Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (28 page)

In early 1956 Paul Baer convinced Joe to “get away from it all” by accompanying him on a Florida golfing junket. “Joe wasn’t a bad golfer,” said Baer. “As one might expect, he had a beautiful swing. He
just couldn’t putt. On a good day he’d shoot in the midseventies. I recall one round we played in Tampa. I believe his pal Charlie Rubaleave, a commercial photographer, was with us that day. This was about the time the press was crowing about Marilyn Monroe’s affair with Arthur Miller. One of our caddies had a copy of the local newspaper with Marilyn’s photo in a swimsuit on the front page. We were on the fifth or sixth hole, a par three, and we had to wait at the tee for the foursome ahead of us to finish up and get off the green. So while we stood there, the caddie with the paper starts to glance at the front page, and the other caddie sees the photo of Marilyn, and he emits a loud wolf whistle. And Joe peers over between practice swings and figures out what it’s all about. The poor caddie didn’t mean anything by it, but Joe took it the wrong way. He grabbed the paper out of the first caddie’s hands, rolled it up, and swatted the second caddie over the head with it. He then tore up the paper and stalked off the course. So much for our round of golf.”

Paul Baer never saw the notorious Marilyn Monroe look-alike mannequin but heard about it from George Solotaire. “Evidently Joe paid some toy manufacturer ten thousand dollars to custom-produce this life-size, one-of-a-kind doll,” said Baer. “It could fold up to fit into a leather carrying case that came with it. Supposedly he took it along when he traveled. George Solotaire told me that at some point in 1957, Joe destroyed it, which I took to be a promising sign.”

DiMaggio may have longed for Marilyn, but in reality there was never a shortage of women to choose from. Aside from the more obvious Monroe imitators, Joe dated a number of starlets and actresses such as Gloria DeHaven, Diana Dors, Gina Lollobrigida, and Jayne Mansfield (often billed as “the poor man’s Marilyn Monroe”). Francie was only one of several airline hostesses in his post-Marilyn life. The gossip columns played up his romances with TWA stewardesses in addition to “glamour girls” Myra Dell and Philadelphia Main Liner Peggy Deegan. Elsa Maxwell, the celebrated society hostess, took Joe under her wing and began inviting him to her many well-publicized parties.
Through Elsa, DiMaggio met and dated a whole new crop of performers, including Cleo Moore, Shirley Jones, and Linda Darnell. Another actress, nineteen-year-old Italian sensation Georgia Moll, purportedly received a chinchilla bikini and a diamond pin from DiMaggio, a publicist’s claim that he vehemently denied.

Publicists, press agents, and gossip scribes tended to make more of DiMaggio’s social pursuits than they were worth.
Lee Meriwether was a case in point. A former Miss California from San Francisco, Meriwether was crowned Miss America in 1955. In 1956 she returned to Atlantic City to crown her successor. With the twenty-year-old “former” beauty queen were her mother and brother. As Richard Ben Cramer relates the story in his DiMaggio biography, Joe chanced upon the trio in the lobby of an Atlantic City hotel. Lee’s mother approached Joe and said to him, “I don’t know if you remember my husband, but he used to come into your family’s restaurant.” The Clipper couldn’t have been more polite. “It’s possible,” he responded, “I’m not sure.” Taking stock of Mrs. Meriwether’s daughter, he invited the whole family to dinner that night. Lee’s mother and brother couldn’t make it, so Lee went alone. Joe took her to Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club, the Mob’s favorite Atlantic City hangout. Joe was more than a little familiar with the place; whenever he came to town, he stayed in a small, private apartment that D’Amato let him use on the second floor of the building. Not only did Skinny regularly play host to DiMaggio, but he also often slipped him a couple grand to appear at his club. The Clipper’s presence in any drinking establishment created more publicity and thus more foot traffic. On this particular night, Joe had agreed to be interviewed on the weekly radio show that broadcast each Sunday from the club, a “favor” D’Amato repaid by giving the Daig twice the usual handout.

