Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (12 page)

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One of the many characters who attempted to latch on to Marilyn Monroe was Robert Slatzer, a self-proclaimed screenwriter and producer. Slatzer (he died in 2005 at age seventy-seven) met Marilyn at Twentieth Century–Fox in 1946, when he was a struggling fan-magazine reporter and she a struggling model and actress. Having fallen in love with her, Slatzer proceeded to write countless articles and a book about her, in the course of which he made the incredible claim that he, and not Joe DiMaggio, had been her second husband. It is noteworthy that Slatzer’s disclosure of a purported marriage came only after Marilyn’s death.

Without a shred of evidence to support his claim, Slatzer contended that their “secret” wedding took place on October 4, 1952, in Tijuana, Mexico, while Joe DiMaggio languished in New York covering the World Series. According to Slatzer, an unnamed lawyer performed the marriage ceremony for a $5 fee. The marriage supposedly ended two or three days later when Darryl F. Zanuck, Marilyn’s boss at Fox, coerced her into a divorce. Slatzer later penned a treatment for a proposed film to be titled
Three Days in Heaven
, encapsulating his “three-day marriage” to Marilyn, and submitted it to several independent producers, hoping to elicit interest in the project.

“Slatzer’s treatment crossed my desk in New York,” said television and film producer Lester Persky, “and while it wasn’t particularly well written, the story line, if true, was sensational. On the surface, I found
it difficult to believe because at the time Slatzer claimed he married Monroe, she was involved with Joe DiMaggio. Why would one of the world’s most alluring and famous women marry a penniless nobody when she had the likes of DiMaggio and Arthur Miller banging at her door? It made no sense, but then again that’s what was so intriguing about it.”

On Persky’s next trip to Los Angeles, he met with Slatzer to discuss the property. “He turned out to be an absolute sleaze bucket,” said Persky, “the kind of bloke who’d sell you his soiled underwear if you were dumb enough to make him an offer. After meeting him, I decided to do a little snooping around and soon learned Monroe had been nowhere near Tijuana on October 4, 1952. A Beverly Hills real estate agent I knew had driven Marilyn around during those three days, showing her prospective apartment rentals all over Los Angeles. The agent had business journals dating back to 1950 detailing the names of clients and the addresses they visited. And there in black and white were her notations on Marilyn Monroe covering the dates in question. So much for Mr. Slatzer’s little fairy tale. I’m not saying he didn’t love her; I’m saying he never married her.”

The
single Bob Slatzer story that did ring true took place in early December 1952, after Marilyn had moved into a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Joe DiMaggio had told her that he would be going to San Francisco for the day to attend a friend’s birthday party, and she had invited Bob Slatzer over for drinks that evening. She had spent the afternoon on the set of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and didn’t expect Joe to return until later that night. Catching an earlier flight back to Los Angeles, Joe arrived while Slatzer was still present. Imagining the worst, DiMaggio asked Marilyn’s guest to leave. Slatzer stood his ground. He wasn’t about to let this dumb-ass dago toss him out on his can, even if it meant getting the shit kicked out of him. DiMaggio turned on Monroe. The couple became embroiled in a bitter quarrel. With no end in sight and probably feeling embarrassed by the mix-up, Marilyn ordered both men to get out. Outside on the street, DiMaggio glared
at his adversary.
“Good night, slugger,” said Slatzer under his breath as he headed for his car. DiMaggio climbed into his Cadillac and drove off in a huff. He spent the night at the Knickerbocker Hotel. The next day he confronted Marilyn and accused her of “two-timing” him. He told her if he ever saw Slatzer’s face again, he’d kill him.

They had a
second spat on Thanksgiving Day. Bernie Kamber, a New York press agent and one of Joe’s buddies from Toots Shor’s, showed up in Los Angeles for a business meeting. While there, he offered to take Joe and Marilyn to the Brown Derby for a late-afternoon turkey dinner. Joe and Bernie arrived first. Marilyn waltzed in nearly two hours late. She’d fallen asleep while taking a bath. DiMaggio refused to speak to her. He spoke only to Kamber, as did Marilyn. Once Joe and Marilyn arrived back at her hotel, he finally let loose. He made such a racket and screamed so loudly that guests in a nearby room called the front desk. A pair of gun-toting security guards knocked at Marilyn’s door. She pulled it open. Was everything all right? They were concerned because a guest on the same floor had complained about the noise. DiMaggio sidled into view. He apologized. The security guards left, and so did Joe. He spent the night in Bernie Kamber’s suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

