Joe DiMaggio

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Joe DiMaggio Page 9

by Jerome Charyn


  But it didn’t happen quite that way. Marilyn was mobbed, and he was not. While he conducted a baseball clinic, Marilyn entertained troops in Korea, visited 113,000 soldiers and Marines on ten little sorties through murderous mountainous terrain. As Maury Allen tells it:

  She . . . was thrilled as pictures of her were flashed around the world. Joe was sullen when she returned.

  “Joe, Joe,” she exclaimed, “you’ve never heard such cheering!”

  “Yes, I have,” Joe said quietly.1

  And we’re meant to chortle at Marilyn’s naïveté. After all, she never once saw him roam center field and never heard the roar of seventy thousand fans after he walloped a home run against the Red Sox. Marilyn’s words are a rueful reminder of what the Jolter has lost, that adulation of the crowd, the whispered hush whenever he appeared in the batter’s box. But they’re also Marilyn’s subtle war cry, her coming-of-age in regard to Joe. Perhaps for the first time she had found her audience.

  In an early draft of her “invented” autobiography, written by Ben Hecht, we can still find a glimmer of truth as she talks about singing to seventeen thousand soldiers on a windy mountaintop in her stiletto heels and lavender sheath of a dress:

  I’ve always been frightened by an audience—any audience. My stomach pounds, my head gets dizzy and I’m sure my voice has left me.

  But standing in the snowfall facing these yelling soldiers, I felt for the first time in my life no fear of anything. I felt only happy.2

  2.

  The “honeymoon” would be a disaster for Joe, the beginning and end of his marriage, as he was jolted into recognition that his wife was a bigger star than he had ever been. His illusions were stripped from him the moment he got off the plane in Japan—or rather, couldn’t get off the plane, since it was held hostage by a phalanx of Marilyn’s fans. The Japanese had gone ape over Niagara, with its femme fatale in the red dress, and Marilyn was known throughout Japan as “The Honorable Buttocks-Swinging Madam,” while DiMag himself was little more than “Mr. Marilyn Monroe.”

  They couldn’t even escape Marilyn’s fans at the Imperial Hotel until she appeared on her balcony and blew kisses at them, “like I was a dictator or something.”3

  Marilyn had the time of her life in Korea. She vamped about as Lorelei Lee, sang “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” to soldiers in the remotest of camps, and said, “I’ll never forget my honeymoon—with the 45th Division.”4

  It’s Norman Mailer who realized that there was a robber bridegroom sitting right on top of DiMaggio’s back—and it wasn’t the 45th Division. “I’m going to marry Arthur Miller,” she confided to Sidney Skolsky less than two months after her wedding. She’d already had terrific fights with DiMaggio upon returning to Japan from the cold of Korea. She caught pneumonia and had to camp out at the Imperial. He would have jealous fits every time a bellboy looked at her and he barred them all from the DiMaggio suite. Joe DiMaggio, the Jolter, that cunning man who combed his hair a hundred times a day, wore a spotless white shirt, could protect his own myth from intruders but couldn’t control his wife: his marriage had become a battleground, with Marilyn like a general who marshaled all her artillery, all her troops. Her will was much fiercer than his, he soon learned, even if she hid it behind her blondness.5

  Things only got worse. He’d helped Marilyn in her fight with Zanuck, had encouraged her not to capitulate, but in Tokyo he’d been little more than an appendage who fumed and finally became a nuisance.

  There are photographs of her taken by Milton Greene around this time that reveal such a startling intimacy—and sensual pleasure—that it is difficult not to think of them as lovers. Certainly Marilyn’s mind wasn’t on Joe DiMaggio, who could no longer help her career. Lorelei Lee had made her the biggest star on the planet, and thank God she was back at work. Zanuck had thrown her into There’s No Business Like Show Business, a musical comedy with Marilyn as a sexpot who disappears inside the decor. It was, she said, “a stupid part in a stupid picture.”6

  But it got her out of the house. She and the Slugger had rented a cottage on North Palm Drive, in Beverly Hills, high above Hollywood. Marilyn, the illegitimate little girl whose father remained a mystery to her, now lived among the stars. But it was of little solace to her. She spent most of her time at Twentieth Century–Fox in Dressing Room M—a little palace with Queen Anne chairs—on the ground floor of the beige stucco Star Building. She inherited her new quarters from Betty Grable, who had lost her crown as queen of the lot. And Marilyn had to wonder about her own career as she looked into the dressing room’s multitude of mirrors.

