Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (27 page)

Liz Renay found Joe “a bit aloof but still a nice guy, a good man, sweet and refined. He was a romantic. He used to send me bouquets of red roses. And yes, he was wonderful in bed. He acknowledged I looked like Marilyn, but that’s all he said about her. I had a feeling
the memories were still too raw. Mostly, he spoke about his childhood and how his father had been a fisherman. And of course he talked about baseball. He told me his brother Dom held the Boston Red Sox record for hitting safely in consecutive games, whereas Joe held the major-league record. In 1949 Dom DiMaggio hit safely in thirty-four straight games. When the thirty-fifth game rolled around, it was Joe who ended his brother’s streak by catching a sinking line drive in the eighth inning in a game between the Yanks and Red Sox. ‘He never forgave me,’ said Joe. ‘Talk about sibling rivalry,’ I remarked. He laughed.”

Liz noted that publishers and producers constantly besieged DiMaggio with book and film offers. “They could’ve given him ten million dollars, and he wouldn’t have given in,” she noted. “His privacy meant too much to him. He was the American hero that nobody knew. Some people claimed he didn’t say much because he had nothing to say. That wasn’t the case. He wasn’t a chatterbox, but he had his moments. He talked about what it meant to be famous and the pressures that came with fame. He discussed his baseball career, the overbearing need he felt to get a hit even in an insignificant game before a few thousand spectators—after all, there might’ve been one fan that had never seen him play before. Another topic that enthused him was money. He advised me to invest in real estate. The next time we met he brought along a dozen brochures and spent hours going over them with me. On his recommendation, I put funds into a Florida motel chain and over the next five years made more than three times my original investment.”

Surprisingly, as Liz learned, Joe liked to gossip. “He wanted to know all about my previous lovers, especially the well-known ones. I told him Alfred Hitchcock liked to be hog-tied and flogged with a dog leash. Cecil DeMille had a foot fetish and loved sucking women’s toes. Joe knew I’d been with Frank Sinatra and wanted to know if he was good in bed. ‘He’s okay,’ I said. ‘Is he better than me?’ Joe wondered. I said, ‘Sinatra can’t carry your jock strap, and he certainly can’t fill it.’ Of course, Frankie asked me the same question about Joe. And I gave him more or less the same response—‘You’re the best, Frankie.’ That’s what all men want to hear, even if it’s total bullshit.”

Liz Renay’s relationship with DiMaggio encompassed a dozen dates spread over a ten-week period. “I realized mine wasn’t the only name in his little black book,” she said. “A drugstore delivery boy told me every time he brought an order to the suite, Joe would have a different woman with him. That didn’t bother me because I saw a good deal of him in August, and I thought we might one day get married.”

In late August, accompanied by George Solotaire, Joe took a break from Liz and flew to Italy to visit Isola delle Femmine, the Sicilian fishing village where both his parents were born and where he still had several distant cousins. According to Solotaire, they were treated like a couple of visiting potentates. Everywhere they went the crowds applauded the Clipper. DiMaggio thought the Italian fishing village looked and felt like Martinez, his birthplace, and began to understand why his parents had felt at home in California. A local teenager handed Joe a bat and softball, and the villagers watched in awe as DiMaggio belted the ball out of sight and into the sea.

After touring the rest of Sicily, Joe and George set out for Venice and that city’s annual film festival. While in Venice, DiMaggio met French actress Anne-Marie Mersen, and their photo appeared prominently in the press. Joe and George then traveled to Rome and took a tour of the Vatican. Joe met Swedish actress Anita Ekberg at a Roman nightclub, and the two danced the night away. Joe and George spent a day in Paris and ended their European sojourn in London.
Sir Cedric Hardwicke, the venerable British actor, drove them around the city. He offered to take them to a cricket match, but only if they had “six months or more to spare.”

Back in the States, Joe appeared as the “mystery guest” on
What’s My Line?
, the television game show hosted by John Daly, an occasional drinking partner of Joe’s at Toots Shor’s. Liz Renay accompanied DiMaggio to the TV studio and sat in the green room while four blindfolded panelists tried to guess the name of the guest. “When he stepped out on stage,” said Liz, “the live audience went nuts. I mean, here was Joe DiMaggio on a television game show. It was so unlike him. And when it was Arlene Francis’s turn to guess, she said, ‘My goodness, only
President Eisenhower and Marilyn Monroe would get that kind of reception.’ The panel quickly established Joe’s identity. But the mention of Marilyn’s name jolted Joe. It was a painful reminder of just how savagely she’d injured him. I think it also pointed to the vast ego problem that had always existed between Joe and Marilyn. Before meeting her he was looked up to by millions. But after marrying her, a whole new generation of journalists arrived on the scene, some of whom thought of Joe as ‘Marilyn’s man.’ He couldn’t stand that. I mean, this is the guy they had to sneak out of Yankee Stadium after ballgames, so he wouldn’t be mobbed and trampled by his army of fans.”

