Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love Read online

  Joe had other thoughts. He’d begun playing baseball at the local Boys’ Club. One day he made off with a broken oar from his father’s boat and fashioned it into a baseball bat. Baseball violated Zio Pepe’s “code of life,” his oft-proclaimed notion that financial independence and self-respect could be attained only by adhering to a strict work ethic. He became infuriated and called his son lagnuso, lazy, meschino, good-for-nothing. “You a bum!” he shouted in broken English. Rosalie DiMaggio calmed her husband by informing him that Joe had procured an after-school job working in an orange juice plant. In Joe’s eyes anything beat having to swab the deck of his father’s boat. It wasn’t the fishing itself or being out on the open water (unless it was very choppy) that bothered Joe; it was the stench of fish and crab entrails after the boat had been at sea. Cleaning up “that mess” nauseated Joe. Mike and Tom would watch with amusement as their younger brother leaned over the side of the boat and puked his guts out.

  To help pay his share of the household expenses, Joe undertook several jobs, none for longer than six months. After leaving the orange juice plant, he went to work on the docks, followed by employment in a cannery and eventually at a warehouse, loading and unloading trucks. When all else failed, he resorted to hawking newspapers on street corners, at the same time perfecting his athletic skills by playing ball in the sandlot leagues of North Beach, not far from home.

  Joe recalled the difficult days of the Great Depression when he and the rest of his family would sit in the Taylor Street kitchen under long strips of sticky yellow flypaper hanging from the ceiling to catch the flies and other insects that flew into the house. In the heat of summer, before the advent of the air conditioner, it was necessary to keep the windows and screen door open. “I felt as if I were stuck to the flypaper,” Joe told Marilyn. “I felt utterly doomed, like one of those poor insects. In 1929 I started high school, and I hated it with a passion. I don’t think I cracked a single book that year. I wanted to quit school—and all those crazy jobs—and start playing ball full-time. Zio Pepe didn’t go for it. Two of my brothers—Vincent, two years older than me, and Dominic, two years younger—had also developed an interest in baseball. The three of us shared a bedroom, and on weekends we would listen to the games on radio. It was our mother who finally went to bat for us. She confronted Zio Pepe and won the right for three of her sons to eventually become major-league baseball players.”

  Rosalie DiMaggio appeared to be a well-bred lady, attired in plain, dark clothes, with her hair often fastened in a bun; she seemed to be an old-fashioned, old-world woman who would never question the opinions of her Sicilian fisherman husband. In reality she was much more sophisticated and open minded than Zio Pepe. “This is America,” she told him. “Everything is possible. Let the boys pursue their dreams. If they want to play baseball for a living, let them at least try.” She made this dramatic proclamation in Italian, her English being no better than her husband’s. And she made it, DiMaggio observed, at a time when Italian Americans were still all too commonly referred to as “guineas.”

  In 1930, having completed the ninth grade, Joe dropped out of school and, two years later, signed on to play minor-league baseball with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. The following year he captured the attention of nearly every major-league scout by hitting safely in sixty-one straight games. His teammates called him “the Walloping Wop.” In 1934 the New York Yankees purchased DiMaggio from the Seals for $25,000 and five yet-to-be-named players. In 1936 he got three hits in his first major-league game and wound up the season with a .323 batting average. The Yankees topped the standings in the American League that season and went on to win the World Series. The owners of the ball club attributed the team’s success largely to the Iron Horse, first baseman Lou Gehrig, as well as to the efforts of their star rookie. Joe DiMaggio wasn’t just a phenomenon at the plate; he was equally adept in the field. Even if he had to say so himself, he possessed an uncanny instinct for the game, a sixth sense, which enabled him to make the most difficult play look easy. It was a skill shared by few. On the Yankees, only Gehrig, fast approaching the end of his career, and catcher Bill Dickey could be compared to DiMaggio.

  Two of Joe’s brothers also wound up in the majors. Dom, known as the “little professor” because he wore glasses when he played, signed with the Boston Red Sox. Vince played in the National League for no fewer than five teams, including the Pittsburgh Pirates and the New York Giants. All three played the same position: center field.

