Joe DiMaggio

by Jerome Charyn

  Still, Hollywood began to poke fun of Marilyn and her desire to become a stage actress; the moguls and their publicity machines said that she was slumming at the Actors Studio—the blonde who wanted to play Dostoyevsky’s Grushenka should have been dreaming about Lorelei Lee. Even Billy Wilder, the one director who seemed to understand the seriousness of her comic art, warned her against Grushenka. “Marilyn, don’t play that part. Everybody’s making jokes about it. You have created a great character. Stay with the character you’ve created. You’ll be an actress and a star like Mae West. Eighty years old, you’ll be playing lead parts with the character you created.”3

  But she didn’t want to be Mae West or Lorelei Lee and The Girl in The Seven Year Itch. She had spent her whole career cultivating that image of the dumb blonde. And now she would have her sabbatical year in Manhattan, far from the studios. “If I close my eyes, and picture L.A., all I can see is one big varicose vein,” she told Truman Capote.4

  At least for a little while, she would shed the mask of a movie star, that monster known as Marilyn. She would meet Capote and Carson McCullers, attend parties with Marlene Dietrich and that reclusive nun Greta Garbo, have a brief affair with Marlon Brando, start her own production company with Milton Greene, talk about theater with Tennessee Williams. She could enter into Manhattan’s fabric the way she never could with Joe, who had hidden her away at Yankee Stadium or at Toots Shor’s with its coterie of leering men. In this other Manhattan, said Barbara Leaming, where she danced with Capote and attended classes at the Actors Studio, Marilyn was “electric with life.”5

  And it was where she bumped into Arthur Miller, whom she had not seen since January 1951. It would be like the continuation of a long fairy tale. They had their own little romance on the sly, since the Owl was still a married man. Unlike DiMaggio, who could talk about baseball as if it were poetry but had little insight into anything else, Miller comprehended the subtle savagery of Marilyn’s contradictions and wants. “She had no common sense, but what she did have was something holier, a long-reaching vision of what she herself was only fitfully aware: humans were all need, all wound.”6

  But Marilyn couldn’t flaunt her married prince in public. So DiMaggio was plucked out of the wings to play Arthur Miller’s beard, who could escort Marilyn to the premiere of The Seven Year Itch at the Loew’s State Theater on her birthday, June 1, 1955. Joe was obliged to walk right under a forty-foot sign of Marilyn on the subway grate, where she showed her white panties to the world. He must have been miserable all night. He threw a surprise birthday party for her at Toots Shor’s right after the premiere. But how happy could she have been among Joe’s comrades at Shor’s saloon, amid the stink of beer and baseball? She had a fight with Joe, stormed out of her own surprise party. A photographer friend, Sam Shaw, had to take her back to the Waldorf Towers. “He loved her beyond anybody’s comprehension,” Shaw believed. It was after the night of the premiere that DiMaggio could be seen lurking in the shadows outside the Waldorf.7

  Lois Weber Smith was Marilyn’s press agent at the time and recalled Marilyn’s difficulties with Joe while she was still at the Waldorf. Smith happened to call Marilyn once and could hear “this pounding noise” in the background. “[Marilyn] didn’t refer to the noise for a while, but she could tell by my voice that it puzzled me. Finally she said, ‘Oh, that’s Joe banging on the door outside.’”8

  3.

  It seemed as if Joe might be banging on that same door for the rest of his life. “I am sure Marilyn was afraid of him, physically afraid. She said Joe had a bad temper,” according to Smith. But I’m not sure how much Marilyn was afraid of him by 1955. She had learned to weave around his temper tantrums and to have her own curious dance with the Jolter. He was her sometime squire and dinner companion who was capable of following her in the street. But Marilyn had something else on her mind—marriage to Arthur Miller. Miller’s wife had already kicked him out of the house and he’d gone off to Reno to get a divorce. Joe had been shunted aside in America’s imagination; Marilyn and her long-legged Owl, Arthur Miller, would soon become the nation’s number one couple. The moguls at Fox panicked when the House Un-American Activities Committee, trying to feed off the romance, prepared to flay Miller alive over his former affiliation with the Communist Party. But Marilyn wouldn’t cave in to the moguls. “Some of those bastards in Hollywood wanted me to drop Arthur. Said it would ruin my career. They’re born cowards and want you to be like them.”9

