He got there blow by blow.
Our kids will tell their kids his name,
Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio
After the war DiMaggio continued to play and to fascinate, but was dogged by injury and illness. He had lived improbably hard through his years of glory, carousing more than his stomach ulcers allowed and smoking two or three packs of cigarettes a day. There had also been a marriage — to a blonde would-be film star. Dorothy Arnold was a singer in a New York nightclub, and had a stock player’s contract with Universal Studios. She and DiMaggio married in 1939, to joyous accolades from thousands of San Franciscans waving Italian flags. Four years later, after Dorothy sued him on the grounds of cruelty, they were divorced.
By 1951, when Joe DiMaggio retired, there had been many girls, but none that anyone remembers. He was known for his male friends. There was Toots Shor, a Jewish entrepreneur who had come up through Prohibition days, and through friendship with racketeers, to running a celebrities’ watering hole in New York. There was George Solotaire, a would-be songwriter who ended up as a wealthy ticket broker in New York. DiMaggio lived on the fringe of show business, and it was not unnatural. His own role had long been to entertain America.
Now, at thirty-seven, DiMaggio was rich, retired, and very obviously lonely. The king of the baseball field was out to pasture and looking for a queen. He thought he had found her in Marilyn Monroe. After the meeting at the Villa Nova, DiMaggio launched immediate pursuit. There were more rendezvous, and probably physical conquest. At first DiMaggio, not unaccustomed to horizontal triumph, was heard to brag a little. For publication, Marilyn would later say she ‘had dinner with him the next night, and every night until he had to leave for New York.’
In less than two months the affair was more than just good copy for Marilyn’s publicity office. Dr Rabwin, who performed Marilyn’s appendectomy, remembered streams of calls from DiMaggio in New York. Roses arrived by the dozen. By her twenty-sixth birthday, on June 1, 1952, the newspapers were starting to chatter about possible marriage. Marilyn refused to comment on that, but vouchsafed (exclusively), ‘I want to love and be loved more than anything else in the world.’ She also said, ‘Men are like wine — they improve with age. But I have nothing against younger men.’
A year later columnist Dick Williams would quote Marilyn in these terms: ‘“There are always rumors about other men going around about me,” she said, sipping a glass of water and watching me lazily with those bedroom eyes of hers. “I honestly don’t know what they’re talking about. Besides, it makes Joe very angry. He’d like to punch some of these people.”’
Anger would have been a colossal understatement had DiMaggio known what was really going on. It appears that during their two-year courtship, and sometimes when DiMaggio was actually in Los Angeles, Marilyn had affairs with at least four other men. She seriously discussed marriage with one, and may even have been briefly — and secretly — married to another.
In spring 1952, on the set of her new movie Monkey Business, Marilyn noticed a fledgling actor of twenty, some six years younger than herself. Nico Minardos was a burly, darkly handsome Greek recently arrived from Athens. He was studying acting at UCLA, a course which included production classes at Twentieth Century-Fox. Marilyn asked another Greek, then working at Fox, to introduce her to Minardos, and an affair began.
Minardos, who went on to become a successful producer and veteran actor, never sought publicity in connection with Marilyn. He was interviewed for this book as the result of a chance remark by a doctor who also knew her. He said he had an affair with Marilyn from late spring 1952 for about seven months, and that they saw each other sporadically until her death ten years later. They were already involved when Marilyn met DiMaggio.
‘I was a young buck,’ Minardos remembered, ‘and she was such a pretty girl. One of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen, waking up in the morning without makeup, absolutely gorgeous. She was bright — shrewd perhaps rather than profoundly intelligent — and such a sensitive kid. And yet she was a lousy lay. Oh, I used to love her. I was very young.’
‘Lousy lay’ notwithstanding, Minardos and Marilyn became close. They met either at her hotel or at his apartment on Wilshire Boulevard. Sometimes when she would arrive, driving her green Pontiac, he would be playing cards with a friend. The two young men would sit in their underwear in the summer heat, finishing the game, and Marilyn would have to wait. She did not seem to mind.
Clearly Marilyn was no longer the sexually fulfilled creature suggested by her first husband, Jim Dougherty. ‘She could never have a climax,’ Minardos said, ‘though she would try so hard. She had such severe psychological problems. She was very, very unhappy.’
