Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  Whitey suspected that Marilyn’s marriage to DiMaggio had begun to unravel, but he didn’t know to what extent. “Marilyn realized my wife and I were fond of Joe, so when talking about him to either of us, she chose her words carefully. Then one day in June, Joe called and asked me to meet him for lunch and not to say anything to Marilyn about it. So we met, and Joe seemed upset. And this was a man who very rarely revealed his inner feelings. After going through his usual harangue about the horrors of the studio system and a recitation of his expectations as to a proper wife’s domestic role, he started complaining that he saw less and less of Marilyn, that she spent far too much time away from home and on the set. And then out of the blue he asked if I knew Hal Schaefer, Marilyn’s voice coach on the film. I told him I did and that Hal had previously coached her on both Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and River of No Return. And I knew he’d taken it upon himself to help her with an album of songs she planned to record for RCA. DiMaggio evidently hadn’t met him on the set of River of No Return. ‘What does he look like?’ he asked. ‘Does he have a wife? Is he a ladies’ man?’ And so on. At the time, I had no idea what he was getting at. Why all the questions? I soon found out.”

  What Whitey Snyder “soon found out” was that Marilyn and Hal Schaefer were having an affair. Schaefer was twenty-nine, a year and a half older than Marilyn. He had dark hair and eyes and a soft, melodic voice. Though he felt Marilyn never reached her potential as a singer, he worked hard to improve her voice. He was gentle, patient, and encouraging. She told friends he reminded her of an earlier voice coach, Fred Karger, with whom she’d also fallen in love.

  “She claimed she loved me,” said Hal Schaefer, “but I’m not sure she knew what that meant. In a sense, I think our relationship represented an escape for her from a marriage that had gone bad. I believe she’d simply outgrown DiMaggio. He wanted a homemaker, and she hoped to become a serious actress. She cultivated certain tastes, which he didn’t share. After he found out about us, he called me up and said he knew I was in love with Marilyn and she was in love with me. He said I should be a man and come face him and discuss it with him at the house. Like an idiot, I said I would. I could hear Marilyn in the background. ‘Don’t come here,’ she pleaded, ‘he’ll kill you. He’ll beat you up. Don’t be foolish.’ I absolutely believed her, because she’d mentioned how crude and controlling he was. She’d said he was very severe and had a short fuse. He had a violent streak. He physically abused her at times, slapped her around. I think she put up with it because she lacked self-esteem. She wasn’t grounded, the result of her terrible childhood, constantly being shifted around from here to there.”

  Hal Schaefer acknowledged that despite the menacing presence of Joe DiMaggio, his affair with Marilyn became serious. “We discussed marriage,” he said. “Marilyn would have converted to Judaism, which is what she eventually did when she married Arthur Miller. After he learned of the affair, or maybe before, I’m not sure which, DiMaggio hired a private detective to follow us around. He bugged my car, my phone, and my apartment. He bugged Marilyn’s car as well. I guess the work was done by the detectives he hired.”

  Harry Hall and Sugar Brown, a pair of former “mob-connected fixers,” often did favors for Joe, as did Abner “Longie” Zwillman, Frank Costello, and Paul “Skinny” D’Amato of Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Over the years, DiMaggio often turned up at Mafia-controlled nightspots and restaurants. They picked up his tabs, gave him expensive presents—even set up a trust account for him at the Bowery Savings Bank into which they made regular deposits. He was their man, the Italian Stallion, the dago with the bat of steel. If DiMaggio needed something done, they did it for him. If he wanted a wire planted in somebody’s car, they were only too happy to oblige. If he wished to have some “Jew-boy punk of a voice coach” at Twentieth Century–Fox rubbed out—well, that could no doubt also be arranged.

  Hal Schaefer began to conjure the most extreme possibilities. By early July, he’d reached his breaking point. As rumors of his romantic involvement with Marilyn Monroe spread, he tried to kill himself by swallowing sleeping pills and a lethal concoction of rum and typewriter-cleaning fluid. Marilyn rushed to his bedside at Santa Monica Hospital. The press followed.

  In an effort to downplay the affair, Schaefer offered reporters the following explanation: “It’s ridiculous Mr. DiMaggio should be any more jealous of me than he is of other people working with his wife. Marilyn’s one of my voice pupils. As a homework assignment, I gave her Ella Fitzgerald’s latest record albums and asked her to study them. She fell in love with Ella’s voice and has gotten to know her personally. Marilyn and I are no more than friends.”

