Starlet Marries the Slugger: Nine Months of Turmoil

He had been thinking about her since the spring of ‘51, when he first saw her picture in the newspaper.

The White Sox were in training in Pasadena that year, and she’d posed for some publicity shots wearing tight white shorts. The caption read: “White Sox pitcher Joe Dobson checks over film starlet Marilyn Monroe as outfielder Gus Zernial does the catching.”

He figured that meant she liked ballplayers, but she’d never been to a baseball game. Joe DiMaggio had never posed with anyone more attractive than Douglas MacArthur.

A year later, he telephoned her publicist, David March, and told him the woman he most wanted to meet in the whole world was Marilyn Monroe.

Dinner was arranged at the Villa Nova on the Strip. It was a Saturday night in the spring of 1952 and Marilyn was filming “Monkey Business.” Joe arrived at at 6:30 p.m., March and his fiancee at 7. Marilyn tripped in around 10.

Expecting a loud, sporty fellow with slicked-back hair and a New York line of patter, she was relieved to find a reserved gentleman who looked more like a Congressman or a steel magnate. Marilyn was excruciatingly shy that night, and DiMaggio, never voluble at the best of times, was at his most laconic. According to their hosts, the starlet and the ball player exchanged fewer than 16 words.

Nonetheless, as Marilyn would later tell her friends, at the end of the evening DiMaggio proposed marriage. Joseph Paul DiMaggio was a man of great certainty, and she was a woman who knew no certainty her entire life.

He was 37, the most famous former athlete in America, only recently retired from a dazzling career. She was still striving to invent hers.

Success came easily to Joe DiMaggio. Marilyn coveted it. She stalked it and flirted with it, but in her own mind, it eluded her.

DiMaggio was blessed with abundant self-confidence and blissful self-acceptance. She, on the other hand, was haunted by agonizing feelings of inadequacy, her every professional moment tortured by the notion that she wasn’t good enough, talented enough or smart enough.

He was secure in his celebrity, perhaps even indifferent to it. Marilyn’s celebrity was a fragile thing that needed to be constantly nurtured and reinforced. Still, she was addicted to it. She gulped it like oxygen.

Dating DiMaggio, she soon discovered, conferred instant respectability. Marilyn was seldom popular on film sets and far too mired in her private torments to be benevolent to her crews. But now she basked in the approbation of the grips and gaffers who bent over backward to do her favors.

“Anything for a friend of the Slugger,” they said. “You must be one special lady.” “Say hello to Joltin’ Joe for me!”

DiMaggio’s father was a fisherman, and this delighted Monroe to the depths of her working-class soul. Joe had a teenage son from his marriage to Dorothy Arnold and a large, cohesive Italian family. Marilyn never knew her own father, and her mother was a ward of various mental institutions. Like functional orphans everywhere, she gravitated to the warmth and exuberance of ethnic family life.

He fell in love with her sweetness, her shyness, her dependency--the very qualities she detested about herself. He thought that he alone saw the real Marilyn and he believed he could alleviate her pain.

DiMaggio harbored a deep, abiding antipathy toward Hollywood. The whole stinkin’ town was populated by sharks and phonies and leeches. Show business was no business for a girl like Marilyn. His prescription was profoundly simple: He would remove the girl from the cesspool of Hollywood, park her in the kitchen of his San Francisco home and they would propagate an infield of little sluggers.

It was a familiar formula in mid-century America, and it must have sounded wonderful to the part of Marilyn that ached for home and hearth. She trumpeted it in the media.

“Marriage is my main career now,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle on Jan. 14, 1954, the day they got married. “A woman’s not a woman unless she has children. . . . We’re going to have six! . . . I’m going to make all of Joe’s favorite foods, like steak and spaghetti.”

But the kitchen was a vast, inhospitable wasteland to Marilyn, and various accounts of her culinary forays read like episodes of “I Love Lucy.” She turned out armloads of soggy spaghetti and tried to dry the noodles with her electric hair dryer. The media swarmed all over it.

She was fond of saying that Joe possessed the grace and beauty of a Michelangelo. He moved like a living statue. If sex were all there was to marriage, it would have lasted forever. Physically, they were spectacularly well-suited, but they were utterly and dismally incompatible in every other respect.

DiMaggio inhabited a cloistered, masculine world of gin rummy, horse racing and endless banter about sports. In New York, Marilyn loved to go to the Met, see all the latest plays and listen to hot jazz. Joe didn’t care for theater, museums or music. He hated parties and premieres. She thrived on them, thrilled to them, gobbled them like candy. She bought him novels and poetry that he refused to read. He could not fathom her obsessive quest to better herself, to study her craft and improve her mind.

Ultimately she chafed at his omnipresent friends who assembled in her living room to watch sports on TV and vivisect the intricacies of home runs hit 15 years earlier in ballparks she had never heard of.

DiMaggio was a traditional Italian male. He was never comfortable with her provocative costumes or her compulsive casual nudity around the house.

In the end, he could not reconcile himself to Marilyn’s need to work in films or to the intense public pleasure she displayed as her white pleated skirt billowed skyward over the subway grate on Lexington Avenue. The tortured complexities of her psyche eluded him. He grew weary of her depressions and her crying jags, of the pills she took to go to sleep and the pills she took to wake up.

It was America’s most famous terrible marriage, and it extinguished itself in nine months.

Still, DiMaggio loved her obsessively, probably more than any man ever had or would. Marilyn knew this intuitively, and she alternately abused and relied upon his constancy for the rest of her life.

Her subsequent deterioration and descent into the abyss merely confirmed his worst feelings about the perils of Hollywood. After 1960, after Arthur and Jack and Bobby and all the others, she would turn to him frequently for comfort in her most desperate hours. When she overdrew by $5,000 at Irving Trust, DiMaggio covered her debt. When she was committed to Payne Whitney for psychiatric treatment in 1961, it was Joe who bailed her out and muzzled the press.

On Aug. 5, 1962, it was Joe who made all her funeral arrangements. It was Joe who stood guard at the Westwood Village Memorial Park to make sure that the Kennedys and Sinatra and all the others who drove her to despondency would be barred from the service.

It was Joe who wept through the ceremony, who whispered “I love you” as he bent over her coffin for a final cold kiss. And it was Joe who, for 20 years, paid to have fresh red roses put on her grave. He never married again.