Joe DiMaggio

by Jerome Charyn

  His fate wasn’t that different from the Bambino’s; it just had prettier wrappings. He was a high-paid shill, a greeter in a white shirt, as useless as the Babe had been. Mantle and Willie Mays would follow in their footsteps, would become greeters at casinos after they retired, shills who would be tossed into oblivion, banned from representing organized baseball because of their association with gamblers. The Jolter also associated with gamblers and hoods, but he was a little more discreet, or hidden, as he always was. Richard Ben Cramer swears that Frank Costello set up a trust fund for DiMaggio at the Bowery Savings Bank, whereby nightclubs such as El Morocco or the Copa put a few hundred dollars into the till every time the Jolter made an appearance. Mob bosses in East Harlem and the Bronx “weren’t at all shocked when Joe hung up his spikes. . . . They knew he didn’t need the money—never would. As they said around their own kitchen tables, Joe DiMaggio didn’t walk away from a hundred grand. He was walking into more than a million in cash—all safe and sound, at the Bowery.”2

  But it wasn’t about money. The money was just a smoke screen. Cramer seems to think that baseball was always a business for DiMaggio, from the very first time he swung a bat for some mom-and-pop team in San Francisco, that he was looking for big bucks. I don’t agree. His greed, his stinginess, his obsession about more and more money was like a constant heartburn, a disease. He was driven by pride, and money was the means of soothing him, of covering up that need never to make a mistake, to live in his own narrow world of perfection.

  Unlike Mantle and Mays, he was never footloose on the field. He was the keeper of his own legend, choreographing every move. He was the first Bomber to take batting practice before a game and the last to trot onto the field, so that every spectator would be staring at him.

  But he was a worrier, with ulcers, and worriers never win. He might have played another year, might have recaptured his swing, but he let Casey Stengel and the Mick drive him out of baseball. Mantle would spook him for the rest of his life—the Mick’s growing fame, the injuries he suffered that were like some devotional or Stations of the Cross for his fans, the home runs, the monkey-shines, the way he would leer at women in the box seats on his route to the dugout, the hysteria in the stands that he might hurt himself again. Fans had revered the Jolter, but they couldn’t love him: he was too perfect, too remote, too much like a god. The Mick was a mortal with magic powers.

  The Jolter couldn’t seem to shake him. He was always introduced last at every event, and once, at the Stadium, right after the Mick’s own retirement, Mantle was introduced after DiMaggio, and the roar from the crowd was greater and longer than it had been for Joe, and he brooded for a whole year about it. When the autograph craze began, he would burn if a ball signed by the Mick brought in more than one signed by him.

  It was the childish rage of a man who might have narrowed himself to invisibility—even while his grizzled pate and Pinocchio nose were recognized everywhere—if an accident hadn’t happened to him. The accident was Marilyn Monroe.

  2.

  Of course, it was no accident on her part. She was much more calculating than the Big Guy. He loved showgirls and starlets, particularly if they were blond and didn’t talk much. He was Joltin’ Joe, the most famous retiree in America, and she couldn’t have cared less. But she did agree to go on a “blind date” with DiMag. It was sometime in the spring of 1952. The Jolter didn’t say a word all evening. He sat in his perfect polka-dot tie, and half of Hollywood came over to pay homage to him. And he didn’t even realize that he was a moth trapped in Marilyn’s powerful, multicolored flame.

  She required a perfect prince, the Gary Cooper of baseball, an authentic American hero to smother all the flak she was getting from the recent revelation that she had posed in the nude several years ago, and that these pics that kept popping up in calendars could wreck her career. She’d also advertised herself as an orphan, and then Marilyn’s mother resurfaced, a refugee from a madhouse, and it looked as if this cruel girl had abandoned her. And so the starlet who had appeared in small but memorable roles in two of the finest films of 1950, The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, and hopped from soundstage to soundstage in 1951, was suddenly a slut and a heartless daughter.

