Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  Back in the States, Joe appeared as the “mystery guest” on What’s My Line?, the television game show hosted by John Daly, an occasional drinking partner of Joe’s at Toots Shor’s. Liz Renay accompanied DiMaggio to the TV studio and sat in the green room while four blindfolded panelists tried to guess the name of the guest. “When he stepped out on stage,” said Liz, “the live audience went nuts. I mean, here was Joe DiMaggio on a television game show. It was so unlike him. And when it was Arlene Francis’s turn to guess, she said, ‘My goodness, only President Eisenhower and Marilyn Monroe would get that kind of reception.’ The panel quickly established Joe’s identity. But the mention of Marilyn’s name jolted Joe. It was a painful reminder of just how savagely she’d injured him. I think it also pointed to the vast ego problem that had always existed between Joe and Marilyn. Before meeting her he was looked up to by millions. But after marrying her, a whole new generation of journalists arrived on the scene, some of whom thought of Joe as ‘Marilyn’s man.’ He couldn’t stand that. I mean, this is the guy they had to sneak out of Yankee Stadium after ballgames, so he wouldn’t be mobbed and trampled by his army of fans.”

  After DiMaggio’s return from Europe, he continued to date Liz Renay, creating the expectation in her mind that he might even propose to her. “I convinced myself that he would ask me to marry him,” she said. “But one day the phone stopped ringing. I waited and waited, and nothing happened. Not a word. Tired of waiting, I dialed Joe’s private number. An operator came on and said the number had been disconnected and the new number was unlisted. That ended that! I’d been unceremoniously dumped. I was heartbroken, primarily because Joe hadn’t had the balls to break up with me in person.”

  Joe DiMaggio sought refuge in other Monroe look-alikes, not always with positive results. When told by a burlesque house proprietor that she looked like Marilyn, exotic dancer Dixie Evans retorted, “Everybody in Hollywood looks like Marilyn Monroe.” She nevertheless tailored her act in imitation of Marilyn, walking, talking, and gyrating like the original. Joe DiMaggio checked out her act at Place Pigalle, an upscale burlesque house in Miami. He’d gone to Florida to visit Sid Luckman, the onetime quarterback for the Chicago Bears. Dixie joined Joe at his table at closing time. He walked her home and made a date to see her the following day. She’d forgotten she had scheduled a court appearance that day and, unable to reach Joe at the Fontainebleau Hotel, where he was staying, inadvertently stood him up. She never heard from him again.

  More successful was his relationship with Gregg Sherwood Dodge, a former New York chorus girl at the Latin Quarter and a girlfriend of Dean Martin. Born Dora Fjelshad in Beloit, Wisconsin, Gregg had changed her name after competing in the Miss America Pageant. Joe first met her while playing for the Yankees. Her then husband, Walter Sherwin, held the position of box office treasurer for the team. After Sherwin and Gregg divorced, she later married aging motorcar scion Horace Dodge II.

  “I knew Joe via our mutual connection to the Yankees,” said Gregg, “but I didn’t know him in the biblical sense until after his divorce from Marilyn. Our affair began in the back seat of a limousine in Palm Beach, Florida. He told me I looked like Marilyn, and I suppose that’s what did it for him. As for me, I’d always liked him. He was regarded as the greatest ballplayer since Babe Ruth. I found him sexy. Having once been married to Marilyn Monroe made him seem even sexier.

  “Regarding Monroe, I soon learned you never spoke of her to him, not even if he brought her up first. In that case, you merely listened. It was clear from the way he spoke that he’d been profoundly hurt by her. He was obsessed with her to the extent that for several years he couldn’t work. All he did was play golf, drink, and move around from place to place, attempting to find solace in the arms of other women, a number of whom looked like Marilyn Monroe. For a while, he did the nightclub circuit. His photo would pop up in the papers with a different girl every few days. He had no difficulty meeting women. One young lady I knew went to bed with him and then divorced her husband with the expectation Joe would marry her, which of course he didn’t.

  “Another woman, about to be married, was so taken with Joe she went to bed with him and then informed him he was her ‘last fling.’ The only good that came of his divorce from Marilyn is that it softened him somewhat. He’d always been a bit of a hard-ass, but after Marilyn he became more human, more understanding. All in all, Joe and I dated on a sporadic basis for a period of approximately three years. And after that, we remained friends, occasionally talking on the phone or meeting for dinner. Although he never said it directly, I concluded that he was smart enough to have ultimately figured out that Marilyn Monroe simply wasn’t good wife material. She was what she was: a delightful companion and bed partner, but not a wife.”

