Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (7 page)

She had left her job at Radioplane and gone full-time into modeling, having been signed by Emmeline Snively of the Blue Book Modeling Agency. As a popular pinup and cover model (her image appeared
in more than a hundred magazines),
she started to meet other photographers, agents, would-be agents, film producers, publicists, advertising executives—in short, an entire crew of Hollywood types, all of them quite different from the people she’d known as Mrs. Jim Dougherty. She had colored her hair a golden blond. The limited contours of domesticity had given way to an exhilarating and expansive new world.

As for Norma Jeane’s mother, she had been released from the San Francisco mental hospital and, as of May 1945, was living in a small room on the top floor of a rundown hotel in downtown Portland, Oregon. In December André de Dienes, a fashion photographer with whom Norma Jeane had started a romance, drove her to Portland for a reunion with Gladys, the first time she’d seen her mother since 1939.

“We had little to say to each other,” Marilyn would inform Dr. Fromm, recounting the Portland visit. “She looked much older than I remembered her. She emanated no warmth. I tried to maintain a cheerful façade. I unpacked a few presents I’d brought for her—a silk scarf, a bottle of perfume, and a box of chocolates—and placed them on top of a coffee table. She wouldn’t go near them, just stared at them. Then, without a word, she lowered her head and buried her face in her hands and seemed to forget all about me. I saw myself to the door and left.”

•  •  •

With her modeling career in full bloom, Norma Jeane was earning enough to rent the bottom floor of Ana Lower’s house on Nebraska Avenue. In early 1946 she received a letter from her mother asking if she could come to Los Angeles and stay with her. Against her better judgment—and in spite of the disappointment of her Portland visit—Norma Jeane agreed. Their second attempt at living together as mother and daughter turned out no better than the first. Within months, Gladys Baker reentered the psychiatric ward at Norwalk State Asylum, the same institution from which she had once tried to escape. From there she would in time be sent to the Rockhaven Sanitarium, a virtual country club for the incurably insane, in Verdugo, California, where
she remained until 1967, five years after Marilyn’s death. Throughout Gladys Baker’s lengthy internment at Rockhaven, it was Marilyn who footed the bills.

In 1946 Norma Jeane became involved with Tommy Zahn, a lifeguard and aspiring actor who later described her to a reporter as “tremendously fit, very robust . . . so healthy.” Photographs of her taken at this time support Zahn’s portrayal. That same summer she hired an attorney, established residency in Las Vegas, and instituted divorce proceedings against Jim Dougherty. The divorce decree was granted on July 5, 1946, in Clark County, Nevada.

Her newfound freedom marked the beginning of an extremely active sexual phase during which Marilyn took numerous lovers ranging in age and experience from a young college student named Bill Pursel to over-the-hill Borscht Belt comedian George Jessel. “Talk about being promiscuous,” she told Dr. Rose Fromm, “I can’t remember the names of three-quarters of the men I slept with at that time.” A name she did recall belonged to Charlie Chaplin Jr., son of the legendary comic, with whom she had an affair in 1947. According to Anthony Summers’s
Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe
, the affair ended when Charlie Jr. caught Marilyn in bed with his brother Sydney. The latter romance ended when she underwent one of several early abortions.

In subsequent years, Jim Dougherty, having remarried and become a patrolman with the Los Angeles Police Department, would tell a journalist:
“I never knew Marilyn Monroe. I knew Norma Jeane Baker, but Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane Baker were two different people.”

By 1952, the year she met Joe DiMaggio, Norma Jeane Baker had grown into the iconic role of Marilyn Monroe both in name and in terms of her career, which, while not yet at its height, was well on its way. Having overcome the “Golden Dreams” nude calendar scandal, she now defended herself against a charge by the press that she’d fabricated her family history, having presented herself to Twentieth Century–Fox and to the public at large as an orphan, when, if truth be told, her mother was still very much alive.