Marilyn told Minardos her story of childhood rape, and he was not sure what to believe. When she talked of wanting to have children, he somehow felt she was fantasizing. When she went to the hospital for the operation which the surgeon confirms was purely an appendectomy, she told Minardos she was ‘having an ovary removed.’ Looking back, Minardos felt that ‘the fascinating thing with Marilyn was that she was acting in her real life. She knew what the reality was, but she acted things out because she loved the drama. …’
Minardos ended up in no doubt that Marilyn had used sex, and was still using it, to get what she wanted. He named in particular Spyros Skouras, the Fox studio boss who had used his influence to advance Marilyn.
‘One night at her hotel,’ said Minardos, ‘Marilyn said, “Do you mind leaving for about an hour? I have a business appointment here between eight and nine.” I thought there was something odd about the way she said it. I was young and jealous and sort of dragged things out. There was a knock at the door and a voice saying, “It’s me, darling.” There was no way to get out. I put on my pants and opened the door, and it was Skouras. He was so angry he barred me from the studio then. And later, when I knew him, he never called me by my name — he would always call me “Marilyn’s boyfriend.” I criticized Marilyn for what she was doing, then and later. She was achieving success partly in a dishonorable way, by using people.’
In November 1952, six months into the DiMaggio courtship, Marilyn would take Minardos to his first Thanksgiving dinner — at the home of Fred Karger, the lover who had rejected her four years earlier. The Karger family, one Marilyn adopted more than any other as her own, welcomed the young Minardos. Months later, at Marilyn’s request, Minardos would take her to observe Greek custom — an Easter service at the local Orthodox church. She was enthralled by the interminable ceremony, and to Minardos’ chagrin insisted on staying for the whole service.
By the fall of 1952, said Minardos, Marilyn was talking of marriage. Things went so far as placing a long-distance call to Athens to speak to his parents, whom Marilyn astonished by announcing theatrically, ‘I want to have a child with your son.’
Young Minardos, however, had his own reasons for shying away from marriage. He said, ‘I was never going to let myself become “Mr Monroe.” If I married a woman she was going to be “Mrs Minardos.”’
Minardos recalled with a shudder that a year or so later newspapers would be referring to Joe DiMaggio as ‘Marilyn’s mate.’ Once while he was with Marilyn, Minardos caught her laboriously writing a love letter to DiMaggio, with a slim brown book open beside her. It turned out to be a volume of letters by an English romantic poet, and Marilyn was copying sections verbatim. In the end, the letter to DiMaggio was a joint production by Minardos and Marilyn together.
Early on, Minardos said, he realized that Joe DiMaggio was ‘extremely jealous.’ This was something that did not wholly escape mention even in the popular press, which carried no news of Marilyn’s dalliances on the side. The newspapers had discovered that DiMaggio shunned publicity, while Marilyn fed on it. At the Beverly Hills Hotel he would stalk upstairs to wait for Marilyn, knowing full well she was eating alone downstairs. The Italian from San Francisco was not amused by Marilyn’s flaunting of her body. She said she was trying to moderate her style, but the exhibitionist
in her was stronger.
Billy Travilla, the designer who was now dressing Marilyn for her films, tried in vain to stop her from wearing overtight clothes. Once, when she had to wear a full skirt for the roller-skating scene in Monkey Business, Travilla thought he had her under control for once. He dressed her for the scene, then watched helplessly as ‘she literally reached back, parted her buttocks, and stuck some of the pleats in the crack to hold them in place. “Fooled you, Billy, didn’t I?” she said as she came off the set. “You and your big silly skirt.”’
Marilyn had some trouble with nature when she tried another old trick. She told Travilla that Jean Harlow, one of her idols, deliberately made her nipples prominent by rubbing them with ice before going into a scene. ‘Mine,’ Marilyn complained, ‘won’t get hard. They’re the wrong sort.’ The problem was solved by artifice — a little round button inserted in the brassiere at the relevant places. The New York Daily News wrote of Monkey Business: ‘Marilyn Monroe can look and act dumber than any of the screen’s current blondes.’ Marilyn reportedly took it as a compliment.
