56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (21 page)

This was not always how it was, no, no, no. Sometimes, and maybe this would be one of them, Dorothy thought, Joe’s anger and annoyance would pass quickly, the silence would be brief. When things were good with Joe, they held hands at the movies. At home he might suddenly reach out and pull her onto his lap; at Toots’s or one of the other places, they might raise a glass together and smile broadly for a camera. He preferred, as a rule, that she not speak much to other men, and as the night grew louder around them Joe at some point would give her a look, knowing, warm even, that said,
let’s get out of here, you and me
. At times there arose between Dorothy and Joe a sudden intimacy that was entirely unplanned, their eyes locking and something passing between them that said
that’s the way I feel too
. Joe would lean in and kiss her neck. Dorothy wanted those to be the moments that lasted forever. Then everything would make sense, being Mrs. DiMaggio and having given up the things she’d given up and now embracing the things she had. These days Joe sometimes liked to lounge with his hand upon her belly, feeling the baby kick.

Maybe he’ll have forgotten all about being angry by the time he comes home, Dorothy thought. Joe was happiest, of course, when things were going well on the field.

Dorothy had her own friends, many of them actors and show people. Lou and Anne Costello, June, and the agent Mort Millman, who had first taken her to Hollywood, and who still believed she could be a star. She was 5′ 4½″, with blue-gray eyes and honey-blonde hair that she had taken to pinning back. Before getting pregnant she had weighed 115 pounds. She went 34-24-35½, like an hourglass, with hips that made men weak. People noticed when she walked into a room. She could still have a career ahead of her, she thought. Maybe she’d start up again if Joe had to go into the service. Dorothy read a lot to help her stay up on things, and she went to the pictures whenever she could. The talk was that the latest Hemingway,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, was going to be made into a movie, Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper starring. That was the best-selling book with the strange first quote: “No man is an Iland, intire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the Maine. . . . ” That was as much of it as Dorothy remembered. Those words couldn’t help but remind her of Joe.
He is like an island sometimes
, she thought, and she shivered.

Dorothy sat down on the edge of the bed and pulled the shoes off her swollen feet. Then she got up again, unsettled, and walked into the living room. Windows stood open at either end of the long apartment and a light wind blew comfortably through. She went and stood in the narrow doorway leading onto the terrace and from there, looking West, she could see a coal barge silently splitting the waters of the Hudson, traveling upstream. Starlings and wrens darted among the treetops that crowded together on the riverbank. From above the birds looked like insects. Then a hawk came into view, gliding above the water.

It was DiMaggio’s bearing, his confidence, and—yes, sure—that silent, almost mysterious manner, that first drew Dorothy in. He carried himself as if he were what mattered in the world. He wasn’t particularly good-looking, not like so many of the show business men she knew. Teeth set too far forward. A faint jowliness around his narrow jaw. Too much nose.

He had fallen for her hard. She was 19 years old and working as an extra on the set of the movie
Manhattan Merry-Go-Round
when a man shuffled over and said, “Joe DiMaggio would like to meet you.” And Dorothy said: “Who’s that?” DiMaggio was playing himself in the film, a brief appearance in which he sang, badly, in his deep voice, “Have you ever been in heaven, well I was last night. . . .”

It was the summer of 1937, and Dorothy was not being coy—it was still quite possible for someone to live in New York and to never have heard of Joe DiMaggio. “I fell in love with him before I knew he was a celebrity,” she told the newspapers later. Now the idea of that seemed almost absurd to Dorothy.

Her given name was Dorothy Arnoldine Olson, though she’d changed it to Dorothy Arnold even before she left Duluth to try to make it in the business. They lived on a steep hill on the west end of town, and they went to church on Sundays. Dorothy was the third of four girls and by the time she came along her father, Victor Arnold Olson, had his heart set on a boy. He’d been a local ski jumping champion, soaring on the long, narrow wooden skis his own father had made for him. Now he worked the rails for Northern Pacific, a conductor mainly, and he wanted to pass on his love of sports to someone. So he taught Dorothy to ski and to skate, and he helped to coach her as she took up tennis, basketball and swimming at school. Dorothy won a city championship in the pool and another on the tennis court, and Victor let her know how proud of her he was. Her sisters called her a tomboy, affectionately though. Dorothy’s mother, Clara, sewed all the girls’ dresses on a treadle machine and cooked meals passed down from the old folks in Norway—roast pork and cabbage on a Sunday, maybe—and kept the house as clean as October snow.

Dorothy was the most talented of the Olson girls. Besides the sports, she also sang and danced, for the family and neighbors at first, then at local gatherings (where folks passed a hat!) and then in children’s revues across Minnesota and even into Wisconsin. Victor’s job meant that they rode the trains for free. In the summers between her school years at Denfeld High, Dorothy sang at parties with a college band and picked up gigs dancing a set show with another girl named Dorothy. “Dot and Dot with a Little Bit of Dash,” they were billed and people came out and paid good money in tough times to see them. Dorothy Arnold, as she was now known on the marquee, started to think that maybe she was on her way.

And maybe she was. While she was still a senior at Denfeld she won a spot in the Band Box Revue, a solid pro outfit that traveled the Midwest out of Chicago. She graduated early to take the job and soon thereafter, at a stop in Madison, Wis., impressed a visiting movie executive so much that at the age of 18 the girl from Duluth was brought to New York to screen test for Paramount. Even after they’d told her no thanks—her voice was “too low for talking pictures,” the man said—Dorothy stayed on in the city, getting modeling assignments for magazines, singing in nightclubs, doing radio spots for NBC. She took whatever work she could find and if the life was hard at times, living cheap in the Chesterfield Hotel with just enough money for food (she had discovered the pleasures of ketchup soup), it was also the life she wanted.

