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| Tuesday, January 16 | |||||
| Joe and Marilyn find the heart is a lonely hunter From "Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life" | |||||
| Editor's note: ESPN.com is running excerpts from Richard Ben Cramer's Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life recently published by Simon & Schuster. This, our last installment, is an excerpt from Chapter 16 when Joe helps Marilyn recover from a particularly rough stretch in her life.
When Marilyn emerged from her hospital rest,
in March 1961, Joe flew her to St. Petersburg, where he was coaching at the Yankees' spring training camp. That was the first year Casey Stengel was gone -- and the first time Joe had been paid the respect of an invitation. For DiMaggio that was vindication -- a validation of all he'd meant to that club. His exile was over, he was back in pinstripes. And when Marilyn said she would meet him in Florida, then Joe was back all the way. He ran around for days before she arrived, getting things ready -- as purposeful as a mama bird building a nest in the spring. He was in action again, and he hadn't lost his moves: he told his pals he was going to be tied up; he told the press precisely nothing about Miss Monroe; he told the road secretary of the Yankees that he wanted two suites at the Soreno -- in case anybody asked. (They did.)
But it wasn't just the old moves. Joe was different, calmer about the little things. The old guys who'd come to camp noticed Daig didn't mind taking meals in the dining room -- he'd sit after dinner, talking with the kids on the team, even if some fans interrupted. A couple of the old writers, Joe asked them to breakfast -- just for the hell of it, he didn't have anything to prove. At that camp, he was a god, a Hall of Famer -- and a relic. It wasn't just the players seemed like boys to him, now. The manager who'd invited him was a kid, too: Joe had seen Ralph Houk break in, after the war. Joe wore his age and distance from the modern game with grace -- never scolded, never compared these kids to his guys, his day, his Yankee winners -- and never tried to make himself a force upon this jet-age club. He cultivated his remove, as he did the handsome gray in his hair -- never had a conversation without some offhand joke about that. He was as elegant (and bygone) as private railroad cars.
And with Marilyn, he showed no swagger of possession. In his years of exile, he'd learned a few things. He told her that she'd saved him by sending him to a psychiatrist. He hadn't stuck with the therapy long, but it was long enough to convince him that the rage inside him could ruin lives -- his, first and foremost. Now, at the age of forty-six, Joe very seldom took a drink -- maybe one beer with dinner. And after dinner, a cup of tea: the endless coffee was a thing of the past. He seemed to want to cultivate a distance even from his old self. With a rueful laugh, he told Marilyn that if he'd been married to that guy he was seven years ago . . . well, he would have divorced him, too.
He wanted her to feel safe with him -- and that meant showing her he'd changed. He could take care of her without taking over. He didn't remonstrate about her habits, her friends -- never said a bad thing about her work. Anyway, she didn't have any work. She didn't seem to have enough energy to get work, or even to want it. The years since their marriage had changed Marilyn, too.
In some ways, she was more womanly -- that was a word the Hollywood writers used to describe her looks when The Misfits came out. Of course, she'd been so miserable then -- overweight and drugged out and haunted around the eyes . . . that was probably just their shorthand way of saying she had aged. Now, as she neared her thirty-fifth birthday, she'd lost all that extra weight -- she was, if anything, too thin. But still, the girlishness hadn't come back. Now, when she went out incognito (without makeup, with her black wig or a head scarf and shades) she didn't have about her the air of a waif -- maybe a housewife, a bit washed out, too busy (or too hopeless) to put herself together.
She could still turn it on, when she took the time and trouble. She could be dazzling -- she could be Marilyn Monroe -- as she was the couple of times Joe took her to the St. Petersburg ballpark, and the boys on the club were so thrilled to meet her, to shake her hand, and get her autograph. (Joe didn't even mind that now.) . . . But that was an act of will on her part. That's what she didn't have the energy for -- not often, anyway.
