J. Taraborrelli - The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Still, after Don’t Bother to Knock , the bad movies continued for Marilyn. In fact, the next year—1952—would start off on a difficult note when in March, Marilyn began work on Monkey Business , in which she played, much to her dismay, a stacked and dumb secretary to Cary Grant’s scientist. Also at around this time, she made a movie called We’re Not Married , which starred Ginger Rogers, Mitzi Gaynor, Eve Arden, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Because the film is centered on three self-contained stories, there is no interaction between most of the various players, so we are denied the pleasure of seeing Zsa Zsa and Marilyn lock horns. This was another dead-end movie that added nothing much to her résumé. It was also the year O. Henry’s Full House was released, consisting of five self-contained mini-movies, each with a separate cast, separate writers, and separate directors, all based on famous short stories by O. Henry, the acknowledged master of the literary form that always bore a touching and unexpected irony in its denouement and became the author’s signature. It received a first-class production and starred some of the Fox lot’s most popular actors, but there wasn’t much for Marilyn to do in this one and most people don’t even know she was in it.

“This is not easy,” Marilyn would tell Berniece when speaking of her career. “I don’t know how many bad movies an actress can make before she just becomes known for… bad movies!”

Joe DiMaggio

J oltin’ Joe. The Yankee Clipper. No matter the nickname, few major-league baseball players in history had as much of an impact on our culture as the famous Joe DiMaggio. In the view of some historians, though, he may be as well known for his relationship with Marilyn Monroe as for his skill as a New York Yankees center fielder (for his entire professional career, 1936 to 1951).

Born Giuseppe Paolo (Joseph Paul) DiMaggio Jr. on November 25, 1914, Joe was the eighth of nine children of Sicilian immigrants in the small town of Martinez, California. When he was a year old, the family moved to San Francisco. He was raised with strict Catholic values in a household that stressed a strong work ethic and, above all, pride in their Sicilian heritage. At the same time, like most children of immigrants back then, the DiMaggio children were taught by their parents that nothing was more important than successfully merging into the American culture and being thought of as American. When he was a young boy, around six, he was forced to wear a leg brace due to a congenital weakness in his ankles. When the brace came off after two years, he was shy and withdrawn but also determined to excel at some physical activity. His brothers Vincent and Dominic played baseball—both went on to the pros—and he was thus inspired to also play the game. Joe dropped out of high school in the tenth grade—like Marilyn. His father, Giuseppe, had wanted him to be a fisherman—crab fishing had been a family trade for generations—but Joe couldn’t stand the smell of fish and cleaning them made him sick to his stomach. For many years, his father would view him as “good for nothing” as a result of his decision to do something other than fishing for a living. Joe’s brother Vince played for the San Francisco Seals, and it was he who persuaded the team’s management to bring Joe, then eighteen, on as a shortstop in 1932. He wasn’t such a great shortstop but he could definitely hit. By the age of twenty-one, he was batting .398. It wasn’t long before he became known as a reliable hitter for the team. He made his major-league debut with the Yankees in 1936, batting ahead of Lou Gehrig. From the start, he was a wonder on the field. It had been four years since the team had been in the World Series, but thanks in large part to DiMaggio, the Yankees would find themselves winning the next four fall classics. Joe joined the team in 1936 amid a great deal of publicity and attention. He was viewed as the greatest thing to happen to the sport in a long time. Paid $15,000 a game, he used the money to set his family up in a nice home as well as to invest in his own seafood restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf called Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto. He had a fifty-six-game hitting streak, from May 15 to July 16, 1941, that is thought of as the greatest in baseball history. Then, after going hitless for one game, he bounced back and hit in the next sixteen games for a total of seventy-two out of seventy-three.

Joe DiMaggio was more than just a baseball player, though. He was a cultural icon during the Great Depression, a desperate time in our history during which Americans sought out public figures for inspiration and motivation. He elevated the sport, but he also elevated the country. Watching DiMaggio in action was a thrill because of his grace and agility, but also it felt like a validation of the American dream. Injuries got the best of him, though, and by the late 1940s there were times when he could barely walk, let alone play the sport. Still, in 1949, he signed a contract with the Yankees for $100,000—an enormous amount of money in the sport at that time. He was deeply depressed after surgery on his foot and the breakup of a marriage—his first, which brought forth one child, a son named Joe Jr. So his heart wasn’t really in the sport at this time. Still, even in his darkest hours, he was an amazing player. That year he had four home runs in three games and was rejuvenated. He went on for another year or so playing the game in historic ways as the country watched, mostly amazed by his exploits: He played in 139 games in 1950, scoring 114 runs and three home runs in a single contest! By 1951, though, his injuries (as well as persistent ulcers and painful arthritis) began to take a toll on him. He announced his retirement at the end of 1951 at just thirty-six. By the time he gave up the sport, he had the fifth most career home runs (361) and the sixth highest slugging percentage (.579) in history. He’s the only player in baseball history to be selected for the All-Star Game in every season he played. He’s still considered one of the best professional baseball players to ever walk out onto a field.

Joe DiMaggio was a complex person, a study in contrasts. Like many celebrated people, he could be charismatic in a room full of people yet distant and sullen behind closed doors. Also, like many celebrities—especially in the sports world—he was accustomed to getting whatever his heart desired when it came to the opposite sex.

What follows is the oft-reported story of how Marilyn Monroe met Joe DiMaggio. It’s true that the two did meet at this time; however, new interviews for this book reveal that this really was not the first time they met.

First, the accepted story:

After seeing Marilyn in a dazzling series of photos she made with the White Sox, Joe decided that he wanted her. Or at least he wanted to meet her, and then take it from there. Marilyn had done the photo shoot with the Sox during their spring training that year at Brookside Park in Pasadena as a publicity gimmick set up by the studio. She posed with popular baseball player Gus Zernial in one of the pictures. After Joe determined that he wanted to know Marilyn, he contacted a mutual friend, David March, and the date was set for March 8, 1952, at Villa Nova, an Italian restaurant. *

Marilyn wasn’t exactly eager to meet Joe. She didn’t quite know who he was, and didn’t much care. She figured he was just an egotistical baseball player—or maybe a football player, she wasn’t sure—and since she knew little about the sport she couldn’t imagine what they would have in common. So while Joe DiMaggio sat waiting with David March and an actress named Peggy Rabe, Marilyn did what she did best in these kinds of social situations—she was late. (“It was a balmy night, and I was late, as usual.”) In fact, she kept them waiting for almost two hours. Of course, when she appeared, the table was more than happy to see her, especially given that she had on a revealing, low-cut white blouse and a tight little blue skirt that made sitting down just a tad perilous. She didn’t know it, but DiMaggio was apprehensive about meeting her.