  Enter Joe DiMaggio, by Marilyn’s own design. Her friend and protector, columnist Sidney Skolsky, a runt who had his own office at Schwab’s mythic drugstore on Sunset Boulevard (where the biggest deals were made over an egg salad sandwich at the counter), had realized like a thunderclap that no one but DiMaggio could rescue this drowning girl. And he did. Skolsky wrote about the “big blind date” in his column and planted stories wherever he could. A romance seemed to be brewing, and there were pictures of them in all the tabloids. Soon they were seen everywhere, but it still makes me suspicious. Tales abound of DiMaggio’s monumental lovemaking, that he could satisfy Marilyn the way no other man had ever done, could hit home runs in the sack, as she once told Truman Capote. But we also know that she slept with other men, including Elia Kazan, while she was sleeping with the Jolter, and that she was crazily in love with Arthur Miller, whom she had met at a party in 1951.

  “It was like running into a tree,” she confided to her acting coach, Natasha Lytess, about meeting Miller. “You know—like a cool drink when you’ve got a fever. You see my toe—this toe? Well, he sat and held my toe and we looked into each other’s eyes almost all evening.” Miller was the most successful playwright in America, a dour, puritanical man. “It must have been like a scent of perfume in a prison cell,” Mailer would say about the owlish Miller, who fled Hollywood and returned to his wife, without even kissing Marilyn.3

  But so what? Clutching her toe could give an erotic charge greater than any kiss. She had been kissed by a hundred men, fondled, passed around from producer to producer on the party circuit like every other Hollywood starlet. “Well, that’s the last cock I suck,” she supposedly said to her lawyer after she signed her first big contract. And even if it’s an apocryphal tale, it could be true. And so she dreamed of marrying the Owl one day, of becoming the second Mrs. Arthur Miller, with a real home rather than a hotel suite or a Hollywood bungalow.4

  But she had a romance with Joe DiMaggio nonetheless. “He wooed her sweetly,” or as sweetly as he knew how. He would come on like a house on fire, rage if she showed the least bit of cleavage to any man but him. She would flee from her “Slugger,” as she called him, and he would chase after her as if he were still roaming the caverns of center field. The Jolter wore her out. He had all the concentration and consistency of a man in the middle of a batting streak.5

  But soon there was a whole continent between them. The baseball season started, and he had to return to New York for the Joe DiMaggio Show under the Yankee dugout. He hated every minute of it. He’d become a collection of cue cards. He had to sweat under the lights and ruin his best shirt and tie. He’d call her every night, and if she wasn’t there, he would fume. But she was coming east that summer to do location shots for Henry Hathaway’s Niagara (1953), the film that would finally make her a star. She plays Rose Loomis, a femme fatale in a red dress who plots to murder her husband with the help of her most recent lover. She’s a woman without mercy, wearing lipstick that’s like a red wound. We see her lying naked under a lavender sheet or else we watch her behind bump along beneath the red dress. Most critics prefer her as the funny, mellow vamp, Lorelei Lee, in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, where she reveals her charm as a gold digger who never really digs too hard. But I do not. Rose Loomis may be a cartoon with a one-dimensional fury, but we’ve never seen this kind of displacement before, as if the schizophrenia lurking under the performance is her own. “We must live two lives whenever we think of her one life,” according to Mailer, or at least look for our own second skin if we want to inhabit whatever persona she has on and off the screen.6

  She’s meek and brazen, “a doe at large in blonde and lovely human form,” but with a rage as deep as DiMaggio’s, deeper even, since so much of his rage comes
from naïveté and narrowness. He’s never quite learned how to negotiate with the world beyond his own parameters in center field. He cannot, or will not, read the complexities around him. He does not want to venture very far—New York is Tootsie’s, and San Francisco is the family restaurant. There’s little in between. He’s frustrated when the world intrudes upon his simple rules and primitive beliefs: women are either housewives or whores. And his own mad quest is to turn Marilyn into a housewife. For the Jolter, there are enemies all over the place, with grudges that he holds forever, or names that he scratches out of his personal phone book.7

  Marilyn’s rage is different. She’d been manhandled, made fun of, treated like a bimbo and a sexual freak who had to get down on her knees to rapacious men with a terrific talent to exploit and humiliate her. And if we consider her for a moment as a female version of Jekyll and Hyde, where she isn’t the respectable Dr. Jekyll, or the monstrous libido bottled inside him, but a shivering and shy starlet, a near-waif who had to invent herself from nothing, without much education or inner resources, but with a rage almost as large as her ability to hallucinate upon a screen, an anger against those who had tried to annihilate her, to prey upon her with their own sexual fantasies and favors—and Hollywood was the land of predator producers, directors, actors, and agents—then Rose Loomis is Marilyn’s means of counterattack.

