Page 30 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe
“How come I never get to pose with beautiful girls like that?” Joe DiMaggio jokes with Sox player Gus Zernial after seeing the photos. The “Yankee Clipper” wants the name of the person who set up the photo shoot, then contacts press agent March to set up a new assignment: arrange a dinner date.
It takes a while. Marilyn’s not interested.
“Don’t you know who he is?” her friend Sid Skolsky pressures her.
She really doesn’t. She only knows he’s some sort of athlete. “He’s a football or a baseball player,” she guesses.
“DiMaggio is one of the greatest names that was ever in baseball. He’s still the idol of millions of fans!” she’s told.
She remains unmoved. “I don’t care to meet him.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like the way athletes dress, for one thing,” she says. “I don’t like men in loud clothes, with checked suits and big muscles and pink ties.”
After much persuasion, she finally agrees to a group dinner on March 8, at Villa Nova, an Italian restaurant on Sunset Boulevard.
It’s a small but popular spot, not too far from the studio soundstages, and is owned by former actor Allen Dale with backing from Charlie Chaplin and director Vincente Minelli.
Marilyn’s late.
“She is always late,” March laughs nervously, leaping from his seat when he spots a flash of platinum blond by the door.
“It’s not really me who’s late,” Marilyn says. “It’s the others who are in such a hurry.”
Joe DiMaggio smiles in appreciation of her humor, revealing a mouth full of crooked teeth.
With his lanky frame and sharp-featured face, DiMaggio is not a conventionally good-looking man.
He’s “a reserved gentleman in a gray suit, with a gray tie and a sprinkle of gray in his hair,” far from the loud and flashy jock Marilyn expected.
If I hadn’t been told he was some sort of ball player, I would have guessed he was either a steel magnate or a congressman.
Though they sit next to one another at dinner, DiMaggio doesn’t say much, doesn’t meet her gaze.
As a naturally shy person herself, Marilyn recognizes that by being quiet and enigmatic, he is beating her at her own game.
You learn to be silent and smiling like that from having millions of people look at you with love and excitement while you stand alone getting ready to do something, she thinks.
What’s most surprising to her is the effect he’s having on all the men at the table.
“The other men talked and threw their personalities around. Mr. DiMaggio just sat there,” she says later. “Yet somehow he was the most exciting man at the table. The excitement was in his eyes. They were sharp and alert.
“Then I became aware of something odd. The men at the table weren’t showing off for me or telling their stories for my attention. It was Mr. DiMaggio they were wooing. This was a novelty. No woman had ever put me so much in the shade before.”
This is a fascinating phenomenon, but as dinner winds down, Marilyn makes her excuses. She has an early call time on set.
DiMaggio asks for a lift back to Ivar Avenue, where he’s staying at the Hollywood Knickerbocker. As Marilyn slows her car near the hotel, she realizes with a pang of regret that her first date with Joe DiMaggio may also be her last.
Until the New York Yankee, who boasted a career batting average of .325, hitting 361 home runs against just 369 strikeouts, steps up.
“I don’t feel like turning in,” he says. “Would you mind driving around a little while?”
“It’s a lovely night for a drive,” Marilyn agrees. For the next three hours, they drive and slowly begin to get to know one another.
“I saw your picture,” DiMaggio tells her.
“Which movie was it?”
“It wasn’t a movie,” he says. “It was a photograph of you on the sports page.”
She knows the one he means. “I imagine you must have had your picture taken doing publicity stunts like that a thousand times,” Marilyn says.
“Not quite,” DiMaggio replies. “The best I ever got was Ethel Barrymore or General MacArthur. You’re prettier.”
Marilyn practically blushes. “I’m sorry I don’t know anything about baseball,” she says.
“That’s all right,” DiMaggio replies. “I don’t know much about movies.”
He opens up to Marilyn about his life. Asks her in a deep and genuine way about hers. Marilyn recognizes in him a kindred spirit.
Both come from humble origins, Joe the eighth of nine children of an Italian immigrant fisherman who learned to play baseball on the sandlot playgrounds of San Francisco.
Both pursued dreams of fame and fortune, though as she’s stepping into the limelight, he’s receding into its shadow.
Six months ago, at age thirty-six, “Joe D.” turned down an offer of a $100,000 annual salary—the largest paycheck in sports—ending thirteen seasons as the New York Yankees’ superstar center fielder through ten American League pennants and nine World Series wins.
The famous ballplayer mentions that he doesn’t mind going on first dates, but often must enlist his good friend George Solotaire to “pry loose” women who attach themselves too tightly.
“I’ll try not to make him too much trouble when he starts prying me loose,” Marilyn promises.
“I don’t think I will have need for Mr. Solotaire’s services this trip” is DiMaggio’s response.
What began as a blind date blossoms into a bicoastal romance.
She can’t stop thinking about him. I was surprised to be so crazy about Joe.
I expected a flashy New York sports type, and instead I met this reserved guy who didn’t make a pass at me.
I had dinner with him almost every night for two weeks.
He treated me like something special. Joe is a very decent man, and he makes other people feel decent, too.
He visits her on set in Hollywood. She nicknames him “Slugger” and travels to New York, where she accompanies him to Toots Shor’s, a restaurant and unofficial men’s club a ten-minute walk from DiMaggio’s suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York City.
Although a steady stream of gossip links Marilyn to Fox contract player Nico Minardos, who’s making his first, uncredited film appearance in Monkey Business, and also to studio president Spyros Skouras, it’s her new relationship with DiMaggio that she tips to Sid Skolsky, who writes: “Joe DiMaggio is looking over Marilyn Monroe’s curves and is batting fine. ”
“It just happens I like Joe,” Marilyn tells her friend, “so much better than I like most actors.”
Actors are often wonderful and charming people, she thinks, but as an actress, to love an actor is something like incest. It’s like loving a brother with the same face and manners as your own.
“We talked a lot about baseball, believe it or not,” Marilyn tells Photoplay magazine. “Joe explained it to me.”
And he introduces her to his friend George Solotaire, who’s impressed that “she’s a real down-to-earth girl. She has plenty of heart. She has not gone Hollywood.”