  Marilyn married Arthur Miller on June 29, 1956, converted to Judaism for the ceremony, and taught herself how to make gefilte fish, while Joe grew more and more obsessed with Marilyn as he fell completely out of her life. He was drinking heavily now and became a kind of predator who ran after Marilyn impersonators after having been “so publicly, famously hurt.” He would wander from town to town, take in every single Marilyn Monroe act across the country, sleep with these impersonators as often as he could.10

  Listen to Liz Renay, a burlesque star who had won the Marilyn Monroe Look-Alike contest sponsored by Twentieth Century–Fox and had written a memoir, My First 2,000 Men. “There were wild bed scenes” with the Jolter, “who kept trying to get glimpses of his Marilyn by looking at me.” She had at least a dozen liaisons with Joe, particularly at his Mayflower Hotel suite. And when he grew sick of Marilyn lookalikes, he would go out on drunken dates with former or current Miss Americas, and once he was “so stinko” he sat on a public staircase at a Parisian hotel with Miss America of 1951, his pants unbuckled and “his member lying exposed upon his leg.”11

  That had become the world according to DiMaggio. He was no more than a common shill at “Skinny” D’Amato’s 500 Club, the mob’s headquarters in Atlantic City. He would appear with some Marilyn lookalike or Miss America on his arm, while people gulped at his pointy nose and the rest of him gone gaunt, and Skinny, grateful to share a bit of DiMaggio’s glamour, shoved “a grand or two” into his pocket.12

  “Golf had become his passion,” according to Maury Allen. The Big Guy was bored to death. And when the nightclub circuit began to sicken him, he found a job in 1958 as a greeter and a shill for the V. H. Monette Company, the main supplier of merchandise for post exchanges on U.S. military bases throughout the world. The company’s chief assets were Joe DiMaggio and Miss Americas, who traveled from base to base. “The generals and colonels were thrilled.” Joe would arrive at a base on Okinawa or somewhere in France and Germany, give a couple of pointers to whatever Little League team was around, and reminisce to a bunch of officers about his batting streak—this from a man who had hardly ever talked to his own teammates.13

  “They loved him,” said Val Monette, owner of the company. “Everybody did. We would play a little golf with the commanding officers of the base, talk a little baseball and a little business, and have a grand old time.”14

  It must have been a ticket to hell for the Big Guy, brooding all the time over Marilyn. If he went far enough away, he might not have to imagine her with the Owl. But how could he have known that Marilyn was on her own ticket to hell? Her picture-book marriage to Miller had turned into a poisonous tale. The queen of gefilte fish had gone on her honeymoon to London in the summer of ’56. She and Milton Greene had hired Laurence Olivier, the greatest actor of his time, to direct her in the first “child” of Marilyn Monroe Productions, The Prince and the Showgirl, a stale period piece without the raucous comedy that might have rescued her. Contemptuous of Marilyn, he glided around her like an oily snake. “All you have to do is be sexy, dear Marilyn,” he said. She took it as a slap in the face and set about to sabotage her very own film. She would arrive later and later to devil Sir Larry, and often didn’t arrive at all.15

  But she had even more problems in the honeymoon castle Olivier had found for her and Miller near one of the queen’s own parks; three weeks into her marriage she stumbled upon her husband’s notebook lying open on the dining room table—Marilyn couldn’t resist, and she summarized for the Strasbergs what she had r
ead: “It was something about how disappointed he was in me, how he thought I was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong.” And he was beginning to agree with Olivier that she was “a troublesome bitch.”16

  She would become pregnant in England and have the first of three miscarriages while The Prince and the Showgirl floundered. Olivier’s production assistant, Colin Clark, provides a telling footnote when he says, “What fun it might have been to make a film with Marilyn Monroe when she felt everyone around her was a friend.”17

  4.

  The marriage got worse and worse. Marilyn spent the whole year of 1957 in a rage against Miller. After humiliating him at a party, she said to one of the guests: “You think I shouldn’t have talked to him like that? Then why didn’t he slap me? He should have slapped me.”18

  She was wounded by Miller’s calculated coldness—a slap would almost have been a sign of affection. But Marilyn was no Pussycat waiting to be punished by her Owl. She didn’t need Arthur Miller. She could have stayed with the Jolter if she had really wanted to be knocked around.

