Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  The Hearst newspaper syndicate picked up the story and ran a follow-up article comparing Dorothy Arnold and Marilyn Monroe, pointing out that both were blond, both were fair skinned, both had “curves in all the right places,” and both were performers. The difference between them, read the piece, “is that Marilyn’s nine years younger than Dorothy and far more successful in her film career.”

  Offended by the article, Dorothy went on the warpath, asserting in the press that her former husband was subjecting their son to a “loose, amoral side of life” and to “a person” (i.e., Monroe) with an “unsavory” reputation, “a person” better known for her “sexual conquests” than for her “film roles.” (So much for the “kind and sweet” Marilyn.) Dorothy reported that during her son’s “quality time” with his dad, Joe would take Butch over to Marilyn’s place and let him use the pool while Joe and Marilyn “retired to her bedroom and had sex.” And while DiMaggio could do whatever he wished in terms of a social life, she didn’t want her son exposed to his father’s affair. “He should be more discreet.” To this she added that considering Joe’s rather substantial income, he was paying far too little in child support. She planned, she said, on going back to court.

  She went back to court, but not until Joe DiMaggio offered his own statement to the press. He called Dorothy’s accusations “ridiculous” and charged her with using his child support payments to her own benefit, rather than their son’s. He stated that her Marilyn Monroe–related comments were vile and untrue. “It’s pure jealousy on her part,” he observed. “She doesn’t even know Marilyn.”

  It was but one more battle in an ongoing war. Before the end of the year, Dorothy Arnold filed papers with the Superior Court of Los Angeles requesting that the monthly child support payment of $150 be increased to $1,000 so she “could establish a home for our son in keeping with his father’s wealth and position.” Further, she petitioned the court to suspend DiMaggio’s visitation rights because he had exposed Joe Jr. to “a person with an immoral reputation.”

  Having retained the services of Loyd Wright Jr., a Los Angeles attorney, DiMaggio took the witness stand and pointed out that not only was he paying child support, but he also financed Joey’s education, summer camp program, extracurricular activities, and medical needs. As an example of his former wife’s “treacherous” behavior, he testified that she had recently sold a piano he’d acquired for Joey and had pocketed the proceeds. And regarding visitation rights, he insisted he was currently negotiating the purchase of a residence in the area, which would give him the opportunity to see his son on a more regular basis. If anything, he felt his visitation rights ought to be broadened, not curtailed. He accused his former wife of “bad-mouthing” him to their son, thereby turning the boy against him. “My son,” he said, “has been brainwashed.”

  Although Judge Elmer Doyle agreed to raise the monthly child support payment to $300, he otherwise ruled for DiMaggio, going so far as to tell Dorothy Arnold she should probably “never have divorced” Joe DiMaggio. As the parties filed out of the courtroom into the outer corridor, a spectator overheard Dorothy mutter to a friend, “I should never have married him—if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had to seek a divorce.”

  • • •

  Jane Russell may have been given top billing in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but Marilyn Monroe was the blonde, and as the film title suggested, gentlemen preferred them. And while it might have been better for publicity purposes had they become rivals, once shooting began, Jane and Marilyn had become good friends. Five years older than Monroe, Russell had graduated from Van Nuys High, the same school Norma Jeane Baker would attend a few years later. At Van Nuys, Jane performed in the same student theater group as Jim Dougherty, Norma Jeane’s future husband. Russell and Monroe also had Howard Hughes in common. Hughes had discovered Jane, and he and Monroe had likewise crossed paths, though to what extent and how intimately Marilyn never divulged.

  Like so many other women in Marilyn’s life, Jane Russell took a protective, almost maternal attitude toward her. Marilyn turned to her for advice on her relationship with Joe DiMaggio. If anyone could discuss the pros and contras associated with marriage to a career athlete, it had to be Jane Russell. In 1943 she’d married her high school sweetheart, Bob Waterfield, who went on to become an all-pro quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams. Having retired from football the same year Joe quit baseball, Waterfield soon began hanging out with DiMaggio. While Jane and Marilyn busied themselves on the movie set, Joe and Bob went golfing together. Despite their shared interest in all matters athletic, they had little else in common. Bob Waterfield envisioned a future for himself in the business end of the movie industry. In the early 1950s, he and Jane Russell started their own film company, producing four motion pictures over the next ten years. Joe DiMaggio hated the Hollywood jungle and everything associated with it. He remained hopeful he could convince Marilyn to quit making films and start making babies. Bob Waterfield told DiMaggio he couldn’t see why she couldn’t do both. Jane Russell concurred. She and Bob had adopted three children, and she had always found parenting perfectly compatible with an acting career. Marilyn felt encouraged.

