Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  They shoved off at four in the morning. Marilyn wore a pair of June’s white deck pants. It was a cold, damp, foggy day. The dark waters of the San Francisco Bay splashed up against the side of the boat as it rolled up and down, up and down with the waves. An hour into the excursion, Marilyn began to feel queasy. Her face had turned ashen. “Got any crackers, Junie?” she asked. June, who was prone to seasickness, produced a box of table crackers. The more they ate, the sicker they felt. To Marilyn’s surprise, Joe didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the constant rocking of the boat. He and Tom were having a wonderful time, reeling in one fish after another. As they passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, Marilyn leaned over the side of the boat and started upchucking the crackers and the remains of her meal from the night before. June bent over the other side of the boat and did the same. Tom reluctantly turned the boat around and headed back to port. Marilyn spent the rest of the afternoon dashing back and forth between bed and bathroom, vowing that any future fishing endeavors would take place on a lake or off a pier, not at sea.

  Yet two days later, she agreed to go deep-sea fishing again, this time in company with Joe and his wartime buddy, fellow retired major leaguer Dario Lodigiani, and to her own amazement, she hooked a big fish after struggling for an hour to reel it in. Dario wanted Joe to help her. “She hooked it,” Joe insisted. “Let her bring it in.” “And I’ll be damned,” said Dario, “if Marilyn didn’t land that monster.”

  As for Marilyn and June, their friendship grew each time Monroe returned to San Francisco. When Joe had business to take care of at the Grotto, Marilyn would frequently get together with June. With Marilyn in disguise (black wig, prescription sunglasses, no makeup), they would stroll to the marina and feed the pigeons. Or they’d sit at an outdoor café, sip hot chocolate, and watch the tourists amble by. In Marilyn, Joe & Me, June DiMaggio’s book on Monroe, she recalled a shopping trip to Sears when Marilyn decided not to go incognito. Easily recognizable, Marilyn soon attracted a large crowd. As they paid and started to leave, they found their way blocked. “Aren’t you Marilyn Monroe?” asked an elderly woman in the crowd. Adopting a Scandinavian accent, Marilyn launched into a lengthy diatribe on how she was just visiting the United States. “Everywun sinks I’m Marileen, but my name is Eve Lindstrom.” When one of them still wanted her autograph, she signed her name as Eve Lindstrom. On the way home, Marilyn and June laughed so hard they almost cried.

  And then there was the midday walk they took along the streets of North Beach when they passed the beauty salon Marilyn had started to use during her visits to San Francisco. As they approached the salon, Marilyn gasped and grabbed June’s hand. There, hanging in the shop’s front window, were tiny packets of blond snippets labeled “Marilyn Monroe’s Hair,” priced at $100 per packet. Marilyn and June were stunned. They rushed home to June’s father’s apartment and called Tom at the Grotto, because he’d been the one to recommend the North Beach salon in the first place. Usually “even-tempered and slow to anger,” June’s father dropped everything, stormed out of the restaurant, and headed straight for the beauty salon. Without a word and ignoring the objections of salon staffers, he grabbed every packet of hair hanging in the window, ripped up the sign, and then, his face a deep crimson, he shrieked at the owner, “How dare you sell Marilyn’s hair without her permission?” When Joe DiMaggio heard the story from his brother, he said, “It’s good you went in there and not me. I’d probably have burned the place down. In fact, I still may.”

  Given her interest in show business, June DiMaggio delighted in hearing Marilyn’s take on the film industry, “a business,” in June’s words, “that didn’t give a hoot for morals or feelings.” At heart a raconteur, Monroe seemed only too glad to oblige, provided June not pass on her stories to “Uncle Joe,” whose Sicilian rage tended to flare at the mere mention of Hollywood, or (in Joe’s words) “the real pimps of Los Angeles: the studio bosses.”