Offscreen, Marilyn’s performance was guaranteed to grieve Joe DiMaggio. On a visit to a U.S. Marine base, she teased ten thousand men with ‘I don’t know why you boys are always getting so excited about sweater girls. Take away their sweaters and what have they got?’
Later in the year, as Grand Marshal of the Miss America Beauty Parade Pageant, she wore a ludicrous dress cut almost to the navel. DiMaggio was said to be hurt and embarrassed. If he knew what was going on behind the public cheesecake, the hurt must have become torment. Away from Los Angeles, on location, Marilyn had been toying with yet another man.
11
IT WAS NOW SIX YEARS since Marilyn had enjoyed a summer romance with Robert Slatzer, the young writer from Ohio who met her in the lobby of Twentieth Century-Fox. He had been dividing his time between his home in Columbus, where he had regular work on local newspapers, and visits to Hollywood, where he hoped to break into the film industry. Meanwhile, as he grew into his twenties, Slatzer remained mesmerized by the ‘girl without guile’ who had given herself to him on a California beach. Marilyn, for her part, encouraged him. He wrote letters from Ohio, and Marilyn responded with streams of long-distance calls, a habit that was to become a Monroe trademark. In the early days it resulted in unpaid bills and at least one lawsuit by the telephone company.
On and off, when Slatzer was in Hollywood, they shared furnished rooms. ‘It was out of necessity sometimes,’ said Slatzer. ‘If you didn’t pay the rent, they could lock up and take all your possessions. It had happened to us both a couple of times, so we shared a place from time to time, to split the cost. You could say we lived together, but just for two weeks here, a month there. We were occasional lovers, but I think I had become one of her few lasting friends.’
By the 1980s, when he was being interviewed for this book, Slatzer spent most of his time in his cramped crow’s nest of a house high in the Hollywood hills. An American flag drooped at the door, and the guest was ushered into rooms piled high with books that had long since overflowed their shelves. In his middle age, Slatzer still enjoyed the regular company of young and pretty women. Conversation was interrupted repeatedly by the squawks of a cage bird and the jangling of the telephone — often heralding another inquiry about Marilyn Monroe.
Since Marilyn’s death Slatzer had gained the dubious reputation of having become a Monroe obsessive. In 1974 his book, The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe, provided a platform for his persistent claim that Marilyn was murdered following an unhappy affair with Robert Kennedy. That, and Slatzer’s rambling way of presenting his case, invited scorn and the suggestion that he was a charlatan. Some doubted whether he ever knew Marilyn at all. The criticism, verging on ridicule, came mostly from reporters and editors jumping at the chance to run a Monroe headline, yet recoiling from attempting serious research of their own.
Slatzer, to be sure, had none of the disciplines of the investigative reporter. His book on Marilyn, like his interviews, was muddled and virtually undocumented. In many ways I found it irritating and unconvincing. However, because of Slatzer’s allegations about the last part of Marilyn’s life — specifically, the very serious statements about President Kennedy and his brother Robert — it seemed essential to substantiate his claim to have known Marilyn or to knock it down. After intensive interviews with Slatzer himself covering a two-year period, and independent research, I came to accept that Slatzer had indeed been close to Marilyn for her entire adult life.
This conviction was based on interviews with numerous witnesses, most of them conducted without Slatzer’s prior knowledge. They include Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder, who made up Marilyn for her first screen test, became her regular makeup man, and finally prepared her, in death, for her funeral. Snyder, everywhere accepted as one of Marilyn’s closest friends, said Slatzer indeed met Marilyn as early as 1946. Snyder wrote:
‘Quite often while I was making her up she would tell me that Bob sent me his best or mention that they had just talked on the phone or even tell me about a date she had with him that night. Bob Slatzer had the capacity for being a good listener which Marilyn so desperately needed through the years that they were friends. … Marilyn used to tell me how she could always call Bob in the middle of the night and he would talk with her for hours. … In my opinion, she always loved him very much.’
The early days of the Slatzer affair with Marilyn were remembered by Noble ‘Kid’ Chissell, a former navy boxing champion turned Hollywood stunt man and bit player. It was his car that Slatzer borrowed the night of his first date with Marilyn, and Chissell himself was with the couple when Slatzer took Marilyn home. He recalls that Marilyn cooked breakfast at Slatzter’s home in those early days, and that their romance survived innumerable separations. One Christmas, late in the forties, Chissell accompanied Slatzer and Marilyn, laden with small presents, to the orphanage where she had once lived herself. It was Marilyn’s idea to make a special delivery of gifts for the children.
