Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (18 page)

They went out to dinner that night, the two of them, and over dinner Marilyn told Joey about the impending marriage. He slept over in her apartment. “She gave me the bedroom,” he recalled, “and she slept on the couch in the living room.” The next evening she took Joey to a movie. “It was a World War II flick,” he continued. “Can you imagine sitting there in the dark, sharing a box of popcorn and a Coke with Marilyn Monroe, knowing that in a week or so she’s going to be your stepmother? How cool is that?” It seemed almost implausible that no one in the press had learned of Joe and Marilyn’s wedding plans. The closest anyone came was Hollywood scribe Louella Parsons, who posited, “If marriage is Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe’s ultimate goal, and I hear it’s just around the bend, they must resign themselves to the fact that it can’t ever be a completely normal union. Marilyn will remain in show business and Joe will not be able to take it.”

“Marilyn resented the column,” said Lotte Goslar, “while Joe DiMaggio dismissed it as ‘a bunch of newspaper talk.’ For myself, I believed Marilyn had finally overcome her reluctance to get married. Having made up her mind to go forward, she was determined to have a family and simultaneously continue her acting career. Or as she put it, ‘It’s not like I’m giving up my career; I’m simply starting a new one.’ ”

A day after the column appeared, Marilyn received a telephone call from Harry Brand, head of publicity at Fox, wanting to know if the couple had a date in mind. Marilyn trusted Brand and asked him to keep the news under lock and key until after the wedding took place. She divulged the date, and he more or less kept his end of the bargain. He notified the press but waited until the morning of the fourteenth. As a publicist, he must have wondered if being married might damage Marilyn’s status as a sex symbol. Such an eventuality would certainly have been problematic for Twentieth Century–Fox.

In the memoir Marilyn wrote with the help of Ben Hecht, she observed: “I had never planned on, or dreamed about, becoming the wife of a great man any more than Joe had thought about marrying a woman who seemed eighty percent publicity. The truth is that we were very much alike. My publicity, like Joe’s greatness, was something on the outside. It had nothing to do with what we actually were.”

On Tuesday night, January 12, her last evening in Los Angeles before departing for San Francisco, Marilyn called Anne Karger, Fred Karger’s mother, with whom she’d remained on close terms long after her early romance with Fred ended. She told Anne and Anne’s daughter, Mary Karger, about her plans to marry Joe. She also contacted Whitey Snyder to tell him. “It seemed only fitting,” he said. “I’d been pushing for the marriage for months. I wished her all the best and told her to name their first kid after me.”

The next day, January 13, Marilyn flew to San Francisco in full disguise and spent the night at the home of Tom and Louise DiMaggio. The civil wedding service took place on Thursday, January 14, 1954, at San Francisco’s city hall. It began at 1:48 p.m., in the chamber of Municipal Court Judge Charles Perry, the chief city officer, and lasted all of three minutes. They exchanged rings—Joe gave Marilyn a platinum eternity band set with thirty-five baguette-cut diamonds—and then he took Marilyn in his arms and kissed her. Among the handful of guests were (best man) Reno Barsocchini and his wife, Tom and Louise DiMaggio, George Solotaire, Lefty O’Doul, and his wife, Jean. Marilyn wore a very natty but proper chocolate-brown broadcloth suit with small rhinestone buttons and a white ermine collar. With the help of another former lover, fashion guru Billy Travilla, she’d bought the outfit the week before off the rack at Saks in Beverly Hills. Joe, having presented his bride with a corsage of three white orchids prior to the ceremony, wore a dark blue business suit and the same polka-dotted tie he’d donned when they first met. On the city register, Joe wrote his age (thirty-nine) and provided his signature; Marilyn gave her legal name, Norma Jeane Dougherty, and noted her age as twenty-five, reducing her actual age by two years.

The group remained in the chamber for another quarter hour, chatting and embracing and wishing the newlyweds well. As Joe and Marilyn left the room, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by the press. More than a hundred reporters and photographers had invaded the lobby and corridors of the building. The couple agreed to pose for one picture. As fifty flashbulbs went off, Joe planted a kiss on Marilyn’s lips. Could they do it again, please? They complied.

Before they could push and shove their way to freedom, they were asked to give the briefest of press conferences. One reporter asked Marilyn what she wanted out of the marriage. “I’ve got what I wanted,” she ventured. “I’ve got Joe.” And what did DiMaggio think of his new bride? “Marilyn’s a quiet girl,” he said. “She likes what I like.” Another reporter wanted to know if they planned to have children—and if so, how many? “A half dozen,” responded Marilyn. “At least one,” said Joe. And finally, somebody asked Marilyn if she felt excited about being married. “You know,” she said, “it’s much more than that.”

