Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  Mosby’s scoop became front-page news. The nude calendar shot, airbrushed to comply with censorship requirements, received wide publication in newspapers and magazines. Joe DiMaggio didn’t object to the fact that she’d posed for the photo, but rather that she’d admitted it when there was no particular need to do so. “Joe doesn’t mind being written about,” Marilyn noted in her memoir, “but he is against doing anything to encourage or attract publicity.” He applied the same standards to Monroe and condemned her for manipulating the media in order to create a news story. When he told her he didn’t know if he could deal with her voracious appetite for public exposure, she replied, “You don’t have to be part of it.”

  “I am,” he said, “and it bothers me.”

  “It’s part of my career,” Marilyn pointed out.

  What irked DiMaggio even more than the Hollywood gossip mongers—the columnists and reporters—were the press photographers constantly in pursuit of Marilyn, waiting for her on every street corner, ready to pounce the moment she appeared.

  “When you were a baseball idol,” she remarked, “you didn’t duck photographers.”

  “Yes. I did,” he answered.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Do you want me to hide in a basement?” she asked. “Movie stars aren’t born, they’re created. Publicity is part of the manufacturing process.”

  “We’ll see how it works out,” he said.

  On April 7, 1952, Marilyn was the subject of a Life magazine feature article, making her first appearance on the cover of the periodical. The publication of the Life piece only weeks after her nude calendar disclosure indicated that the latter hadn’t damaged her reputation in the least. If anything, the “Golden Dreams” calendar shot increased her star power and made her a more valuable commodity. Yet when Marilyn showed DiMaggio a copy of the April 7 issue, he dismissed it with a wave of his hand.

  “I’ve been on the cover of Life myself,” he said “What does it prove?” Then, answering his own question, he remarked, “Absolutely nothing. It’s all vanity.”

  In April 1952 Joe DiMaggio returned to San Francisco and several days later flew to New York to begin a new job. He’d ended his thirteen-year baseball career in 1951, due to the grind of the road and an accumulation of injuries, not least of which was a surgically removed three-inch bone spur in the heel of his foot. At the time of his retirement, he’d been making $100,000 per year, one of the first major leaguers to reach the six-figure plateau. The Yankees currently had a new center fielder, a kid from Oklahoma named Mickey Mantle. Neither as graceful nor as polished a ballplayer as DiMaggio, Mantle would nonetheless develop into a great outfielder in his own right. He would also remain a source of ongoing annoyance to DiMaggio, who too easily became jealous of any ballplayer whose skills rivaled his own. Even Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams, often said to have had the “best eye” in baseball, would refer to Joe as “the Prima Donna of Prima Donnas.”

  DiMaggio’s new job, which paid just about the same salary he’d earned during his last years with the Yanks, seemed at odds with his personality. He’d become the host of a television talk show that was broadcast from a cramped studio located in the basement tunnel behind the home-team dugout at Yankee Stadium. The show involved five minutes of pregame commentary on his part, followed by a postgame interview with either a Yankees player or a member of the visiting team. The producers of the show were responsible for choosing the interviewee and writing out the postgame questions. DiMaggio hated doing the show almost as much as he’d despised working on his father’s fishing boat. He felt insecure about appearing before the cameras and was convinced he wasn’t doing a good job. He was right.

  Richard Ben Cramer, one of DiMaggio’s biographers, reported one instance when the Yankee Clipper threw an absolute fit, spewing curses and refusing to go on, because somebody had misplaced the first cue card. The program director eventually calmed him down and saw to it that they wrote out a new cue card in block letters:

  HI, I’M JOE DIMAGGIO.

  WELCOME TO THE JOE DIMAGGIO SHOW.

  He was once again sharing a suite with George Solotaire at the Elysée Hotel in Manhattan. Also staying with them was Robert Solotaire, George’s twenty-two-year-old son. “Joe would rush back to the hotel after his TV spot and call Marilyn Monroe in Hollywood,” recalled Robert. “He was nuts about her. Following their daily phone conversation, the three of us would head out for dinner, either at Toots Shor’s, where Joe had his own table, or the Stage Deli, on Seventh Avenue. Although Joe usually let others do the talking, these days he’d blabber nonstop about Marilyn. From the very beginning, he wanted to marry her. He’d construed an image of her that seemed totally unrealistic. I remember one night at Toots Shor’s when he told sports reporter Jimmy Cannon that ‘Marilyn’s nothing but a fun-loving little kid.’ She’d give up her acting career if he asked her, he said. She’d quit making movies to start a family, have babies.

