Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  • • •

  According to an FBI report dated February 15, 1965, Joe DiMaggio offered to pay $25,000 to a pair of unnamed mobsters for a two-minute pornographic film showing a “young” Marilyn Monroe (at nineteen or twenty) performing a sexual act with an unidentified male figure.

  “The report turned out to be accurate,” said Dom DiMaggio. “My brother acquired the film with money that had been given him by one or another of his wealthy buddies. He showed me the film, but I can honestly say I don’t know if it was Marilyn or not. It looked like her, but who knows? I didn’t know her at that age. Given the possibility that it was Marilyn in the film, Joe was taking no chances. He wasn’t about to let her name get dragged through the mud, particularly when she wasn’t able to defend herself. After showing me the film, he got out a pair of scissors and cut it into shreds.”

  • • •

  If Joe DiMaggio hadn’t been as well known as he was—one of the most recognizable men in the country—he could have readily passed for a banker, chief executive officer of a major corporation, or an investment broker. His tall frame impeccably tailored, fingernails manicured, every one of his gray hairs in place, he looked like anything but the son of a struggling, craggy-faced fisherman from “the old country.” Yet the demise of Marilyn Monroe—his Marilyn—had left him joyless.

  “We would be relaxing in the office or in an airport lounge, sometimes in the midst of a conversation,” reported DiMaggio’s attorney and constant companion Morris Engelberg, “when suddenly his head would droop. When I asked him what was the matter, he picked up his head, looked right at me, and said, ‘Don’t you know, Morris, don’t you know?” Even at times when he should have been feeling exhilarated, such as when he was receiving an award or enjoying his family, the sadness would rob him of all pleasure.

  Joe DiMaggio was not a man of complex sensibilities and in fact had a rather dour, literal way of taking in the world. Years later, after DiMaggio died, singer-songwriter Paul Simon reported, in an article he wrote, that when he met Joe DiMaggio for the first time, the two had only one thing to talk about. “What I don’t understand,” Simon quotes DiMaggio as saying, “is why you ask where I’ve gone. I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial, I’m a spokesman for Bowery Savings Bank, and I haven’t gone anywhere.” In fact, Simon was making no attempt to address the metaphorical value of using Joe DiMaggio, whose larger-than-life presence had been in some ways an illusion. Apprearing on The Dick Cavett Show, Simon himself averred that he was actually a bigger fan of Mickey Mantle and had chosen Joe DiMaggio’s name by default only because Mantle’s didn’t have enough syllables.

  The only thing that truly interested Joe after Marilyn’s death was making money. He was very naïve about the process, but he was meticulous about his image, and, luckily for him, Madison Avenue liked it. In 1972 Joe signed on to be the spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank of New York City, and even when the bank was in danger of being seized by the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), Joe’s commanding presence gave them the air of stability and solvency. Nobody was more surprised than Joe was to find that he was good at this spokesperson job. He had always shied away from cameras and had hated anyone invading his privacy, but he learned the scripts that were written for him, and he delivered his lines like he truly believed in the Bowery Bank. Joe seemed to be the perfect gentleman to ask, “Is there anyone who couldn’t use a bundle of cash?” He stayed with the bank until 1992.

  Joe never learned to completely trust his ability to work in front of the camera very much, and when Vincent Marotta, the president of Mr. Coffee, called him, having gotten his number from a mutual friend in Cleveland, to ask Joe to represent the new coffee maker company in 1972, DiMaggio’s impulse was to run away. “I rang Joe up on a Saturday morning,” Marotta told Linda Wertheimer on NPR in 2005. “It was about eleven; I shall never forget this. He answered the phone, and I told him who I was, and, of course, he said, ‘What’s the name of that product?’ And I said, ‘Mr. Coffee. You haven’t heard of it, Mr. DiMaggio, ’cause it’s brand new.’ And he said, ‘Well, I have heard of it. Yes, I was playing in a golf tournament last week. I won one as a prize.’ ” Joe then turned him down flat. The next day, however, Marotta flew to California and called DiMaggio once again. “This time when he answered the phone, he said, ‘Well, hi! How you doing? How’s the weather there?’ He had a whole different attitude.” The two had lunch in San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, and DiMaggio listened, impressing Marotta with his choice of broiled salmon, and when the lunch was over, Marotta said, “He put out his hand and shook hands. He said, ‘I’m going to go with you.’ That was it. And he ended up being with me almost fifteen years.”

