Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  • • •

  To handle the hundreds of film scripts that arrived regularly at her Manhattan apartment, Marilyn hired May Reis, and soon asked her to replace Hedda Rosten as her private secretary. Lena Pepitone, another new household employee, was hired in 1957 to serve as Marilyn’s New York maid and wardrobe mistress.

  “I think the reason Marilyn hired me,” said Pepitone, “was because of my Italian heritage. The first time we met, she told me, ‘I love Italians. My second husband was Italian.’ ‘I know,’ I responded. ‘You were married to Joe DiMaggio.’ ‘Hey,’ Marilyn laughed, ‘you know about him?’ ‘Of course,’ I answered. ‘Everybody knows about Joe DiMaggio.’ ”

  Marilyn asked Pepitone if she knew how to cook Italian food. “I’m an Italian food fanatic,” she said. “Joe used to take me for the greatest Italian dinners.”

  Monroe paid Pepitone $150 a week. “Aside from my salary,” she recalled, “Marilyn constantly gave me little presents and large Christmas bonuses. She did that with all the household employees. She gave Florence Thomas, her housekeeper, a small fortune. She was enormously generous. That Christmas she gave a Chagall drawing to Susan Strasberg. She gave Paula Strasberg the string of pearls she’d received from the emperor of Japan during her 1954 honeymoon with Joe DiMaggio. She gifted Lee Strasberg with hundreds of dollars’ worth of books, records, clothes, and cases of champagne. She turned over her black Thunderbird to John Strasberg on his eighteenth birthday. She gave Joe DiMaggio Jr. his first car as well. Arthur Miller received a leather-bound edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica for Christmas. I had the feeling her generosity stemmed in part from a desire to be loved, like the little girl that thrusts a bunch of daisies into her mother’s hand.”

  Instead of daisies, Marilyn presented her mother with a new Christmas wardrobe. She sent Inez Melson (whom she’d named her mother’s conservator) money with which to buy Gladys Baker an assortment of slips, vests, pants, gowns, hose, sweaters, shoes, boots, and a raincoat. In return, Melson sent Marilyn a packet of four dinner place mats that Gladys had made in occupational therapy. In an accompanying letter, Melson wrote that when she last visited Gladys at Rockhaven, refreshments had been served in the garden, and Gladys “presided over the coffee urn. She also arranged all the cookies and sandwiches on the trays.” The letter, Lena Pepitone attested, reduced Marilyn to tears. She said to Lena, “My mother lost her memory, and I can’t forget anything except for my lines. It’s all there, all the time, buzzing around in my brain. That’s why I’m afraid I’ll end up going as crazy as my mother and her mother.”

  It didn’t take Lena Pepitone long to discover that Marilyn had mounted a full-length poster of Joe DiMaggio in one of her bedroom closets and would often stand in front of it and stare at it while listening to “The Man I Love,” as sung by Billie Holiday. “It was a baseball poster,” Pepitone noted, “the kind you’d find in a sports memorabilia shop. He had on his Yankee uniform and it showed him swinging a bat. Considering that she and Arthur Miller were married at the time, I wondered how she got away with it, until it dawned on me that he never bothered looking in her closet. He usually slept in the guest bedroom and spent most of his time locked away in the study. I didn’t say anything to Marilyn about the poster—or about her little song ritual—until the day she brought it up. ‘What do you think of the poster?’ she asked. Not knowing what to say, I blurted out something like, ‘Well, I’ve heard he had the perfect swing.’ ‘He also has a perfect physique,’ she responded, ‘and he knows it. He used to boast about it all the time. That is, until I gave him two gift-wrapped presents: a mirror and a ruler. That shut him down, at least for a while.’ ”

  Lena Pepitone had a friend named Judy who’d dated Joe DiMaggio on a few occasions since his breakup with Marilyn. “They were only buddies,” said Lena. “I got to know Joe somewhat in later years, but Judy told me something about him I found interesting. He felt awkward with adults but not around children. He came alive with children. After Marilyn, he began visiting orphanages in and around New York. He became active in the Little Leagues. Judy said his personality changed with children. He related to them. In this respect, he was like Marilyn. When I asked her about Joe’s affinity for kids, she said, ‘It’s true, as long as they’re not his own. He doesn’t get along at all with Joey Jr., his son.’ ”