Dorothy was not afraid. She felt that success and fame were all around her, right outside her window in the winking Broadway night, and that one day soon she would have them both.

She met DiMaggio while doing that bit part on location in the Bronx, and even as their relationship quietly warmed—somehow, from the start, she felt worldly next to Joe—Mort Millman took notice of Dorothy over at NBC. Dorothy, Millman decided, had remarkable talent. He was sure she could make it big in no time if she’d take another run at a movie house. At Universal Studios the decision-makers
liked
her deep voice—alluring and rich—and liked the oomph-girl curves of her body and that honey-blonde hair. She signed her name to a contract that was to last for seven years. When her film
The Storm
opened at the Lyric theater in downtown Duluth, the locals poured out to see the homegrown girl made good, never mind that Dorothy’s role was so small. Victor sat through the movie twice, making him late for work on the railroad for the first time in many years.

And how excited her father and all the family had been that Dorothy was dating Joe DiMaggio. Dorothy now lived in Hollywood and DiMaggio in New York but she came to see him on occasion during the season, and they had spent that winter in California together. Once again Dorothy was sure that the next, grander step was near. “I haven’t a ring or anything,” she told one of the gossip writers, “it’s just understood.”

The film work was steady and very good now for Dorothy: a featured part in the movie
The House of Fear
and then a recurring role, the female lead, in the serial
The Phantom Creeps
. In
Phantom
she played a determined (“and beautiful,” reviewers said) reporter chasing after the evil Dr. Zorka, a mad scientist portrayed by Bela Lugosi. “My editor hired me because I move fast and I’m not easy to scare,” Dorothy’s character, Jean Drew, tells a detective at one point. And after unearthing an important detail of Zorka’s nefarious plan (at times a giant silver robot would get involved on Dr. Zorka’s behalf) she would say to the police things like, “not bad for a nosy reporter, huh?” Each episode ended with Jean Drew in a terrible and uncertain fix—flung into the sea after a boat crash, say—and you had to wait until the next episode to see it resolved. Dorothy wore high heels and lace hats in almost every scene and she never let go of her purse. She could handle her own stunts. Week after week she appeared on screens all across the country. In Minnesota the newspapers called Dorothy “Duluth’s No. 1 glamour girl.”

He gave her a diamond ring in the summer of 1939 and he told her he would hit a home run for her in the next day’s All-Star game. And then he had done it. She went home to tell her parents—
lord, Clara, that diamond looks like an ice cube on her hand
—and when word got around Duluth, the newspaper reporters came to the Olsons’ house and from that moment the watch was on. Everyone in town wondered when the wedding would be, and where.
Here? In our Duluth?

Even Walter Winchell called the Olson house looking for the latest scoop, and in the months that followed, writers everywhere took more of an interest in Dorothy. One paper did a story recounting her diet secrets (“only fruit for dessert, but she eats all the spaghetti and meat she wants!”) and others asked whether she planned to stay in pictures even after she wed. “I don’t intend to let marriage interfere with my career,” Dorothy said, though she knew that wasn’t true. Wishful thinking. Before DiMaggio had slid the ring onto her finger he had told her that he wanted her to give up acting. She could not keep living in Hollywood, for one thing, and he needed her around and unencumbered. (Biddable, he meant by this, and there for him to lean on.)

Dorothy had resisted the urge to argue with him. This was Joe DiMaggio she was getting ready to marry! “A good marriage like our parents have,” she told her sister Joyce, was more important than even a movie career. The wedding, it was finally announced, would take place in San Francisco, some time after the World Series that fall.

NOW DUSK WAS
beginning to settle over the Hudson. Occasionally a car horn sounded or someone shouted on the street below. The soft sun slipped behind the trees across the water in New Jersey. Maybe she would sit on the terrace for a while and read; or maybe she’d stay in and put the radio on. First, Dorothy went into the kitchen to see about getting something to eat. She couldn’t go an hour without feeling hungry these days. It had been a few weeks now since she’d first felt the baby move.

No matter what happened between Dorothy and Joe in the years ahead, they would always have that wonderful, on-top-of-the world time of 1939 and ’40: the months leading up to the wedding; the great, surreal day itself; and then the enchanted period afterward. Never had Dorothy been happier. Joe was happy then too, looser and more comfortable somehow, and, in the summer of 1939, on his way to batting .381. Dorothy came and stayed with DiMaggio in his rooms at the Hotel New Yorker that season and when she wasn’t filming the last episodes of
The Phantom Creeps
, she sometimes met him on the road. They were the handsomest couple around, and full of one another. Once, at the Shoreham Hotel in D.C., they had gone down to the bar and Joe had sat at the piano and, jokingly, banged on the keys (literally banged, he couldn’t play at all) and then Dorothy sang a little something for the people there.

She went with him to the World Series in Cincinnati where the Yankees finished a sweep of the Reds (Vince’s team, although he had joined the club too late in the season to be allowed to play in the Series games) and then, stopping in Chicago along the way, Dorothy and Joe had traveled to San Francisco. There a crowd of well-wishers from North Beach, and DiMaggio’s family, as well as, most thrillingly, a wedding date, four weeks hence, awaited them.

The days were happy and light. She modeled her dress for Marie and the other DiMaggio sisters, and bantered sometimes with Dominic, and played cards in the sitting room with Joe. One afternoon Rosalie took Dorothy into the kitchen and taught her how to make the spaghetti and the sauce and the meatballs just the way Joe liked them. (Eighteen months later, in the apartment in New York, Dorothy still fixed that meal for Joe once a week.) On a day in early November, Joe received a telegram addressed to him at the wharf, at Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto, and Dorothy was beside him when he opened it to see that he had won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award.