  Though Joe was never much of a coffee drinker—because of his ulcer, he preferred tea and Sanka, which was decaffeinated—people believed that he was the owner of the company, and they would come to him with their complaints, in which case he would tell them to write to Marotta’s office. The relationship with Mr. Coffee ended abruptly in 1987, when the company added elements to his contract that he had not approved.

  Not long afterward, DiMaggio was offered a sizable amount of money to lend his name to a chain to be called DiMaggio Cucina Italian restaurants, which one of the owners of Famous Ray’s Pizza planned to open all across North America. According to Morris Engelberg, they made two critical mistakes. First, when they invited Joe in for the meeting, the restaurant was packed with people who obviously expected Joe DiMaggio to be there, and Joe did not like being the unwitting main attraction. The other mistake was not warning the guests to stay away from the subject of Marilyn Monroe.

  One of the pizza-eating guests asked Joe, “How was Marilyn?” and another asked his companion Martha Lee if she was Marilyn Monroe’s daughter. Joe was silent for the entire meeting, and when he left, he was in a deep funk. Even though it would have been very painful for him to turn down the kind of money he had been offered, Joe decided to walk away from the deal altogether.

  In 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake, a quake of 7.1 magnitude, overwhelmed the greater San Francisco and Monterey Bay areas, the largest earthquake to hit the San Francisco area since 1906. The event lasted only about twenty seconds, but it did massive damage that extended into a focal depth of eleven miles (typical focal depths are four to six miles), leaving homes in ruin and even disrupting service on the Oakland Bay Bridge. Joe DiMaggio’s house at 2150 Beach Street was unharmed, but stories circulated about Joe vacating the home carrying garbage bags filled with cash in the amount of some $600,000.

  The slugger had driven his friend Sam Spear’s car to Candlestick Park for a World Series game that day, and he had not made arrangements with the Giants for parking. “So we had to park in the Hunters Point Shipyard dirt lot,” Spear explained. Reporters said that Joe left by limo as soon as there was a rumor of tremors, but Spear corrected that inaccuracy. “We didn’t park in the players’ lot, and Joe didn’t leave in a limo. He left in my Buick.” Says writer Ben Cramer, “As to the six hundred thousand dollars—not true. Joe didn’t have anywhere near that amount of cash, and even if he did, he was very conscious of interest offered by the banks, and that money was important to him. Sam Spear, as far as I know the only eyewitness to the scene, confirmed my suspicions. ‘He didn’t have any bags in his hands. Absolutely not. He was in there only for a few minutes. He was wearing a sport jacket, and if he had any cash, there is just so much room in a pocket.’ ” Even though the house was undamaged, the aftershocks were still threatening, so Joe spent the night at Spear’s home.

  • • •

  Besides money, Joe DiMaggio had only one other passion that eased the pain of living without Marilyn: his work with the South Broward County Memorial Hospital that led to creating the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, where Joe kept the home he had bought for his retirement.

  In 1992, administrators at Memorial were wracking their brains for ways to beef up services and facilities in their 144-bed
children’s wing, when someone suggested that they try to get a celebrity sponsor. Chief executive Frank Sacco came up with Joe DiMaggio’s name. “We asked him because he’s a hero, and he’s here, and we knew he loves children,” Sacco said. “He goes beyond baseball. He’s an American hero.” It went against DiMaggio’s nature to let the hospital use his name. He was, after all, a man who treasured his privacy in an almost obsessive way, and giving them his name would certainly compromise the barrier he had carefully constructed between himself and the public. “He forced himself to endure—sometimes grudgingly—the attention of adoring adults at charity events that helped raise millions for his namesake hospital,” reported Bob LaMendola, health reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. The hospital benefited from Joe’s participation. With Joe DiMaggio on its board, the hospital could all of a sudden raise $600,000 in a single day, $3 million in a year. Sacco said, “He helped the hospital land big donations—up to five hundred thousand—by going to private lunches with prospective donors, even though he didn’t like such affairs.”

