberg.’ She must have repeated this mantra a dozen times. When we arrived at Payne Whitney, she went to sign the papers. Joe told Marilyn he’d head back to his suite at the Hotel Lexington and then join her later that night in her apartment. When Kris returned, she began apologizing to Marilyn, but the damage had been done. Marilyn screamed at her in the car, threatened to sue her for malpractice, and told her she was done. She was like a hurricane. After that night, Marilyn never saw or spoke to Dr. Kris again.”
Joe DiMaggio understood that, whatever Marilyn’s condition before her hospitalization, she remained extremely upset, all the more so given her treatment at Payne Whitney. She agreed to enter a hospital in a more comfortable and less menacing setting, provided she could leave without having to go through a middleman and provided Joe be listed as her caretaker. In addition, DiMaggio promised to fly in from Florida to visit her whenever he had a day off. At five o’clock on February 11, having made arrangements through the team physician of the New York Yankees, Joe accompanied Marilyn to the Neurological Institute of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where she remained without incident for three weeks, until March 5. DiMaggio visited her on a half dozen separate occasions, flying in twice a week.
“Joe DiMaggio remained convinced that Marilyn’s career was slowly killing her,” said Ralph Roberts. “I tended to agree.”
• • •
In many respects Joe DiMaggio appeared to be a changed man, perhaps due to his limited exposure to psychotherapy but more likely the result of his realization that if he didn’t alter his personality, he and Marilyn could never work out their differences. He seemed more tender, gentle, and patient with her, less prone to fits of jealousy and anger, more understanding. They were closer now—and nicer to each other—than they’d ever been. He apparently told her that if he’d been married to his former self, he too would have sought a divorce. When he visited from St. Petersburg, they sat in her room at Columbia-Presbyterian and had long, heartfelt conversations—mostly the actress talking and the ballplayer listening. Marilyn introduced him to the doctors and nurses at Columbia-Presbyterian as “my hero—the man who rescued me from that utter hellhole.”
By middle age, about to turn forty-seven, DiMaggio had changed in other respects as well. Because of his ulcers, which came and went, he cut back on his cigarette habit and indulgence in alcohol, limiting himself to a half pack a day and a couple of glasses of beer at dinner. He’d taken to drinking tea instead of coffee and had given up rich desserts. He was more generous when it came to money. When Marilyn told him she’d overdrawn her checking account at Irving Trust by $7,000, he generously covered it for her. Although never a simple man, he still had simple tastes. As one of his pals put it, “Give Joe a cup of tea and turn on the TV set, and he’s a happy man.” For this reason, if for no other, the relationship with Marilyn didn’t—and probably couldn’t—work full-time. It was his growing awareness that this was the case, and his gradual acceptance of that fact, that imbued their current bond with an intimacy it had previously lacked.
The day that Marilyn walked out of Columbia-Presbyterian, Joe invited her to join him at the Yankee spring training camp in Florida. Even among the veteran Yankee players, it became known that Joe had undergone a certain metamorphosis. “I always regarded DiMaggio as a haughty, imperious type of guy,” said Mickey Mantle. “He struck me as somebody who just didn’t like people, who wanted to be left alone, and who was above it all. That’s not to say he wasn’t one of the greatest ballplayers of all time, but he certainly w
asn’t one of the warmest. But in 1961, for whatever reason, he seemed different. He’d stick around and eat dinner with the young guys on the team. He’d give them tips. He’d give the old guys tips as well. He’d tell stories. He’d invite players for breakfast. He began to socialize. Then he disappeared for a while. We heard Marilyn Monroe came to visit him, and he wanted to spend time with her.”
Joe and Marilyn occupied separate but adjoining rooftop suites at the oceanfront Tides Hotel and Bath Club, in the quiet and peaceful, predominantly residential town of North Redington Beach, Florida. They rested, swam, fished, walked along the beach at sunset, collected seashells, biked, dined alone, and attended several Yankees spring training games together. It was like a second honeymoon but without the wedding ceremony.
Mercifully, the press didn’t know where to find them and the Yankee front office wasn’t talking. Sports Illustrated ran a photo of Marilyn ogling Joe (wearing his old number 5) as he hit fly balls to prospective outfielders, but that was the extent of the press coverage. One morning as they sat on the beach at North Redington—Marilyn in a loose-fitting white dress, sunglasses and a large floppy hat—they were spotted by a group of tourists, one of whom approached and asked Monroe for her autograph. “Leave the lady alone,” snapped Joe, a seeming reversion to his former possessive self, for which he later apologized to Marilyn, explaining that he was merely “trying to preserve her privacy.”