  She kept up a good front. “Joe and I want a lot of little DiMaggios,” she told reporters, while she plotted the best way to dump him. She had little free time to flirt, but she cuckolded him as often as she could, had a fling with her handsome voice coach, Hal Schaefer. And the Jolter hired detectives and thugs to follow Schaefer and threaten him. He had nothing better to do. It was the lowest point in his life, far worse than any slump. The Yanks had won the pennant without him in ’52 and ’53. Mantle was now the heart of the team at the age of twenty-two. Joe sat like a monk in front of the television set, watching old Westerns and waiting for Marilyn to come home from the Star Building without once realizing that North Palm Drive was a way station to her and that he, her famous husband, was little more than a transient who happened to share her bed.7

  “He didn’t like actors kissing me, and he didn’t like my costumes. He didn’t like anything about my movies, and he hated all my clothes. When I told him I had to dress the way I did, that it was part of my job, he said I should quit that job. But who did he think he was marrying when he was marrying me?” Marilyn would lament in a letter to Milton Greene.8

  He had no insights into her nature. Marilyn was too complex a creature for him, too various, too volatile, and unlike Dorothy, she couldn’t be tamed. He should have run to San Francisco in that Cadillac of his, with the license plate “JOE D,” but he was lost. He sat still, Marilyn so deep in his blood that it was like a malignant fever. Nothing in his limited landscape could calibrate La Monroe. He couldn’t find a workable quotient for her. He had a desperate need to simplify. Long walks with Toots could no longer soothe him. Nothing could. He never realized that Tootsie’s Table One was only a subterfuge. The male company of nightclubs and saloons couldn’t protect him against the whirlwind of Marilyn Monroe.

  3.

  He visited her on the set, frowned at her flimsy costume, and she was so perturbed that she tripped over the wiring and nearly broke her neck. She’d begun to take all kinds of pills and would stumble around in the midst of filming a scene. Hal Schaefer had to walk her “like an overheated horse” until she woke up. Nobody could understand that she had become a sleepwalker in her own marriage.9

  In August she ran to New York to do location shots for her next film, Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. But she couldn’t escape from the Jolter. He followed her after four days and moved into her eleventh-floor suite at the St. Regis. New York was his town, after all. At least here he could sit with his cronies at Table One, dodge autograph hounds. But Marilyn had already captured New York, stolen it away from him without even trying. The town had eyes for her and her alone. According to one of Fox’s publicists: “The Russians could have invaded Manhattan, and nobody would have taken notice.”10

  And so the Jolter sat and sulked, either at Table One or the King Cole bar at the St. Regis. He told his chum Jimmy Cannon about his days and nights with Marilyn, who worked like a dog, he said, “up at five or six in the morning and doesn’t get through until seven at night. We eat dinner, watch a little television, and go to bed.”11

  It sounded like the description of a morgue. He never understood that he was describing the hollows of his own life, not Marilyn’s. She came alive when she was without the Jolter—and she felt particularly alive on the streets of New York, in all the hurly-burly of shooting a scene, with reporters and a big crowd mingling behind th
e barricades or watching her from the roofs. She stood in her high heels on a subway grating, her legs otherwise bare, and a wind machine hidden under the grate drove Marilyn’s dress right up to her earrings, while a hundred photographers clicked away at her crotch. “A dark patch of pubic hair was visible through two pairs of sheer white nylon panties,” wrote Barbara Leaming.12

  Who could have dreamt that a little stunt with a wind machine would create such a stir? That picture of Marilyn outside the Trans-Lux, smiling at half the world in her high heels, soon became one of the most celebrated icons of the twentieth century and catapulted her beyond the reach of all the moguls in movieland, with an innocent, joyful carnality. But perhaps it wasn’t innocent at all. Perhaps the joy she expressed was the joy of being away from Joe, and the power she had to luxuriate in her own body, under the gaze of an adoring crowd. It was like her “honeymoon” with the 45th Division, a respite from marriage. Marilyn loved to be naked, felt soothed without the restraint of clothes—the different personalities that any costume imposed upon her—and here, with her dress billowing, she was as naked as she could get in front of other people.