  One of those predators was Elia Kazan, who felt that every starlet in Hollywood was fair game. He’d sleep with Marilyn and pass her on to a friend, had even tried to give her away to Marlon Brando on the set of Viva Zapata! according to one of Marilyn’s biographers, Barbara Leaming. But he was no fool about Marilyn. “She had a bomb inside her,” he said. “Ignite her and she exploded.” Still, he was blind to her power on the screen, convinced she was no more than “a charming light comedienne,” and dumped her when it was convenient. “Marilyn was what she was, a delightful companion. A delightful companion is a delightful companion, not a wife.”8

  He pokes fun at her regard for Joe DiMaggio. In bed with Kazan for the last time, Marilyn confesses that her Slugger “comes all the way down from San Francisco, and we haven’t even done it yet! . . . He wants to marry me, and I really like him. He’s not like these movie people. He’s dignified.” And Kazan gives her his little poisoned kiss-off: We made love; congratulations and farewell.9

  3.

  The Jolter did want to marry her. He asked her all the time, certain that she would quit Hollywood and give up making films. But he couldn’t really read Marilyn Monroe. She was a girl who lived within the crazy dance of a mirror, whose sense of worth came from the flickering light of a screen. She risked as much of herself on the movie-house wall as the Jolter had risked in center field, but he never saw it. Still, he was drawn to her fractured beauty. She had, as Mailer suggests, “a species of vulnerability that all who love her will try to describe, a stillness in the center of her mood, an animal’s calm at the heart of shyness, as if her fate is trapped like a tethered deer.”10

  She was much more elusive than Dorothy had ever been; he could capture “Dottie,” but not this tethered deer. He pursued her in his own fashion: “She’d shy from the pressure of his grasp . . . and he’d come on, to woo her, care for her, convince her,” according to Cramer. And when the pressure became too great and she couldn’t breathe, Marilyn would run from him again. But all this hustle and bustle with the Jolter didn’t hurt her career. She’d never received as much attention as she did with Joe DiMaggio. Her studio, Twentieth Century–Fox, was quick to cash in on this romance. It would seize like contraband every picture of Joe visiting Marilyn on the lot, exorcize whoever else was in the photo, and present the ex-ballplayer and his blonde as the royal couple of the decade: the crown prince of baseball and the future queen of Twentieth Century–Fox.11

  The publicity department at Fox had a real coup; Marilyn and Joe were now American royalty and they weren’t even man and wife; it seemed as if half the planet worshiped them. And when she abandoned the set of Niagara for a weekend in the summer of ’52, flew down from Buffalo to be with her Slugger in his Yankee domain, Marilyn was overwhelmed: the Yankees and New York had adopted her in a single day. The Jolter’s pregame show was mobbed from the moment she appeared at the Stadium. “A lot of guys used to hang around that studio just to see her,” remembered Phil Rizzuto. “She was really gorgeous. She’d sit in the stands before the games and talk to some of the players.” Then he’d whisk her off to Table One, the little hermitage where Toots Shor wouldn’t allow intruders. “Joe’s a very proud and dignified guy, and he didn’t like all the men looking at her. Joe is a jealous guy. But I think there is one main point to remember about Joe and Marilyn. Joe loved her.”12

  But not even love was enough. The whole city and its tabloids took pride in the fact that its very own Clipper “had sallied forth from his Manhattan cave and clubbed to (radiantly happy) submission this golden girl of Hollywood.” Radiant she was and also sick to death of baseball talk and the Jolter’s friends, those “strange, loud, adoring men” at Toots’ saloon. He didn’t seem to have any friends far from Table One or the Yankee clubhouse. And he wouldn’t take her dancing, fearful as he was that someone might peek down her dress, or rub a little too close to Marilyn. High culture held little appeal. He wouldn’t escort her to the theater or a museum, and would rave like a lunatic whenever she wanted to venture out on her own. “He’s very sweet and kind,” she confessed to a friend. “And very much a gentleman. But sometimes he’s so boring I could scream. All he knows and talks about is baseball.”13