As she’d done in the nude calendar controversy, Marilyn took matters into her own hands, releasing a statement admitting that Gladys Baker was incapacitated, a patient in a mental institution, and that she’d fibbed only to protect her mother from the glare of public scrutiny. She said that although she’d lived with her mother for a brief period as a child, she barely knew her. Nor had she ever met her father. Her childhood, she added, had largely been spent in an orphanage and in the homes of a number of foster families. If the press felt she had misled anyone, she wished to apologize and hoped to be forgiven. She was forgiven.

As Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper wrote, “Let’s give Marilyn Monroe the benefit of the doubt.”

I
N LATE MAY 1952, HAVING
fully recuperated from her appendectomy and having set the record straight on her Little Orphan Annie past, Marilyn Monroe arrived for a brief stay in New York before continuing on to Buffalo, where, in June, she would star in
Niagara
, a suspense drama with a cast that included Joseph Cotten and Jean Peters. Marilyn’s role as a young, sultry, oversexed wife called for her to wear a dress that, in the words of one film critic. was “cut so low you can see her navel.” In anticipation of her stay in New York, Joe DiMaggio temporarily vacated his quarters at the Elysée Hotel and moved into a large suite at the Drake. He filled the suite with several bouquets of fresh roses.

Marilyn’s first order of business in New York entailed visiting Yankee Stadium to watch DiMaggio—immaculately attired in a pinstripe suit—suffer through one of his pre- and post-game WPIX-TV broadcasts. Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto, DiMaggio’s interview subject that day, recalled how elated Joe seemed when Marilyn complimented him on his performance. “I don’t know whether she meant it or not,” said Rizzuto, “but Joe lapped it up. She told him how well he’d done—‘You’re doing swell,’ she said, ‘just relax’—and he broke into an ear-to-ear smile. And whenever Joe DiMaggio smiled, he’d reveal those horse-sized buck teeth of his. Needless to say, they weren’t his best
feature. In any event, they didn’t seem to bother Marilyn. I once read that she felt attracted to men who wore glasses and had bad teeth. Joe didn’t wear glasses, but he certainly qualified so far as his choppers were concerned.”

Rizzuto remembered how, once the broadcast ended, the tiny TV studio filled up with Yankees ballplayers eager to catch a firsthand glimpse of Monroe “There were maybe a dozen of us in the room,” said the shortstop, “all vying to get close to Marilyn, badgering her for an autograph. Even old Casey Stengel, the skipper, shoved his way in. And Marilyn was very accommodating, very sweet about everything, posing for pictures with some of the players and so forth. Everyone knows how glamourous she looked, so I won’t go into that. Let’s just say that in person she looked even more scrumptious than she did on the silver screen, and I guess some of the guys were maybe getting a little too familiar with her, because all at once Joe began to lose it. He became agitated, no doubt equally pissed off because he was being ignored. He suddenly grabbed Marilyn rather forcefully and started pushing her toward the door. ‘C’mon, you fuckers, you’ve seen enough,’ he said. And then a moment later they were gone.”

That week, DiMaggio squired Marilyn to all his usual haunts. They visited the Stork Club, the Copacabana, El Morocco, the Colony, the Jockey Club, and Toots Shor’s. And wherever they turned up, they were in the spotlight. Fellow diners and drinkers looked and whispered. They tapped each other on the shoulder and pointed with their eyes. Marilyn adored the attention. She told Joe she loved New York and hated Hollywood. “There’s no place like New York,” she said. At Toots Shor’s, they encountered Dario Lodigiani, an old wartime crony of Joe’s, a former bunkmate who’d grown up with Joe in San Francisco and then found himself in the same World War II unit as Joe. Dario, who’d played second base for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Chicago White Sox, regaled Marilyn with stories related to DiMaggio’s military service, including one about how in 1944 (after Joe had spent time at a number of training bases on the mainland),
the Seventh Army Air Forces flew him to Honolulu to play baseball with the troops.