  In connection with the premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn and Jane were asked to participate in the traditional hand-foot imprint ceremony in the courtyard at Grauman’s Theatre. For Marilyn it was the fulfillment of a fantasy she’d entertained since her childhood days at the orphanage. As Marilyn and Jane kneeled on the sidewalk, Marilyn suggested that Russell pull down the top of her dress and press her exposed breasts into the wet cement; she offered to do the same with her buttocks, preserving them for posterity’s sake. When informed by the Fox representative that her suggestion was unacceptable, Marilyn came up with another idea. She thought a diamond should be used to dot the i in her name, a reminder of her big number (“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”) in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Instead of a diamond, Fox sanctioned the use of a rhinestone. A few weeks later, the rhinestone mysteriously disappeared. “Oh well, it’s the thought that counts,” Marilyn told a journalist. “Frankly, I think if Jane Russell’s boobs and my ass had been used instead of our hands and feet, a lot more people would’ve visited that site.”

  Long after she and Marilyn appeared together in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Jane Russell stated that she retained “genuine admiration and affection” for Marilyn. “She was anything but the airhead she so often portrayed in her films,” said Russell. “She was very smart and quite unique. Despite her spotty background, she managed to make a grand success of her career. Yet for all her success, she remained neurotically insecure, constantly in search of advice and guidance, and forever in pursuit of a lasting love. I never for a minute believed that she and Joe DiMaggio would last. They were in love, very much so, but they didn’t understand each other. They came from different universes. That was the tragedy of their relationship. They couldn’t stay together. It was ill fated, written in the stars.”

  • • •

  One of the many characters who attempted to latch on to Marilyn Monroe was Robert Slatzer, a self-proclaimed screenwriter and producer. Slatzer (he died in 2005 at age seventy-seven) met Marilyn at Twentieth Century–Fox in 1946, when he was a struggling fan-magazine reporter and she a struggling model and actress. Having fallen in love with her, Slatzer proceeded to write countless articles and a book about her, in the course of which he made the incredible claim that he, and not Joe DiMaggio, had been her second husband. It is noteworthy that Slatzer’s disclosure of a purported marriage came only after Marilyn’s death.

  Without a shred of evidence to support his claim, Slatzer contended that their “secret” wedding took place on October 4, 1952, in Tijuana, Mexico, while Joe DiMaggio languished in New York covering the World Series. According to Slatzer, an unnamed lawyer performed the marriage ceremony for a $5 fee. The marriage supposedly ended two or three days later when Darryl F. Zanuck, Marilyn’s boss at Fox, coerced her into a divorce. Slatzer later penned
a treatment for a proposed film to be titled Three Days in Heaven, encapsulating his “three-day marriage” to Marilyn, and submitted it to several independent producers, hoping to elicit interest in the project.

  “Slatzer’s treatment crossed my desk in New York,” said television and film producer Lester Persky, “and while it wasn’t particularly well written, the story line, if true, was sensational. On the surface, I found it difficult to believe because at the time Slatzer claimed he married Monroe, she was involved with Joe DiMaggio. Why would one of the world’s most alluring and famous women marry a penniless nobody when she had the likes of DiMaggio and Arthur Miller banging at her door? It made no sense, but then again that’s what was so intriguing about it.”

  On Persky’s next trip to Los Angeles, he met with Slatzer to discuss the property. “He turned out to be an absolute sleaze bucket,” said Persky, “the kind of bloke who’d sell you his soiled underwear if you were dumb enough to make him an offer. After meeting him, I decided to do a little snooping around and soon learned Monroe had been nowhere near Tijuana on October 4, 1952. A Beverly Hills real estate agent I knew had driven Marilyn around during those three days, showing her prospective apartment rentals all over Los Angeles. The agent had business journals dating back to 1950 detailing the names of clients and the addresses they visited. And there in black and white were her notations on Marilyn Monroe covering the dates in question. So much for Mr. Slatzer’s little fairy tale. I’m not saying he didn’t love her; I’m saying he never married her.”