  An embittered Joe DiMaggio appeared unannounced and uninvited on the Show Business movie set. When he saw Marilyn, he scoffed at her scanty costume. As she approached him, he walked away and spoke to Ethel Merman, whom he knew from New York. He agreed to pose for a photograph with Merman but declined to do likewise with his wife. Marilyn became so perturbed that she tripped over an electrical cable and sprawled to the ground. The next day she contacted Darryl Zanuck and asked him to ban her husband from the set. A week later, when Joe drove to the studio, a security guard at the front gate turned him away. That evening, Joe and Marilyn had words. He asked her why she’d had him banished from the set. She evidently let loose with a tirade of pent-up emotions, calling him a has-been and accusing him of attempting to damage her career. For the first time in many months, DiMaggio spent the night at the Knickerbocker Hotel.

  The following day when Joe returned home, he found a note waiting for him. Written on the back of a dry-cleaning receipt, it read: “Dear Joe, I know I was wrong! I acted the way I did and said the things I did because I was hurt—not because I meant them—and it was stupid of me to be hurt because actually there wasn’t enough reason—in fact no reason at all. Please accept my apology and don’t, don’t, don’t be angry with your baby—she loves you. Lovingly, your wife (for life), Mrs. J. P. DiMaggio.”

  For what it was worth, DiMaggio folded the letter and placed it in his wallet for safekeeping. It remained there for the rest of his life.

  “To some degree, I felt sorry for Joe,” said Whitey Snyder. “Marilyn had betrayed and humiliated him. The press exploited the scandal and ran daily stories on Marilyn’s affair. I invited Joe over for dinner one night. He looked like a beaten dog. At first he didn’t want to discuss Marilyn, but once he began he couldn’t stop. He described the note she’d written him and everything that had preceded it but said he didn’t see how he could ever trust her again. Yet he still loved her. Maybe he loved her too much. Maybe that was the problem. I said I felt sure Marilyn still loved him as well and that a marriage could succeed even if one or the other partner had cheated. ‘This is Hollywood,’ I said, ‘land of the unfaithful.’ Joe winced.”

  Marilyn continued her affair with Hal Schaefer. “We used a friend’s apartment,” he remarked. “But I hasten to add that sex wasn’t the focus of our relationship. We found solace and comfort in each other’s company. It isn’t that Marilyn wasn’t a wonderful lover, but essentially she regarded sex as her function. She almost felt it was expected of her to have sex with a man, because that’s something she could do, something she could give to make a man feel good. I’m afraid she was less successful in terms of her own fulfillment.”

  • • •

  Marilyn had barely completed work on There’s No Business Like Show Business when, on August 10, shooting began in Los Angeles on The Seven Year Itch. A comedy/spoof directed by Billy Wilder and coproduced by Wilder and Charles Feldman (Marilyn’s agent), the film succeeded commercially and at the same time won wide critical acclaim. Not quite as impressed as the film critics, Marilyn insisted she’d once again been cast as a “dopey blonde” in a “crummy movie.”

  A month after filming began, the cast and crew flew to New York to shoot the exterior street scenes. As Marilyn disembarked, she found herself surrounded by reporters. “No Joe?” one of them asked. “
Isn’t that a shame?” said Marilyn. He joined her a day later in an eleventh-floor hotel suite at the St. Regis Hotel on Central Park South. From all outward appearances their relationship seemed to be back on track.

  Jim Haspiel, a teenaged fan of Marilyn’s who’d been writing to her for several years, learned the location of the actress’s suite and decided to pay her a surprise visit. “I was with a friend,” he said, “and the two of us entered the lobby of the hotel and climbed the stairs to the eleventh floor. We knocked on the door of her suite and a man opened it. I asked if we could meet Miss Monroe. He said she wasn’t available and shut the door. Well, we weren’t about to use the stairs again so I rang for the elevator and it came up and Joe DiMaggio stepped out. He looked at us, and we looked at him. I told him we were there because we wanted to meet Marilyn Monroe. He couldn’t have been more gracious. ‘Wait here,’ he said. He disappeared into the suite and two minutes later came back out with Marilyn. He left her with us. We’d brought a camera, and she posed for pictures with us and chatted and was perfectly delightful. And then she kissed me, and I was in seventh heaven.”