  Chapter 14

  IN SEPTEMBER 1957 JOE DIMAGGIO Jr. transferred from Black-Foxe Military Institute in Los Angeles to Lawrenceville Prep School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. At the time a boys’ boarding school, Lawrenceville was fifty miles southwest of New York, five minutes south of Princeton, New Jersey, and forty miles north of Philadelphia. Sixteen-year-old Joey thrived in his new environment. At five foot eight and 165 pounds, he was still filling out, though he would never be as tall and as muscular as his father. Yet he became a shot-putter on the school’s winter track team and a javelin thrower on the spring team. Not big enough to play a position on the football team, he practiced for hours and became the team kicker. When asked by a member of the press why he hadn’t tried out for the varsity baseball squad, he said he wanted to concentrate on track. It was the old story. He knew he couldn’t compete with his father’s feats on the baseball diamond, so why try?

  “I tried like hell to make the junior varsity football team,” Joey recalled. “The coach told me if I got good at it, he’d give me a spot as a placekicker. That’s all I needed to hear. Every afternoon after class I’d be out there with a dozen footballs, practicing field goals, extra points, and kickoffs. I’d practice kicking until the rest of the team went off for dinner. I’d be out there booting footballs half the night. I suppose I wanted to prove to my father that I was good at something.”

  Joey developed a number of interests at Lawrenceville. He joined the staff of the school newspaper (the Lawrence), the science club, and the chess team. He became a chapel usher and appeared in a school play. He eventually became president of the Open Door Society, which arranged for prospective underprivileged students to visit the campus. He continued his childhood interest in aviation, taking flying lessons at a small airport outside Philadelphia. His father paid for the flight lessons as well as for the fees associated with school. And until his son turned twenty-one, DiMaggio had to keep up his child support payments to Joey’s mother.

  Although Marilyn Monroe had endured more than her share of recent difficulties, she continued to remain in close contact with Joey, especially now that they were both on the East Coast. His connection to Monroe also ensured Joey a direct line to his father, who called regularly to find out about Marilyn.

  “At first he made no effort to visit me at school,” said Joey, “but he did call. I’d hoped he’d come to our first football game. When we lost seven to six because I missed the extra point, I felt relieved he wasn’t there. When I told him the final score, he surprised me with his answer. ‘You’ll make it next time,’ he said.”

  Joined by a classmate from Lawrenceville, Joe Jr. spent Thanksgiving break of 1957 with his father in New York. George Solotaire provided the boys a pair of theater tickets to My Fair Lady, followed by a late-night dinner at Dinty Moore’s. The following day, Thursday, Toots Shor hosted Joe and the two boys for Thanksgiving dinner at his home. Joey and Chuck Heller then went to a new Broadway musical called Rumple, after which they returned to Toots’s apartment, where Joe Sr. introduced them to Frank Gifford, Kyle Rote, and Charlie Conerly of the New York Giants football team. On Friday DiMaggio took George Solotaire, Joey, Chuck Heller, and a third Lawrenceville student to dinner at the Colony. On Saturday the group (including jockey Eddie Arcaro’s daughter, Toots Shor and his daughter, and John Daly) went to Philadelphia for the annual Army-Navy football game. On Sunday they were at the Polo Grounds to watch the football Giants take on the San Francisco 49ers. Late that afternoon, Joey and his friend left New York and returned to school.

  All in all, though his father hadn’t spent much time alone with his son, it had been a good visit, pr
obably the best in years. Joey’s letter home to his mother, while on the whole enthusiastic, nonetheless reflected a degree of doubt, as if Joey couldn’t quite accept Big Joe’s sudden transformation: “JD has tried to be charming in his miserable sort of way, but then I guess he’s doing better than I expected, and he knows no different so we bless him and give him our love.”