It had always been her will that made Marilyn Monroe. And whatever else was wrong (a marriage, a movie, the studio, the industry) she'd always had that as her guide and spur -- her own restless wanting. The real change now was she couldn't count on that. When she was weary or hurting, she found that reservoir was dry -- she didn't want to be Marilyn Monroe, or anything else -- and that was scary. While she was still in the hospital in New York, she'd had a visit from her friend, the poet Norman Rosten, and what he saw disturbed him ever after. "She was ill," as Rosten would later write, "not only of the body and mind, but of the soul, the innermost engine of desire. That light was missing from her eyes."
In Florida, Joe and Marilyn hid away, and took care of each other like an old married couple. She liked to do for him. She made his tea, and listened to his troubles. Joe Jr. had made it out of Lawrenceville, and was enrolled at Yale. But the boy wasn't happy, wasn't doing well, wasn't fitting in. He was drinking, and that made Big Joe angry. The boy had wrecked the car Joe bought for him -- now he wanted another. Did he think they grew on trees? . . .
Joe tried to guard Marilyn's sleep, made sure she ate, and listened to her troubles. Her stomach was hurting her, and sometimes she had awful pain and cramps. She didn't know how she could find a psychiatrist in New York -- she could never talk to Dr. Kris again. She liked her psychiatrist in L.A., Dr. Greenson, but she wouldn't move there just to talk to him. There was no one to talk to at night, no matter where she was, and sleep was impossible. That's why those pills were so important. . . .
She gave Joe not a whit of trouble. She made elaborate plans to sneak in a visit with her half-sister, Berniece (who lived in Gainesville, Florida). But then, Marilyn called Berniece in tears. She couldn't make the meeting. Joe had decided, that day was for fishing. Another day, he decided they had to hit the beach. So Marilyn (covered with clothes from her ankles to a large floppy hat) sat with Joe on a couple of deck chairs outside the hotel. One passerby stopped and asked for her autograph. Joe growled: "Leave the lady alone."
When the Yankees went north in April, Joe and Marilyn broke camp, too. They would be at the Stadium for opening day -- honored guests in the press box. In fact, they were together almost every day and night, at the suite Joe used in the Hotel Lexington, or a few blocks away, at her apartment on East 57th -- the place she used to share with Arthur Miller. Now that apartment was half-furnished. (Things Arthur liked had moved with him to the country house.) Some rooms had nothing in them but the white wall-to-wall carpet, with leftover stains from the basset hound, Hugo. (He'd moved with Arthur to Connecticut, too.) . . . Joe didn't like to leave Marilyn alone in that apartment. The way he figured, someone had to watch over her -- and he was the man.
It was like he told her when he made his first gingerly push back into her life -- that was a few months back, on Christmas night. As Marilyn recalled in a letter to Ralph Greenson, her L.A. psychiatrist, she was in the apartment with her new publicist, a woman named Patricia Newcomb, when a forest of poinsettia plants arrived. Marilyn asked Pat who they were from, but Pat said she couldn't tell: the card only read, "Best, Joe."
Marilyn said, "Well, there's only one Joe. . . ."
"Because it was Christmas night," as she wrote to Dr. Greenson, "I called him up and asked him why he had sent me the flowers. He said, 'First of all, because I thought you would call me to thank me,' and then he said, 'Besides, who in the hell else do you have in the world?' "
From JOE DIMAGGIO by Richard Ben Cramer. Copyright ® 2000 by Richard Ben Cramer. Reprinted by persmission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Richard Ben Cramer is the author of the bestselling What It Takes: The Way to the White House, which was acclaimed as one of the finest books ever written on American politics. His journalism has appeared in Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Time and Newsweek. His dispatches from the Middle East for the Philadelphia Inquirer won the Pultizer Prize for International Reporting in 1979. with his wife and daughter, he lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore. | Purchase "Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life" Visit Barnes & Noble online to purchase your copy of this book.
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Richard Ben Cramer says Joe DiMaggio was a nearly impossible subject to write about.