Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (11 page)

The day they came to visit, Joe Jr. led Marilyn and his father on a walking tour of the campus. They then took him to Trader Vic’s for dinner. Years after first meeting Marilyn, Joe DiMaggio’s son would say, “I took to her at once. In many respects she was like a kid herself, not at all like a movie star. Marilyn was neither haughty nor imperious. Quite to the contrary, she was straightforward and down-to-earth. There was a soft simplicity about her. She could be moody, but she was usually buoyant and always generous. She seemed extremely feminine. She tried to encourage me in my difficult relationship with my father, but at the same time, she never tried to supplant my mother, though in fact that wouldn’t have been a difficult thing to do. She always asked all the right questions: Did I have any friends at school? What were my favorite courses and why? Which writers did I like to read? It wasn’t just idle chatter. I felt she had a sincere interest in getting to know me.

“By contrast, my father’s main focus revolved around Black-Foxe’s athletic program. He wasn’t concerned with me as a person. And I had to be careful how I spoke to him, because the wrong tone or comment would instantly jettison him into a black hole. It was always a matter of living up to his expectations. The only times he seemed pleased with me were when I could report I’d scored a game-clinching basket or won a student tennis tournament, or something of that sort. Attaining a good exam score or course grade didn’t mean much to him. You had to
excel in sports. That’s what impressed him, and that’s the reason I never took baseball very seriously. No matter how hard I tried, I would never be good enough. I could never be another Joe DiMaggio.”

Joey stressed that his father had a rather superficial view of life. “He concerned himself with image, with how things looked,” said Joe Jr. “For example, he was a chain-smoker. I can’t remember ever seeing him when he didn’t have a cigarette in his mouth. He went through three to four packs a day. But you won’t find many photographs of him smoking. He’d see a photographer coming his way, and he’d ditch the cigarette. It wasn’t cool in terms of image for an athlete to be caught with a cancer stick in hand. To impress the kids, you had to demonstrate that you were a wholesome guy, even if you weren’t.”

Joey’s mother took advantage of the fact that her son was boarding at Black-Foxe—she was rarely around. Mort Millman, Dorothy Arnold’s agent, had found his client work as a lounge singer at the Mission Inn in Carmel, California. When that job ended, she embarked on the dinner club circuit and later performed on the road with the Minsky’s Follies. “She was out of town most of the time,” said Joey. “I remember taking several short vacations with her, once to Mexico and twice to Las Vegas. And then her family owned a summer cottage on Caribou Lake, in Wisconsin, so we’d hang out there once in a while. But for the most part I didn’t see much of her, particularly during my first two years at Black-Foxe. Because I was by myself most of the time, Marilyn began visiting me at school, sometimes with my father, other times alone. She’d take me out for dinner or invite me back to her place. Within a matter of months she moved from a house rental on Castilian Drive in the Hollywood Hills to a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and then into an apartment on North Doheny. She couldn’t sit still. Neither could my mother or father. Consequently, I never had a permanent childhood address. Because Marilyn experienced a similarly nomadic childhood, she understood me better than anyone else.”

Joe Jr. readily admitted that he soon developed a “mad crush” on Marilyn. He confessed that she became the “object” of his “adolescent
fantasies.” Joey went so far as to tell his mother that Marilyn was “a doll” and had “beautiful legs.”

“I suppose I was jealous of my father,” he admitted. “It was all very Freudian.” Joey’s Black-Foxe classmates seem to have fostered their own MM fantasies. They couldn’t stop talking about her. They demanded to know if Joe Jr. had ever seen her “in the buff.” “Yeah,” he told them, “I saw her in that nude calendar spread, where she’s sprawled across a red velvet sheet.” “Not the calendar, asshole! In the flesh!” Even if he had seen her that way, he never would have admitted it. Not to them. They asked if in private she sounded the same as she did on-screen—with that breathy, sexy voice of hers. In fact, she didn’t, but he assured them she did. And then there was the time he engaged in fisticuffs with a schoolmate because “the jerk” called Marilyn “a hooker.” Busted him in the mouth. Split his lip and broke a couple of teeth. The fight nearly got Joey suspended from school. He told his father about it, and Joe DiMaggio “must’ve said something to somebody,” because in the end nothing came of the incident.