“So here’s Staff Sergeant Joseph Paul DiMaggio, without the familiar number five on his back, and the instant he arrives,” said Dario, “they pile him into a jeep and drive him to Honolulu Stadium and shove a baseball bat into his paws. His Yankee teammate Charles ‘Red’ Ruffing is pitching. There are twenty thousand fans, mostly military personnel, in the stands, and he steps to the plate and belts Ruffing’s first pitch a country mile, way over the left-field bleachers, out of sight and onto the street, and everybody goes nuts. And the next time up he stretches a double into a triple and slides into third so hard you’d think he was Ty Cobb. But that’s how he played the game. I’m glad we were on the same team. I mean, we’re not fighting the Nazis, but we’re at least entertaining the boys. And then after a couple of months, Joe’s duodenal ulcer kicks up, and he spends the rest of the war in and out of military hospitals.”

“Right,” responded DiMaggio, “and when I’m not playing ball or convalescing in a hospital bed, I’m playing pinochle and poker with four- and five-star generals. It was boring as hell, but it’s not my fault they didn’t ask me to drop bombs on the enemy. I’d have gladly obliged.”

“Like Ted Williams,” said Dario. “Now, there’s a war hero for you.”

“Listen,” said DiMaggio, “Pee Wee Reese and Johnny Mize played exhibition ball for the navy during the war, and nobody said a word. It’s not my fault they handed me a bat and mitt instead of a machine gun.”

Marilyn liked the give-and-take. And she enjoyed the stream of men that flocked to Joe’s table to shake hands with the Clipper and ogle his date. Nor did she mind the autograph collectors with their ever-ready supply of pens and notepads. For them it was a double bonanza: the baseball immortal and the Hollywood glamour queen. Approaching DiMaggio when he sat alone (or with his coterie of followers) would have been out of the question, but in Monroe’s presence, he became more serene and more human. Joe took immense pride in having this utterly beautiful woman on his arm, knowing that every man in the
room envied him, wanted to be him. It was true. Let them covet their secret dreams of what it must be like to fall into bed with her. Let them gaze upon her and wonder. Look but don’t touch. For once he wasn’t even distressed by the omnipresence of the press, the loathsome scribes who tailed them from place to place, reporting on their daily doings as if they were the two most vital personages on the planet. He smiled for the paparazzi—as well as the legitimate lensmen—who hovered round like flies at a beach resort. This was the new DiMaggio. It was different from the stardom he’d enjoyed as a ballplayer. It was love, and he loved it.

Given the enormity of DiMaggio’s ego, it is easy to imagine the thrill he experienced at the end of the day when he and Marilyn returned to his hotel suite to spend the night together. And she, too, took great pleasure in being with Joe at a point when everything still seemed so simple, so wonderful. She was a person with human relations problems, worries, fears, inadequacies, and insecurities, but everything she was beginning to feel for Joe—trust, gratitude, admiration, even adulation—helped combat her shortcomings and frailties. And then too, as she later informed Truman Capote, DiMaggio, with his amazing physique and staying power, had all the makings of a superb lover. She called him “Daddy” and “Pa” as well as “Slugger,” and in extolling his sexual prowess to Capote, she remarked, “Joe’s biggest bat isn’t the one he used at the plate.”

Yet from the beginning of their relationship, there were moments and incidents that must have raised red flags in Marilyn’s mind. One of these incidents took place the night they celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday with George Solotaire at Le Pavillon, then New York’s finest (and most expensive) French restaurant. On being introduced to Solotaire, whom Marilyn hadn’t as yet met personally, she said: “So you’re the fellow who runs interference for Joe and pries the girls loose when they become inconvenient.”

“I guess that’s me,” agreed the Broadway ticket broker.

Comparing notes, it developed that Solotaire, like Marilyn, had spent several years of his childhood in an orphange. Their shared
experience created an immediate and lasting bond between them. Of DiMaggio’s pals, Solotaire remained the one to whom she always felt closest.

During the meal, an elderly gentleman approached them from another table. His name was Henry Rosenfeld. A wealthy clothing manufacturer, Rosenfeld had known Marilyn since 1949, when she arrived in New York to help promote
Love Happy
, a Marx Brothers comedy in which she’d been handed a small role—one of her first—as the dumb blonde. From the way Marilyn and Rosenfeld spoke to each other, it became obvious to DiMaggio that the pair had once been on intimate terms.