  “My old man never said anything to him, but he thought Joe misunderstood Monroe. Like, here’s this young, beautiful woman on the verge of becoming one of the most successful and famous actresses in the world, an international superstar, and she’s going to give it all up to make lasagna for Joe and spend her days changing diapers. It didn’t compute. The main problem was that Joe’s triumphs belonged to the past, and he lived on them, while Marilyn’s great success lay just ahead of her.”

  To be sure, Joe DiMaggio had a very “old school” view of women: a woman should be reserved and, it went without saying, should respect and honor her man. Proud of Marilyn’s beauty, he loved that she was admired but preferred that she be admired from afar. According to Joe, there was no better career for a woman than being a homemaker and mother. He and Marilyn had discussed this issue during their time together. And while she had refused to promise anything concerning her own intentions, she had assured Joe that starting a family was her dearest wish. DiMaggio convinced himself that he would prevail in the end and would convince her to give up her acting career in exchange for the sanctity of a domestic partnership. Until that time was at hand, he would help her attain the public acclaim she so desperately sought.

  On April 27, some three weeks after DiMaggio’s departure from Hollywood, Marilyn suffered an appendicitis attack. Taken to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, she had her appendix removed the following day. “If I die,” she told Joe DiMaggio over the phone prior to the surgery, “I want you to put roses on my grave every week, just as William Powell did for Jean Harlow.” Actually, Marilyn wasn’t afraid that she would die—it wasn’t a dangerous surgical procedure—but that she would be left with a lower abdominal scar. “You never know when I might want to pose for another nude calendar shot,” she joked with Shelley Winters, who’d shared an apartment with her when both actresses were first breaking into the film business.

  “When it came to surgery,” said Shelley, “Marilyn’s greatest fear was that some doctor would accidentally remove her ovaries, eliminating the possibility of having a child. I learned later that prior to her appendectomy, she’d taped a note to her abdomen reminding the surgeon not to tamper with her ovaries. When I heard this, I told her an appendectomy has nothing to do with a woman’s reproductive organs. ‘I know,’ said Marilyn, ‘but when they have you strapped to an operating table, they just love to carve you up.’ I believe her fear stemmed from the fact that she suffered from a condition that had been diagnosed as endometriosis, a gynecological disorder that caused extremely painful menstrual periods, for which she underwent some half dozen surgical procedures during her life. I have no idea why, but her gynecologist, Dr. Leon Krohn, was also in the operating room when she had her appendectomy, so perhaps she thought he might remove her ovaries.”

  Unable to join Marilyn after her operation because of his television commitment, Joe telephoned her at all hours. He sent letters and telegrams and several bottles of champagne, which the head nurse confiscated for the duratio
n of her stay. He arranged for a local florist to deliver a fresh bouquet of roses twice a day until she left the hospital. He also asked David March, who’d introduced them, to visit her after the surgery. To DiMaggio’s dismay, March brought along a reporter. DiMaggio never spoke to the publicist again.

  After Marilyn’s release from Cedars, Joe telephoned her nonstop at the Bel Air Hotel, where she’d rented a suite to convalesce. He dispensed advice and counsel on how she should handle the public relations aspect of her profession. He’d gone through it in his own career, he said, and he’d learned from bitter experience how to deal with “all those vultures,” most of them only too willing to take advantage of her. Nobody in Hollywood could be trusted. They were all fakes and charlatans. She must be wary of reporters and agents, producers and photographers. And among the worst were the studio executives. They were using her. They were exploiting her beauty and talent for their own purposes. It was because of this, he told her, that the only film role they would ever offer her would be that of the bombshell, the buxom blonde, the wiggling, giggling, ass-grinding sexpot, a fantasy figure whose inclusion in the script was solely a moneymaking proposition. And the only bank accounts they were interested in enriching were their own. They were about to make millions off Monroe, and they were paying her thousands. The only way to fight them, insisted DiMaggio, was to do what he’d done with the New York Yankees: hold out. “Hold out,” he said, “until they pay you what you’re worth.”

