Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  According to Marilyn Monroe biographer Donald Spoto, DiMaggio didn’t return to San Francisco at once but instead remained in seclusion in the Los Angeles home of Dr. Leon Krohn, Marilyn’s gynecologist. The couple had consulted with Krohn on a number of occasions because of Marilyn’s seeming difficulties in becoming pregnant.

  Dressed in black as if for a funeral, Marilyn appeared on the lawn an hour later. With her were Jerry Gielser and Sidney Skolsky. Supporting herself on Giesler’s arm, Marilyn slowly approached a bank of press microphones. But it was Giesler who spoke: “Miss Monroe will have nothing to say to you this morning. As her attorney, I am speaking for her and can only say that the conflict of careers has brought about this regrettable necessity.” In response to a barrage of questions, Marilyn, in a quiet voice, hardly more than a whisper, remarked, “I can’t say anything today. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Resting her head on Giesler’s shoulder, she began to cry. As she dabbed her tears with a white handkerchief, she turned away, and with Giesler’s help, walked back to her house.

  Three weeks later, on October 27, 1954, Marilyn Monroe, America’s pinup girl, marched into Santa Monica Superior Court and won an uncontested divorce from Joe DiMaggio. Again wearing black, the tearful twenty-eight-year-old star was accompanied into court by Jerry Giesler, Sidney Skolsky, Mary Karger (Fred Karger’s sister), and her business manager Inez Melson. Her voice breaking with emotion, her makeup running, Marilyn told Superior Court Judge Orlando Rhodes (and a packed courtroom) that DiMaggio had often been testy and even refused to allow her to have friends in their home.

  “I voluntarily gave up my work in hopes that it would solve our problems,” she said, “but it didn’t change his attitude. I hoped to have out of my marriage love, warmth, affection, and understanding, but the relationship was one of coldness and indifference. My husband would get into moods when he wouldn’t speak to me for periods of sometimes ten days. If I would try to reproach him, usually he wouldn’t answer me at all. When he would, he would say, ‘Leave me alone.’ If I would say, ‘What’s the matter?’ he would say, ‘Stop nagging me.’ ”

  Inez Melson, Marilyn’s corroborating witness, confirmed her employer’s testimony, pointing out that DiMaggio “would push Marilyn away when she tried to show affection for him and would say, ‘Don’t bother me.’ ” Because she’d been on excellent terms with Joe, Melson informed him prior to the hearing that she’d been asked to testify against him, a gesture the ballplayer appreciated. They remained friendly long after the divorce.

  Some of Marilyn’s recitations of her husband’s shortcomings sounded startlingly similar to Dorothy Arnold’s condemnations of DiMaggio during their divorce trial. To her credit, Marilyn never mentioned the episodes of physical abuse she’d suffered at Joe’s hands. Such testimony would have been redundant. Twenty minutes into the proceedings, Judge Rhodes brought his gavel down, terminating the 286-day Joe DiMaggio–Marilyn Monroe marriage, granting an interlocutory decree that would become final one year after issuance.

  An intriguing footnote to the hearing is the disappearance of the entire courtroom record pertaining to the divorce. It disappeared for good after being transferred several years later to the trial records archive in Los Angeles. Following the hearing, DiMaggio wrote to Judge Rhodes requesting that the file be sealed. Rhodes denied the request. According to a clerk of the court, “The trial record, including Marilyn Monroe’s complete testimony, was available to anyone who wanted to see it. My guess is that one of DiMaggio’s friends, acting on his behalf, came in, requested the file, and then walked out with it. No doubt embarrassed by Monroe’s testimony, DiMaggio wanted to make the file disappear. That’s only a guess, but in light of everything that transpired following their divorce, it’s probably pretty close to the truth.”