  The single Bob Slatzer story that did ring true took place in early December 1952, after Marilyn had moved into a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Joe DiMaggio had told her that he would be going to San Francisco for the day to attend a friend’s birthday party, and she had invited Bob Slatzer over for drinks that evening. She had spent the afternoon on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and didn’t expect Joe to return until later that night. Catching an earlier flight back to Los Angeles, Joe arrived while Slatzer was still present. Imagining the worst, DiMaggio asked Marilyn’s guest to leave. Slatzer stood his ground. He wasn’t about to let this dumb-ass dago toss him out on his can, even if it meant getting the shit kicked out of him. DiMaggio turned on Monroe. The couple became embroiled in a bitter quarrel. With no end in sight and probably feeling embarrassed by the mix-up, Marilyn ordered both men to get out. Outside on the street, DiMaggio glared at his adversary. “Good night, slugger,” said Slatzer under his breath as he headed for his car. DiMaggio climbed into his Cadillac and drove off in a huff. He spent the night at the Knickerbocker Hotel. The next day he confronted Marilyn and accused her of “two-timing” him. He told her if he ever saw Slatzer’s face again, he’d kill him.

  They had a second spat on Thanksgiving Day. Bernie Kamber, a New York press agent and one of Joe’s buddies from Toots Shor’s, showed up in Los Angeles for a business meeting. While there, he offered to take Joe and Marilyn to the Brown Derby for a late-afternoon turkey dinner. Joe and Bernie arrived first. Marilyn waltzed in nearly two hours late. She’d fallen asleep while taking a bath. DiMaggio refused to speak to her. He spoke only to Kamber, as did Marilyn. Once Joe and Marilyn arrived back at her hotel, he finally let loose. He made such a racket and screamed so loudly that guests in a nearby room called the front desk. A pair of gun-toting security guards knocked at Marilyn’s door. She pulled it open. Was everything all right? They were concerned because a guest on the same floor had complained about the noise. DiMaggio sidled into view. He apologized. The security guards left, and so did Joe. He spent the night in Bernie Kamber’s suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

  If Joe DiMaggio demonstrated a propensity for violence, he had an altogether different side as well. He was capable of great and unexpected moments of tenderness. On Christmas Eve, Marilyn returned to her suite from a studio party and found Joe standing on a stepladder hanging the last ornaments on an eight-foot-tall Christmas tree. He had placed a magnum of champagne in a silver ice bucket. Logs blazed in the fireplace. On a table, next to a small gift-wrapped box, sat a card that read “Merry Christmas, Marilyn.” The box contained a pair of emerald earrings. “The earrings were beautiful,” she would tell Joe DiMaggio Jr., “but not as beautiful as the tree. It was the first time in my life anyone ever gave me a Christmas tree. I was so happy I cried.”

  In return, Marilyn gave Joe a pair of gold cufflinks as well as an eight-inch-by-ten-inch matted and framed photograph of herself reclining on a satin chair, smiling at the camera. The photo was signed across the front in bold blue ink: “I love you Joe. Marilyn.”

  They celebrated New Year’s in San Francisco with Joe’s family. Marilyn had visited Joe in the Bay City several months earlier, but only for a weekend. On that visit she had demonstrated her interest in what Robert Solotaire called “the simple pleasures of life”—she and Joe had spent part of the day cleaning and polishing his car. This time, with the Fox Studios closed for the holidays, she anticipated spending a week.

  They stayed on the third floor of Joe’s three-story attached stone house at 2150 Beach Street, a quiet residential block in the Marina District, one hundred yards from Marina Green, a picturesque park adjacent to Fisherman’s Wharf and the Municipal Boat Basin. DiMaggio bought the house in 1937 (for less than $15,000) as a gift to his parents. After his father’s death in 1949 and his mother’s in 1951, his widowed sister, Marie DiMaggio Kron, moved in (with her daughter Betty) and lived on the second floor. Following his retirement, Joe DiMaggio made it his home base, a place to hang his hat on the few occasions he wasn’t out of town. Marie looked after the house, cooked, cleaned, answered Joe’s fan mail, and in general took care of her brother. Practically an obsessive-compulsive when it came to cleanliness, she kept the house dust-free and absolutely spotless. No one could be neat enough for Marie. A small room off Joe’s third-floor bedroom contained many of his baseball trophies, plaques, and medals. Another room on the same floor became Joe’s walk-in wardrobe closet. A larger-than-life oil portrait of DiMaggio in his Yankees pinstripes covered a wall in the downstairs living room. A den served as the TV room. A patio faced an enclosed backyard, where Joe had set up a telescope to gaze at the stars on cloudless nights. Unbeknownst to most of his cronies, Joe had been interested in astronomy since his teenaged years and had even gathered a tidy selection of books on the subject. It was the only even remotely intellectual pursuit he’d had as a young man.