  And then there was Francie (a pseudonym), an airline stewardess he encountered in the late summer of 1955 while visiting his pal Joe Nacchio in Panama City, Florida. “We met at a nightclub,” she recalled. “I happened to be there with a girlfriend, and he came over and asked me to dance. I knew of him because I grew up in Boston, and my father, an avid Red Sox fan, used to take me with him to the ballpark. I’d met Ted Williams on one occasion, and when I told Joe about it that evening, he became quite animated. Williams batted .406 the same year [1941] that Joe hit in fifty-six consecutive games. Joe told me there had been talk between the owners of the Yanks and Red Sox to set up a trade: Williams would go to the Yanks, and Joe would play for the Red Sox. And his brother Dom DiMaggio, Boston’s center fielder, would be moved to right to make room for Joe.”

  From the beginning, Francie, a raven-haired version of Monroe, realized that any romance with DiMaggio had its limitations. “I’d been engaged and had broken it off shortly before I met Joe,” she said. “I needed to recuperate and sort things out. Joe’s marriage to Marilyn had ended badly. Neither of us wanted a serious relationship. We were happy to see each other only now and again. We’d meet in different cities, depending on my flight schedule. Joe had a friend in Philadelphia named Eddie Liberatore, a scout for the Dodgers, and he’d put us up. And there was a man in Chicago, Sam Brody, a clothing manufacturer, and he’d do the same. And when I had a layover in New York, I’d sometimes stay with him at the Hotel Lexington.”

  Meanwhile, Marilyn’s liaison with Arthur Miller had become a matter of public record. At the end of September 1955, she accompanied him to the opening night of his latest play, A View from the Bridge, at New York’s Coronet Theater. The play, which in part depicts a vile and violent Sicilian family engaged in the business of commercial fishing, may well have been fueled by Marilyn’s representations to Miller concerning the physical abuse visited upon her by Joe DiMaggio. In any case, Arthur’s wife, Mary, had learned of the affair and had ordered her husband out of their Brooklyn Heights apartment.

  Soon after October 17—his fortieth birthday—Arthur Miller (following a telephone session with his onetime psychiatrist, Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein) moved into the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-Third Street and then into an elegant West Side brownstone. Marilyn moved as well. Her six-month sublet at the Waldorf having ended, she took over a sublet on an apartment at 2 Sutton Place, with views of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge. Then, on October 31, 1955, she appended her signature to the final decree of divorce, legally and irrevocably terminating her marriage to Joe DiMaggio.

  Joe was with his flight attendant Francie in New York a month after the filing in the California court system by Monroe’s lawyer of the final set of divorce papers. “It was only a technicality,” Francie noted. “The actual divorce proceeding had taken place the year before. Still, Joe seemed rather despondent over the phone. I didn’t realize how despondent until I reached his hotel suite. There, atop his bed, he’d placed a life-sized porcelain-and-rubber doll made up to look exactly like Marilyn Monroe. The platinum hair looked real. It had lifelike arms and legs. The coloring, including makeup, was hers. The finger- and toenails of the doll were coated with red polish. The figure had obv
iously been constructed with great attention to detail and at considerable expense. There was an almost indecent authenticity to the breasts and other erogenous zones.”

  Francie’s first reaction was disbelief, followed by confusion. Her plane, a night flight from Los Angeles, had arrived at eleven o’clock, and she’d taken a cab straight to Joe’s hotel only to be confronted by the macabre mannequin.

  “How do you like her?” asked DiMaggio.

  “I don’t,” she said.

  “I like her,” remarked DiMaggio. “She’s Marilyn the Magnificent. She can do anything Marilyn can do except talk.”

  “Can she make love to you?” asked Francie.

  “Absolutely,” answered DiMaggio. “Would you like a demonstration?”

  As the onetime Yankee Clipper began to unbuckle his belt, Francie the flight attendant, still clutching her overnight bag, made her exit.

  “It had to be one of the weirdest experiences I ever had,” she said. “It absolutely and totally creeped me out. It goes without saying I never again spoke to Mr. DiMaggio.”