  Marilyn had made the mistake one night, having had too much to drink, of thinking Joe might find amusing a Joe Schenck anecdote, namely how she’d allowed the old man to fondle and lick her breasts while another starlet “gave him head, lots of it, tons of it.” It had been their combined birthday present to Schenck. “I don’t know his exact age,” Marilyn had told DiMaggio, “but he was old, take my word for it. He was as ancient as the pyramids of Egypt. And this little game went on for what seemed an eternity, and nothing happened. It wouldn’t go up. Or maybe it sort of went halfway up for a few seconds, then down again. So after a while we switched places. He started licking the other girl’s boobs, while I did what she’d been doing. And I worked hard at it. I gave it my all, because I liked Joe and wanted to make him happy on his birthday. Nothing. No reaction. Dead as a doorknob. It was kind of sad, not so much for us but for him. I think it depressed him. It reminded him of his age, of what he’d once been and what he’d become,”

  Joe DiMaggio hadn’t found the anecdote the least bit touching or amusing or anything other than an old pimp exploiting two young girls. It angered him. He refused to converse with Marilyn for the better part of a week. “For God’s sakes, Joe,” she’d pleaded. “I was a kid at the time, an impressionable young kid. And he was a sweet old man. It meant absolutely nothing.” It didn’t matter what she said. Here was another example of Marilyn’s succumbing to the system, of prostituting herself merely to advance her career. So in talking to June DiMaggio about her past, Marilyn spoke only in generic terms. No names. She said nothing that would shock DiMaggio if it ever did get back to him.

  “She told me,” wrote June DiMaggio, “how the head honchos at Twentieth Century–Fox chased after her around the office, and she would give in to them quickly just to get it over with. She said that it hurt and that she hated it.” According to June, Marilyn added that when she came home exhausted from a day’s shoot, invariably “some powerful old geezer” from the studio would call, and just the sound of his voice “made her skin crawl.” June surmised that Marilyn “must have learned to turn off her emotions as a very young child. On the casting couch, believing that she had to sleep with wrinkled old men to survive in the business, she continued to turn her emotions off. She protected herself by playing a part there, too.”

  Chapter 6

  RETURNING FROM SAN FRANCISCO, MARILYN moved into a three-room, first-floor apartment at 882 North Doheny Drive between Sunset and Santa Monica Boulevards in Beverly Hills. It was small but charming. The living room featured wall-to-wall white carpeting, a wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors, a working fireplace, and the same white baby grand piano she’d been given by her mother as a child. She installed customized shelves in the living room and bedroom to accommodate her collection of books and phonograph records. She divided the third room into a wardrobe closet and office with an exercise corner that contained weights and a yoga mat. There was a television set and a seven-foot sofa in the living room where Joe spent much of his time, smoking cigarettes and watching his favorite shows. He helped her move in. He and Joey were her first dinner guests in the new apartment. As Joey recalled, “Marilyn insisted on making lasagna using a recipe and step-by-step instructions provided by Aunt Marie, my father’s sister. Evidently something went terribly wrong. The finished dish looked like an afterbirth, all red and gory. I don’t think my father cared. He smiled and took us all out to a restaurant for dinner. Marilyn later learned how to prepare spaghetti and spaghetti sauce, and on weekends she’d sometimes make breakfast for my father. She also learned a few words and phrases in Italian. But that was about it.”

  Hardly disturbed by Marilyn’s lack of culinary skill, DiMaggio’s main concern had to do with the disorder in the apartment and Marilyn’s unwillingness to clean up after herself. He telephoned George Solotaire in New York and complained that the place had begun to resemble the backseat of Marilyn’s car. Every stick of furniture in the apartment was covered with discarded items of clothing. Old newspapers and magazines sat in a heap on the kitchen table. The kitchen counters were coat
ed with old coffee and food stains. Dirty dishes were stacked high in the sink. Empty bottles and cans littered the bedroom floor, along with clumps of used tissue paper and an assortment of forks, knives, and spoons. The bathroom was no better. In San Francisco, Marie tidied up after Marilyn, but there was nobody around to clean up after her in Beverly Hills. Joe DiMaggio, fastidious to an almost annoying degree, began buying paper plates and cups to counter the dirty dish situation. When that solution failed, he fled to the Knickerbocker Hotel and spent his nights there.