They spent several days in Gainesville, where Marilyn visited with her half sister Berniece Miracle and Berniece’s daughter, Mona Rae. Marilyn borrowed Joe’s car one afternoon and drove to Miami Beach to see Isidore Miller. On April 11, back in New York, she sat next to Joe DiMaggio in the press box on opening day at Yankee Stadium. The pregame ceremony included Jane Morgan singing “The Second Time Around,” which Bob Hope introduced by dedicating it to “Joe and Marilyn.” At the end of the game, Yankees coowner Dan Topping hugged Marilyn and handed her a baseball signed by the entire team. A few months later, she sent the ball to Joe DiMaggio Jr., who subsequently sold it to a sports memorabilia shop for $400.
“After busting out of Yale,” said Joey, “I did the dumbest thing I’ve probably ever done. I moved to San Francisco and married a girl I barely knew. We eloped. It lasted a month. I then moved to my mother’s house in LA, and within a couple of weeks, I racked up a six-hundred-dollar phone bill. So I gave her the money from the sale of the baseball and split. I moved in with a guy named Tom Law, who earned a living of sorts as an extra in the movies. He got me a job working at his uncle’s rug factory in Santa Monica, which ended when a crane veered off course and gouged a large hole in my leg. After it healed, I joined the marines. I figured the armed forces were probably more interesting and less dangerous than working in a rug factory.”
In 1994 Berniece Miracle (with daughter Mona Rae Miracle) coauthored My Sister Marilyn, recalling (among other episodes) a stay with her half sister in New York in late April. The visit had been arranged when Marilyn spent time with Berniece in Gainesville, Florida. When Berniece came to New York, Marilyn paid to have her hair styled by Kenneth and bought her a new wardrobe. Joe DiMaggio squired Gladys Baker’s two daughters around town, taking them to lunch at Serendipity (he drove them there but didn’t go in) and provided them with theater tickets. Berniece, who was modest and down-to-earth, had fond memories of DiMaggio. In her Marilyn memoir, she described him as “unpretentious” and “full of common sense and concern for Marilyn.” Joe was equally impressed with Berniece. Before her departure, he gave her an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of himself in a Yankees uniform, which he inscribed: “To Marilyn’s lovely sister Berniece—whose pleasant company was appreciated, Joe DiMaggio.”
Lena Pepitone recalled that Joe and Marilyn spent a good deal of time together during April and the beginning of May. They would stay either at her apartment or in his suite at the Hotel Lexington, a few blocks away. “Arthur Miller had removed some furniture from the apartment,” said Pepitone, “and you could see stains all over the white carpeting where his dog had peed or pooped. Joe hired a carpet cleaner and went furniture shopping with Marilyn to replace what Miller had taken out. I thought they might be preparing to live together again. Then one night they had an argument. Joe found a discarded grocery bill in the trash. He added it up and discovered that the store had charged Marilyn nearly twice what she should have paid. ‘Why don’t you look the bills over before you pay them?’ he scolded her. Marilyn grabbed the bill out of his hand. ‘It’s none of your business,’ she growled. ‘It’s my money, not yours.’ That’s how it started. It ended with Joe giving Marilyn a bit of a shove as he rushed past her out the door in a burst of anger.”
They soon had words again, this time over the surprise arrival at Marilyn’s apartment of a white French poodle puppy, a gift from Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio’s onetime pal. Marilyn referred to Sinatra alternately as “Frankie” or “Francis.” So why, DiMaggio demanded to know, had Frankie or Francis delivered a puppy to Marilyn’s door? He realized that Sinatra and Monroe knew each other, but he didn’t know the extent of their friendship. Most of Hollywood’s leading actresses, particularly the more attractive ones, had at some point crossed paths with Sinatra. But how many of them were the recipients of small, cuddly puppies? Why the dog? Why now? It made no sense. Joe pressed her for an answer, until she finally offered him one. It sounded all too familiar.
“It’s none of your business, Joe,” she said. “You and I are no longer married. I don’t have to answer to you.”
And he said: “You never did answer to me, even when we were married. You did what you wanted to do, and that was probably part of the problem.”