After DiMaggio’s return from Europe, he continued to date Liz Renay, creating the expectation in her mind that he might even propose to her. “I convinced myself that he would ask me to marry him,” she said. “But one day the phone stopped ringing. I waited and waited, and nothing happened. Not a word. Tired of waiting, I dialed Joe’s private number. An operator came on and said the number had been disconnected and the new number was unlisted. That ended that! I’d been unceremoniously dumped. I was heartbroken, primarily because Joe hadn’t had the balls to break up with me in person.”

Joe DiMaggio sought refuge in other Monroe look-alikes, not always with positive results. When told by a burlesque house proprietor that she looked like Marilyn, exotic dancer Dixie Evans retorted, “Everybody in Hollywood looks like Marilyn Monroe.” She nevertheless tailored her act in imitation of Marilyn, walking, talking, and gyrating like the original. Joe DiMaggio checked out her act at Place Pigalle, an upscale burlesque house in Miami. He’d gone to Florida to visit Sid Luckman, the onetime quarterback for the Chicago Bears. Dixie joined Joe at his table at closing time. He walked her home and made a date to see her the following day. She’d forgotten she had scheduled a court appearance that day and, unable to reach Joe at the Fontainebleau Hotel, where he was staying, inadvertently stood him up. She never heard from him again.

More successful was his relationship with Gregg Sherwood Dodge,
a former New York chorus girl at the Latin Quarter and a girlfriend of Dean Martin. Born Dora Fjelshad in Beloit, Wisconsin, Gregg had changed her name after competing in the Miss America Pageant. Joe first met her while playing for the Yankees. Her then husband, Walter Sherwin, held the position of box office treasurer for the team. After Sherwin and Gregg divorced, she later married aging motorcar scion Horace Dodge II.

“I knew Joe via our mutual connection to the Yankees,” said Gregg, “but I didn’t know him in the biblical sense until after his divorce from Marilyn. Our affair began in the back seat of a limousine in Palm Beach, Florida. He told me I looked like Marilyn, and I suppose that’s what did it for him. As for me, I’d always liked him. He was regarded as the greatest ballplayer since Babe Ruth. I found him sexy. Having once been married to Marilyn Monroe made him seem even sexier.

“Regarding Monroe, I soon learned you never spoke of her to him, not even if he brought her up first. In that case, you merely listened. It was clear from the way he spoke that he’d been profoundly hurt by her. He was obsessed with her to the extent that for several years he couldn’t work. All he did was play golf, drink, and move around from place to place, attempting to find solace in the arms of other women, a number of whom looked like Marilyn Monroe. For a while, he did the nightclub circuit. His photo would pop up in the papers with a different girl every few days. He had no difficulty meeting women. One young lady I knew went to bed with him and then divorced her husband with the expectation Joe would marry her, which of course he didn’t.

“Another woman, about to be married, was so taken with Joe she went to bed with him and then informed him he was her ‘last fling.’ The only good that came of his divorce from Marilyn is that it softened him somewhat. He’d always been a bit of a hard-ass, but after Marilyn he became more human, more understanding. All in all, Joe and I dated on a sporadic basis for a period of approximately three years. And after that, we remained friends, occasionally talking on the phone or meeting for dinner. Although he never said it directly, I concluded
that he was smart enough to have ultimately figured out that Marilyn Monroe simply wasn’t good wife material. She was what she was: a delightful companion and bed partner, but not a wife.”

And then there was Francie (a pseudonym), an airline stewardess he encountered in the late summer of 1955 while visiting his pal Joe Nacchio in Panama City, Florida. “We met at a nightclub,” she recalled. “I happened to be there with a girlfriend, and he came over and asked me to dance. I knew of him because I grew up in Boston, and my father, an avid Red Sox fan, used to take me with him to the ballpark. I’d met Ted Williams on one occasion, and when I told Joe about it that evening, he became quite animated. Williams batted .406 the same year [1941] that Joe hit in fifty-six consecutive games. Joe told me there had been talk between the owners of the Yanks and Red Sox to set up a trade: Williams would go to the Yanks, and Joe would play for the Red Sox. And his brother Dom DiMaggio, Boston’s center fielder, would be moved to right to make room for Joe.”