  But she never realized that she was also performing for Joe, that he was in the crowd, watching her with his own sense of doom that could eat away her joy. Gossip columnist Walter Winchell had seen his chance to goad DiMaggio, had pulled him out of his lair at the St. Regis and propelled him right into the crowd of Marilyn watchers. Joe was bewildered. He had “the look of death” on his face, according to Billy Wilder.13

  Filled with rage, forlorn, he stumbled into Toots’ saloon and told Toots what had happened, that he’d just seen his wife do a striptease right on Lexington Avenue. Then he returned to the hotel and slapped around his wife in a “famous fight” that woke up the entire eleventh floor at the St. Regis. “Joe was very, very mad with her,” recalled Gladys Whitten, Marilyn’s hairdresser, “and he beat her up a little bit. There were bruises on her shoulders, but we covered them with makeup.”14

  4.

  It didn’t matter how contrite he was. Joe was in the doghouse and remained there. Back at Beverly Hills, he was banished from Marilyn’s bed and had to sleep downstairs on the couch. She would file for divorce within three weeks. They had not even been married nine months. Twentieth Century–Fox was alerted, and “the studio cavalry rode onto the scene.” Poor Joe never had a chance; he couldn’t get to see Marilyn; she’d moved onto the lot, slept in the Star Building, and Joe wasn’t allowed near the studio. Zanuck was careful about Joe and his status as an American prince, but he couldn’t have him “slugging Fox’s number one asset.”15

  The studio helped her hire Jerry Geisler, movieland’s most prominent criminal lawyer, who would defend Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner’s teenage daughter, after she stabbed to death Lana’s longtime mobster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato. Geisler had become a sort of house lawyer to the studio and its stars. But Joe DiMaggio wasn’t Johhny Stompanato, and Geisler realized soon enough that he would have to tread lightly around the Yankee Clipper if he didn’t want to damage Marilyn’s reputation. Like the best Hollywood director, he staged a press conference in early October outside Marilyn’s cottage, dressed her all in black, as the widow of her own marriage, and talked about the conflict of careers and “this regrettable necessity” of divorce. Every step was choreographed. The bereaved bride would stumble once; Geisler would clutch Marilyn and steer her to his car, while she dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and said, “I’m so sorry.”16

  And who was there to choreograph the Jolter? He would follow her into restaurants and make a scene. The waiters were embarrassed for the Big Guy. How the hell could they throw him out? It got even worse. He became an actor in his own pathetic comedy that was like an imitation of the Keystone Kops. He’d hired a detective to follow Marilyn around; he was always hiring detectives, had had his first wife watched while he was in the army. But this time he had an accomplice, Frank Sinatra, his old buddy from Table One. Both of them, accompanied by a pair of sleuths, burst into a building where they thought Marilyn was hiding with Hal Schaefer. But the sleuths had gone into the wrong apartment, and Marilyn got away with Hal.

  Hadn’t Sinatra had his own crazy romance with Ava Gardner? He was either kissing or killing her. He and the Daig were a pair of Old World charmers, with their fiefdom over women and all the privileges of male company at Table One, where women weren’t really welcome unless they looked like Ava Gardner or Marilyn Monroe. The Boy with the Golden Tonsils could also be a bit of a psychopath, beating up men or women (often without much reason) and boasting of his mob connections. Perhaps his combination of tenderness and cruelty helped make him America’s number one troubadour. But DiMag didn’t have golden tonsils. He could barely sing his own name. He had an old-fashioned sense of honor that Sinatra never had, was a relic even before he retired. It’s hard to believe that he couldn’t have hated himself at this moment, even if he had little power of reflection. He had loved a woman, loved her to death, and all he had to show was the battered-down door of some stupid apartment. He was far from the magic garden in center field where he had roamed with such assurance. He was forty years old and breaking down. The man with a world of dignity in his swing, who looked like a maestro whether he hit a homer or struck out, suddenly seemed to have no dignity at all.