  • • •

  The first Saturday following the divorce hearing, Marilyn went to see Joe DiMaggio Jr. “She picked me up at Black-Foxe and took me to lunch at Chasen’s,” said Joey. “We sat way in the back so nobody could see us. I’d heard all these news reports as to how she’d given an Oscar-winning performance at the hearing, but I could tell the divorce saddened her. She didn’t look well. She told me how sorry she was it hadn’t worked out with my father, that he’d called her the night before the hearing and asked her to reconsider. ‘I adore your father,’ she said, ‘but we just can’t seem to live together.’ Then she told me that even though she and my father had gotten divorced, she hadn’t divorced me, and she planned on staying in touch and would that be all right? And of course I said ‘Yes.’ After that we took a long drive. We headed south and wound up in San Diego, more than two hours from Beverly Hills. Marilyn didn’t say much. I guess it was a kind of therapeutic exercise for her. We ate dinner at some lobster shack on the beach in San Diego, and then we drove back. And when we reached Black-Foxe that night, Marilyn told me to open the glove compartment. Inside, on top of a bunch of road maps, I found a small gift-wrapped package. ‘It’s for you,’ she said. ‘I missed your thirteenth birthday. Open it.’ It was a leather billfold with my initials engraved on it. Inside was a crisp hundred-dollar bill and a wallet-sized photo of Marilyn with an inscription that read, ‘For Joey—Love, your forever step-mom.’ ”

  Joe DiMaggio had moved out of Dr. Krohn’s house and into a room at the Knickerbocker Hotel. A week after the divorce, he called Sidney Skolsky and asked him to come over. He wanted to talk with him. As Isabella, Sidney’s wife, drove him to the hotel, the journalist said, “If I get hit over the head with a bat, you know where you delivered me.”

  Skolsky needn’t have worried. By the time he saw the ballplayer, DiMaggio’s rage had melted away.

  “It was about noon when I entered Joe’s room,” Skolsky wrote in his autobiography. “He pointed toward the bed and asked me to sit down. I sat on the edge of the bed. He drew his chair up close to me.

  “ ‘There’s one thing I must know,’ he said as softly as a torch singer squeezing the pathos out of every note. ‘Is there another man? Why did Marilyn divorce me?’

  “I felt awful. No man should be confronted by an idol on his knees, begging to have his clay feet examined. And I had no balm for them.

  “How could I tell him he’d bored her? How could I tell a man his ex-wife became ex because she found him dull?

  “I spoke all around it, saying that Marilyn wasn’t mature enough to be a wife, that she had failed before, that Marilyn’s ever bigger ambition didn’t call for a husband, and that she didn’t want to cater to Joe’s likes and dislikes.

  “Joe thanked me. I honestly don’t believe he had the slightest inkling of what I had avoided saying.”

  Whatever Sidney Skolsky did or didn’t think of Joe DiMaggio, he wasn’t the ballplayer’s only source of information regarding Marilyn. Joe went to see Inez Melson at her home in the Hollywood Hills, where, as a hobby, she raised and trained parakeets. Inez had helped Joe pack his belongings the day before he left North Palm Drive and had agreed to store a number of cartons in her own home. When he visited her after the divorce, they sat on her porch at dusk and watched the deer dart in and out of the woods surrounding her property. Joe, usually the picture of poise and dignity, had to be consoled and soothed while he spoke about his “baby” and all that had gone amiss in the marriage.

  Among other things, he concluded that he’d never been able to relax with Marilyn. In her company, he’d come to expect the unexpected. He never knew what might happen next, who might come along and try to whisk her out of his grasp. If he was too controlled and controlling, she was uncontrollable. She could be cold, calculating, and manipulative. Yet she could also be warm, loving, zany, offbeat, and comical. These were the traits—combined with her physical beauty and an underlying sadness of soul—that had so completely bound him to her.

  And then there was Frank Sinatra. Winner of that year’s Academy Award for his work in From Here to Eternity, Frankie suddenly reemerged in DiMaggio’s life. Sinatra and DiMaggio shared one impor
tant credential: they’d both lost women they loved. DiMaggio had lost Monroe; Sinatra and his wife since 1951, actress Ava Gardner, had recently separated. Sinatra hired private investigator Barney Ruditsky to keep an eye on Ava. Ruditsky had spotted Ava with a young Mexican beach boy on one occasion and a female dance instructor on another. Frank and Joe commiserated with each other over drinks, usually at the Sunset Club on Sunset Boulevard, at other times at the Villa Capri, an Italian restaurant owned by Pasquale “Patsy” D’Amore, a pal of Frank’s.

  As a favor to Joe, Sinatra instructed Ruditsky to keep tabs on Monroe as well as Gardner. Even though Marilyn and the Yankee Clipper were legally divorced, Joe wanted to catch Marilyn with Hal Schaefer, whom he suspected she was still dating. He had convinced himself that if he did catch Marilyn “in the act,” the interlocutory decree would be voided and the divorce action reversed.

