Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (2 page)

Convinced that the evening had been a waste of everyone’s time, Marilyn ultimately decided to leave. It was nearly eleven o’clock. She said she’d had a hard day at the studio, and she was exhausted. She thanked David March, excused herself, and stood.

Joe DiMaggio also stood.

“May I see you to the door?” he asked.

He followed her through the restaurant to the front entrance, where he broke his silence again.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he said.

Marilyn owned a white 1949 Ford convertible, which she’d parked a block from the restaurant. When they reached her car, DiMaggio had more to say.

“I’m not staying very far from here,” he said, “and I haven’t any transportation. Would you mind dropping me at my hotel?”

“Not at all,” said Marilyn, “as long as you don’t mind the mess.” Sliding into the car, DiMaggio noticed that the backseat was piled high with books, newspapers, film scripts, empty soda bottles, candy wrappers, half-eaten candy bars, and assorted articles of clothing. On top
of the slag heap sat a camera and a tennis racquet. On top of the tennis racquet were five or six traffic tickets. When he later described the scene to George Solotaire, Joe said it looked like a bomb had gone off in the backseat.

“Where are you staying?” Marilyn asked.

“At the Knickerbocker. It’s on North Ivar.”

Marilyn drove for several minutes. Then, as she reported in her memoir, she “began to feel depressed.” For some difficult to define reason, she didn’t want Joe DiMaggio to step out of her car and out of her life forever, “which was going to happen” as soon as they reached his hotel.

DiMaggio must have experienced a similar sense of impending loss. As they approached the Knickerbocker, he said, “I don’t feel like turning in. Would you mind driving around a little while?”

“It’s a lovely night for a drive,” Marilyn answered.

They drove around for the next three hours, and for much of that time DiMaggio did something he’d almost never done before. He talked about himself. He opened up and didn’t stop. He told Marilyn about his days as a baseball player with the New York Yankees ball club. When he arrived in New York in 1936 as a twenty-one-year-old rookie, he wore a new business suit and visited the top of the recently completed Empire State Building, where, by chance, he met Fiorello La Guardia, the city’s renowned Italian American mayor. Tony Lazzeri, the veteran Yankees infielder, who also hailed from San Francisco, took the trouble to show DiMaggio around. Joe found New York intriguing, and he loved baseball; but in truth, the sport had served him primarily as a springboard, a means to an end, a way to avoid having to follow in his father’s footsteps as a commercial fisherman. As a young man, he had no particular ambitions. He didn’t know what he wanted to do in life; he knew only what he didn’t want to become.

His parents, Giuseppe and Rosalie, had come to America from Isola delle Femmine, a Sicilian island adjacent to Palermo in the Golfo di Carini, where the DiMaggios had been fishermen for generations. His father had arrived first and, after saving enough money, had sent for
Rosalie. They settled in Martinez, a small fishing village twenty-five miles northeast of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was there, on November 25, 1914, that he Joe was born, the eighth of nine children. Less than a year later, Zio Pepe, as his father was known, packed his fishing boat with everything they owned and moved the family into a four-room ground-floor flat at 2047 Taylor Street, a three-story building on the slope of Russian Hill, in San Francisco. The rent on the apartment came to $25 per month.

Overlooking resplendent San Francisco Bay, North Beach (“a tiny town within a large city”) encompassed a quarter mile of row houses, bars, restaurants, and coffeehouses. Fisherman’s Wharf, with its endless stream of tourists and sightseers, stood at the bottom of the steep, ski-slope-like hill that led to the DiMaggio residence. Hundreds of small fishing vessels bobbed gently in the waters below. Seagulls wheeled above, swooping down for an occasional morsel of discarded food. In the early-morning hours, the old fishermen, most of them Italian immigrants like Giuseppe, could be seen standing in clusters, patching their nets and repairing their boats.

Zio Pepe, a short, robust man who spoke almost no English, rose at four o’clock in the morning six days a week to comb the Bay for crab. He worked hard not only because he had to but also because he believed you were supposed to. He expected his five sons, each of whom bore the middle name Paul (after the family’s patron saint), to do likewise. Money was sparse, but pride was plentiful in the DiMaggio household. Until he turned twelve, Joseph Paul DiMaggio wore hand-me-downs and earned his keep at the dinner table by toiling after school on Zio Pepe’s fishing boat. Two of his older brothers—Mike and Tom—had withdrawn from school to work with Dad on a full-time basis.

