Dorothy was not afraid. She felt that success and fame were all around her, right outside her window in the winking Broadway night, and that one day soon she would have them both.
She met DiMaggio while doing that bit part on location in the Bronx, and even as their relationship quietly warmed—somehow, from the start, she felt worldly next to Joe—Mort Millman took notice of Dorothy over at NBC. Dorothy, Millman decided, had remarkable talent. He was sure she could make it big in no time if she’d take another run at a movie house. At Universal Studios the decision-makers liked her deep voice—alluring and rich—and liked the oomph-girl curves of her body and that honey-blonde hair. She signed her name to a contract that was to last for seven years. When her film The Storm opened at the Lyric theater in downtown Duluth, the locals poured out to see the homegrown girl made good, never mind that Dorothy’s role was so small. Victor sat through the movie twice, making him late for work on the railroad for the first time in many years.
And how excited her father and all the family had been that Dorothy was dating Joe DiMaggio. Dorothy now lived in Hollywood and DiMaggio in New York but she came to see him on occasion during the season, and they had spent that winter in California together. Once again Dorothy was sure that the next, grander step was near. “I haven’t a ring or anything,” she told one of the gossip writers, “it’s just understood.”
The film work was steady and very good now for Dorothy: a featured part in the movie The House of Fear and then a recurring role, the female lead, in the serial The Phantom Creeps. In Phantom she played a determined (“and beautiful,” reviewers said) reporter chasing after the evil Dr. Zorka, a mad scientist portrayed by Bela Lugosi. “My editor hired me because I move fast and I’m not easy to scare,” Dorothy’s character, Jean Drew, tells a detective at one point. And after unearthing an important detail of Zorka’s nefarious plan (at times a giant silver robot would get involved on Dr. Zorka’s behalf) she would say to the police things like, “not bad for a nosy reporter, huh?” Each episode ended with Jean Drew in a terrible and uncertain fix—flung into the sea after a boat crash, say—and you had to wait until the next episode to see it resolved. Dorothy wore high heels and lace hats in almost every scene and she never let go of her purse. She could handle her own stunts. Week after week she appeared on screens all across the country. In Minnesota the newspapers called Dorothy “Duluth’s No. 1 glamour girl.”
He gave her a diamond ring in the summer of 1939 and he told her he would hit a home run for her in the next day’s All-Star game. And then he had done it. She went home to tell her parents—lord, Clara, that diamond looks like an ice cube on her hand—and when word got around Duluth, the newspaper reporters came to the Olsons’ house and from that moment the watch was on. Everyone in town wondered when the wedding would be, and where. Here? In our Duluth?
Even Walter Winchell called the Olson house looking for the latest scoop, and in the months that followed, writers everywhere took more of an interest in Dorothy. One paper did a story recounting her diet secrets (“only fruit for dessert, but she eats all the spaghetti and meat she wants!”) and others asked whether she planned to stay in pictures even after she wed. “I don’t intend to let marriage interfere with my career,” Dorothy said, though she knew that wasn’t true. Wishful thinking. Before DiMaggio had slid the ring onto her finger he had told her that he wanted her to give up acting. She could not keep living in Hollywood, for one thing, and he needed her around and unencumbered. (Biddable, he meant by this, and there for him to lean on.)
Dorothy had resisted the urge to argue with him. This was Joe DiMaggio she was getting ready to marry! “A good marriage like our parents have,” she told her sister Joyce, was more important than even a movie career. The wedding, it was finally announced, would take place in San Francisco, some time after the World Series that fall.
NOW DUSK WAS beginning to settle over the Hudson. Occasionally a car horn sounded or someone shouted on the street below. The soft sun slipped behind the trees across the water in New Jersey. Maybe she would sit on the terrace for a while and read; or maybe she’d stay in and put the radio on. First, Dorothy went into the kitchen to see about getting something to eat. She couldn’t go an hour without feeling hungry these days. It had been a few weeks now since she’d first felt the baby move.