  According to LaMendola, right up until the last year of his life, when he was too sick to travel anymore, “DiMaggio made monthly visits to the children’s hospital, stopping at children’s bedsides and bringing bears at Christmas—all without publicity. He rejected the idea of inviting the news media.”

  The hospital remains Joe DiMaggio’s living legacy, and thousands of children have been treated, regardless of their circumstances. The hospital’s credo is a phrase that DiMaggio coined early on. He suggested they adopt as a slogan “Whether rich or poor, no child will ever be turned away.” Today the motto appears above the entrance to the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Wing, in the lobby, in the building elevators, and on all its promotional materials.

  • • •

  Nothing could fill the void that Marilyn’s death had left in the Yankee Clipper’s heart, however, and her absence seemed to cause him more pain as years went on. In 1991 DiMaggio served as grand marshal of the Orange Bowl Parade on New Year’s Eve, and Morris Engelberg accompanied him in the parade. After it was over, around ten at night, Engelberg took DiMaggio out to eat at the Deli Den and then pleaded that Joe come back to his place to ring in the New Year. “It doesn’t mean anything to me,” said DiMaggio. “It’s just another night.” Engelberg drove DiMaggio home and then watched him walk through the lobby of his building, stooped and fragile, displaying his “bad head,” as Engelberg called it, the moody look his friend would get whenever he let Marilyn Monroe into his thoughts.

  As far as Engelberg could tell, Monroe was the one person in life that DiMaggio had truly loved, particularly since DiMaggio had a special fondness for underdogs and blondes but had also created what Buzz Bissinger called, in his 2000 Vanity Fair piece “For Love of Joe DiMaggio,” a “trail of relationships chopped off as if with the stroke of an ever sharpened knife because of distrust, or suspicion, or failure to obey the rules of DiMaggio.”

  Chapter 22

  AS JOE DIMAGGIO AGED, HE became more embittered by the loss of Marilyn Monroe, and he pushed further and further away from the people who wanted to be close to him. As writer David Halberstam once observed, “He lived a very, very lonely life for a long time.” DiMaggio had a definitive mistrust of people, and no one was immune from his scorn, just as no one was assured of lifelong friendship or devotion. Over the years, Joe grew ever warier that his so-called friends were capitalizing on his name and profiting at his expense.

  Through the 1990s, he began frequenting New York again in ways he had not been doing in many years, and he seemed, to some of the people who knew him, to be tiring at least somewhat of Morris Engelberg and was seeking relationships on the East Coast. Other pals speculated that he went to New York to get away from business, and he kept his visits under wraps, staying at the New York apartment of friends Dick and Kathy Burke and frequenting an Irish pub in Atlantic City as much as any restaurant in NYC. He often had lunch with cartoonist Bill Gallo, and Gallo frequently mentioned DiMaggio in his column, which didn’t bother the Clipper because DiMaggio said he could tell Gallo didn’t want anything from him.

  He was bored with Florida and California, and he established a new version of the kind of roundtable he had had at Toots Shor’s years before, this one called the Bat Pack, a group started by his podiatrist Rock G. Positano, who had treated him for a heel spur on his right foot. Writer Elisabeth Bumiller reported that “Dr. Positano strapped up DiMaggio’s foot, fitted him with an arch support, and gradually built a retinue of four or five guys . . . who ate dinner with DiMaggio and reveled in his orbit when the legend visited New York.”