If Joe DiMaggio demonstrated a propensity for violence, he had an altogether different side as well. He was capable of great and unexpected moments of tenderness.
On Christmas Eve, Marilyn returned to her suite from a studio party and found Joe standing on a stepladder hanging the last ornaments on an eight-foot-tall Christmas tree. He had placed a magnum of champagne in a silver ice bucket. Logs blazed in the fireplace. On a table, next to a small gift-wrapped box, sat a card that read “Merry Christmas, Marilyn.” The box contained a pair of emerald earrings. “The earrings were beautiful,” she would tell Joe DiMaggio Jr., “but not as beautiful as the tree. It was the first time in my life anyone ever gave me a Christmas tree. I was so happy I cried.”

In return, Marilyn gave Joe a pair of gold cufflinks as well as an
eight-inch-by-ten-inch matted and framed photograph of herself reclining on a satin chair, smiling at the camera. The photo was signed across the front in bold blue ink: “I love you Joe. Marilyn.”

They celebrated New Year’s in San Francisco with Joe’s family. Marilyn had visited Joe in the Bay City several months earlier, but only for a weekend. On that visit she had demonstrated her interest in what Robert Solotaire called “the simple pleasures of life”—she and Joe had spent part of the day cleaning and polishing his car. This time, with the Fox Studios closed for the holidays, she anticipated spending a week.

They stayed on the third floor of Joe’s three-story attached stone house at 2150 Beach Street, a quiet residential block in the Marina District, one hundred yards from Marina Green, a picturesque park adjacent to Fisherman’s Wharf and the Municipal Boat Basin. DiMaggio bought the house in 1937 (for less than $15,000) as a gift to his parents. After his father’s death in 1949 and his mother’s in 1951, his widowed sister, Marie DiMaggio Kron, moved in (with her daughter Betty) and lived on the second floor. Following his retirement, Joe DiMaggio made it his home base, a place to hang his hat on the few occasions he wasn’t out of town. Marie looked after the house, cooked, cleaned, answered Joe’s fan mail, and in general took care of her brother. Practically an obsessive-compulsive when it came to cleanliness, she kept the house dust-free and absolutely spotless. No one could be neat enough for Marie. A small room off Joe’s third-floor bedroom contained many of his baseball trophies, plaques, and medals. Another room on the same floor became Joe’s walk-in wardrobe closet. A larger-than-life oil portrait of DiMaggio in his Yankees pinstripes covered a wall in the downstairs living room. A den served as the TV room. A patio faced an enclosed backyard, where Joe had set up a telescope to gaze at the stars on cloudless nights. Unbeknownst to most of his cronies, Joe had been interested in astronomy since his teenaged years and had even gathered a tidy selection of books on the subject. It was the only even remotely intellectual pursuit he’d had as a young man.

“Don’t read anything into it,” DiMaggio had told George Solotaire,
one of the few friends aware of his interest. “I don’t know shit about astronomy. I just like looking up there at all the lights. It makes me wonder.”

Marie, a slim, handsome, dark-eyed woman devoted to Joe’s needs, took it upon herself to introduce Marilyn to Italian cooking. Wearing a pair of eyeglasses (she was myopic), Marilyn watched and took notes as she stood next to Marie in Joe’s kitchen. They spent hours going over Marie’s homespun recipes for both meat and vegetable lasagna. “It was a lost cause,” said Dom DiMaggio. Joe’s younger brother had been introduced to Marilyn at the Grotto. Older brother Tom managed the eatery, and Vince managed the bar area until he quit to move his family forty miles north of San Francisco. Other family members held various jobs, from cashier to maître d’. The restaurant always became more crowded when word spread that Joe was in town. Celebrities, particularly from the sports world, made it a point to drop in. Ted Williams, Joe Louis, and jockey Eddie Arcaro were among that year’s crop of visitors.

“Marilyn radiated great beauty and charm,” said Dom DiMaggio, “which is probably one of the reasons she eventually established a name that far transcended the film business. I used to kid her because in truth she couldn’t cook her way out of a paper bag. I told her if you’re Italian, food is not only sustenance, it’s the basis for social gatherings, a way of life. She said she’d been trying to learn to cook for years but couldn’t get the hang of it. She accepted her culinary limitations with good humor. ‘I guess I’ll never be a chief chef at the Waldorf,’ she quipped. She mentioned she loved Italian food as well as the people of Italy. ‘They’re warm, lusty, and friendly as hell,’ she said. ‘I want to go to Italy someday.’ ‘Maybe you and Joe can go together,’ I responded. She smiled and said, ‘I’d like nothing better.’ ”

Marilyn’s favorite dish at the Grotto was lobster thermidor. She also liked the boiled beef dinner. Whenever she and Joe ate at home, he would make a point of dropping into the Grotto kitchen to pick up a healthy serving of each. She complained lightheartedly that since
meeting Joe, she’d gained ten pounds and gone up a complete dress size. “If we’re together much longer,” she quipped, “I’ll begin to look like Mae West.”