  Given the events that unfolded a week later, Haspiel (who went on to write a book on Marilyn) detected none of the apparent tensions that had beset the couple in Los Angeles. Yet Haspiel, for all his youthful exuberance, was nothing more at the time than a casual observer. Evelyn Keyes, a cast member of The Seven Year Itch, became friendly with Marilyn and witnessed the relationship at close range.

  “They were civil in public,” she said, “but behind closed doors they were at each other’s throats. DiMaggio couldn’t accept it that she wasn’t totally domesticated and devoted to him. She wasn’t a housewife. She was Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn told me DiMaggio had certain expectations for people, such as herself and his son, and if they didn’t live up to his expectations, he became disappointed and took it out on them.”

  In addition to the problems that already existed, there was the question of Marilyn’s affair with Hal Schaefer. His ego all but shattered, DiMaggio went on a siege against Marilyn consisting of daily outbursts of anger and rage. Perpetually late on the set—so much so that the film ran behind schedule and over budget—Monroe told Evelyn Keyes that Joe kept her up all night, every night, yelling and screaming at her. He’d become an erupting volcano, spewing out lava and ash on a nightly basis.

  “Marilyn described one particularly nasty fight,” said Keyes. “It seems she’d bought a new dress, and she put it on to go out, and DiMaggio accused her of going off to meet a man, and he tore the dress to shreds with her in it. She ran into the bedroom and locked the door. He pounded on the door. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you another dress. Ten dresses.’ He continued pounding until Marilyn, wearing a negligee, finally relented and let him in. He apologized. Then he sat next to her on the bed and attempted to slip her negligee down off one shoulder. She pulled it back into place. He tried to kiss her and she pulled away. He attempted to push her down on the bed, and she stood up. ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘I’m your husband, but you won’t sleep with me?’ ‘You’ve got it,’ she answered. He rose and left the room. Marilyn relocked the door and tried to sleep.

  “The next day she arrived on the set three hours late. Billy Wilder had a fit. He told me privately Marilyn lit up the screen like nobody’s business, but he couldn’t take all the bullshit that went with it. He contended that Marilyn thought the way she looked entitled her to certain privileges. ‘But it doesn’t work with me,’ he added, ‘because I look at her not as a man but as a director.’ ”

  Joe and Marilyn made peace long enough to go out to dinner one evening with George and Robert Solotaire. Joe Nacchio, a Panamanian friend of DiMaggio’s, joined them in the middle of the meal. “We went to the Palm restaurant,” reminisced Robert Solotaire. “Marilyn and I discussed art most of the evening, while the two Joes talked baseball. What I remember best is that when Joe went to the men’s room, Marilyn started complaining about him. And then when Marilyn got up to go to the ladies’ room, Joe returned the favor. It wasn’t like him to disparage Marilyn. I took it as a sign of his unhappiness. He called her a narcissist and said she tried to please everyone but him.”

  If Marilyn and Joe’s marriage could be considered to have been a theater piece, the curtains were about to part for the final act. On September 15, at two in the morning, a mob of two thousand men, including dozens of photographers, gathered at Lexington Avenue and Fifty-Second Street to watch the famous skirt-blowing scene involving Marilyn Monroe and her Seven Year Itch costar Tom Ewell. As word spread that La Monroe was standing over a subway grating, her skirts whirling round her neck, her creamy thighs and peek-a-boo knickers in full view, the crowd grew in size and volume. Walter Winchell located Joe DiMaggio at the St. Regis’s King Cole Bar nursing a drink and insisted he come watch his wife perform the climactic scene of the film. There were numerous takes (and camera flashes) as the wind machine underneath the grating lifted Marilyn’s low-cut white dress, recreating the effect of a passing train. Marilyn’s gushy line as “the train” passed and the wind blew was a whimsical “Isn’t it delicious?”