  The rules that Joltin’ Joe imposed on his family and friends were demanding and strict, and any deviation from them would lead to suspension of all communication. Perhaps because he came late to Joe’s life, Positano remained close to Joe to the end, and the podiatrist was more than willing to adhere to DiMaggio’s rules of conduct. On one occasion, Positano arrived for dinner with Joe and his granddaughters, Kathie and Paula, at Coco Pazzo in the city, wearing a cashmere shirt and blazer, which constituted a violation of the Clipper’s commandments on proper attire in the presence of women. When the young women excused themselves to go to the bathroom, Joe instructed Positano to excuse himself as soon as they returned; Rock was to say that he had received an emergency call, and then he should go to his office, where he could don a proper shirt and tie before he returned. Aware that failure to do so would mean expulsion from the inner circle, Positano did just what he was told, and when he reappeared at the restaurant, Joe announced, “Okay. Now we can have dinner.”

  Positano understood how hard a friend needed to work just to remain friends with Joe. “He was one of the warmest, sincerest people you’ll ever meet in your life,” Positano said, “but it wasn’t easy being part of Joe’s inner circle. There was always a tremendous responsibility and stress, because so few were allowed in. You couldn’t even bring a friend to dinner without clearing it with Joe first.” The worst offense anyone could commit was the mention of Marilyn Monroe. “Nobody mentioned Marilyn,” said his friend Gene Schoor, the journalist who wrote a definitive biography about Yogi Berra. “If they did, they were dead from then on. Period.”

  After DiMaggio’s death in 1999, Rock Positano was the person that Morris Engelberg, as executor of DiMaggio’s will, entrusted with the task of organizing a memorial service in New York.

  The entire DiMaggio clan had always seemed close, but there were seeds of discord even in their youth, and the parents’ deaths (Giuseppe’s in 1949, and Rosalie’s in 1951) marked the beginning of a shift in loyalties, after which there was less and less incentive to keep sibling relationships intact as time went on. The oldest DiMaggio brother, Tom, told a reporter before Marilyn’s death that while he might not be rich or well known, he felt sure that Joe was jealous of what he did have, which included a satisfying life with his wife and children.

  Everyone in the family, especially Joe, was truly devastated by the death of brother Michael, a tragedy that facilitated Joe’s decision to marry MM, but it did nothing to shore up the relationships Joe had with his siblings. Joe played alongside Vince and Dom on the San Francisco Seals baseball team, but he soon surpassed both the younger and the older brother and became a star. Vince was content to stay with San Francisco and was also convinced that he was far more fortunate than Joe would ever be because of his happy family. Dom, who played for the Boston Red Sox for many years, always found that his famous brother perpetually overshadowed him, but he learned to live with it. Joe, however, never entirely trusted that Dom wasn’t jealous or forever trying to get something from him.

  When Joe DiMaggio lived in San Francisco after MM’s death, he lived with his sister Marie in a house he had bought for his parents while he was playing for the Yankees. Marie kept house and did basic bookkeeping for him, signing checks for his corporation and opening his mail. Morris Engelberg remembered her as “one of the sweetest, sweetest ladies I had ev
er met.” Most of the time, he said, “she would be sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.” At some point, Joe suspected that she was stealing from him items that he had been given as gifts. He stripped her of her bookkeeping duties and instructed Engelberg to cut her out of his will, even though she was already in her eighties. When she died in 1996, DiMaggio did not even attend her funeral. One day Engelberg visited Joe and asked casually, “How’s Marie doing?” “She died a couple months ago,” DiMaggio replied tonelessly. Engelberg searched his friend’s face for some sign of emotion but found none.

  Vince moved away, and the situation between Joe and Dom became increasingly combative. They would go months without exchanging a word, stabbing each other with cold silences, and no one knew why. Dom would show up for games or at dinners where he knew Joe was sure to be, and Joe surmised that Dom was trying to steal the spotlight, and that would set him off. Dom was better with money than Joe was, amassing a fortune in what appeared to Joe to be a ridiculously easy manner. He sold the building where the family restaurant had once been, for example, and made a fortune, and his every investment seemed to pay off in the biggest possible way. Joe was clearly angered by his little brother’s success and resented it openly.