  The DiMaggio siblings garnered an abundance of publicity. They weren’t the only brothers playing major-league baseball at that time, but because there were three of them, all playing the same position and all doing well, the attention came in a variety of forms. Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons wrote that the saga of the DiMaggio family would make a “great movie,” and inquiries arrived at the Taylor Street homestead from a number of producers and film studios. There were countless articles in newspapers and magazines. There were dozens of requests for radio interviews, television having not yet arrived. Every Italian American group and organization in America invited the brothers to become honorary members. Grantland Rice, then the nation’s most famous sportswriter, got so caught up in the excitement that he penned a poem and ran it in his column: “Out the olive trail they go—Vincent, Dominic, and Joe . . . Who is it that steals the show? Vincent, Dominic, and Joe.”

  But what most pleased the Yankee Clipper was that Zio Pepe soon became the baseball trio’s most ardent fan. He regaled the other North Beach fishermen with daily updates on their latest feats. He scanned the box scores in the newspaper every morning to see how his sons had performed the day before. He adorned his living room with photographs of his offspring in their respective team uniforms. For each son, he compiled a scrapbook of sports page items and articles clipped from the newspapers by his four daughters. He even traveled east one year to watch his boys play in person.

  “He never fully understood the game,” Joe told Marilyn. “He showed up in a straw hat, then simply stood and cheered with the rest of the crowd. What he liked most were the hot dogs they served at Yankee Stadium, though he complained they were too expensive. The next time he came to the stadium, he said, he’d bring along his own food.”

  The more DiMaggio spoke, the more Monroe liked him. He hadn’t told her everything about himself, but he’d told her enough. Two and a half hours had elapsed, and they were still driving around Hollywood and Beverly Hills in Marilyn’s car. Not yet done, Joe began speaking, in an almost boastful manner, about his relationships with women.

  According to Marilyn’s memoir, he revealed that he “worried” whenever he went out with “a girl.” He didn’t mind going out once with her. It was the second time that made him uneasy. As for the third time, that eventuality seldom took place. He had a “loyal friend” named George Solotaire who “ran interference” for him and, when necessary, “pried the girl loose.”

  “Is Mr. Solotaire in Hollywood with you?” Marilyn inquired.

  “Yes,” said DiMaggio. “He’s staying with me at the Knickerbocker.”

  “I’ll try not to make too much trouble when he starts prying me loose,” she said.

  “I don’t think I will have use for Mr. Solotaire’s services this trip,” he replied.

  They drove on without speaking for a while, but Marilyn didn’t mind. She had the feeling that “compliments from Mr. DiMaggio were going to be few and far between,” so she was “content” to sit in silence and enjoy the one he’d just paid her.

  Several minutes later, he spoke up again.

  “I saw your picture the other day,” he told her.

  “Which movie was it?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t a movie. It was a photograph of you on the sports page. You were holding a baseball bat.”

  Marilyn remembered the photo session with Gus Zernial and Joe Dobson.

  “I imagine you must have had your picture taken doing publicity shots l
ike that a thousand times,” she said.

  “Not quite,” Joe answered. “The best I ever got was Ethel Barrymore or General MacArthur. You’re prettier.”

  “Two compliments in one sitting,” remarked Marilyn. “This must be my lucky night.”

  “Here’s another compliment for you,” said DiMaggio. “I wouldn’t have waited at the Villa Nova as long as I did if I hadn’t really wanted to meet you. I kept thinking of that sports page photo. I figured you must like ballplayers.” Actually, Joe’s admission that he found Marilyln attractive had an odd effect on her. “I had read reams on reams of writing about my good looks, and scores of men had told me I was beautiful,” she said in her memoir. “But this was the first time my heart had jumped to hear it. I knew what that meant, and I began to mope. Something was starting between Mr. DiMaggio and me. It was always nice when it started, always exciting. But it always ended in dullness.”

  It did not end in dullness that night. Marilyn returned to the Beverly Carlton and invited Joe to join her. He didn’t see George Solotaire again until the following morning when he took a cab back to the Knickerbocker Hotel. Solotaire was waiting for him.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Pretty damn well,” said DiMaggio.