  Joe would continue to offer Marilyn this kind of frank, earnest, fatherly guidance for the rest of her days. It was one of the traits she most admired in him, which drew her to him as both a friend and a lover. He became one of the few devotees who gave her more than he took, a man who, in his own way, came to love her unconditionally. Yet somehow, even his all-abiding love couldn’t begin to heal all the wounds she’d suffered in her childhood, a period so dark and dismal it had left her emotionally scarred for life.

  Chapter 3

  SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER MARILYN MONROE’S appendectomy, an event ensued that proved eerily similar, in a number of respects, to the recent “Golden Dreams” nude calendar affair.

  Based on what Marilyn had told Twentieth Century–Fox about her childhood and upbringing, the studio’s publicity department had portrayed her in various press releases as a “disadvantaged orphan” whose formative years had been spent shuttling back and forth between a desolate Los Angeles orphanage and a collection of foster homes, some better than others. Investigating the actress’s past and present, a reporter discovered that Marilyn’s mother was still alive, suggesting that either the studio or Monroe (or both) had lied. “Just who is the real Marilyn Monroe?” the journalist asked in a widely distributed UPI (United Press International) article. It was a question Marilyn herself would pose many times in her life and to which there was no single or simple response.

  In search of an answer, Marilyn had begun therapy in 1950 with Dr. Judd Marmor, a prominent West Coast psychiatrist (analyst), whose patient roster included an assortment of movie stars, studio executives, and Beverly Hills housewives. Discussing Marilyn, Dr. Marmor acknowledged seeing her only once or twice in 1950. “One of my patients was Shelley Winters, Marilyn’s friend and former roommate, and she sent her to see me. Another person who recommended that Marilyn begin therapy was director Elia Kazan, with whom Marilyn had an on-again, off-again three-year affair. The problem was that Marilyn lacked the funds at this point to commit to any long-term program. So we really didn’t get into anything. I think she’d seen one or two other therapists in Los Angeles, but, again, only for a session or two. It wasn’t until she moved to New York in 1955 that she began therapy in earnest.”

  Marilyn had actually attempted a form of therapy prior to 1955. The doctor’s name was Rose Fromm, a German Jewish refugee who arrived in New York in 1937 and settled on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “In 1951,” said Dr. Fromm, “I spent six months in Los Angeles. I knew journalists Jim Bacon and Sidney Skolsky, and they introduced me to Marilyn Monroe. I’d known both columnists since 1948. I have to stress that I’d worked as a psychotherapist in Europe but not in the United States, and I made that perfectly clear to Marilyn. My doctorate in clinical psychology had been awarded abroad, and I had no interest in going through the process all over again, beyond what I needed in order to do psychiatric research in the US. In any event, Marilyn and I got along famously, and she visited my Los Angeles apartment at least a dozen times during 1951. I think at this point in time she actually preferred the kind of informal setting I provided, as opposed to the more traditional and regimented psychoanalytic sessions she underwent later in life. Basically, I think she just wanted to have somebody help her make sense of her troubled past and very turbulent childhood.”

  The circumstances surrounding that “turbulent childhood” took shape well before June 1, 1926, the date of her birth in a charity ward at Los Angeles County General Hospital. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Monroe—she claimed to be related to James Monroe, the fifth president of the United States—came from a working-class family with a considerable history of emotional disturbance. Gladys’s maternal grandfather, Tilford Marion Hogan, committed suicide in 1933, and her mother and father both spent time in mental institutions. Gladys, red haired, fair skinned, and attractive, married businessman Jack Baker in 1917, when she was only fifteen. They had two children, Hermitt and Berniece, but Jack terminated the marriage after several years and took the children with him when he moved to Kentucky. Gladys never saw her son again. He contracted tuberculosis and died at age fifteen. Meanwhile, a succession of men followed Jack in Gladys’s bed, including an unemployed merchant named Edward Mortensen. Gladys and Mortensen were wed on October 11, 1924, and were divorced seven months later. Despite the irrefutable fact that Gladys and Mortensen never spoke again following their divorce, he is identified as Marilyn’s father on her birth certificate, a designation that is biologically not feasible considering the date of their last meeting. The same certificate listed Marilyn’s baptismal name as Norma Jeane Mortenson, a misspelling of Edward’s last name, which her mother later changed (though not legally) to Norma Jeane Baker.