  EIGHT

  “Bigger Than the Statue of Liberty”

  1.

  He survived on will alone, morphed into a demon lover who fit himself somehow into the contours of Marilyn’s life. It wasn’t easy. He would stalk her when she moved to New York in 1955, wait in the alleys outside her apartment at the Waldorf, pound on her door, and suffer in silence when she announced to half the world that Arthur Miller was the only man she had ever loved. But his concentration wasn’t shot. The Jolter leapt onto a new center field, a much more difficult and dangerous terrain where he risked his own sanity, with few people to cheer him in the stands—there were no stands surrounding this center field, and he had to bump up against his shadow, make himself available when Marilyn wanted him or needed him, and disappear (or pretend to disappear) when she didn’t. He’d become friendly with a ubiquitous Washington lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, whom he had met at Toots Shor’s in 1950 or ’51 and who counted among his clients Mafia don Frank Costello, Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner, Sinatra, and the Democratic National Committee. The Jolter would often spend Christmas with Williams at his palatial Washington home, where Williams felt Joe’s agony over Marilyn. “Joe carries a torch bigger than the statue of Liberty. It has not lessened through the years. He was crazy about her.”1

  Even with that torch, he still went to the fights with Williams, Toots, and sometimes Ernest Hemingway. The crowds wouldn’t leave him alone, while Hemingway often went unrecognized until one fan noticed him and his white beard and said, “Hey, you’re somebody, ain’cha?” And Hemingway answered without a blink, “Yeah, I’m his doctor.”2

  But having Papa play his court jester couldn’t have lessened DiMaggio’s pain. It wasn’t like that time with his first wife when he wanted to win her back. His epic battles with Dorothy might bring on a batting slump or feed his ulcer, but she couldn’t haunt him the way Marilyn could. Dorothy had never crawled into his blood. Marilyn had broken through his wall of invincibility, that aloofness of the Yankee Clipper. Her talent for being alone was as great as his. He was a wanderer and she was a waif. And perhaps for the first time he saw himself in her, saw his own brooding silence in the strange mirror of her face, as if she were the private witch of Joe DiMaggio, who could work her magic on him and had little need of his fame.

  He couldn’t defend himself against this blond witch—she’d arouse him and bedevil him until he had no guard against her, and suddenly he wasn’t the Jolter any more, wasn’t the great DiMaggio but some suitor inside a country he’d never gone into before, his very own being, the widest and most mysterious of all center fields. And he, who’d never been humbled, even with a .263 batting average during his
last year in baseball, even with Stengel against him and Mantle hovering behind him, had held onto his own myth until Marilyn came along and robbed DiMag of all he had ever had when she dumped him, turned him into a national joke:

  DiMaggio Loses Final Game to Hollywood Goddess;

  DiMaggio Run Out of Romanoff’s

  It was as if baseball itself, and all the precious metaphors that had sustained him so long, had betrayed the Big Guy. The language of baseball, with its hops and twists, the one language he had ever mastered, was now being used to ridicule him. It hurt the Yankee Clipper, but he didn’t withdraw. He went right inside the whirlwind with Marilyn Monroe, to be with her as best he could.

  2.

  She turned her back on Hollywood, ran from her own fame in ’55. She arrived in Manhattan as an anonymous creature, known as Zelda Zonk, without a hint of makeup and wearing dark glasses and a scarf to hide her blond hair. She enrolled at the Actors Studio, studied with Lee Strasberg, the great angry rabbi of Method Acting, whose nose bled all the time out of his ferocious hatred (and fear) of Hollywood. Of course the Actors Studio saw through her disguise, and its acolytes were immediately jealous of all the attention Strasberg gave her. Elia Kazan, Strasberg’s own rival at the Studio (who’d fallen out of favor after he ratted on his fellow actors in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee to preserve his own skin as a Hollywood director), said that Strasberg was an opportunist who saw his chance to latch onto Marilyn’s fame. But it’s not as simple as that. She needed the angry rabbi and the little nest he gave to her at the Studio as much as the rabbi needed her.

 

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