  Joe had known a lot of good-looking women but none more beautiful than Marilyn Monroe. He phoned her later that morning and in the afternoon sent her a bouquet of roses.

  “You know,” he told Solotaire, “this is the first time I ever called up a girl the morning after. I had to ask her how she felt.”

  Chapter 2

  IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING THAT Joe DiMaggio and George Solotaire never did get to Hawaii that year. George returned to New York, while DiMaggio spent the next few weeks in Los Angeles with Marilyn Monroe. When David March called Marilyn to find out how she and the ballplayer had fared after leaving the Villa Nova together, she told him, “Your friend struck out.” The truth of the matter is that he’d hit a home run, but Monroe hoped to avoid unnecessary publicity so early in their relationship. She knew full well that if she leveled with March, the press would be at their doorstep in no time at all.

  Naïve in certain respects but uncommonly savvy in others, Marilyn also understood that in the eyes of the general moviegoing public, a sex symbol is always sexier if romantically unattached. The powers that be at Twentieth Century–Fox, with which Marilyn had signed a seven-year contract, couldn’t have cared less how many lovers she took so long as their identities remained a matter of private concern.

  During Marilyn’s and Joe’s time together, she spent her working hours at the studio on the set of Monkey Business, while he played golf at the Brentwood Country Club and on other days visited the racetrack to bet on the horses. One afternoon Joe joined Frank Sinatra for lunch at the Polo Lounge. He and Sinatra had known each other since Skinny D’Amato, a former Mob figure turned nightclub operator, had introduced them in New York. In June 1946, accompanied by Toots Shor and Marlene Dietrich, Sinatra and DiMaggio attended a Joe Louis–Billy Conn heavyweight fight at Yankee Stadium. DiMaggio spent the night with Dietrich, who was thirteen years his senior, reporting afterward that while she “wasn’t a bad lay, she had the foulest breath I’ve ever inhaled.”

  By far the two most recognizable Italian American celebrities of their generation, DiMaggio and Sinatra had formed an immediate bond. A music critic of the day compared Sinatra’s vocal style to the sight of DiMaggio swinging a bat. “They both make it look so easy,” he wrote. Although they both enjoyed the benefits of their respective fame—and everything that came with it, including financial reward and beautiful women—there were essential differences between them. While Sinatra bathed in the glory of his renown, DiMaggio resisted the attendant intrusions into his personal life. When approached by an aggressive autograph hound at the Polo Lounge that afternoon, Sinatra obliged, whereas DiMaggio refused. “Can’t you see we’re eating lunch?” Joe snapped. The intruder retreated, pleased to have copped at least one signature for his trouble.

  “How do you stand it?” DiMaggio asked.

  “It comes with the territory,” said Sinatra. “And if publicity bothers you, wait till they hear about you and Marilyn.”

  To forestall the inevitable, DiMaggio and Monroe spent their evenings hidden away in his suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel. They ordered their meals from room service and paid a bellhop to buy wine for them from a nearby liquor store. Their secret remained intact until Marilyn called her old buddy and confidant, Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, to ask him what he thought of Joe DiMaggio. “He has a big name,” said Skolsky. “You could do a hell of a lot worse.” The next day he ran an item on Joe and Marilyn in his newspaper column.

  DiMaggio didn’t know about the item until later that day when he received a telephone call from Toots Shor.

  “Is it true?” he asked.

  “Is what true, Tootsie?”

  “About you and Marilyn Monroe? It’s in Sid Skolsky’s column.”

  Although DiMaggio ordinarily might have denied the story, he and Shor had been friends since Joe’s earliest days with the Yankees. On one occasion, overhearing a deprecating comment about Joltin’ Joe at a Yankee baseball game, the saloonkeeper had punched out the irreverent spectator, thereby proving his everlasting allegiance. On those occasions when the Yanks lost at home, Toots would soothe Joe by taking long walks with him down Fifth Avenue. And when they won, which was usually the case, Toots would stand rounds for everyone in the house.

  “It’s true about Marilyn,” DiMaggio admitted. “We’re like a good double-play combination. It’s just a matter of two people meeting and something clicks.”

