Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  Encouraged by Hollywood talent agent Mort Millman, Dorothy Arnold (having resumed use of her professional “screen” name) decided to reenter the world of show business, not as an actress but primarily as a vocalist. Millman reasoned, not incorrectly, that as “the former Mrs. Joe DiMaggio,” Dorothy could draw a crowd—more out of curiosity perhaps than anything else. By mid-1945, she had contracted to appear nightly with Nat Brandwynne and His Orchestra in the Starlight Room at the Waldorf-Astoria.

  “My mother had stayed on as Little Joe’s nanny,” said Emerald Duffy, “and when Dorothy began singing with the band, we all moved into a large residential suite at the Waldorf Towers. Incredibly, Joe DiMaggio was still courting Dorothy, hoping to remarry. He’d come by to retrieve his son and take him back to his own suite at the Hotel Edison or the Elysée, where they’d sit around and watch TV all evening. Then he’d have somebody drop the boy off in the morning. At some point he suggested they try living together again. She had no intention of going back to him. She told my mother that he would never change, that he was immersed in cement, that he had no regard or respect for women. Besides, she’d started dating somebody else, and she was evidently crazy about him.”

  Her new love interest was George Schubert, a former Wall Street investment broker who soon took over as Dorothy’s manager. They were married on August 1, 1946. As Joyce Hadley saw it, he was more talkative than Joe DiMaggio but otherwise shared many of Joe’s characteristics. “Schubert,” she wrote, “was stiff . . . and controlled in everything he said and did.” Like DiMaggio, he was domineering, demanding, narcissistic, and full of himself. As she’d done with Joe, Dorothy rationalized his behavior, oblivious to the reality of the situation. Life with her new husband consisted largely of dining, drinking, dancing, and attending wild parties—a radical change from her previous lifestyle. But unlike DiMaggio, Schubert had little of his own money. “I’m afraid,” she told her sister Joyce, “I’m attracted to all the wrong men.”

  “The real victim in all this was Little Joey,” said Emerald Duffy. “His mother had nicknamed him Butch, though I never knew exactly why. To be honest, his parents simply weren’t there for him. After she married George Schubert, Dorothy absented herself almost completely from her son’s life. Between her marriage and her show business career, she was never around. And the boy was virtually invisible to his father. Joe DiMaggio appeared to like little kids, constantly gave them his autograph and a few kind words, but he seemed oblivious to his own son. Occasionally he’d take him along to the ballpark. I went with them only once. Joey was about six, and he wore his little Yankee baseball uniform, pinstripes and all. And he had his own baseball mitt, the Joe DiMaggio children’s signature model. He looked really cute. He kept asking me if I thought his dad would play catch with him on the sidelines before the game. ‘I don’t see why not,’ I told him. But when we reached Yankee Stadium and after DiMaggio suited up, he asked one of his teammates to toss a ball around with his son. He couldn’t be bothered.”

  Emerald recalled the day a sports magazine needed a photo of DiMaggio and Joe Jr. for their front cover. DiMaggio sent a limo to collect Joey and drive him to the photographer’s studio, where they posed together for a few shots, after which the boy was driven home. His father didn’t say two words to him. He had a dinner date that night with Peggy Deegan, his “girlfriend of the moment.” He didn’t have time for his son.

  Emerald Duffy went on to describe Little Joey’s early childhood years as an “abysmal period,” during which he had little emotional contact with either parent. In addition, he had few friends his own age. At school, when he told classmates his name was Joe DiMaggio, nobody believed him. “You’re full of shit,” they’d say. “His best pal,” Emerald noted, “was an elderly elevator operator at the Waldorf, whose name was Max. Max had no family of his own, so he kind of adopted Joey. They adopted each other. Joey spent hours riding up and down with Max, chatting away with him, unburdening himself. It seemed sad in a way. My mother tried to be there for Joey, but she was being paid to look after him—it wasn’t the same thing.”