  “In those days, in California,” said Hal Schaefer, “to finalize a divorce, you had to go through a one-year waiting period before it became absolutely final. If you could prove that your partner was having an affair, you could have the proceedings made null and void, and you would have to start over again. It was a ridiculous, antiquated, uncivilized law, which was almost never invoked. But DiMaggio knew about it and kept trying to find Marilyn in some compromising situation so he could halt the inevitable.”

  On the night of November 5, DiMaggio, Sinatra, and a couple of Sinatra’s cronies, Hank Sanicola and Billy Karen, were drinking and eating a late dinner at the Villa Capri when Barney Ruditsky called and said that Marilyn and a man who looked like Hal Schaefer had entered an apartment building at 8112 Waring Avenue in West Hollywood. He believed he knew which apartment they were using. Minutes later a car screeched to a halt in front of the building. DiMaggio, Sinatra, Karen, and three other people jumped out and were met by Barney Ruditsky and Phil Irwin, a private investigator with whom Ruditsky often worked.

  On the drive over, Sinatra had tried to quell DiMaggio’s rage, but by the time they arrived, the ballplayer was “ready to kill.” Fearing what DiMaggio might do if he caught Schaefer with Monroe, Sinatra and Ruditsky tried to convince him to wait in front of the building while the rest of the crew went inside. Joe refused.

  The squadron of seven entered the building and, with Rudisky leading the way, located the suspected apartment. At approximately eleven thirty, the tenants of the building heard a thunderous crash as DiMaggio and his gang broke down the front door and invaded the apartment.

  Hearing movement coming from the bedroom, they rushed in, breaking furniture along the way, turning on lights, and taking snapshots as photographic evidence to document their findings. The only problem was, they’d entered the wrong apartment. The bedroom was occupied all right, but not by Hal Schaefer and Marilyn Monroe. Instead they came upon Mrs. Florence Kotz, a fifty-year-old woman who’d been asleep and was now cowering in her bed, her eyes wide as saucers, her mouth agape as she let loose a bloodcurdling shriek. Marilyn and Hal Schaefer happened to be in the same building but on a floor above Mrs. Kotz’s flat.

  “Now and again Marilyn and I used an apartment that belonged to actress Sheila Stuart, one of my voice students,” said Hal Schaefer. “We were in her apartment the night of November 5, when I heard a commotion in front of the building. I peeked out the slats of the window and saw Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra standing across the street with a bunch of tough-looking characters. I knew they’d come looking for us, and I also knew if DiMaggio ever got his hands on me I’d be in trouble. He blamed me for the divorce, though Marilyn would’ve left him with or without me. DiMaggio lived in a bubble. He was a man who’d had everything he ever wanted in life with one exception—and that exception was Marilyn Monroe. He needed to blame somebody other than himself. At any rate, we managed to sneak out of the apartment and down a back stairwell. I never saw Marilyn again after that night. It just became too scary. You can just imagine. We were both torn up about it.”

  The building’s landlady called the police. The police report cited the episode as an “attempted burglary,” without mentioning the names of any of the key players. In May 1957 Florence Kotz filed suit against DiMaggio, Sinatra, et al., for $200,000, but Mickey Rudin, Sinatra’s attorney, managed to settle the suit out of court for $7,500. And then matters became complicated.

  Confidential magazine got wind of the story, called it the “Wrong Door Raid,” and ran a lengthy exposé. The California State Senate launched its own investigation into the raid, calling Sinatra and friends to the witness stand. They attempted to subpoena DiMaggio as well but couldn’t locate him. Sinatra brought in a battery of lawyers and testified he’d been nothing more than an innocent bystander. Billy Karen said he didn’t remember any details of the event. Hank Sanicola claimed he’d remained behind at the Villa Capri. Barney Ruditsky was excused from testifying due to a heart ailment. When the press finally found DiMaggio and asked him about the Wrong Door Raid, he insisted he hadn’t been part of it and had nothing to say.

  The day after the raid, Charles Feldman and Billy Wilder gave a party for Marilyn at Romanoff’s, attended by Hollywood’s Royal Guard. Among the guests were Clark Gable, Daryl Zanuck, Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gary Cooper, Doris Day, Jimmy Stewart, William Holden, Claudette Colbert, Susan Hayward, and Irving “Swifty” Lazar. Life featured the gala in its next issue.