  Joe DiMaggio watched in horror as again and again his wife’s panties were exposed. He had “the look of death on his face,” Billy Wilder would later claim. Cries of “Take it off!” and “Let’s see more!”—intermingled with a chorus of shrill wolf whistles—pierced the hot night air. Wilder suddenly stopped the shoot and ordered Marilyn to don a less transparent pair of panties. The diaphanous pair she had on revealed far more than any movie censor would allow to be seen. Marilyn retreated to her trailer to change. By the time she returned to the set, DiMaggio had stormed off. Forlorn and embittered, he headed for Toots Shor’s to drown his sorrow in drink. His wife, he told Toots, had just performed a striptease act on Lexington Avenue.

  It’s unclear exactly what transpired later that night in Marilyn’s suite at the St. Regis. The following afternoon when she arrived on the set, both of her eyes were red and swollen.

  She told Evelyn Keyes that Joe had repeatedly struck her, inadvertently confirming a press story alleging that guests on the eleventh floor at the St. Regis had heard loud noises coming from Marilyn’s suite. She’d told Joe she couldn’t help it, that she did what the director told her to do. It was good for the picture. “Bullshit!” he’d yelled by way of response. “It’s good for Darryl Zanuck. Good for his fucking wallet, that’s all.”

  That afternoon Joe DiMaggio flew back home to San Francisco—alone. Marilyn and the rest of the cast headed for Los Angeles the following day to put the finishing touches on the film, a process that ran on until early November. According to Lotte Goslar, Marilyn called Joe after she returned home. “Why are you calling me?” he asked. She answered, “Because I’m unhappy when you’re hurt, Joe.” She wanted to give it one last shot. He resisted, said Goslar, “perhaps because he needed to end up on top somehow. But she persisted until he agreed to fly down to see her. He took her to dinner at the Villa Nova, ‘for old time’s sake.’ He wanted to save the marriage, though he’d lost face because of the way Marilyn had treated him and because of her affair with Hal Schaefer, which, by the way, she’d resumed. Joe and Marilyn spent several days together and never stopped haggling. Marilyn moved out of her house and into Building 86, called the Stars’ Building, on the Fox lot. DiMaggio followed her around, spying on her. She’d be in a restaurant eating dinner with a friend, and he’d burst in and sit down with them. He hired detectives, which Marilyn told me he’d done with his first wife when he served in the armed forces during World War II. This gentleman of grace and dignity had become something of a psychopath. Somehow he didn’t frighten Marilyn.

  “She knew how to sidestep him, knew his limitations, and, I think, knew he loved her too deeply to do her real bodily harm. Still, he hit her, and no woman should have to endure such treatment. It made her nervous, though in some strange way, she didn’t mind it as much as she should have. It kind of validated h
er and confirmed for her just how much he cared about her. Her insomnia never abated. But it certainly didn’t help her insomnia. Dr. Lee Siegel, Fox’s resident physician, gave her a new prescription for sleeping pills. When she finally decided to end the marriage, it was Harry Brand, the head of Fox publicity, who introduced her to attorney Jerry Giesler.”

  A prominent criminal attorney, Jerry Giesler had nevertheless represented such public figures as Shelley Winters and Ingrid Bergman in divorce proceedings. Marilyn retained Giesler and signed a two-page complaint against Joe DiMaggio, citing “mental cruelty” as the cause of her divorce action. The press located DiMaggio in New York, where he’d gone to take in the 1954 World Series classic between the New York Giants and Cleveland Indians. Refusing to comment on the status of his marriage, he chose instead to talk about the spectacular catch at the Polo Grounds by Giants center fielder Willie Mays of a towering drive by Vic Wertz in game one of the Series. Mays had caught the ball while racing full speed with his back to home plate. “I’d have made the catch, too,” claimed DiMaggio with deadpan candor, “but unlike Willie, I wouldn’t have lost my baseball cap.”

  Joe and Marilyn were legally separated on October 5. The following day, a hundred reporters and photographers jammed onto the lawn in front of 508 North Palm Drive. At ten o’clock in the morning, Joe DiMaggio and Reno Barsocchini emerged from the house carrying Joe’s luggage. They loaded it into the trunk and backseat of DiMaggio’s Cadillac. Climbing into the passenger side of the car, the former slugger couldn’t hide his disappointment. “He looked as grim and gray as if he’d just made the third out in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded and the Yanks down by a run,” wrote Sheilah Graham in a subsequent column. Asked what he planned on doing, Joe said, “I’m going to San Francisco. It’s my home and always has been. I’m never coming back here.”