  Then in late 1950, following her divorce from George Schubert, Dorothy Arnold became convinced that her career opportunities would be brighter in California. With Joey in tow, she left New York and moved to Los Angeles. There, once again bereft of companionship and left to his own devices, Joey eventually found a new “best pal.” Her name was Marilyn Monroe, and in January 1954 Marilyn would evolve into something far more vital than a “best pal”—she would become Joey’s stepmother.

  • • •

  It wasn’t that Joe DiMaggio hadn’t wanted to tell Marilyn about his four-year marriage to Dorothy Arnold—it wasn’t that at all. Rather, it had been a question of finding “the right time and the right place.” That, in any case, is how he phrased it when he finally got around to conveying the sordid details, many of which Monroe had already heard from George Solotaire the night they dined together at the Plaza. As a result, Joe’s long-awaited “confession” came as no great surprise.

  By late July 1952, Marilyn had finished shooting Niagara and had flown to Los Angeles, leaving Joe behind in New York to plod on with his television sports show. But at the beginning of September, she returned to the East Coast to attend the New York premiere of Monkey Business, and to serve as grand marshal for the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Twentieth Century–Fox’s publicity department had arranged Monroe’s participation in the pageant and had booked her into a luxury suite at the Ritz-Carlton, directly on the Boardwalk. In conjunction with her appearance as grand marshal, a US Army photographer was deployed to take pictures of the actress for an upcoming recruitment drive.

  The day before the pageant DiMaggio joined Marilyn at her hotel. That evening they ate a late dinner at the Merry-Go-Round Bar, off the Ritz lobby, and it was during their meal that he brought up the subject of his previous marriage. The following day Marilyn dressed for the event in a low-cut black chiffon gown, which displayed a good deal more of her than Joe thought it should have.

  In his biography of Joe DiMaggio, Richard Ben Cramer refers to Marilyn’s comment on the outfit. It was “an entirely decent dress,” she insisted. “You could ride in a streetcar in it without disturbing the passengers. But there was one bright-minded photographer who figured he would get a more striking picture if he photographed me shooting down. I didn’t notice him pointing his camera from the balcony.”

  The “bright-minded” photographer in this case happened to be the one sent by the army, and while his pictures revealed too much of Monroe’s very ample cleavage to be utilized for recruitment purposes, they appeared (somewhat retouched) in the next day’s press. If there were anybody who hadn’t as yet seen Marilyn’s nude calendar shots, they could familiarize themselves with her body by taking in the Atlantic City pictorials. Letters poured into newspaper offices from church groups and ladies’ clubs condemning Monroe for her lack of decorum and good taste.

  Predictably, Joe DiMaggio became infuriated when he saw the published photos. For him it was Dorothy Arnold and her “scandalous” Jones Beach two-piece bathing suit all over again. “He was screaming at Marilyn,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer. “Like she’d done the whole thing to embarrass him. She tried to explain. It was publicity. It was part of her job. She had to show herself.”

  They’d been through all this before, and DiMaggio remained as adamant as ever. “You don’t need to show them anything. Not a damn thing. You look like a fuckin’ whore in that outfit.”

  But that was the gown the studio had given her to wear.

  “Wear your own goddamn clothes, not theirs.”

  She didn’t have any clothes worth wearing.

  “Well then, buy them,” he snapped. “Or maybe you do have them, and they’re in the backseat of your car along with everything else you own. Can’t you see that those Hollywood swine are using you? You’re nothing to them but a piece of meat.”

  Marilyn agreed and Joe calm
ed down. He apologized for yelling, and she accepted his apology. That was the pattern they’d established. She’d do something that would set him off. He’d scream. She’d retreat. He’d feel contrite and offer an apology. They’d embrace and make up. And then, without fail, something else would come along, and they’d begin all over again.

  Chapter 5

  WHEN THE 1952 BASEBALL POSTSEASON ended in early October—the Yanks took the World Series from the Dodgers in seven games—Joe DiMaggio flew to San Francisco, picked up his dark blue ’52 Cadillac bearing the license plate “JOE D,” and drove to Los Angeles to spend time with Marilyn Monroe. The first thing he did was to take her on a shopping spree for a new wardrobe. He sat there patiently while she tried on a variety of outfits. Every dress had a high neckline. That was the deal: he’d pay for the clothes provided they met his sartorial specifications. She agreed to wear them if he promised to be more patient with her. He said he would try.