Marilyn Monroe once named Frank Sinatra one of the two most fascinating men she’d ever known, the other being Marlon Brando. The legendary entertainer first met the legendary actress before she married Joe DiMaggio. He’d been cast opposite her in the ill-fated Girl in Pink Tights. Reportedly, Marilyn had sought refuge in Sinatra’s Coldwater Canyon home for a day or two immediately following her divorce from DiMaggio. Although still involved with Hal Schaefer, Monroe had evidently indulged in a brief romp with Sinatra. And then there had been the scandalous Wrong Door Raid in which DiMaggio, aided by Sinatra, attempted to catch Marilyn “in the act” with Schaefer. Neither DiMaggio nor Schaefer had the slightest inkling that the target of the raid was also involved with one of its chief perpetrators. “I had no idea that Marilyn and Frank Sinatra were lovers,” said Hal Schaefer.
In the mid-1950s, at the height of Marilyn’s New York period, she and Sinatra had continued to see each other occasionally. Once, when Sinatra performed at the Copa in New York, Marilyn arrived unexpectedly with Milton and Amy Greene, only to be told that without reservations they couldn’t get in. Sinatra spotted Marilyn and instructed a waiter to set up an extra table at the foot of the stage. To the amazement of the Greenes, he proceeded to sing the entire set directly to Marilyn. Their affair resumed after Monroe’s divorce from Arthur Miller. Lena Pepitone admitted that on at least one occasion Sinatra had spent the night with Marilyn in her New York apartment. “I served them dinner at night and breakfast in the morning,” she said, “and this was one day after Joe DiMaggio had slept over.”
Sinatra’s gift to Marilyn of a cute little puppy told Joe DiMaggio everything he needed to know, or almost everthing: he wasn’t the only Italian American in Marilyn’s life, though he may well have been the only one that truly loved her. But there wasn’t much he could do or say. After all, as Marilyn had conveniently pointed out, they were no longer husband and wife. The elation Joe experienced after publicly resuming their relationship quickly turned into confusion. In reality, Sinatra was only part of the story. The other part—Marilyn’s involvement with John F. Kennedy, the newly elected president of the United States—represented a chapter that seemed almost fictional.
In what must surely be considered an intricate juggling act, Marilyn somehow managed to compartmentalize and yet combine her trio of lovers. D
iMaggio, Sinatra, and Kennedy had Marilyn in common. She stayed with JFK at the Carlyle during one of his periodic trips to New York, finding him “strong yet fragile.” As for Sinatra’s gift, Marilyn named the poodle “Maf” (or “Maaf-Honey”) because of the crooner’s purported Mafia connections. To spite Arthur Miller, Marilyn let Maf sleep on an expensive white beaver coat that the playwright had given her as a birthday present.
If Joe DiMaggio resented Marilyn’s reluctance to be with him on an exclusive basis, he tried not to show it. He saw her whenever she seemed willing to see him and otherwise busied himself socially with one or another of a long list of standbys, his favorite being Phyllis McGuire, if only because she was already spoken for and therefore couldn’t object to his ongoing pursuit of Monroe. In fact, McGuire’s beau, Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, coincidentally a friend of Sinatra’s, called Joe and invited him for a round of golf. “Giancana soon became a regular golf partner,” said Paul Baer. “They made for an odd twosome, particularly because Joe would occasionally spend time with Phyllis, Giancana’s girlfriend, and the arrangement didn’t seem to bother Sam.”
Evidently not the possessive type, Giancana had a second girlfriend, Judith Campbell, a former Las Vegas showgirl whom Frank Sinatra had introduced to Jack Kennedy in 1960. Like Marilyn Monroe, Campbell attended the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles that summer and continued her relationship with JFK after he entered the White House. Not only did Giancana know about Campbell’s affair with the president, but he encouraged it. Campbell became a glorified courier, carrying messages back and forth between Giancana and Kennedy, Kennedy and Giancana. To add to the intrigue and make matters even more complicated, Judith Campbell was likewise sexually involved with Frank Sinatra and now, thanks to Giancana, with Joe DiMaggio. It all made for an unholy alliance, with Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe at the center of what would become an interlocking circle of tragedy and misfortune. “It’s difficult to believe,” said Peter Lawford, “that JFK and Marilyn Monroe would soon both be dead.”
Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love Page 31