Dinner with Lee went well, as did Joe’s radio interview. He reminisced about his days as a Yankee. The second radio guest that evening was Walter Winchell. The columnist spent several minutes at the microphone telling the listening audience that he’d always been a “huge”
admirer of Joe DiMaggio. “And do you know who he’s with tonight?” Winchell added. “He’s with the former Miss America, Lee Meriwether. I hear they’re quite a team. Are there wedding bells in their future? Stay tuned.”

After the radio show, Winchell insisted Joe and Lee accompany him to the Cotton Club, where there was a dance act that “couldn’t be missed.” In the cab on the way to the Cotton Club, the columnist turned to the couple and said, “Thanks for the scoop.”

“Ah, Walter, come on,” DiMaggio said. “You realize how long I know this girl? Maybe three hours.”

Winchell remarked, “Are you saying you deny it?”

“Stop it, Walter. You’re beginning to bug me.”

Winchell knew enough to let it drop. But two days later, in the
New York Mirror
, he ran a full-page picture of DiMaggio and Meriwether taken at the 500 Club—the photo ran under a boldfaced headline: “TO WED?”

Meriwether, at the time the women’s editor for NBC-TV’s
Today
show, hosted by Dave Garroway, was asked by the program’s producer if she wanted to deny the story on air. The next morning, Miss America 1955 informed ten million viewers that she barely knew Joe DiMaggio and had no intention of marrying him, now or ever.

Lee Meriwether didn’t hear from DiMaggio until roughly six months later when, at two in the morning, the telephone rang in her bedroom, rousing her out of sleep. “It’s Joe DiMaggio,” said a voice at the other end. “I need to see you.”

As her mind began to clear, she could hear that DiMaggio had been drinking. “Where are you?” she asked.

“Please, I need to talk to you. Can I come over?”

“What time is it?”

“What’s the difference?” he said. “I’m coming over.”

Lee felt uncomfortable. “How do you know where I live?” she inquired.

The caller hung up.

Despite the awkward content of their telephone conversation, Lee Meriwether occasionally dated Joe DiMaggio, accompanying him to New York nightspots, but only as a platonic friend and nothing more. There were other Miss Americas who found themselves in the same position. Marian McKnight, Miss America 1957, didn’t look very much like Marilyn Monroe but nevertheless did an impersonation of the Hollywood star during the talent phase of the pageant competition. Attired in a tight satin gown, long silk scarf, and a Yankees baseball cap with the number 5 on it, McKnight, a South Carolinian, warbled a cute new song she’d written about DiMaggio and Monroe in which, while making love, the ballplayer looks up and asks, “What’s the score?” The Clipper caught the act while attending a dress rehearsal and was quoted in the press as saying, “That’s my wife, all right. Miss McKnight does a good imitation.” He and Marian had dinner together. Some time later she told the press, “Joe DiMaggio’s a very sweet, down-to-earth man. We’re friends, not very close friends, but we manage to keep in touch.”

Yolande Betbeze, Miss America 1951, was likewise nothing more than Joe’s friend, whose occasional dates were well covered by the press. The Stork Club would pay them to drop in and lend the place a bit of glamour. One reason the pair never connected on a deeper level had to do with Yolande’s awareness that Joe, in the months following the dissolution of his marriage to Monroe, was emotionally incapable of sustaining anything approximating a real relationship.

Yolande had seen quite enough of DiMaggio stumbling from one Manhattan nightclub to another, wanting to touch the bright lights of the city without getting burned, a feat he could seemingly accomplish only when semipolluted. She witnessed DiMaggio at his worst while both were visiting Paris, France. As Yolande related the story, she had brought along a female friend to help the friend get over a romantic involvement. In Paris, at the Hotel George V, where all three were staying, they ran into Joe.

One evening the trio went drinking, first at the Club Lido on the Champs Elysées, then at Au Lapin Agile in Montmartre. When they
arrived back at the George V, DiMaggio, “totally shit-faced,” put the make on Yolande’s friend. Yolande was treated, as she put it, to the sight of DiMaggio sitting on an upper-floor staircase of the hotel very late at night, trying to talk Yolande’s girlfriend into bed. The problem was that Joe had put away so much booze he could barely get out a coherent word. He was so smashed, in fact, he wasn’t aware that his pants were wide open and his member was fully exposed. “And that,” Yolande recalled, “was the biggest thing you ever saw.”