  A few weeks later, Marilyn, wearing one of her new fashion selections, accompanied DiMaggio to Black-Foxe Military Institute on Wilcox Avenue in Hollywood to visit his son. Joe Jr. had just celebrated his eleventh birthday. DiMaggio hadn’t seen the school before, though Joey had been a student there since 1951. Because of its location, Black-Foxe (named after its cofounders) catered primarily to the sons of families involved in the movie industry. Ranging in age from seven through nineteen, the “junior cadets,” as they were officially designated, were required to wear military uniforms when attending class. One of Joe Jr.’s classmates, the son of a well-known film director, later described the academy as “an overpriced dumping ground for the disaffected male offspring of prominent Hollywood parents eager to rid themselves of their kids for a couple of years, if not longer.”

  On Friday afternoons the entire student body, in full dress regalia, with a band playing in the background, would march up and down the drill field for the pleasure of the academy’s instructors and those parents who were there to pick up their sons for the weekend. The school would break out the rifles for the parade, small stock rifles for the younger students, real rifles for the high school–aged cadets. “That’s when you knew you were at a military academy,” said Joey Jr. “There was no mistaking it for a regular boarding school.”

  The day they came to visit, Joe Jr. led Marilyn and his father on a walking tour of the campus. They then took him to Trader Vic’s for dinner. Years after first meeting Marilyn, Joe DiMaggio’s son would say, “I took to her at once. In many respects she was like a kid herself, not at all like a movie star. Marilyn was neither haughty nor imperious. Quite to the contrary, she was straightforward and down-to-earth. There was a soft simplicity about her. She could be moody, but she was usually buoyant and always generous. She seemed extremely feminine. She tried to encourage me in my difficult relationship with my father, but at the same time, she never tried to supplant my mother, though in fact that wouldn’t have been a difficult thing to do. She always asked all the right questions: Did I have any friends at school? What were my favorite courses and why? Which writers did I like to read? It wasn’t just idle chatter. I felt she had a sincere interest in getting to know me.

  “By contrast, my father’s main focus revolved around Black-Foxe’s athletic program. He wasn’t concerned with me as a person. And I had to be careful how I spoke to him, because the wrong tone or comment would instantly jettison him into a black hole. It was always a matter of living up to his expectations. The only times he seemed pleased with me were when I could report I’d scored a game-clinching basket or won a student tennis tournament, or something of that sort. Attaining a good exam score or course grade didn’t mean much to him. You had to excel in sports. That’s what impressed him, and that’s the reason I never took baseball very seriously. No matter how hard I tried, I would never be good enough. I could never be another Joe DiMaggio.”

  Joey stressed that his father had a rather superficial view of life. “He concerned himself with image, with how things looked,” said Joe Jr. “For example, he was a chain-smoker. I can’t remember ever seeing him when he didn’t have a cigarette in his mouth. He went through three to four packs a day. But you won’t find many photographs of him smoking. He’d see a photographer coming his way, and he’d ditch the cigarette. It wasn’t cool in terms of image for an athlete to be caught with a cancer stick in hand. To impress the kids, you had to demonstrate that you were a wholesome guy, even if you weren’t.”

  Joey’s mother took advantage of the fact that her son was boarding at Black-Foxe—she was rarely around. Mort Millman, Dorothy Arnold’s agent, had found his client work as a lounge singer at the Mission Inn in Carmel, California. When that job ended, she embarked on the dinner club circuit and later performed on the road with the Minsky’s Follies. “She was out of town most of the time,” said Joey. “I remember taking several short vacations with her, once to Mexico and twice to Las Vegas. And then her family owned a summer cottage on Caribou Lake, in Wisconsin, so we’d hang out there once in a while. But for the most part I didn’t see much of her, particularly during my first two years at Black-Foxe. Because I was by myself most of the time, Marilyn began visiting me at school, sometimes with my father, other times alone. She’d take me out for dinner or invite me back to her place. Within a matter of months she moved from a house rental on Castilian Drive in the Hollywood Hills to a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and then into an apartment on North Doheny. She couldn’t sit still. Neither could my mother or father. Consequently, I never had a permanent childhood address. Because Marilyn experienced a similarly nomadic childhood, she understood me better than anyone else.”