  At the time of Norma Jeane’s birth, her mother was employed as a film cutter at Consolidated Film Industries in Hollywood, where she’d worked since 1923. In the early fall of 1925, she had an affair with C. Stanley Gifford, a salesman in the same firm. Gladys became pregnant, and Gifford, unwilling to assume responsibility, cut off the relationship. He offered her money, which she proudly refused to accept. According to Dr. Fromm, Marilyn, or Norma Jeane, “never doubted the true identity of her birth father. Nor did Gladys Baker, for that matter. It was Stanley Gifford. Why Gladys wrote “Mortenson” on her daughter’s birth certificate is anybody’s guess. My guess is that she was in love with Gifford and felt terribly hurt that he’d abandoned her. And at least she and Mortensen had been married, which conferred the newborn infant with some vague sense of legitimacy.”

  Gladys Baker had turned twenty-four when she gave birth to Norma Jeane. Gladys’s mother, Della Monroe Granger, urged her to retain her full-time position at Consolidated and to place the infant with a foster family. Norma Jeane was turned over to Wayne and Ida Bolender, Christian Science adherents, who lived on East Rhode Island Street in Hawthorne, California, the same street as Della, an overzealous follower of the same religious ideology. Gladys paid the couple $5 a week to look after her daughter. “Aunt Ida,” as Norma Jeane knew her, served as her foster guardian and substitute mother. Although Ida objected to being called “Mommy” by the child, Wayne didn’t mind being referred to as “Daddy.” He thus became the first in a long line of elusive father figures that Norma Jeane/Marilyn Monroe would look to for protection and guidance in years to come.

  “With the exception of Joe DiMaggio and perhaps one or two others, the pivotal truth is that few of these so-called father figures offered her anything even close to guidance,” said Dr. Fromm. “And the surrogate mothers even less so. Ther
e’s that horrific anecdote she related to me involving her grandmother, who frequently visited her at the Bolender house when she was a baby and sometimes took her across the street to her own home. The story has it that one day Della tried to smother the infant with a pillow because she wouldn’t stop crying. They committed the woman to Norwalk State Hospital, in Norwalk, LA County. It wasn’t her first stay in a mental institution. After several weeks at Norwalk, she suffered a manic seizure and died the following day.”

  Even the most mundane of Norma Jeane’s childhood activities had a phantasmagoric edge to them. On weekends her mother sometimes took her on outings, mostly by trolley, to the beach at Santa Monica. But on those occasions Gladys seemed nervous and preoccupied, barely capable of relating to her daughter. Wayne and Ida Bolender took her to religious pageants and sent her to Sunday school, an experience, she told Dr. Fromm, that gave rise to a recurring childhood dream wherein she stands up in church without any clothes on, and all the people there are lying at her feet on the floor of the church, and she walks naked, with a sense of freedom, over their prostrate forms. Another dream, also involving nudity, resulted from a visit she paid with the Bolenders to a country cemetery. In this dream she races naked around a cemetery at dawn trying to find a way out, getting lost, tripping over a headstone, then finally exiting the cemetery through high steel gates.

  Norma Jeane attended kindergarten and then first grade with Lester, a boy her age who’d been adopted by the Bolenders. The two children were given private piano lessons at home, but Lester, as Marilyn Monroe recalled, constantly disrupted the lessons by throwing temper tantrums. She additionally remembered (how could she not?) that the Bolenders would discipline both youngsters by beating them with a belt, a practice that forever instilled in her a fear of violence. Her favorite “household member” turned out to be Charlie, a pet collie that accompanied her on treks through a clump of piney woods several blocks behind the house. One morning she awoke to find that Wayne Bolender had given the dog away the night before. No explanation for this action was ever provided. “Charlie simply disappeared,” Marilyn would tell Dr. Fromm, “like so many others in my life.”