  • • •

  Matters grew worse for Joe long before they got better. There seemed no way he could escape Marilyn. She was perpetually in the news. She’d agreed to return to Hollywood to begin shooting Bus Stop. She and Arthur Miller planned to get married. She wanted to convert to Judaism and have his babies. Miller was the first man she ever loved. Joe heard the latter declaration while watching television with Edward Bennett Williams, the prominent attorney he’d known since 1951 and at whose Washington, DC, home he stayed from time to time. (Williams was also TV game show moderator John Daly’s father-in-law.) Marilyn’s photo appeared on the covers of Life and Time, to say nothing of a dozen lesser publications. Joe couldn’t avoid her image or erase the memory of the humiliating headlines they’d run when she left him, how the Great DiMaggio had “Struck Out” with the actress—headlines all too reminiscent of those published in Japan during their honeymoon, when they’d referred to him as “Mr. Marilyn Monroe.” The indignity and shame he suffered from the most recent onslaught of news items dogged his every waking hour. His face would darken at the mere mention of her name. How could he begin to get over her if her image and words appeared everywhere all the time? And how dare “they” treat an American idol, one of history’s greatest ballplayers, as if he were nothing more than a minor leaguer?

  In early 1956 Paul Baer convinced Joe to “get away from it all” by accompanying him on a Florida golfing junket. “Joe wasn’t a bad golfer,” said Baer. “As one might expect, he had a beautiful swing. He just couldn’t putt. On a good day he’d shoot in the midseventies. I recall one round we played in Tampa. I believe his pal Charlie Rubaleave, a commercial photographer, was with us that day. This was about the time the press was crowing about Marilyn Monroe’s affair with Arthur Miller. One of our caddies had a copy of the local newspaper with Marilyn’s photo in a swimsuit on the front page. We were on the fifth or sixth hole, a par three, and we had to wait at the tee for the foursome ahead of us to finish up and get off the green. So while we stood there, the caddie with the paper starts to glance at the front page, and the other caddie sees the photo of Marilyn, and he emits a loud wolf whistle. And Joe peers over between practice swings and figures out what it’s all about. The poor caddie didn’t mean anything by it, but Joe took it the wrong way. He grabbed the paper out of the first caddie’s hands, rolled it up, and swatted the second caddie over the head with it. He then tore up the paper and stalked off the course. So much for our round of golf.”

  Paul Baer never saw the notorious Marilyn Monroe look-alike mannequin but heard about it from George Solotaire. “Evidently Joe paid some toy manufacturer ten thousand dollars to custom-produce this life-size, one-of-a-kind doll,” said Baer. “It could fold up to fit into a leather carrying case that came with it. Supposedly he took it along when he traveled. George Solotaire told me that at some point in 1957, Joe destroyed it, which I took to be a promising sign.”

  DiMaggio may have longed for Marilyn, but in reality there was never a shortage of women to choose from. Aside from the more obvious Monroe imitators, Joe dated a number of starlets and actresses such as Gloria DeHaven, Diana Dors, Gina Lollobrigida, and Jayne Mansfield (often billed as “the poor man’s Marilyn Monroe”). Francie was only one of several airline hostesses in his post-Marilyn life. The gossip columns played up his romances with TWA stewardesses in addition to “glamour girls” Myra Dell and Philadelphia Main Liner Peggy Deegan. Elsa Maxwell, the celebrated society hostess, took Joe under her wing and began inviting him to her many well-publicized parties. Through Elsa, DiMaggio met and dated a whole new crop of performers, including Cleo Moore, Shirley Jones, and Linda Darnell. Another actress, nineteen-year-old Italian sensation Georgia Moll, purportedly received a chinchilla bikini and a diamond pin from DiMaggio, a publicist’s claim that he vehemently denied.