With George Solotaire, Lefty O’Doul, and Reno Barsocchini running interference, the newlyweds, trailed by dozens of reporters and a crowd of five hundred spectators, left city hall through a basement exit and headed for Joe’s Cadillac, which they’d prepacked with suitcases. Joe had asked Solotaire to be his best man, but not knowing if he could get there on time, George had willingly surrendered the honorary spot to Reno Barsocchini. Lefty held the car door open for DiMaggio, while Reno and George helped Marilyn into the passenger’s seat.

As the couple sped off, a journalist for the
San Francisco Chronicle
asked Solotaire where the newlyweds were planning to honeymoon. “I have no idea where they’re headed,” he said. “I’m not sure they know.” This exchange, as Monroe biographer Fred Lawrence Guiles accurately assessed it, seemed an “apt description” of a marriage slated to last little more than nine months.

They headed for Paso Robles (translation: “Pass of the Oaks”), a hilly village three hours south of San Francisco. They stopped long enough to fill a thermos with hot coffee and exchange wedding
presents. Joe gave Marilyn a full-length black sable coat. She handed him the twenty nude transparencies taken of her in 1949 by photographer Tom Kelley, including the one that had become the “Golden Dreams” calendar shot. The transparencies were considered too graphic for calendar use; they showed Marilyn’s pubic hair before she began bleaching the area to match the bleached blonde hair on her head. “When Joe told me about the gift,” remarked Whitey Snyder, “I said, ‘Well, you can always airbrush the photos and hang them in your den.’ I was kidding, of course, but he didn’t see it that way. He refused to speak with me for a good six weeks.”

At six in the evening, they pulled into the Clinton Motel in Paso Robles, where DiMaggio had reserved room number 15 at the rate of $6.50 per night. They ate dinner by candlelight at a steakhouse across the street from the motel. After their meal, they checked into their room with two bottles of champagne, a box of imported French crackers, and two tins of caviar. Ernie Sharpe, the motel proprietor, later told the
Los Angeles Times
that the couple spent fifteen hours in the room, which came equipped with a double bed, a small refrigerator, and a TV. They checked out at noon the next day.
Marilyn looked “radiant.” Joe appeared “solemn and tired.” “We’ve got to put a lot of miles behind us,” he said as they climbed into the car.

They pushed on in a southeasterly direction and continued straight through until they reached their destination: a quiet hideaway mountain lodge outside Idyllwild, near Palm Springs. The lodge belonged to Loyd Wright, DiMaggio’s and Marilyn’s attorney. For their convenience he’d filled the refrigerator with food and stocked the liquor cabinet. Tired from the drive, DiMaggio went to bed. Marilyn stayed up and made several telephone calls, one to reporter Kendis Roehlen.
“I finally did it,” she told Roehlen. “Except for Joe, I’ve sucked my last cock.”

The next morning, Marilyn received a call from Loyd Wright. He informed her that news of her marriage to DiMaggio had made headlines all over the world and that they were being heralded as the ideal
couple. One newspaper dubbed them “the Legend and the Goddess.” Wright also wanted Marilyn to know that in recognition of her marriage and
as a gesture of good faith, Twentieth Century–Fox had lifted her suspension, placing her back on payroll and even agreeing to pick up Natasha Lytess’s salary. The only condition was that Marilyn had to return to work—rehearsals for
Pink Tights
were scheduled to begin on January 20. DiMaggio was outraged. He informed Wright he had no intention of allowing his wife to appear in
that
movie or in any movie that called for her to run around half naked, playing a woman of easy virtue.

Monroe’s attorney advised Fox of the couple’s decision. The studio renewed her suspension. Unwilling to ruin her honeymoon, Marilyn deferred to her husband. She and Joe had struck a bargain whereby she could continue her career so long as he had an active voice in choosing her roles. They didn’t argue about it. For once they didn’t argue at all. They played a lot of billiards at a nearby bar. They took long early-morning walks in the mountain snow, Marilyn in boots, jeans, and her new sable coat. They built a snowman and had playful snowball fights. They occasionally drove into Palm Springs for dinner, always at small, out-of-the-way restaurants so as to avoid being recognized. Except for Wright’s periodic updates, they spoke to no one. The press reported that they’d “dropped off the face of the earth.” Marilyn later said the best part of it was that Joe never once turned on the TV set.