While Joe Jr. never experienced Monroe “in the buff,” save the nude calendar shot, he did see her in a bathing suit. “Her Hollywood Hills sublet had an outdoor swimming pool,” he recalled, “and when I went over there, mainly on weekends, I’d swim, and Marilyn would sit poolside and read. She always had her nose in a book. I think she felt somewhat insecure because she hadn’t completed high school, and this is how she compensated. Then, too, she was perpetually on this self-improvement kick. She wanted to expand her horizons. She had an artistic nature and a quick mind. She was imaginative and creative, but in a sort of childlike way. I can’t explain it. She wrote poetry and kept journals. She’d often quote from writers like Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She’d taken an extension course in art and literature at UCLA and had planned on taking additional courses, but there was never enough time.”

One Sunday afternoon Joe and Marilyn picked up his son at school and drove him to the Castilian Drive residence to spend the day. The
three of them were sitting around the pool, relaxing, when they heard a clicking sound coming from behind some hedges. A newspaper photographer had hidden out and was taking pictures. DiMaggio jumped up and chased the fellow away, but the damage had been done. The photos appeared in all the papers a day or two later. “And that,” said Joe Jr., “is when all hell broke loose.”

The news media contacted Dorothy Arnold for a comment. Did she know about Monroe and her former husband? What did she think of Marilyn? And did she mind her son spending time with the couple?

Dorothy claimed she knew of DiMaggio’s relationship with Monroe. She said she had nothing per se against Marilyn—she seemed to be “a kind and sweet lady”—but her former husband was a horse of a different color. He never took a fatherly interest in his son. He didn’t take his visitations with Butch seriously. All they ever did together was watch television. And eat junk food. Joe never even spoke to Butch. He didn’t offer parental guidance of any kind. To be blunt, he was an unfit father. She had taken up golf with Butch, which is more than his father had done, even though Joe was an avid golfer. She’d exposed her son to all sorts of activities. He loved building model airplanes. She’d registered him at Clover airfield (in Santa Monica) for an aviation course geared toward young teenagers. He’d flown in the cockpit of a plane with a private instructor. At her family’s lake house in Wisconsin, he’d been given sailing and waterskiing lessons. In Mexico, he’d learned all about the art of bullfighting. She’d done all this for Butch, and what had DiMaggio done for him? Nothing, absolutely nothing!

The Hearst newspaper syndicate picked up the story and ran a follow-up article comparing Dorothy Arnold and Marilyn Monroe, pointing out that both were blond, both were fair skinned, both had “curves in all the right places,” and both were performers. The difference between them, read the piece, “is that Marilyn’s nine years younger than Dorothy and far more successful in her film career.”

Offended by the article, Dorothy went on the warpath, asserting in the press that her former husband was subjecting their son to a “loose,
amoral side of life” and to “a person” (i.e., Monroe) with an “unsavory” reputation, “a person” better known for her “sexual conquests” than for her “film roles.” (So much for the “kind and sweet” Marilyn.) Dorothy reported that during her son’s “quality time” with his dad, Joe would take Butch over to Marilyn’s place and let him use the pool while Joe and Marilyn “retired to her bedroom and had sex.” And while DiMaggio could do whatever he wished in terms of a social life, she didn’t want her son exposed to his father’s affair. “He should be more discreet.” To this she added that considering Joe’s rather substantial income, he was paying far too little in child support. She planned, she said, on going back to court.

She went back to court, but not until Joe DiMaggio offered his own statement to the press. He called Dorothy’s accusations “ridiculous” and charged her with using his child support payments to her own benefit, rather than their son’s. He stated that her Marilyn Monroe–related comments were vile and untrue. “It’s pure jealousy on her part,” he observed. “She doesn’t even know Marilyn.”

It was but one more battle in an ongoing war. Before the end of the year, Dorothy Arnold filed papers with the Superior Court of Los Angeles requesting that the monthly child support payment of $150 be increased to $1,000 so she “could establish a home for our son in keeping with his father’s wealth and position.” Further, she petitioned the court to suspend DiMaggio’s visitation rights because he had exposed Joe Jr. to “a person with an immoral reputation.”