No matter what happened between Dorothy and Joe in the years ahead, they would always have that wonderful, on-top-of-the world time of 1939 and ’40: the months leading up to the wedding; the great, surreal day itself; and then the enchanted period afterward. Never had Dorothy been happier. Joe was happy then too, looser and more comfortable somehow, and, in the summer of 1939, on his way to batting .381. Dorothy came and stayed with DiMaggio in his rooms at the Hotel New Yorker that season and when she wasn’t filming the last episodes of The Phantom Creeps, she sometimes met him on the road. They were the handsomest couple around, and full of one another. Once, at the Shoreham Hotel in D.C., they had gone down to the bar and Joe had sat at the piano and, jokingly, banged on the keys (literally banged, he couldn’t play at all) and then Dorothy sang a little something for the people there.
She went with him to the World Series in Cincinnati where the Yankees finished a sweep of the Reds (Vince’s team, although he had joined the club too late in the season to be allowed to play in the Series games) and then, stopping in Chicago along the way, Dorothy and Joe had traveled to San Francisco. There a crowd of well-wishers from North Beach, and DiMaggio’s family, as well as, most thrillingly, a wedding date, four weeks hence, awaited them.
The days were happy and light. She modeled her dress for Marie and the other DiMaggio sisters, and bantered sometimes with Dominic, and played cards in the sitting room with Joe. One afternoon Rosalie took Dorothy into the kitchen and taught her how to make the spaghetti and the sauce and the meatballs just the way Joe liked them. (Eighteen months later, in the apartment in New York, Dorothy still fixed that meal for Joe once a week.) On a day in early November, Joe received a telegram addressed to him at the wharf, at Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto, and Dorothy was beside him when he opened it to see that he had won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award.
The church of Saints Peter and Paul, covered in scaffolding for repairs, rose majestically upward from the block alongside Washington Square in Joe’s old neighborhood. It was here that Dorothy took daily instruction from Father Parolin—the same pastor who had tutored little Joe and the rest of the boys in the church’s clubroom many years before—and on the Thursday before the Sunday wedding she stood at the high altar and was accepted into the Catholic faith. She and Joe had signed their marriage license together at the county clerk’s by then and Dorothy’s parents and sisters and grandfather had arrived from Duluth. On Saturday night Joe had a bachelor’s dinner at the Grotto.
The day of the wedding, Nov. 19, 1939, was like a dream fulfilled for Dorothy: She was like a princess and Joe like a prince. The police said that they had never seen such a crowd in North Beach, 10,000 people or more, they guessed, packed into the streets around Saints Peter and Paul. There was absolutely no place to park. Across the way in Washington Square, people stood on benches and young men climbed up the boughs of the willow trees or to the tops of the stout pines along the sidewalks, going wherever they could for a better glimpse. Even the bronze fireman statue had people draped upon it. This was the scene that Dorothy saw from the back seat of the limousine as it inched carefully through the thick crowd trying to get to the front of the church. The wedding was set for 2 p.m. but many people, the vast majority of them entirely uninvited, had arrived inside Peter and Paul early that morning and sat through not one but two services to make sure that when the wedding began they would be in a good spot to see. In two days Dorothy would turn 22 years old; Joe would turn 25 in six.
In the limousine Dorothy realized that she, and her parents sitting beside her, were late. This hardly mattered to her. The scene around them was like something from a movie. People cheered a
s the car rolled slowly along, and some banged happily on the hood and called out her name, or Joe’s. Dorothy understood that this mass of people, in their homburgs and Sunday bests, were there first to see the marriage of their Joe, the Yankee hero from the playground down the block. But she knew they were there for her too. Nothing could have convinced Dorothy otherwise. Just look at all the women in the crowd, straining and craning for a look as the car passed by. This was no ordinary girl that Joe was marrying. They wanted to see what a Hollywood starlet looked like on her wedding day, what she wore and how she held her hands. By now it was half an hour past when the ceremony had been scheduled to begin. The sky was clear and the sun shone warmly down. An ambulance idled along a side street, just in case. Already a woman had fainted by the doors of the church.