Their honeymoon didn’t end at Loyd Wright’s mountain lodge. The couple returned to San Francisco at the end of January after stopping off in Monterey. With Lefty and Jean O’Doul in tow, Joe and Marilyn boarded a Pan American airliner headed for Tokyo, Japan. The Japanese newspaper
Yomiuri Shimbun
had invited the Yankee Clipper to help launch the Japanese baseball season, and DiMaggio had seized the opportunity to extend his honeymoon by taking along his bride as well as the O’Douls. Jean and Marilyn could shop and go sightseeing together while Joe and Lefty, both of whom had visited Japan in 1951, occupied themselves with baseball-related matters.

As Marilyn depicted it in her personal memoir, the Japanese leg of her honeymoon began on a questionable note. They were still airborne when General Charles Christenberry, a high-ranking US Army officer, came over to introduce himself. After ascertaining that the couple would be staying in Japan for the rest of the month, he asked, “How would you like to visit Korea for a few days and entertain the American troops currently stationed in Seoul as part of the UN occupation force?”

“I’d like to,” Joe DiMaggio answered, “but I don’t think I’ll have time this trip.”

“I don’t mean you, Mr. DiMaggio,” the general replied. “My inquiry was directed at your wife.”

“She can do anything she wants,” said Joe. “It’s her honeymoon.”

“I’d love to do it,” said Marilyn. “What do you think, Joe?”

Joe shrugged. “Go ahead if you want. As I told the gentleman, it’s your honeymoon.”

General Christenberry took down the name of their hotel in Tokyo and promised Marilyn he’d be in touch. DiMaggio, forever conscious of his public image, had consented but only because to do otherwise would have seemed unpatriotic.

Thousands of fans greeted the plane when it landed at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. It soon became apparent that they had come to see Marilyn Monroe rather than Joe DiMaggio. As much as the Japanese loved baseball, they absolutely revered Hollywood movie stars. So eager were they to catch a glimpse of Marilyn that the police, fearing a riot, insisted that the honeymooners depart the plane through the cargo hatch and hide out in the customs office until the crowd dispersed. In Tokyo, the DiMaggios and the O’Douls were given adjoining suites at the five-star Imperial Hotel. The day after their arrival, Joe and Marilyn agreed to a hastily arranged press conference in the hotel lobby. The questions ranged from the risqué to the ridiculous. A reporter for the paper that had invited DiMaggio to Japan asked the actress how and when she’d developed her famous wiggle walk.

“I started when I was six months old, and I haven’t stopped yet,” she answered. The same journalist wanted to know what Marilyn hoped to do while in Japan.

“I’d like to find a good Japanese restaurant. Any suggestions?”

Another reporter noticed that Monroe had a small splint on her right thumb and asked how she’d injured it.

“I fell out of bed,” she quipped. “How else?”

Commenting on Marilyn’s arrival in Tokyo, an observant Japanese film critic wrote, “Marilyn Monroe’s greatest artistic achievement is the creation of Marilyn Monroe. She is the reincarnation of herself. She is truly an original.”

Besides Tokyo, the DiMaggios and O’Douls visited the Japanese cities of Kobe, Osaka, and Yokohama. While at the Imperial Hotel, Joe and Marilyn drew vast crowds whenever they came or went. Hundreds of curious locals gathered on the street in front of the hotel each morning and chanted Marilyn’s name until she emerged on the balcony of her suite, like a monarch greeting her subjects. She and Joe were followed around Tokyo by dozens of reporters and news photographers. Although Marilyn assured journalists she was there only in a supporting role and that
“marriage is now my main career,” the press described her as “Joe DiMaggio’s greatest catch” and “America’s most famous actress.” They labeled her “the Honorable Buttocks-Swinging Madam” and irreverently referred to Joe DiMaggio as “Mr. Marilyn Monroe” and “the Forgotten Man.” If Joe hadn’t previously understood just how big a star he’d married, he realized it now, and it didn’t altogether please him. At times he became surly. And silent. At other times he became pushy.
“We’re not going shopping today—the crowds will kill us,” he told his wife. She obeyed.

At a cocktail party thrown in their honor by the international set of Tokyo, which included several high-ranking US Army officials, they once again encountered General Christenberry. He told the couple he’d completed arrangements for Marilyn’s Korean visit with the troops. DiMaggio informed the general that Jean O’Doul would accompany
Marilyn on the trip. “That’s fine,” said Christenberry. “We’re all extremely grateful for your wife’s service to the country.” Cholera and yellow fever shots were administered to both women, and they were issued visas for the trip.