  While he regularly spoke to Marilyn by phone, Joe DiMaggio Jr. didn’t see her until early in February 1958. “She’d bounced back from the problems she’d been going through and wanted to visit me at Lawrenceville,” said Joey. “I told her I’d come to New York to see her. I didn’t want a repetition of the troubles I’d had with my classmates at Black-Foxe every time she appeared on campus. She told me to come in on a Sunday, because Arthur Miller wouldn’t be around. I said I’d come by train, but she insisted on sending a limousine service to pick me up and then drive me back at night. It had snowed pretty heavily earlier in the week, so we went to Central Park and built a snowman. We ate lunch at a small restaurant near her house. Then she had me up to her apartment, and we just chatted. I told her about my Thanksgiving visit with Dad. I told her about a falling-out I’d had during the summer while visiting with relatives on my mother’s side of the family and how I had no intention of ever seeing them again. ‘Isn’t that a bit harsh?’ she asked, and then she inquired after my mother. I told her my mother had been going out with a restaurant owner in California named Ralph Peck. His real name was Pickovitch, but he’d shortened it for professional reasons. My mother, I said, had been given a few small film roles but, as usual, was frustrated by her overall lack of success. ‘Maybe she’s lucky,’ said Marilyn. ‘Fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There are times when I wish I were still Norma Jeane. There’s comfort in anonymity.’

  “She didn’t say much about my father, although I had the sense she wasn’t altogether happy in her current marriage. My suspicions were confirmed two weeks later when I heard from her at school. She called to report she’d just seen my father. They’d spent an afternoon together. They planned on being together now and then, when it was mutually convenient—nothing formal, just the two of them. She still loved him—always had and always would. Nobody knew about them. Marilyn swore me to secrecy. What’s amazing, I suppose, is that despite all the journalists and biographers that wrote about Marilyn Monroe, not one seemed aware of her relationship with my father during her marriage to Arthur Miller. They all realized that Dad and Marilyn began seeing each other again in the spring of 1961, following her divorce from Miller. But the truth is that their affair, if you want to call it that, began much sooner and always remained a secret.”

  Other than Joe Jr., the one person who did know of the affair was Paul Baer. It was in Baer’s apartment that Joe and Marilyn carried on their tryst.

  “One evening in early 1958,” said Baer, “I went to dinner with Joe, and he did something almost unheard of for him: he began talking about Marilyn. He’d read about her troubles and wondered whether he could be of help. After all, he knew her as well as anyone. She’d always considered him a kind of paternal figure as well as a lover. But there were several problems, not the least of which was Arthur Miller. What if Miller found out Joe had tried to contact Marilyn? Maybe he’d go public with the news, possibly contact the press—and wouldn’t that prove embarrassing? And then, too, Marilyn had recently changed her home phone number, and Joe didn’t know how to reach her. Finally, if he did reach her, and she consented to see him, where the hell could they meet? He couldn’t very well have her up to his hotel suite. The hotel personnel all knew him and would almost certainly recognize Marilyn, even in her usual disguise.”

  Paul Baer immediately understood that Joe ached to see Marilyn again but couldn’t risk the possibility of getting caught. He also understood why DiMaggio had brought him into the equation. Paul currently resided on Fifth Avenue, but he maintained a second apartment, a small rental on the Upper West Side, which would make an ideal hideaway for Joe and Marilyn.

  As Baer put it, “I had a petite one-bedroom flat on Central Park West in the midnineties, which I held on to after I moved because the rent was moderate, and I could use it to put up friends from out of town. I also used it for weekly poker parties. Joe came on several occasions. I’d prepare lots of spaghetti and lasagna, and we’d feast before the games. Joe used to say I made the best lasagna in New York.”

  Located on the fifteenth floor of an imposing building, Paul Baer’s apartment consisted of a bedroom, living room, and small kitchen alcove. All rooms looked out on the Central Park reservoir. The living room contained a rubber tree that practically filled the entire room. It left space only for a couch, a bar, and a card table. A king-sized platform bed dominated the bedroom, which contained a desk and dresser.

  Inez Melson provided DiMaggio with Marilyn’s new telephone number at her East Fifty-Seventh Street apartment. He called, and she immediately agreed to meet him at his friend’s Central Park West apartment.