  Joe Jr. readily admitted that he soon developed a “mad crush” on Marilyn. He confessed that she became the “object” of his “adolescent fantasies.” Joey went so far as to tell his mother that Marilyn was “a doll” and had “beautiful legs.”

  “I suppose I was jealous of my father,” he admitted. “It was all very Freudian.” Joey’s Black-Foxe classmates seem to have fostered their own MM fantasies. They couldn’t stop talking about her. They demanded to know if Joe Jr. had ever seen her “in the buff.” “Yeah,” he told them, “I saw her in that nude calendar spread, where she’s sprawled across a red velvet sheet.” “Not the calendar, asshole! In the flesh!” Even if he had seen her that way, he never would have admitted it. Not to them. They asked if in private she sounded the same as she did on-screen—with that breathy, sexy voice of hers. In fact, she didn’t, but he assured them she did. And then there was the time he engaged in fisticuffs with a schoolmate because “the jerk” called Marilyn “a hooker.” Busted him in the mouth. Split his lip and broke a couple of teeth. The fight nearly got Joey suspended from school. He told his father about it, and Joe DiMaggio “must’ve said something to somebody,” because in the end nothing came of the incident.

  While Joe Jr. never experienced Monroe “in the buff,” save the nude calendar shot, he did see her in a bathing suit. “Her Hollywood Hills sublet had an outdoor swimming pool,” he recalled, “and when I went over there, mainly on weekends, I’d swim, and Marilyn would sit poolside and read. She always had her nose in a book. I think she felt somewhat insecure because she hadn’t completed high school, and this is how she compensated. Then, too, she was perpetually on this self-improvement kick. She wanted to expand her horizons. She had an artistic nature and a quick mind. She was imaginative and creative, but in a sort of childlike way. I can’t explain it. She wrote poetry and kept journals. She’d often quote from writers like Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She’d taken an extension course in art and literature at UCLA and had planned on taking additional courses, but there was never enough time.”

  One Sunday afternoon Joe and Marilyn picked up his son at school and drove him to the Castilian Drive residence to spend the day. The three of them were sitting around the pool, relaxing, when they heard a clicking sound coming from behind some hedges. A newspaper photographer had hidden out and was taking pictures. DiMaggi
o jumped up and chased the fellow away, but the damage had been done. The photos appeared in all the papers a day or two later. “And that,” said Joe Jr., “is when all hell broke loose.”

  The news media contacted Dorothy Arnold for a comment. Did she know about Monroe and her former husband? What did she think of Marilyn? And did she mind her son spending time with the couple?

  Dorothy claimed she knew of DiMaggio’s relationship with Monroe. She said she had nothing per se against Marilyn—she seemed to be “a kind and sweet lady”—but her former husband was a horse of a different color. He never took a fatherly interest in his son. He didn’t take his visitations with Butch seriously. All they ever did together was watch television. And eat junk food. Joe never even spoke to Butch. He didn’t offer parental guidance of any kind. To be blunt, he was an unfit father. She had taken up golf with Butch, which is more than his father had done, even though Joe was an avid golfer. She’d exposed her son to all sorts of activities. He loved building model airplanes. She’d registered him at Clover airfield (in Santa Monica) for an aviation course geared toward young teenagers. He’d flown in the cockpit of a plane with a private instructor. At her family’s lake house in Wisconsin, he’d been given sailing and waterskiing lessons. In Mexico, he’d learned all about the art of bullfighting. She’d done all this for Butch, and what had DiMaggio done for him? Nothing, absolutely nothing!