  She’d already had a bit of a fling with fashion photographer Milton Greene, a handsome gnome of a man who dressed all in black and looked a little like Peter Lorre. He shared a secret ambition with Marilyn—to have their own production company where she would not be at the mercy of Hollywood moguls such as Darryl Zanuck, who hated Marilyn but now saw her as a valuable “asset” whom he could exploit at will, lend out to another studio and reap all the profit. If she weren’t tied to Zanuck and Twentieth Century–Fox, she could select her scripts and own a piece of every film she made. But it was a fanciful dream in 1952. With Joe at her side, she might have been the princess of Yankee Stadium, but no audience could see her as a femme fatale in a red dress until Niagara was released in 1953. She would have to wait.

  And wait she did. She would have two other films released in 1953—Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire—where she played “The Girl,” a dizzy blonde with a babyish voice that would soon become her signature. Next Zanuck decided to throw her into a Western, River of No Return, directed by Otto Preminger; she feuded with him right away. Preminger told her to speak in the kittenish voice of Lorelei Lee, and when she wouldn’t, he called her a whore in front of the entire crew. She became murderous on the set, and the bighearted saloon girl she’s supposed to be in the film has the perverse, icy warmth of dislocation: she’s utterly absent from the screen.

  Now Zanuck put her in another musical, The Girl in Pink Tights, a remake of an old Betty Grable vehicle about a schoolmarm who becomes a singing sensation. Grable had already been discarded by Twentieth Century–Fox, and Marilyn didn’t want to dance and sing as Betty Grable’s ghost. She refused the role, and Zanuck had her suspended without pay and all the privileges of a star. He was willing to ruin his biggest asset. The same publicity machine that had helped create Marilyn was now prepared to destroy her. Fox’s publicists planted stories with the two potent witches of Hollywood, gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, who called Marilyn unstable and hinted that she was a whore. It would have worked had Marilyn not dropped a bombshell on Hedda and Louella and the whole apparatus at Twentieth Century–Fox.

  She was her own relentless publicity machine. She’d been hiding out in San Francisco with DiMaggio while the two witches tore into La Monroe. No one at Fox could find her. It was on January 14, 1954, when she called Fox’s chief publicist to tell him she was at San Francisco’s City Hall and would be ma
rrying the Jolter within an hour.

  She had made Zanuck and most of Hollywood look very small. “From the day of their marriage, she [would] become the leading female character in that great American movie which runs in serial each day in the newspapers of the world,” according to Mailer. Zanuck had no choice. Marilyn had outmaneuvered him. He lifted the suspension. How could he snub the prince of baseball and his bride and not wish them well? Suddenly Marilyn had become a bigger asset than he had ever imagined.14

  SEVEN

  Mr. Marilyn Monroe

  1.

  How can we explain what happened next? Marilyn captured him in the whirlwind of her persona—with all its porous, vulnerable masks—and he never quite recovered. There’s one little anecdote that’s repeated in every book about DiMaggio and Marilyn. I’ll steal it from Maury Allen’s Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? We all know some little piece of the tale. The Jolter, always a practical man, was scheduled to leave on a baseball junket that January with Lefty O’Doul, his former manager on the San Francisco Seals who had remained a friend, and he decided to take his bride along and turn the junket into an extended honeymoon. It was a colossal miscalculation, but he couldn’t have known. He’d been on a previous junket to Japan, where he was treated as a baseball god and called DiMaggio-san, and was sent on a goodwill mission to Korea (near the end of 1950); he visited hospitals and had lunch with General Douglas MacArthur. And now he was returning to Japan, still the prince of baseball, retired or not, and the legitimate heir to Babe Ruth, or Bay-ba Ru-tu. He expected much the same adulation and was willing to share some of it with his bride.