  “They arranged to get together on a Wednesday afternoon,” said Baer. “It had to be a well-orchestrated operation because the press was always around. In addition, there was this devoted New York fan club—they called themselves the Marilyn Monroe Seven—and they followed her everywhere. She encouraged them. She’d invite them over for dinner now and then. So, anyway, I gave Joe a key to the apartment. He told me he’d be wearing a fake beard and a low-slung hat when he arrived at the building. He’d use the name Mr. Morse, as in Morse code, and he’d get to the building ten minutes before Marilyn. She’d use the name Mamie, as in Mamie Eisenhower, the then First Lady. The next order of business involved taking care of Bob, the building’s hardworking, cross-eyed, not so bright, daytime doorman. I took Bob aside, gave him twenty bucks, and explained that a friend, Mr. Morse, would come by on Wednesday to use my apartment for a few hours. And then I added that a friend of his, a woman named Mamie, would be joining him. I instructed Bob to let them both go upstairs to my apartment. Bob gave me a cross-eyed wink. ‘Don’t worry, boss,’ he said. ‘I’ll let them in.’ ”

  Paul Baer tidied the apartment, put fresh sheets on the bed, stocked the refrigerator with champagne, bought a bouquet of flowers for the bedroom, and left Joe and Marilyn a business card that read simply, “Have fun, kids! Yours, Paul Baer.”

  “With one notable hitch, the plot worked to perfection,” recalled Baer. “Joe called the following day to thank me. He said they’d disposed of a bottle and a half of champagne and made good use of the bedroom. It had been like old times with Marilyn—everything had gone as planned. He just wanted to make sure nobody else found out about it, not even his great buddy George Solotaire. I told him not to worry—nobody would know. The next time I went to the building, I happened to see Bob, the doorman. I handed him another ten dollars in addition to the twenty I’d already given him. ‘Bob,’ I said, ‘thanks for taking care of my friends.’ For someone who rarely demonstrated any emotion, Bob suddenly became very animated. ‘Boss,’ he yelped, ‘I kept my cool, but you won’t believe who went up to your place the other day.’ Without waiting for a response, he said, ‘Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe! They had on these ridiculous disguises, but you couldn’t mistake them. Can you dig it, boss? DiMaggio and Monroe. Joe and Marilyn. Did you know they were using your apartment? And by the way, what the hell ever happened to Mr. Morse and Mamie? They never showed.’ ”

  Chapter 15

  ALTHOUGH JOE DIMAGGIO MET WITH Marilyn Monroe only periodically in the years between 1958 and 1960, it appeared they met often enough to assuage his damaged soul. So eager was he to continue seeing Marilyn that he agreed to seek professional counseling in order to overcome his jealousy and anger issues. Dr. Kris, Marilyn’s psychoanalyst, provided her patient with the name of a psychiatrist for DiMaggio. Marilyn passed it on.

  Joe went for a while, and the sessions seemed to help. Although he remained critical of those he deemed a threat to Marilyn’s happiness, he learned to temper his condemnatio
ns. He appeared better able to deal with Marilyn on her terms as opposed to his own. For her part, she appeared better able to deal with DiMaggio now than when she’d been his spouse.

  Marilyn still had the Big Fellow very much on her mind. To Lena Pepitone, she mused, “I guess everybody I’ve ever loved, I still love a little.” Or maybe more than a little—who was to say? In addition to the poster of Joe Marilyn had mounted in her closet, she now carried a small snapshot of Joe in her wallet. She changed the combination on her jewelry box to 5-5-5, honoring Joe’s retired Yankee number. When she informed DiMaggio of the change, he said, “You should’ve made it 36-24-36.”

  Joe’s psychiatrist, whose name has never been divulged, advised him to rejoin the workforce and to do something not directly related to baseball. In mid-1958, through retired quarterback Sid Luckman, he connected with the V. H. Monette Company, based in Smithfield, Virginia. The company was the leading supplier of merchandise and goods to military exchange stores and outlets in the United States and Europe. He signed on as corporate vice president and was paid a salary of $100,000 a year plus expenses. Among other benefits, the company paid for DiMaggio’s executive suite at the Lexington Hotel in New York.