The car stopped and police officers came to help Dorothy and her parents push through the crowd and through the front doors of Saints Peter and Paul. No longer did the grand space with its high, vaulted ceilings seem cavernous, as it had to Dorothy during her days of instruction. Now there were 2,000 people inside. Every pew was packed beyond capacity and people stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisles and the naves. Boys and girls balanced on top of the confessional boxes. “I beseech you to be calm,” Father Parolin had begged the noisy crowd just before Dorothy came in. “Remember that you are in the house of the Lord. I ask you in His name to be silent.” Nonetheless, when they saw her they stood and cheered. Dorothy recognized hardly a single face.
A moment passed and then she was starting down the bridal aisle on her father’s arm. The church organ played Ave Maria. Dorothy wore a white, satin dress, V-necked and sculpted to fit. Five feet of train trailed behind her. Orange blossoms on her veil, orchids in her arms. Later a reporter would write that she was so “utterly beautiful that it just hurt to look at her.” Dorothy moved past the candlelit stands of pom-poms and gladioli. The crowd had quieted to a buzz. Ahead of her on the altar she saw Joe, tall, confident and dashing—yes, dashing was the word—in his cutaway tuxedo, wing collar and polka-dotted ascot tie. His brother Tom stood beside him as the best man. The four DiMaggio daughters were the bridesmaids, Dorothy’s sister Irene the matron of honor. The altar looked wintry and magical, its white Carrara marble seemingly covered in white chrysanthemums. Father Parolin stood in his snowy robe. On the ceiling of one of the side altars smiling white-winged cherubs frolicked among white clouds against a light blue sky. “Be happy, Dottie. We love you,” whispered Victor as he let her go. Their families and their friends sat in the first 10 rows, along with the dignitaries. San Francisco mayor Angelo Rossi had a spot up front with his wife. It was he who had given the chrysanthemums.
The fairy-tale day had only just begun. After the blur of the ceremony, and the kiss that the women would say laughingly was too brief for their liking, Dorothy and Joe walked down the long aisle together and out through the wide, open doors. Just above them two boys lay inside the scaffolding, like stowaways, peering impishly down. (I know that guy, Joe thought, chuckling to himself. The kid from Taylor Street, Dino Restelli.) Again policemen, sweaty by now, helped clear the way through the crush and to the DiMaggios’ car.
Dorothy and Joe had their portraits taken a few blocks away and then went for a celebrative family meal—just the 60 of them—at the Grotto. That night, 400 people turned out to the reception there, to drink bottles of gin and get merry, swing-dancing to a three-piece band. On the tables, amid a magnificent feast of turkey and sides of beef, hams, roasted capons and caviar, stood ice sculptures of ballplayers at the bat. It was all like a happy dream to Dorothy, almost preposterous. She cut the white wedding cake and fed the first piece to her husband by hand, and Joe, by way of a speech, said, “Well, I’ve had many a thrill in my days as a ballplayer and everything else, but I just want to say this is one of my happiest and best thrills I’ve ever had.” They stayed at the reception for only a short time, laughing and chatting and stealing kisses, before leaving into the salt-aired night to begin the rest of their lives.
The glow of that day lasted long inside Dorothy, and inside both of them. They honeymooned in California: a night at the Pine Lake Lodge near Fresno, where a little brook ran beside the candlelit dinner tables, and a stay down south at the Hotel Del Coronado, where they lunched in their bathing suits on the beach.
When Dorothy went home to Duluth the following month the papers asked her again about her career and this time she told them the truth—that she was putting it on hold. She had canceled her contract with Universal. She planned to devote herself to “being a good wife.”
As winter drew to a close and Tom hammered out Joe’s contract with the Yankees for the 1940 season, Joe insisted on a specific add-on to go with his salary of thirty-two five. “The New York Club further agrees to pay transportation for Mrs. DiMaggio from San Francisco to New York, and return to San Francisco,” the contract read. Dorothy, in other words, was part of the package. That summer in New York she hired an Italian tutor, four times a week, so that she could surprise Rosalie and Giuseppe and, speaking their language, get to know them better the next time Joe brought her home.
WAS SHE WRONG to be disappointed? Was she wrong to want more?