  “Don’t read anything into it,” DiMaggio had told George Solotaire, one of the few friends aware of his interest. “I don’t know shit about astronomy. I just like looking up there at all the lights. It makes me wonder.”

  Marie, a slim, handsome, dark-eyed woman devoted to Joe’s needs, took it upon herself to introduce Marilyn to Italian cooking. Wearing a pair of eyeglasses (she was myopic), Marilyn watched and took notes as she stood next to Marie in Joe’s kitchen. They spent hours going over Marie’s homespun recipes for both meat and vegetable lasagna. “It was a lost cause,” said Dom DiMaggio. Joe’s younger brother had been introduced to Marilyn at the Grotto. Older brother Tom managed the eatery, and Vince managed the bar area until he quit to move his family forty miles north of San Francisco. Other family members held various jobs, from cashier to maître d’. The restaurant always became more crowded when word spread that Joe was in town. Celebrities, particularly from the sports world, made it a point to drop in. Ted Williams, Joe Louis, and jockey Eddie Arcaro were among that year’s crop of visitors.

  “Marilyn radiated great beauty and charm,” said Dom DiMaggio, “which is probably one of the reasons she eventually established a name that far transcended the film business. I used to kid her because in truth she couldn’t cook her way out of a paper bag. I told her if you’re Italian, food is not only sustenance, it’s the basis for social gatherings, a way of life. She said she’d been trying to learn to cook for years but couldn’t get the hang of it. She accepted her culinary limitations with good humor. ‘I guess I’ll never be a chief chef a
t the Waldorf,’ she quipped. She mentioned she loved Italian food as well as the people of Italy. ‘They’re warm, lusty, and friendly as hell,’ she said. ‘I want to go to Italy someday.’ ‘Maybe you and Joe can go together,’ I responded. She smiled and said, ‘I’d like nothing better.’ ”

  Marilyn’s favorite dish at the Grotto was lobster thermidor. She also liked the boiled beef dinner. Whenever she and Joe ate at home, he would make a point of dropping into the Grotto kitchen to pick up a healthy serving of each. She complained lightheartedly that since meeting Joe, she’d gained ten pounds and gone up a complete dress size. “If we’re together much longer,” she quipped, “I’ll begin to look like Mae West.”

  Early one morning, while Marilyn caught up on her sleep, Joe and Tom DiMaggio went duck hunting. Between them, they bagged five birds. That evening Tom and his wife Louise invited Joe and Marilyn to their apartment (four blocks from DiMaggio’s house) for a dinner of wild duck and wild rice. They were joined by Tom’s grown daughter June DiMaggio, who was taking voice lessons with the hope of breaking into show business. Marilyn confided in June that she’d never eaten wild duck and doubted she’d be able tolerate the gamy flavor. But she didn’t want to insult Joe, who took great pride in having “hunted down” their dinner with a shotgun. “If you don’t like the taste,” said June, “turn to me and give me a wink.” Marilyn did more than that. After a few bites, she crossed her eyes and curled up her nose. June took her plate into the kitchen, removed the remaining duck, replaced it with chopped sirloin and covered the meat with rice. June placed the new delicacy in front of Marilyn. She tasted it and smiled broadly. “This is wonderful!” she purred. None the wiser, Joe watched Marilyn devour her dinner. He told her he was glad she appeared so taken with wild duck. “Maybe I’ll shoot some more for you again soon,” he said. “I can’t wait,” gushed Marilyn.

  Another day Tom invited Marilyn to join him on a deep-sea fishing trip aboard the Yankee Clipper, a twenty-two-foot Chris-Craft that the New York Yankees had presented to Joe in 1949 in conjunction with Joe DiMaggio Day at Yankee Stadium. Joe had given the boat to his brothers for use as a commercial fishing vessel. The fish served at the Grotto were often caught aboard the Yankee Clipper. Joe and June DiMaggio rounded out the crew that went out to sea that morning.