  She hadn’t forgotten the Big Guy. She kept a photo of him in her closet, and the combination on her jewelry box was 5-5-5. “I guess everybody I’ve ever loved, I still love a little,” she liked to say.19

  And she kept in touch with Joe Jr., treated him like a member of her own scattered little tribe. She was on the phone with him a lot, and Joe Jr. was having some problems; a roly-poly boy at a prep school in New Jersey, he always felt in his father’s shadow. “JD has tried to be charming in his miserable sort of way,” he would write to his mother about Joe. But his relationship with Marilyn had given him a sudden clout. He could pick up the phone and call her. “And that was one thing that put him on the map with his dad.” Joe Jr. was the only conduit to Marilyn that the Jolter had while she was Mrs. Arthur Miller. Dining with generals, wandering from base to base like some Bedouin, he couldn’t have known how miserable she was.20

  It was Billy Wilder who rescued Marilyn, like some frog prince jumping out from behind his camera with the offer of a role in his new film, Some Like It Hot. Wilder wanted her to play “Sugar Kane,” another bimbo. She signed the contract and prepared for the film by sitting in the dark and guzzling champagne. The servants marveled at her ability to stuff herself, according to Barbara Leaming. “She devoured lamb chops, steaks, hamburger, veal cutlets, and home-fried potatoes. She was particularly fond of chocolate pudding.”21

  She wailed and moaned at the first screening of Some Like It Hot in February 1959. “I look like a fat pig. Those cocksuckers made me look like a funny fat pig.” But she failed to grasp her own unbridled magic. She wasn’t fat. She was voluptuous, like a girl right out of Rubens, with a godlike ampleness and a mystery that defied the cinematic machine. “I never knew what Marilyn was going to do, how she was going to play a scene,” Billy Wilder confessed. “Monroe was always surprising. You never knew what would come out of her.”22

  She still had to go back to her marriage . . . and the screenplay that the Owl had scribbled for her, The Misfits, about three modern-day cowboys and the divorcée they’re involved with, Roslyn Taber, who was meant to be a reflection of Marilyn as he envisioned her, alas: she thought she would be playing Grushenka and not The Girl, but Miller’s “Grushenka” was a mousy sleepwalker who drifts in and out of her dreams. The film went into production in 1960, and that’s how she was on the set—a sleepwalker. “Her eyes are gone. She can’t be photographed,” said cameraman Russ Metty.23

  But the inertia came from the script, not from Marilyn, and she fought with everyone, including her screenwriter husband and her director (John Huston). She wasn’t even the star of the film. Clark Gable, as one of the cowboys, Gay Langland, seized whatever little force The Misfits had: he was no longer the romantic rebel of Gone with the Wind but a wrangler who rounds up horses and sells them to be slaughtered.

  He would suffer a massive heart attack a day after production ended and die eleven days later. His death would haunt Marilyn for the rest of her life, as if she had murdered the man whom she had fantasized as her own father ever since she was a child.

  Her marriage was over. Miller packed his bags and left before she had the chance to throw him out. She returned to New York alone, in her usual disguise as Zelda Zonk; but it was more than a disguise now. She had become an anonymous creature living in an empty apartment (Miller had taken most of the furniture). She grew profoundly depressed, reached out for whatever little lifeline she had: she’d started calling Joe even before she broke up with Miller. She couldn’t eat or sleep, but fed herself “with pills, and splits of champagne,” and finally, on February 5, 1961, she ended up inside the psychiatric ward at Payne Whitney. Her mother and grandmother had been locked away in a madhouse, and Marilyn must have sniffed her own doom. After three days she was allowed to make a phone call—she called Joe. He flew in from Florida and arrived at Payne Whitney in a shot.24

  “I want my wife,” he said, as if his courtship with Marilyn had never ceased, and he was more of a husband to Marilyn than Arthur Miller had ever been; he started to shake the reception desk, his neck bulging with palpable rage. Not even Payne Whitney could defy his anger or his eloquence.

  5.

