In the fall of 1954, weeks after Marilyn Monroe filed for divorce, a devastated Joe DiMaggio turned to the one man who understood: Frank Sinatra.
Both were American icons, both were of Italian descent and had friends in the mob, and both had been publicly left, in spectacular fashion, by their sex-bomb wives.
Sinatra had just hired a private investigator to trail Ava Gardner, his great obsession and soon-to-be ex.
Sinatra offered the same services to DiMaggio. He had Monroe’s phone bugged, and when she moved into the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue, DiMaggio would wear a fake beard and hold The New York Times over half his face while he sat in the lobby for hours, waiting for a glimpse of her.
One night, after a bout of drinking, Sinatra and DiMaggio, along with five henchmen, went over to an apartment complex in West Hollywood. DiMaggio knew Monroe was carrying on with her voice coach, a young guy named Hal Schaefer, and he wanted to catch them in the act and cause a little pain.
On the drive over, even Sinatra became alarmed by how enraged DiMaggio was. He tried to talk him down, to no avail, and at 11:30 p.m., a 50-year-old lady named Florence Katz awoke to find her door broken down, Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra hovering over her, ready to pounce. She screamed, and the cops came, but they kept the stars out of their official report.
Sinatra paid Katz $7,500 in an out-of-court settlement, but the Hollywood tabloid Confidential nonetheless broke the story. They called it “The Wrong Door Raid,” but for the rest of his life, DiMaggio would claim he was never there and knew nothing about it.
When they met in 1952, Joe DiMaggio had just ended his career as a legendary New York Yankee; Marilyn Monroe, however, was at the beginning of hers, on the verge of becoming an international superstar. On the night they collided, on a double-date in Los Angeles, her friend David March said, “You could almost hear Mr. DiMaggio going to pieces.”
Monroe was 25, DiMaggio 37. They spent that first night together, and despite the infamously tumultuous, short-lived marriage to follow, they were never really apart again.
In the forthcoming “Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love” (Atria Books), author C. David Heymann reveals the complicated, lifelong bond between these two very troubled superstars.
Monroe was born Norma Jeane Baker on June 1, 1926, in LA. She never knew her father, and her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic incapable of caring for her. The young Norma Jeane was bounced around among relatives and orphanages and, at age 11, was molested by a foster father.
DiMaggio — a child of the Depression, the eighth of nine born to Italian immigrants — was raised in San Francisco. His first marriage — to Dorothy Arnold, a bit player in films — was a disaster. She thought she was getting an icon of American decency. Instead, her new husband drank and chain-smoked and cheated constantly.
They had a baby, Joe Jr., but DiMaggio barely paid attention to him and regarded him as an irritant. When the baby got sick, Joe would check in to a hotel.
Arnold filed for divorce in 1943, citing “cruel indifference.”
“He was concerned with image, with how things looked,” Joe Jr. has said. “He wasn’t concerned with me as a person.”
In fact, Monroe wrote in her memoir that she was reluctant to meet DiMaggio because she thought he’d be an egomaniac, spoiled by fame and public adulation. But during that first dinner, he barely spoke, and she was intrigued. Men never ignored her.
“From the beginning,” said close family friend Robert Solotaire, “he wanted to marry her.”
DiMaggio was obsessed with Monroe, but he saw her through his narcissistic lens. He loved her, was thrilled to be chosen by the world’s most desirable woman, but he also wanted her to wear high-necked blouses and low hemlines and quit being a movie star.
“Joe misunderstood Monroe,” Solotaire said. “Like, here’s this young, beautiful woman on the verge of becoming one of the most successful and famous actresses in the world, and she’s going to give it all up to make lasagna for Joe and spend her days changing diapers?”
Yet during their courtship, DiMaggio worked to squelch his possessiveness, and Monroe, who spent her life in search of a father figure, a man who’d never, ever abandon her, found that in DiMaggio.
“She’d grown accustomed to his paternalistic guidance and the protective side of his personality,” said Monroe’s close friend Lotte Goslar. “And here was a father figure with whom she could have sex. And the sex was pretty damn good, if she had to say so herself.”
“She’d grown accustomed to his paternalistic guidance and the protective side of his personality and here was a father figure with whom she could have sex. And the sex was pretty damn good, if she had to say so herself.”
- Lotte Goslar
On Jan. 14, 1954, DiMaggio and Monroe eloped in San Francisco. True to her witty, self-aware form, Monroe told a friend that “except for Joe, I’ve sucked my last c–k.”
The marriage had ground rules: DiMaggio had to approve all of her future films. Monroe was never to be semi-dressed. She had to break out of her “dumb blonde” typecasting — a point she agreed with. But she wasn’t to outshine him. When she did, he’d sleep in another bedroom and go days without speaking to her.