  George Solotaire suggested that Joe hire a housekeeper twice a week to deal with Marilyn’s apartment. Joe hesitated. He didn’t think she’d give a stranger access to her residence. “The truth of the matter,” said Robert Solotaire, “is that Joe happened to be one of the most impecunious fellows you’d ever want to meet. He made up all sorts of excuses why he couldn’t spring for a maid, which, by the way, would’ve been a lot less expensive than staying at the Knickerbocker. But that’s Joe DiMaggio for you. He was cheap, probably the result of growing up during the Depression in a household with little money to spare for extras. Just how cheap was he? If you went to a restaurant with him and there were leftovers on the plate, he’d take them home in a doggy bag—not only his leftovers but yours as well. Now, that’s cheap. And don’t forget, this is a guy who was getting paid a hundred thousand bucks a year to hit a baseball when the average player made far less. He had plenty of cash, and he almost never picked up his own tab; somebody was always treating him to dinner and drinks. As for Marilyn’s apartment, he temporarily solved the problem by buying a vacuum cleaner and employing a college coed to go over there once a week and tidy up. The coed lasted less than a month, because after she put everything away, Marilyn couldn’t find anything. One item that disappeared was a photograph she had of her half sister Berniece with Mona Rae, Berniece’s young daughter. Marilyn blamed the student for the photo’s disappearance and fired her. Joe finally hired a commercial cleaning outfit to do their thing. He then called a domestic employment service and found a housekeeper who kept the place reasonably clean.”

  Whereas Joe DiMaggio could be criticized for having been thrifty, one of Marilyn Monroe’s most prevalent traits had to be her unceasing generosity. She perpetually doled out more money than she managed to bring in, and, as a result, constantly found herself in the red. Besides her usual array of expenses, she now had to pay for her mother’s maintenance and upkeep at Rockhaven, the posh private facility where she would remain for years to come. A more recently acquired expense was Grace Goddard, who had left Doc Goddard and returned to Los Angeles. By now an unemployed (and unemployable) alcoholic with an addiction to pain medication and sleeping pills, Grace turned to Marilyn for help. Feeling sorry for her former guardian, Marilyn hired her to perform minor secretarial chores. Before the end of the year, learning that she had uterine cancer and only a few months to live, Grace killed herself by overdosing on barbiturates. It was Marilyn who made and paid for the funeral arrangements. Grace was buried at Westwood Memorial Park, a spot in the middle of Los Angeles chosen by Marilyn because of its “beauty and serenity.” The ashes of Ana Lower had been interred in the same cemetery in 1948. Marilyn told Joe DiMaggio that when she died, she, too, wanted to be buried there. It comforted her to think of Westwood Memorial as her final resting place. In Joe DiMaggio Jr.’s presence, his father said to Marilyn, “You’re much too young to be so preoccupied with death. You’ve got a whole life ahead of you.”

  • • •

  Joe DiMaggio’s aggressive attitude toward Natasha Lytess, Marilyn’s drama coach, grew in intensity after Twentieth Century–Fox dropped Lytess from its payroll, placing the responsibility for her salary entirely in Monroe’s hands. “That’s why you never have any money to spend on yourself,” DiMaggio berated the actress. Joe wasn’t the only Lytess detractor. Allan “Whitey” Snyder, in charge of Marilyn’s makeup at Twentieth Century–Fox, thought little of MM’s drama coach and said as much. Monroe soon reduced Natasha’s salary. Without notifying Lytess, she’d begun studying with Michael Chekhov, the Russian-born nephew of the famous playwright Anton Chekhov. Although Marilyn frustrated Chekhov with her habitual lateness, he acknowledged her talent and suggested she’d make a good Grushenka in a film version of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a role that continued to fascinate Marilyn for the rest of her life. She told Chekov, who’d been a student of Stanislavski, the father of Method acting, that she “wanted to be an artist, not an erotic freak.” She didn’t “want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac. It was all right for the first few years, but now I’m different.”

  If Marilyn hoped to change her image, it wasn’t evident from the Photoplay magazine awards ceremony in 1953. Wedged into a skintight, tissue-thin gold lamé gown originally designed for Marilyn to wear in a scene that was ultimately cut from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn stole the spotlight from every other reigning Hollywood star in attendance that night. The “scandalous” gown, coupled with the patented Monroe walk, created a backlash of public condemnation. Joan Crawford, for one, announced in the press that Marilyn “must have mistaken the award ceremony for a burlesque show.” One of Marilyn’s few defenders was Betty Grable, a former Twentieth Century–Fox glamour queen well known for her World War II derrière pinup shot. Interviewed by a reporter, Grable accurately assessed Marilyn’s key contribution to the world of cinema: “Why, Marilyn’s the biggest thing that’s happened in Hollywood in years. The movies were just sort of moving along, and all of a sudden, zowie, there was Marilyn. She’s a shot in the arm for Hollywood.”