She couldn’t say that she didn’t miss it, the charge she had felt each time she stepped onto a soundstage, the way she could sense the eyes of everyone upon her, the feeling, after delivering her lines, that people had liked what she had done. She had loved seeing WITH DOROTHY ARNOLD in a newspaper display’s thick, bold print. Her parents kept a scrapbook of her clippings. Since the marriage, though, the only work Dorothy had done was barely work at all—a magazine ad for Swift Premium Tender Frankfurts. AS A DINNER MEAT THEY’RE A REAL WINNER! SAYS MRS. JOE DIMAGGIO, read the big type. In the photograph she held up a platter of frankfurters and little toasts. She wore a black-and-white striped shirt buttoned to her neck and a look of amused endurance on her face. “Both in the movies (she was Dorothy Arnold before her marriage) and in big league sports, Mrs. Di Maggio has had a lot of experience recognizing ‘winners,’ ” the words beside her picture continued. “ ‘I’m not surprised that those new frankfurts are so popular,’ says Mrs. Di Maggio. ‘Their grand mild flavor makes a real hit with hearty outdoor appetites.’ ”
It had been a payday at least, and the allusion to her past life in the movies—well, at least there was that. Everywhere now she was only Mrs. Joe DiMaggio, or equally often, “Mrs. Joe.” That’s what the doormen called her as she went out, “How are you, Mrs. Joe? Think Mr. DiMaggio will get another hit today?” She would smile and say that she hoped so. Joe was receiving more fan mail than ever these days; he seemed to be on everybody’s mind.
It got too hot in the apartment! When the afternoon sun beat down through the big west-facing windows the living and dining rooms filled with luminous heat. It got hotter with each pregnant week. Sometimes Dorothy had to draw the shades to block out the sun, giving the rooms a gray gloominess.
She wondered if she and June would even be friends if not for Lefty and Joe. She wondered which friends were really hers. These days even her actor pals like George Raft and Virginia Pine seemed more interested in getting tickets to the Yankees game than in seeing her. They knew that Joe was on a real run. At the ballpark each day the reporters and the photographers and the people sitting near her box on the third base side noticed when Dorothy walked in.
Was she wrong to feel unhappy sometimes? Was she wrong to be sad?
She had money and new clothes, and places to wear them to, and circles of famous people to move in at night. Isn’t this how it was supposed to be? Their penthouse apartment cost $300 a month in rent alone. It overlooked the Apthorp, for goodness sake, the block-long luxury building with the huge inner courtyard, and one of Manhattan’s most coveted addresses. Literally, they looked down upon it, and upon all of this great city, thirteen hundred miles from the two-story wood frame house where Dorothy was born. Joe loved her, she knew that. He loved her deeply in his way. Her belly was
growing larger each day, though when she lay down on her back on top of the bedcovers she could look downward and still see her feet.
The truth was she wouldn’t have minded any of it, giving up her career, the trading in of “Dorothy Arnold” for “Mrs. Joe,” being the woman by the hero’s side, if not for the distance that often came between them. She wouldn’t have minded toning down her own natural gabbiness and residing in Joe’s surrounding stillness, or going with him to the nightspots that he most liked to go, or even spending some nights at home by herself. She wouldn’t have minded any of that if not for the feeling she so often had. The feeling of. . . being tolerated. That was it. She felt that she was being tolerated and not adored, and that Joe’s good humor with her might in an unforeseen moment disappear.
The baby will change things, she thought. The baby would make them whole again, restore their unity. She remembered the January night when their child may have been conceived, a beautiful bright memory that shone through the days they had spent together in Duluth that winter. They had made love in the bed at Joyce’s apartment, intensely and noisily—her parents in the next room had heard!—and then a day later all of them had gone bowling. Joe hadn’t seemed to mind at all when she got the better score. Joe loved her, she was sure of that. And he was good with kids, goofing around with his nieces Betty and Joan in San Francisco, taking them upon his lap or letting them comb his hair and tug on his tie. He was good to Jerry Spatola’s girls too, and Joe, playing the same game now for a rich living that he had once played on the days he was skipping school, still had a boyishness in him. He liked to sit on their living room floor, even in his tie and suspenders, and operate his train set. When the baby came, she told herself, the sad feelings would go away and they would be happy, a real family at last, and Joe would love her the way she wanted and needed to be loved.
56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports Page 16