From the beginning, Francie, a raven-haired version of Monroe, realized that any romance with DiMaggio had its limitations. “I’d been engaged and had broken it off shortly before I met Joe,” she said. “I needed to recuperate and sort things out. Joe’s marriage to Marilyn had ended badly. Neither of us wanted a serious relationship. We were happy to see each other only now and again. We’d meet in different cities, depending on my flight schedule. Joe had a friend in Philadelphia named Eddie Liberatore, a scout for the Dodgers, and he’d put us up. And there was a man in Chicago, Sam Brody, a clothing manufacturer, and he’d do the same. And when I had a layover in New York, I’d sometimes stay with him at the Hotel Lexington.”

Meanwhile, Marilyn’s liaison with Arthur Miller had become a matter of public record. At the end of September 1955, she accompanied him to the opening night of his latest play,
A View from the Bridge
, at New York’s Coronet Theater. The play, which in part depicts a vile and violent Sicilian family engaged in the business of commercial fishing, may well have been fueled by Marilyn’s representations to Miller
concerning the physical abuse visited upon her by Joe DiMaggio. In any case, Arthur’s wife, Mary, had learned of the affair and had ordered her husband out of their Brooklyn Heights apartment.

Soon after October 17—his fortieth birthday—Arthur Miller (following a telephone session with his onetime psychiatrist, Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein) moved into the Chelsea Hotel on West Twenty-Third Street and then into an elegant West Side brownstone. Marilyn moved as well. Her six-month sublet at the Waldorf having ended, she took over a sublet on an apartment at 2 Sutton Place, with views of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge. Then, on October 31, 1955, she appended her signature to the final decree of divorce, legally and irrevocably terminating her marriage to Joe DiMaggio.

Joe was with his flight attendant Francie in New York a month after the filing in the California court system by Monroe’s lawyer of the final set of divorce papers. “It was only a technicality,” Francie noted. “The actual divorce proceeding had taken place the year before. Still, Joe seemed rather despondent over the phone. I didn’t realize how despondent until I reached his hotel suite. There, atop his bed, he’d placed a life-sized porcelain-and-rubber doll made up to look exactly like Marilyn Monroe. The platinum hair looked real. It had lifelike arms and legs. The coloring, including makeup, was hers. The finger- and toenails of the doll were coated with red polish. The figure had obviously been constructed with great attention to detail and at considerable expense. There was an almost indecent authenticity to the breasts and other erogenous zones.”

Francie’s first reaction was disbelief, followed by confusion. Her plane, a night flight from Los Angeles, had arrived at eleven o’clock, and she’d taken a cab straight to Joe’s hotel only to be confronted by the macabre mannequin.

“How do you like her?” asked DiMaggio.

“I don’t,” she said.

“I like her,” remarked DiMaggio. “She’s Marilyn the Magnificent. She can do anything Marilyn can do except talk.”

“Can she make love to you?” asked Francie.

“Absolutely,” answered DiMaggio. “Would you like a demonstration?”

As the onetime Yankee Clipper began to unbuckle his belt, Francie the flight attendant, still clutching her overnight bag, made her exit.

“It had to be one of the weirdest experiences I ever had,” she said. “It absolutely and totally creeped me out. It goes without saying I never again spoke to Mr. DiMaggio.”

•  •  •

Matters grew worse for Joe long before they got better. There seemed no way he could escape Marilyn. She was perpetually in the news. She’d agreed to return to Hollywood to begin shooting
Bus Stop
. She and Arthur Miller planned to get married. She wanted to convert to Judaism and have his babies. Miller was the first man she ever loved. Joe heard the latter declaration while watching television with Edward Bennett Williams, the prominent attorney he’d known since 1951 and at whose Washington, DC, home he stayed from time to time. (Williams was also TV game show moderator John Daly’s father-in-law.) Marilyn’s photo appeared on the covers of
Life
and
Time
, to say nothing of a dozen lesser publications. Joe couldn’t avoid her image or erase the memory of the humiliating headlines they’d run when she left him, how the Great DiMaggio had “Struck Out” with the actress—headlines all too reminiscent of those published in Japan during their honeymoon, when they’d referred to him as “Mr. Marilyn Monroe.” The indignity and shame he suffered from the most recent onslaught of news items dogged his every waking hour. His face would darken at the mere mention of her name. How could he begin to get over her if her image and words appeared everywhere all the time? And how dare “they” treat an American idol, one of history’s greatest ballplayers, as if he were nothing more than a minor leaguer?