  Despite the amusing baseball analogy, Joe DiMaggio wasn’t amused.

  In her memoir, Marilyn described what was to be the first of a number of “frank and often vociferous discussions” between them.

  “I don’t know if I can take all your crazy publicity,” Joe told her. She tried to explain that Sidney Skolsky had betrayed her, that it didn’t serve her purpose any more than Joe’s to have the story go public. But it wasn’t the Skolsky item that bothered DiMaggio. What displeased him was another story about Marilyn that had just surfaced in the press, namely her admission that several years earlier she’d posed in the nude and that one of the resultant photographs had been used as the basis for a calendar that had become a piece of Americana, a frozen image of female sensuality.

  In May 1949, when the photo was taken, Marilyn was just another Hollywood hopeful without a studio or a job, a simple but imaginative young woman with small-town good looks and a figure that took one’s breath away. Columbia Pictures had dropped her, she claimed, because she’d refused to sleep with Harry Cohn, the studio’s tyrannical boss. She later told Truman Capote that though she’d thwarted Cohn’s awkward advance, she’d accepted cash from occasional businessmen “who could well afford” her favors. “It made them happy, and it paid the rent,” she mused, “so what the hell.” But now she was broke and behind on her monthly car installment. Photographer Tom Kelley had once asked her to pose au natural, and she had declined. Recalling Kelley’s offer, she called him and asked if the offer still stood. It did. They arranged to meet on May 27 at Kelley’s Sunset Boulevard studio. Also present at the studio was Tom’s wife, Natalie, who acted as her husband’s assistant. The photographer spread a red velvet drop across the floor and put an Artie Shaw record on the turntable. Marilyn disrobed. Over the next two hours Kelley shot two rolls of film, twenty-four shots per roll. He gave Marilyn one of the developed rolls as a gift. Marilyn signed a release form using a pseudonym. Kelley paid her $50. After the session, the three of them celebrated by going to a coffee shop and ordering chili.

  Kelley subsequently sold two of the nude shots of Marilyn for a total of $1,000 to John Baumgarth, a calendar publisher from Chicago, who used one of them as the centerpiece of what became known as the “Golden Dreams” calendar. The remaining twenty-two exposures mysteriously disappeared, purportedly st
olen from Kelley’s file cabinet. The “Golden Dreams” calendar grossed millions of dollars and could be found hanging in nearly every bar, gas station, and barber shop in the States, to say nothing of its prodigious sales abroad. So popular an item was it that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, though rumored to be gay, displayed it on the wall of his recreation room in the privacy of his home. By strange coincidence, Marilyn met Hoover in the early 1950s when she attended a Department of Justice reception in Washington with comedian Milton Berle. Marilyn and Uncle Miltie had briefly been lovers in the late 1940s, a period in the actress’s life when nearly every man she met became a bedmate, provided he could help advance her career. There were exceptions—such as Harry Cohn—but more often than not, Marilyn allowed herself to be exploited. Hollywood, she quickly learned, wasn’t a place where an ambitious starlet could afford to be a prude.

  About the time Marilyn met Joe DiMaggio—with the “Golden Dreams” calendar selling better than ever—a wire service reporter named Aline Mosby received a tip that the nude calendar girl was none other than Marilyn Monroe. Mosby called the publicity department at Fox and asked for a confirmation. In a state of near panic, studio executives contacted Marilyn, who readily admitted that she had indeed committed “the unforgivable sin” of posing in the nude. Darryl Zanuck, head of Fox and instrumental in helping to launch Monroe’s career, ordered her to “deny everything.” Nice girls, he told her, don’t take off their clothes for money. Marilyn told Zanuck she wasn’t ashamed of what she’d done and therefore saw no reason to lie. Zanuck threatened to invoke the morals clause in her contract and cut her loose, a course Monroe didn’t believe he would pursue. Harry Brand, Fox’s publicity director, ultimately supported her decision and arranged a luncheon between Marilyn and Aline Mosby, at which the actress tearfully described the two-hour photo session with Kelley, insisting that at the time she’d been broke and frightened. She made clear the only funds she’d collected for the session were the $50 she’d received from the photographer.