  Publicists, press agents, and gossip scribes tended to make more of DiMaggio’s social pursuits than they were worth. Lee Meriwether was a case in point. A former Miss California from San Francisco, Meriwether was crowned Miss America in 1955. In 1956 she returned to Atlantic City to crown her successor. With the twenty-year-old “former” beauty queen were her mother and brother. As Richard Ben Cramer relates the story in his DiMaggio biography, Joe chanced upon the trio in the lobby of an Atlantic City hotel. Lee’s mother approached Joe and said to him, “I don’t know if you remember my husband, but he used to come into your family’s restaurant.” The Clipper couldn’t have been more polite. “It’s possible,” he responded, “I’m not sure.” Taking stock of Mrs. Meriwether’s daughter, he invited the whole family to dinner that night. Lee’s mother and brother couldn’t make it, so Lee went alone. Joe took her to Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club, the Mob’s favorite Atlantic City hangout. Joe was more than a little familiar with the place; whenever he came to town, he stayed in a small, private apartment that D’Amato let him use on the second floor of the building. Not only did Skinny regularly play host to DiMaggio, but he also often slipped him a couple grand to appear at his club. The Clipper’s presence in any drinking establishment created more publicity and thus more foot traffic. On this particular night, Joe had agreed to be interviewed on the weekly radio show that broadcast each Sunday from the club, a “favor” D’Amato repaid by giving the Daig twice the usual handout.

  Dinner with Lee went well, as did Joe’s radio interview. He reminisced about his days as a Yankee. The second radio guest that evening was Walter Winchell. The columnist spent several minutes at the microphone telling the listening audience that he’d always been a “huge” admirer of Joe DiMaggio. “And do you know who he’s with tonight?” Winchell added. “He’s with the former Miss America, Lee Meriwether. I hear they’re quite a team. Are there wedding bells in their future? Stay tuned.”

  After the radio show, Winchell insisted Joe and Lee accompany him to the Cotton Club, where there was a dance act that “couldn’t be missed.” In the cab on the way to the Cotton Club, the columnist turned to the couple and said, “Thanks for the scoop.”

  “Ah, Walter, come on,” DiMaggio said. “You realize how long I know this girl? Maybe three hours.”

  Winchell remarked, “Are you saying you deny it?”

  “Stop it, Walter. You’re beginning to bug me.”

  Winchell knew enough to let it drop. But two days later, in the New York Mirror, he ran a full-page picture of DiMaggio and Meriwether taken at the 500 Club—the photo ran under a boldfaced headline: “TO WED?”

  Meriwether, at the time the women’s editor for NBC-TV’s Today show, hosted by Dave Garroway, was asked by the program’s producer if she wanted to deny the story on air. The next morning, Miss America 1955 informed ten million viewers that she barely knew Joe DiMaggio and had no intention of marrying him, now or ever.

  Lee Meriwether didn’t hear from DiMaggio until roughly six months later when, at two in the morning, the telephone rang in her bedroom, rousing her out of
sleep. “It’s Joe DiMaggio,” said a voice at the other end. “I need to see you.”

  As her mind began to clear, she could hear that DiMaggio had been drinking. “Where are you?” she asked.

  “Please, I need to talk to you. Can I come over?”

  “What time is it?”

  “What’s the difference?” he said. “I’m coming over.”

  Lee felt uncomfortable. “How do you know where I live?” she inquired.

  The caller hung up.

  Despite the awkward content of their telephone conversation, Lee Meriwether occasionally dated Joe DiMaggio, accompanying him to New York nightspots, but only as a platonic friend and nothing more. There were other Miss Americas who found themselves in the same position. Marian McKnight, Miss America 1957, didn’t look very much like Marilyn Monroe but nevertheless did an impersonation of the Hollywood star during the talent phase of the pageant competition. Attired in a tight satin gown, long silk scarf, and a Yankees baseball cap with the number 5 on it, McKnight, a South Carolinian, warbled a cute new song she’d written about DiMaggio and Monroe in which, while making love, the ballplayer looks up and asks, “What’s the score?” The Clipper caught the act while attending a dress rehearsal and was quoted in the press as saying, “That’s my wife, all right. Miss McKnight does a good imitation.” He and Marian had dinner together. Some time later she told the press, “Joe DiMaggio’s a very sweet, down-to-earth man. We’re friends, not very close friends, but we manage to keep in touch.”

  Yolande Betbeze, Miss America 1951, was likewise nothing more than Joe’s friend, whose occasional dates were well covered by the press. The Stork Club would pay them to drop in and lend the place a bit of glamour. One reason the pair never connected on a deeper level had to do with Yolande’s awareness that Joe, in the months following the dissolution of his marriage to Monroe, was emotionally incapable of sustaining anything approximating a real relationship.