J
OSHUA LOGAN, THE DIRECTOR OF
Bus Stop
, Marilyn Monroe’s next film, couldn’t say enough on behalf of his star’s acting abilities.
“When I tell people Marilyn Monroe may be one of the very finest dramatic talents of our age,” he ventured in an article for the
New York Times,
“they laugh in my face. But I believe it. I believe it to such an extent that I would like to direct her in every picture she wants me for, every story she can dig up.”

Based on a hit Broadway play by William Inge,
Bus Stop
marked the first collaborative film effort between Twentieth Century–Fox and Marilyn Monroe Productions. In accordance with her latest contract with Fox, Monroe sanctioned the project, the director, the screenwriter, and the cinematographer. She’d had approval on Fox’s selection of cast members. She likewise had the last say on the choice of costumes, though her
Bus Stop
outfits turned out to be as low-cut and risqué as every other film wardrobe she’d ever slithered into. She replaced Natasha Lytess with Paula Strasberg, an action which so infuriated Lytess that she threatened to write a “tell-all” exposing her former pupil for what she was: “an ungrateful monster.”

MM hired Hedda Rosten, Norman’s wife, as her personal secretary at $250 per week. The Rostens attended the University of Michigan at the same time as Arthur Miller; Hedda and Mary, Miller’s first wife,
had been college roommates. Marilyn hired Hedda primarily because she’d heard that the Rostens were having money problems but also because, as a former social worker, Hedda had the capacity to be nurturing and supportive. And in February 1956 Marilyn leased a house at 595 North Beverly Glen Boulevard in the Westwood section of Los Angeles to serve as home base during the filming of
Bus Stop.
Marilyn shared the residence with Milton, Amy, and Joshua Greene, their two retainers, and Florence Thomas, her own housemaid.

Although Josh Logan’s glowing assessment of Marilyn’s performance in
Bus Stop
seems accurate enough, the movie itself, at least by contemporary standards, ranks with the most mediocre of Marilyn’s previous films. In
Bus Stop
a naïve and simple-minded young rodeo cowboy named Bo (played by Don Murray) falls in love with Cherie (Marilyn Monroe), a hillbilly café singer whom he meets on a bus. His intentions are honorable—he wants to marry her—but his temper and jealous side are too much for her. When she tries to run away, he finds her and forces her to board a bus bound for his Montana ranch. When the bus stops at a diner, the passengers learn that the road ahead has been closed by a snowstorm and that poor Cherie is a kidnap victim. After spending a night in the diner, waiting for the storm to abate, the passengers prepare to reboard the bus. Our rodeo cowpoke is suddenly contrite and sorrowful enough for Cherie to reconsider her options. At the end of this rather unremarkable “boy-gets-girl” melodrama, the Monroe and Murray characters clamber aboard the bus and ride off into a glorious sunrise.

So much for plot! One wonders just what Marilyn (and Milton Greene) saw in this tiresome film script and what compelled them to make it MMP’s virginal coproduction, though in fact it did well at the box office. Perhaps Monroe detected flashes of Joe DiMaggio in Bo’s demanding and controlling manner. Or maybe she simply welcomed the opportunity to be her own boss, regardless of the property.

Before filming began, she noticed that actress Hope Lange, making her film debut, had a head of hair the same color as hers. She
demanded that Hope’s tresses be darkened so as not to compete with her own shade of platinum. Although Marilyn complied with Josh Logan’s request that Paula Strasberg be kept off the set, she sulked whenever the director made her reshoot a scene. And when he dared cut a scene she liked, her fangs came out. A year after the release of
Bus Stop,
when Logan tried to visit her in her dressing room on the London set of
The Prince and the Showgirl,
she lambasted him:
“Why the hell did you cut out that scene in the bus? I’ll never forgive you as long as I live.” Logan told her he didn’t have final cut on the picture. Marilyn didn’t believe him. She slammed the dressing room door in his face. What Marilyn should have known was that few directors have final cut on a studio picture. It was Twentieth Century–Fox she should have blamed.