Having retained the services of Loyd Wright Jr., a Los Angeles attorney, DiMaggio took the witness stand and pointed out that not only was he paying child support, but he also financed Joey’s education, summer camp program, extracurricular activities, and medical needs. As an example of his former wife’s “treacherous” behavior, he testified that she had recently sold a piano he’d acquired for Joey and had pocketed the proceeds. And regarding visitation rights, he insisted he was currently negotiating the purchase of a residence in the area, which would give him the opportunity to see his son on a more regular
basis. If anything, he felt his visitation rights ought to be broadened, not curtailed. He accused his former wife of “bad-mouthing” him to their son, thereby turning the boy against him. “My son,” he said, “has been brainwashed.”

Although
Judge Elmer Doyle agreed to raise the monthly child support payment to $300, he otherwise ruled for DiMaggio, going so far as to tell Dorothy Arnold she should probably “never have divorced” Joe DiMaggio. As the parties filed out of the courtroom into the outer corridor, a spectator overheard Dorothy mutter to a friend, “I should never have married him—if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had to seek a divorce.”

•  •  •

Jane Russell may have been given top billing in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, but Marilyn Monroe
was
the blonde, and as the film title suggested, gentlemen preferred them. And while it might have been better for publicity purposes had they become rivals, once shooting began, Jane and Marilyn had become good friends. Five years older than Monroe, Russell had graduated from Van Nuys High, the same school Norma Jeane Baker would attend a few years later. At Van Nuys, Jane performed in the same student theater group as Jim Dougherty, Norma Jeane’s future husband. Russell and Monroe also had Howard Hughes in common. Hughes had discovered Jane, and he and Monroe had likewise crossed paths, though to what extent and how intimately Marilyn never divulged.

Like so many other women in Marilyn’s life, Jane Russell took a protective, almost maternal attitude toward her. Marilyn turned to her for advice on her relationship with Joe DiMaggio. If anyone could discuss the pros and contras associated with marriage to a career athlete, it had to be Jane Russell. In 1943 she’d married her high school sweetheart, Bob Waterfield, who went on to become an all-pro quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams. Having retired from football the same year Joe quit baseball, Waterfield soon began hanging out with DiMaggio.
While Jane and Marilyn busied themselves on the movie set, Joe and Bob went golfing together. Despite their shared interest in all matters athletic, they had little else in common. Bob Waterfield envisioned a future for himself in the business end of the movie industry. In the early 1950s, he and Jane Russell started their own film company, producing four motion pictures over the next ten years. Joe DiMaggio hated the Hollywood jungle and everything associated with it. He remained hopeful he could convince Marilyn to quit making films and start making babies. Bob Waterfield told DiMaggio he couldn’t see why she couldn’t do both. Jane Russell concurred. She and Bob had adopted three children, and she had always found parenting perfectly compatible with an acting career. Marilyn felt encouraged.

In connection with the premiere of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, Marilyn and Jane were asked to participate in the traditional hand-foot imprint ceremony in the courtyard at Grauman’s Theatre. For Marilyn it was the fulfillment of a fantasy she’d entertained since her childhood days at the orphanage. As Marilyn and Jane kneeled on the sidewalk, Marilyn suggested that Russell pull down the top of her dress and press her exposed breasts into the wet cement; she offered to do the same with her buttocks, preserving them for posterity’s sake. When informed by the Fox representative that her suggestion was unacceptable, Marilyn came up with another idea. She thought a diamond should be used to dot the
i
in her name, a reminder of her big number (“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”) in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Instead of a diamond, Fox sanctioned the use of a rhinestone. A few weeks later, the rhinestone mysteriously disappeared. “Oh well, it’s the thought that counts,” Marilyn told a journalist. “Frankly, I think if Jane Russell’s boobs and my ass had been used instead of our hands and feet, a lot more people would’ve visited that site.”

Long after she and Marilyn appeared together in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
, Jane Russell stated that she retained “genuine admiration and affection” for Marilyn. “She was anything but the airhead she so often portrayed in her films,” said Russell. “She was very smart and quite
unique. Despite her spotty background, she managed to make a grand success of her career. Yet for all her success, she remained neurotically insecure, constantly in search of advice and guidance, and forever in pursuit of a lasting love. I never for a minute believed that she and Joe DiMaggio would last. They were in love, very much so, but they didn’t understand each other. They came from different universes. That was the tragedy of their relationship. They couldn’t stay together. It was ill fated, written in the stars.”