Joe had other thoughts. He’d begun playing baseball at the local Boys’ Club. One day he made off with a broken oar from his father’s boat and fashioned it into a baseball bat. Baseball violated Zio Pepe’s “code of life,” his oft-proclaimed notion that financial independence and self-respect could be attained only by adhering to a strict work
ethic. He became infuriated and called his son
lagnuso
, lazy,
meschino
, good-for-nothing. “You a bum!” he shouted in broken English. Rosalie DiMaggio calmed her husband by informing him that Joe had procured an after-school job working in an orange juice plant. In Joe’s eyes anything beat having to swab the deck of his father’s boat. It wasn’t the fishing itself or being out on the open water (unless it was very choppy) that bothered Joe; it was the stench of fish and crab entrails after the boat had been at sea. Cleaning up “that mess” nauseated Joe. Mike and Tom would watch with amusement as their younger brother leaned over the side of the boat and puked his guts out.

To help pay his share of the household expenses, Joe undertook several jobs, none for longer than six months. After leaving the orange juice plant, he went to work on the docks, followed by employment in a cannery and eventually at a warehouse, loading and unloading trucks. When all else failed, he resorted to hawking newspapers on street corners, at the same time perfecting his athletic skills by playing ball in the sandlot leagues of North Beach, not far from home.

Joe recalled the difficult days of the Great Depression when he and the rest of his family would sit in the Taylor Street kitchen under long strips of sticky yellow flypaper hanging from the ceiling to catch the flies and other insects that flew into the house. In the heat of summer, before the advent of the air conditioner, it was necessary to keep the windows and screen door open.
“I felt as if I were stuck to the flypaper,” Joe told Marilyn. “I felt utterly doomed, like one of those poor insects. In 1929 I started high school, and I hated it with a passion. I don’t think I cracked a single book that year. I wanted to quit school—and all those crazy jobs—and start playing ball full-time. Zio Pepe didn’t go for it. Two of my brothers—Vincent, two years older than me, and Dominic, two years younger—had also developed an interest in baseball. The three of us shared a bedroom, and on weekends we would listen to the games on radio. It was our mother who finally went to bat for us. She confronted Zio Pepe and won the right for three of her sons to eventually become major-league baseball players.”

Rosalie DiMaggio appeared to be a well-bred lady, attired in plain, dark clothes, with her hair often fastened in a bun; she seemed to be an old-fashioned, old-world woman who would never question the opinions of her Sicilian fisherman husband. In reality she was much more sophisticated and open minded than Zio Pepe. “This is America,” she told him. “Everything is possible. Let the boys pursue their dreams. If they want to play baseball for a living, let them at least try.” She made this dramatic proclamation in Italian, her English being no better than her husband’s. And she made it, DiMaggio observed, at a time when Italian Americans were still all too commonly referred to as “guineas.”

In 1930, having completed the ninth grade, Joe dropped out of school and, two years later, signed on to play minor-league baseball with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. The following year he captured the attention of nearly every major-league scout by hitting safely in sixty-one straight games. His teammates called him “the Walloping Wop.” In 1934 the New York Yankees purchased DiMaggio from the Seals for $25,000 and five yet-to-be-named players. In 1936 he got three hits in his first major-league game and wound up the season with a .323 batting average. The Yankees topped the standings in the American League that season and went on to win the World Series. The owners of the ball club attributed the team’s success largely to the Iron Horse, first baseman Lou Gehrig, as well as to the efforts of their star rookie. Joe DiMaggio wasn’t just a phenomenon at the plate; he was equally adept in the field. Even if he had to say so himself, he possessed an uncanny instinct for the game, a sixth sense, which enabled him to make the most difficult play look easy. It was a skill shared by few. On the Yankees, only Gehrig, fast approaching the end of his career, and catcher Bill Dickey could be compared to DiMaggio.

Two of Joe’s brothers also wound up in the majors. Dom, known as the “little professor” because he wore glasses when he played, signed with the Boston Red Sox. Vince played in the National League for no fewer than five teams, including the Pittsburgh Pirates and the New York Giants. All three played the same position: center field.