Early one morning, while Marilyn caught up on her sleep, Joe and Tom DiMaggio went duck hunting. Between them, they bagged five birds. That evening Tom and his wife Louise invited Joe and Marilyn to their apartment (four blocks from DiMaggio’s house) for a dinner of wild duck and wild rice. They were joined by Tom’s grown daughter June DiMaggio, who was taking voice lessons with the hope of breaking into show business. Marilyn confided in June that she’d never eaten wild duck and doubted she’d be able tolerate the gamy flavor. But she didn’t want to insult Joe, who took great pride in having “hunted down” their dinner with a shotgun. “If you don’t like the taste,” said June, “turn to me and give me a wink.” Marilyn did more than that. After a few bites, she crossed her eyes and curled up her nose. June took her plate into the kitchen, removed the remaining duck, replaced it with chopped sirloin and covered the meat with rice. June placed the new delicacy in front of Marilyn. She tasted it and smiled broadly. “This is wonderful!” she purred. None the wiser, Joe watched Marilyn devour her dinner. He told her he was glad she appeared so taken with wild duck. “Maybe I’ll shoot some more for you again soon,” he said. “I can’t wait,” gushed Marilyn.

Another day Tom invited Marilyn to join him on a deep-sea fishing trip aboard the
Yankee Clipper
, a twenty-two-foot Chris-Craft that the New York Yankees had presented to Joe in 1949 in conjunction with Joe DiMaggio Day at Yankee Stadium. Joe had given the boat to his brothers for use as a commercial fishing vessel. The fish served at the Grotto were often caught aboard the
Yankee Clipper.
Joe and June DiMaggio rounded out the crew that went out to sea that morning.

They shoved off at four in the morning. Marilyn wore a pair of June’s white deck pants. It was a cold, damp, foggy day. The dark waters of the San Francisco Bay splashed up against the side of the boat as it rolled up and down, up and down with the waves. An hour into
the excursion, Marilyn began to feel queasy. Her face had turned ashen. “Got any crackers, Junie?” she asked. June, who was prone to seasickness, produced a box of table crackers. The more they ate, the sicker they felt. To Marilyn’s surprise, Joe didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the constant rocking of the boat. He and Tom were having a wonderful time, reeling in one fish after another. As they passed under the Golden Gate Bridge, Marilyn leaned over the side of the boat and started upchucking the crackers and the remains of her meal from the night before. June bent over the other side of the boat and did the same. Tom reluctantly turned the boat around and headed back to port. Marilyn spent the rest of the afternoon dashing back and forth between bed and bathroom, vowing that any future fishing endeavors would take place on a lake or off a pier, not at sea.

Yet two days later, she agreed to go deep-sea fishing again, this time in company with Joe and his wartime buddy, fellow retired major leaguer Dario Lodigiani, and to her own amazement, she hooked a big fish after struggling for an hour to reel it in. Dario wanted Joe to help her. “She hooked it,” Joe insisted. “Let her bring it in.” “And I’ll be damned,” said Dario, “if Marilyn didn’t land that monster.”

As for Marilyn and June, their friendship grew each time Monroe returned to San Francisco. When Joe had business to take care of at the Grotto, Marilyn would frequently get together with June. With Marilyn in disguise (black wig, prescription sunglasses, no makeup), they would stroll to the marina and feed the pigeons. Or they’d sit at an outdoor café, sip hot chocolate, and watch the tourists amble by. In
Marilyn, Joe & Me
, June DiMaggio’s book on Monroe, she recalled a shopping trip to Sears when Marilyn decided not to go incognito. Easily recognizable, Marilyn soon attracted a large crowd. As they paid and started to leave, they found their way blocked. “Aren’t you Marilyn Monroe?” asked an elderly woman in the crowd. Adopting a Scandinavian accent, Marilyn launched into a lengthy diatribe on how she was just visiting the United States. “Everywun sinks I’m Marileen, but my name is Eve Lindstrom.” When one of them still wanted her
autograph, she signed her name as
Eve Lindstrom
. On the way home, Marilyn and June laughed so hard they almost cried.