  Charles Feldman toasted Marilyn, calling her “the eighth wonder of the world.” She drank champagne and danced with Gable, Zanuck, and Bogart. She sang a duet with Mrs. Billy Wilder and apologized to Billy for her constant tardiness during the filming of The Seven Year Itch. Photographer Sam Shaw saw her home at the end of the evening. A new acquaintance, Shaw had been hired by Fox to shoot a set of publicity stills of Marilyn. In his spare time he’d been teaching her how to use a camera that Joe DiMaggio had given her as a present.

  Two days after the Wrong Door Raid and a day after her “coming out” party, Marilyn entered Cedars of Lebanon to undergo corrective surgery for her ongoing gynecological condition. She hoped the procedure would enable her to have children. Joe DiMaggio drove her to the hospital. Dr. Leon Krohn performed the operation on November 8. Marilyn remained at Cedars for five days, DiMaggio by her bedside. He stayed with her after she returned to North Palm Drive. On November 25, still recuperating from her surgery, she celebrated Joe’s fortieth birthday by taking him to the Villa Capri for dinner. Joe used the occasion to ask her to come back and start again. It was the one birthday present she wasn’t able to give him.

  Joe DiMaggio returned to San Francisco the next morning. Reached at his Beach Street home by a local reporter, he offered a brief comment blaming the film industry and Twentieth Century–Fox for their sexploitation of Marilyn Monroe, ruining her reputation and in turn their marriage.

  When Roy Craft, a leading member of Fox’s publicity department, read DiMaggio’s unflattering characterization of the studio, he decided to issue his own statement to the press: “Marilyn Monroe had a flamboyant reputation when Joe DiMaggio married her. The point is, if you build a home behind a slaughterhouse, you don’t complain when you hear the pigs squealing.”

  Chapter 10

  MARILYN MONROE HAD BECOME THE world’s number one female box office attraction. That fact notwithstanding, she remained, as Joe DiMaggio had constantly reminded her, a hapless victim of the pernicious Hollywood system. Twentieth Century–Fox continued to dictate her selection of films, roles, costars, producers, and directors. Moreover, although she’d recently received an increase in salary, it didn’t come close to the pay base commanded by other high-visibility stars. While she and DiMaggio had discussed the possibility of her breaking away from Fox and starting her own independent film production company, nothing had come of the idea. Ultimately, it was Milton H. Greene, a young, opportunistic magazine photographer, who persuaded Monroe to take matters into her own hands.

  Marilyn first met Greene in September 1949 at a Beverly Hills house party. He’d co
me to town to put together a photo essay for Life magazine on promising Hollywood starlets. Johnny Hyde, with whom Monroe was then living, had gone to Palm Springs for the week on a business-related matter.

  Attracted to the vibrant, darkly handsome, twenty-seven-year-old photographer—and hoping to be included in his photo essay—Marilyn spent two nights with him at what he referred to as “my West Coast house,” the Chateau Marmont, overlooking Sunset Boulevard. After his return to New York later that month, he received a playful telegram from Marilyn addressed to Milton “Hot Shutter” Greene:

  . . . .

  It’s that I think you are superb –

  And that, my dear, is not just a blurb. . . .

  Marilyn and Milton didn’t meet again until October 1953, when he returned to Hollywood with Amy Greene, his newlywed bride, a former New York fashion model. In the interim, Greene had moved from Life to Look magazine. Monroe again spent time with the couple in September 1954, during the New York location filming of The Seven Year Itch.

  Like Joe DiMaggio, Milton felt strongly that Twentieth Century–Fox had exploited Monroe and that she possessed far more promise and talent than the studio seemed willing to admit. Frank Delaney, Greene’s lawyer, read Marilyn’s contract with Fox and contended that it was basically a “slave labor agreement” and therefore invalid. By December 1954, encouraged by Milton Greene, whose judgment she’d come to trust, the “not-so-dumb blonde” had made up her mind to sever her connections with Fox and to leave Hollywood altogether and relocate to New York.

  In the back of her mind lurked the enticing figure of Arthur Miller, who worked and lived in New York. But there were other considerations as well. Her old flame Elia Kazan had often spoken to her of the Actors Studio, located in Manhattan, which he had cofounded and which acting guru Lee Strasberg ran.