  Betty Grable had been cast opposite Marilyn—and Lauren Bacall—in How to Marry a Millionaire, which began shooting that April. Based on a bestselling 1951 novel by Doris Lilly, the movie follows the fortunes of three women who rent an expensive New York apartment and scheme to find themselves a trio of millionaire husbands. Doris Lilly met Monroe for the first time just after the Photoplay scandal had run its course and a week before shooting got underway on How to Marry a Millionaire.

  “Famous Artists agent Charles Feldman joined us for lunch at the Café de Paris, Fox’s commissary,” recalled Doris. “I’d known Charlie for ages. He had a violent crush on Marilyn. They’d had a tryst several years before, but Marilyn had abruptly called it off. Charlie had great intuition. As early as 1950, he told me he knew this young actress named Marilyn Monroe and that she had superstar written all over her. He said she was shrewd, had good instincts, and knew how to create publicity for herself. He eventually became her agent, or at least one of them. At first he assigned her to Hugh French at Famous Artists, but then took her on himself. What I remember about my first meeting with Marilyn is that the commissary was jammed with all sorts of stars—Charlton Heston, Rita Hayworth, Montgomery Clift, Spencer Tracy, among others—and as soon as Marilyn walked in, they stopped eating and started staring, their forks frozen in midair. All motion ceased.

  “The next day, I saw her at a Fox cocktail party. The studio bigwigs were all there, including Darryl F. Zanuck and Spyros Skouras, as well as the usual complement of Hollywood lawyers, press agents, talent scouts, publicists, journalists, what have you. And when Marilyn appeared, the place went stone dead. Everyone gaped. The center of the room cleared as she walked through. It was like the parting of the Red Sea, the same reaction she’d inspired the day before in the commissary. Considering her youth, it all seemed rather amazing.”

  During the making of the film, which was shot in Hollywood and New York, Doris spent a considerable amount of time with Marilyn and came to know her well despite Monroe’s forever shifting moods and personality changes. “I’m not the first person to point out that Marilyn was a highly complex individual,” noted Doris. “She could tell you a very revealing story about herself in the morning, and in the afternoon she’d relate the same story but with completely altered details. You never got the same story twice. In other words, the earth was forever shifting under her feet—and yours, i
f you were in her company. There was a mercurial quality to her sensibility that made it impossible to pin Marilyn down.”

  According to Doris, Joe DiMaggio marched to his own drummer. “He was carved of granite and never changed. He was set in his ways. That’s not to say he wasn’t an intriguing man. He was intriguing because he revealed so little of himself. Marilyn told you everything, and DiMaggio told you nothing, but ultimately they were both hieroglyphics. It was difficult, if not impossible, to read either one of them.”

  DiMaggio came and went during the filming of How to Marry a Millionaire, leaving Los Angeles on junkets to New York and Chicago, on business trips to San Francisco. Doris Lilly remembered that he visited the set only once. He stood in the back, hidden in the shadows, watching Marilyn like a hawk. Afterward they engaged in a loud argument in her dressing room. He felt her outfits in the film were far too revealing. Marilyn told Doris he’d voiced the same objection on the set of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It seemed to Doris Lilly as if Joe wanted to put Marilyn in a birdcage, to possess her, and the more he tried to curtail her freedom, the more she rebelled. He resented anyone he perceived as standing in the way of his relationship with her. One name on his enemies list was that of Natasha Lytess. Natasha was at Marilyn’s side every night helping her rehearse her lines for the following day’s shoot. Doris Lilly happened to be at Marilyn’s Doheny Drive residence when DiMaggio confronted Lytess and said to her, “Why don’t you find yourself another victim—haven’t you stolen enough of Marilyn’s money?” On a separate occasion when Lytess called the actress, he picked up the phone and told her, “If you wish to speak to Miss Monroe, contact her agent—don’t call here.”