All of this began on their honeymoon, and in weeks, when DiMaggio felt he was losing control of her, he beat her more than once. Joe Jr. recalled being woken up one night by their fighting.
“I was asleep downstairs,” he said, “and I woke up to the sound of my father and Marilyn screaming . . . After a few minutes, I heard Marilyn race down the stairs and out the front door, and my father running after her. He caught up to her and grabbed her by the hair and sort of half-dragged her back to the house. She was trying to fight him off but couldn’t.”
The next morning, Joe Jr. asked Marilyn what happened.
“Nothing happened, Joey,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”
Monroe felt suffocated. In her memoir, she wrote that she and DiMaggio had known “it wouldn’t be an easy marriage,” but that she had no idea of the abuse to come.
Monroe was always on a quest for self-improvement: psychotherapy, college courses, devouring books and art exhibits. DiMaggio preferred to spend his time indoors, drinking and smoking and watching daytime TV, just waiting for her to come home from work.
And when she did, the barrage began: Whom did she talk to? What scene did she shoot? Did she stop anywhere on the way home, and with whom?
“When she didn’t respond the way he wanted her to, he became physical,” Heymann writes. “On one occasion, he ripped an earring from her lobe and scratched her face.”
Riven with anxiety, Monroe began drinking and taking sedatives. She began an affair with voice coach Schaefer, and when DiMaggio found out, he called Schaefer and told him to come over.
Schaefer heard Marilyn screaming in the background. “Don’t come here!” she said. “He’ll kill you. He’ll beat you up.” Schaefer knew it was true and stayed away.
Nine months in, Monroe could take no more. In October 1954, she filed for divorce, citing only “mental cruelty.”
The filing obliterated Joltin’ Joe. For the rest of his life, Marilyn Monroe was his singular obsession. He dated girls who looked like her, and in one of the book’s more outrageous claims, DiMaggio spent $10,000 on a life-size sex doll made in Monroe’s image. One year after Monroe filed for divorce, he showed it to a stewardess he was seeing.
“She’s Marilyn the Magnificent,” DiMaggio said. “She can do anything Marilyn can do, except talk.”
Yet Monroe — who likely never knew of the doll — still saw DiMaggio. When she had gynecological surgery weeks after filing for divorce, DiMaggio not only took her to the hospital but was with her through her five-day stay and her recuperation at home. As soon as she was better, she took him to dinner for his 40th birthday.
Though she still slept with DiMaggio, Marilyn had moved on. Aside from Schaefer, she was dating Marlon Brando and had begun an affair with the married playwright Arthur Miller.
Though she’d go on to marry and divorce Miller, none of the men in her life ever compared to DiMaggio. She trusted him above all.
DiMaggio never stopped trying to win her back. He started therapy for anger management. He loaned her money. In February 1961, when Monroe — who’d been diagnosed by two top psychiatrists as a paranoid schizophrenic like her mother — was forcibly institutionalized in New York City, only DiMaggio answered her call for help.
He came as soon as she phoned, on her third day in lockup. He demanded to see Monroe. The head nurse told him only her doctor could do anything.
“I’ll give you five minutes to get her out here,” said DiMaggio, “or I’ll tear this f–king place apart brick by brick.”
Monroe was promptly released to his care. He took her to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, where she introduced him as “my hero.”
Every week, until his death in 1999, DiMaggio had fresh roses delivered to Monroe’s crypt twice a week.
DiMaggio never lost hope he and Monroe would remarry — even as she continued her downward spiral with drugs and booze and mental illness, after she got involved with both President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, even after she became convinced she’d marry one of them.
He wasn’t delusional. DiMaggio and Monroe had never stopped seeing each other, and she thought they could have a future together without remarriage. Days before she died, Monroe told a friend, “If it weren’t for Joe, I’d probably have killed myself years ago.”
On Aug. 5, 1962, 36-year-old Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her bedroom of a drug overdose. Conspiracy theories abounded, but DiMaggio believed it a suicide.
When she died, he was really her only family. DiMaggio was the one who flew from New York to LA, United Airlines holding the flight just for him. He was the one who identified Monroe’s body, who organized a small, private funeral, who designed her simple, elegant headstone.
DiMaggio never returned to her grave, but he remembered the wish she’d expressed so many years ago, when they were first dating: that when she died, she wanted flowers delivered to her grave every week, just like William Powell did for Jean Harlow.
And every week, until his death in 1999, DiMaggio had fresh roses delivered to Monroe’s crypt twice a week. He never remarried, and on his deathbed, his last words were, “‘I’ll finally get to see Marilyn again.”