The DiMaggio siblings garnered an abundance of publicity. They weren’t the only brothers playing major-league baseball at that time, but because there were three of them, all playing the same position and all doing well, the attention came in a variety of forms. Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons wrote that the saga of the DiMaggio family would make a “great movie,” and inquiries arrived at the Taylor Street homestead from a number of producers and film studios. There were countless articles in newspapers and magazines. There were dozens of requests for radio interviews, television having not yet arrived. Every Italian American group and organization in America invited the brothers to become honorary members. Grantland Rice, then the nation’s most famous sportswriter, got so caught up in the excitement that he penned a poem and ran it in his column: “Out the olive trail they go—Vincent, Dominic, and Joe . . . Who is it that steals the show? Vincent, Dominic, and Joe.”

But what most pleased the Yankee Clipper was that Zio Pepe soon became the baseball trio’s most ardent fan. He regaled the other North Beach fishermen with daily updates on their latest feats. He scanned the box scores in the newspaper every morning to see how his sons had performed the day before. He adorned his living room with photographs of his offspring in their respective team uniforms. For each son, he compiled a scrapbook of sports page items and articles clipped from the newspapers by his four daughters. He even traveled east one year to watch his boys play in person.

“He never fully understood the game,” Joe told Marilyn. “He showed up in a straw hat, then simply stood and cheered with the rest of the crowd. What he liked most were the hot dogs they served at Yankee Stadium, though he complained they were too expensive. The next time he came to the stadium, he said, he’d bring along his own food.”

The more DiMaggio spoke, the more Monroe liked him. He hadn’t told her everything about himself, but he’d told her enough. Two and a half hours had elapsed, and they were still driving around Hollywood
and Beverly Hills in Marilyn’s car. Not yet done, Joe began speaking, in an almost boastful manner, about his relationships with women.

According to Marilyn’s memoir, he revealed that he “worried” whenever he went out with “a girl.” He didn’t mind going out once with her. It was the second time that made him uneasy. As for the third time, that eventuality seldom took place. He had a “loyal friend” named George Solotaire who “ran interference” for him and, when necessary, “pried the girl loose.”

“Is Mr. Solotaire in Hollywood with you?” Marilyn inquired.

“Yes,” said DiMaggio. “He’s staying with me at the Knickerbocker.”

“I’ll try not to make too much trouble when he starts prying me loose,” she said.

“I don’t think I will have use for Mr. Solotaire’s services this trip,” he replied.

They drove on without speaking for a while, but Marilyn didn’t mind. She had the feeling that “compliments from Mr. DiMaggio were going to be few and far between,” so she was “content” to sit in silence and enjoy the one he’d just paid her.

Several minutes later, he spoke up again.

“I saw your picture the other day,” he told her.

“Which movie was it?” she asked.

“It wasn’t a movie. It was a photograph of you on the sports page. You were holding a baseball bat.”

Marilyn remembered the photo session with Gus Zernial and Joe Dobson.

“I imagine you must have had your picture taken doing publicity shots like that a thousand times,” she said.

“Not quite,” Joe answered. “The best I ever got was Ethel Barrymore or General MacArthur. You’re prettier.”

“Two compliments in one sitting,” remarked Marilyn. “This must be my lucky night.”

“Here’s another compliment for you,” said DiMaggio. “I wouldn’t have waited at the Villa Nova as long as I did if I hadn’t really wanted
to meet you. I kept thinking of that sports page photo. I figured you must like ballplayers.” Actually, Joe’s admission that he found Marilyln attractive had an odd effect on her. “I had read reams on reams of writing about my good looks, and scores of men had told me I was beautiful,” she said in her memoir. “But this was the first time my heart had jumped to hear it. I knew what that meant, and I began to mope. Something was starting between Mr. DiMaggio and me. It was always nice when it started, always exciting. But it always ended in dullness.”

It did not end in dullness that night. Marilyn returned to the Beverly Carlton and invited Joe to join her. He didn’t see George Solotaire again until the following morning when he took a cab back to the Knickerbocker Hotel. Solotaire was waiting for him.