  He would fly her to Florida, become her prince again, even if only for a little while. He went fishing with Marilyn, brought her to the Yankee training camp in St. Petersburg, where he participated as a volunteer batting instructor now that Casey Stengel was gone—the Ol’ Perfesser had been fired. “His exile was over, he was back in pinstripes.” Mantle was king of the Yankees now, but a very shy king who didn’t get in the Jolter’s way. Still, DiMaggio wasn’t at ease with the new Bombers. He remained “as elegant (and bygone) as private railroad cars.”25

  And he was much more tender with Marilyn, didn’t fly into jealous fits, though Marilyn still had to weave around her Slugger, pretend that she hadn’t been having long hot talks with Frank Sinatra on the phone, that her poodle puppy wasn’t a gift from Frank—secretly she called it “Maf” (her shorthand for Sinatra’s ties to the Mafia).

  And so with Maf in the middle, they fell into a quiet, low-key romance. It was like having her personal lifeguard, she told a journalist from Denmark. When she needed gall bladder surgery that summer, Joe was there; he helped her recuperate in that barren apartment of hers with its white wall-to-wall carpet and her “oceanic mess.” But she felt imprisoned by Joe’s constant, cloying care, and the jealousy that was becoming harder and harder for him to suppress. When he had to start visiting military bases again for the Monette Company in August 1961, Marilyn ran off to L.A. without warning Joe. It was perhaps the biggest mistake of her life. She was thinking of Sinatra and her career. “Frankie won’t let me be lonely,” she said.26

  By this time she was existing in a haze of alcohol and barbiturates. Poet and playwright Norman Rosten, who was Miller’s best friend and now her friend too, had seen her at the hospital and would say that Marilyn was ill, “not only of the body and mind, but of the soul, the innermost engine of desire. That light was missing from her eyes.”27

  Now Marilyn began her own dance of doom, as many of her biographers believe; she would appear in a drunken stupor at the Golden Globes in 1962, when she stumbled onto the stage to accept her award as the World’s Favorite Female Star; she would be fired from her last film, Something’s Got to Give, after her own studio declared she was insane and would never work again (meanwhile she was juggling a simultaneous romance with JFK and his brother Bobby); she would rant at Jack Kennedy like a mad witch when he dumped her after she sang “Happy Birthday” to him at Madison Square Garden in a skintight sheath; she would visit her Hollywood psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, seven days a week, sipping champagne in the middle of each session; she would suffer blackouts and violent changes of mood while living like a vagabond and a waif in her last home, a walled-in hacienda.

  Not even the Slugger could save her, though he tried. Sometimes he’d show up at her
door and she’d send him away, or else she’d invite him into her hacienda that had little more than a lamp and a bed. He hired a detective to keep track of her romps with the Kennedy boys and Sinatra, who began to beat her up; and like a quiet cavalier, he’d wait outside the walls of Sinatra’s compound in Palm Springs and watch over her. Even with all his patience, he was still the Jolter, with dark, murderous blood in his heart: he would never talk to Sinatra again, and would despise the whole Kennedy clan for the rest of his life.

  Right after Fox fired her, he flew from London to L.A.—he was still Val Monette’s “ambassador” to American military bases—arrived at Marilyn’s hacienda, and begged her to marry him; he would whisk her away from Hollywood now that she was finished with films. “And she looked at him like he was from Mars.” They had a fight. The Big Guy licked his wounds and went to New York. Not even in his worst slump had he ever been so blue. He didn’t want to hide out in his hotel. He ran to Toots Shor’s and matched his favorite saloonkeeper “belt for belt.”28

  “What can you do with a girl like that?” he asked Toots.

  And Toots said, “Aw, whaddya do with any whore . . .”

  The Big Guy bolted out the door and never talked to Toots again.29

  Her demon lover couldn’t get Marilyn on the phone, but he didn’t give up. He wooed her from afar—calling her and calling her—and then from up close. She couldn’t resist that boyish pleading from this man with the silver hair. And she agreed to marry her Slugger again. They picked a wedding date: August 8. She ordered a wedding gown from her designer, Jean Louis, who was famous for having dressed Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn herself in the tightest of skintight gowns. Meanwhile, Joe quit his job with Val Monette, who mourned the loss. “Joe left us on August 1, 1962. . . . He told me he had talked to Marilyn and thought she had finally agreed to leave the movies and remarry him and move with him to San Francisco.”30