Half a dozen other witnesses, all of whom had known Slatzer since the early fifties, confirmed his connection with Marilyn. They include Gordon Heaver, an Englishman who arrived in Hollywood in 1952 as a story editor for Paramount Studios. He met Marilyn in Slatzer’s company that year. Others, from Slatzer’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio, recall him talking about Marilyn as a close friend during the fifties. They included playwright and longtime correspondent for the Columbus Star, Doral Chenoweth; veteran Scripps-Howard writer Ron Pataki; wealthy restaurateur Lee Henry; and Slatzer’s dentist, Dr Sanford Firestone.
By the late fifties Dr Firestone’s interest was so piqued, after hearing Slatzer talking on the telephone to a woman identifying herself as Marilyn, that he went to great lengths to discover whether his friend was pulling some elaborate hoax. Using contacts of his own in Hollywood, Firestone managed to speak to Marilyn himself. She confirmed that it had indeed been her voice on the recent call, and Firestone eventually met Marilyn, thanks to the Slatzer connection.
Slatzer’s account of events in 1952, when Marilyn was already firmly labeled as Joe DiMaggio’s girl, is startling.
In early June that year, with Monkey Business completed, Marilyn flew East to play the part of an unfaithful wife in Niagara, a film that would succeed not least because of its dramatic setting in the shadow of the Falls. It became famous, however, for a sensual walking shot, then, and perhaps still, the longest walking shot in movie history.
While the cast and crew assembled at Buffalo, on the U.S. side of the Canadian border, Marilyn diverted to New York City for a brief interlude with DiMaggio. It was now, on a whirlwind round of Manhattan’s night spots, that the champion showed off his prize to his friends.
The friends Marilyn met at Toots Shor’s were men’s men — boisterous sportsmen, gamblers, wrestlers, and habitual nightclubbers. A journalist who later interviewed her reported: ‘To Marilyn, valiantly fighting the battle of the descending eyelids for Joe’
s sake, it was sheer garbage. She had other interests she had devoutly hoped to indulge during her New York stay — an afternoon at the theater, a visit to the museums and the like, but Joe, who succeeded in calling the shots, would have none of that.’
Meanwhile, presumably unbeknownst to DiMaggio, Marilyn was nurturing yet another interest — a tryst with Robert Slatzer.
Slatzer says Marilyn called him in Ohio before she left Hollywood, suggesting he meet her at the Niagara location. Now twenty-five, bored with his work in newspapers and still fascinated by Marilyn, Slatzer jumped at the chance. At the General Brock Hotel, on the Canadian side of the falls, he made contact with Frank Neill, a studio publicist. Neill, who saw Slatzer as a newspaperman and occasional reviewer, found him the perfect accommodation — a room adjacent to Marilyn’s.
Slatzer says Marilyn greeted him with enthusiasm. She was drinking heavily and flaunting her nudity more than Slatzer remembered from his visits to California, a point corroborated by one of her hairdressers, who told of Marilyn going naked to the window, then giggling when she saw a group of youths peering up at her.
Niagara Falls was a traditional honeymoon spot, and the woman the press was touting as Joe DiMaggio’s bride-to-be now astonished Slatzer. ‘Wouldn’t this be a wonderful place to get married?’ she said. ‘We wouldn’t have to go to Niagara Falls because we’re already here.’
They had never considered marriage before, and Slatzer decided the drink was talking. Then, after another night of liquor and lovemaking, Slatzer found himself asking the question seriously. This time it was Marilyn who balked, saying she was not ready for marriage.
As shooting of Niagara continued, makeup man Whitey Snyder observed that Marilyn was again terrified of performing before the cameras. She was also extremely restless. The director appointed Snyder to the role that would soon become familiar, baby-sitting Marilyn. He spent hours gently talking her into appearing on the set, and escorted her to New York when she suddenly decided to visit DiMaggio again. Slatzer, meanwhile, had lost his job, as a result of dallying too long with Marilyn at Niagara. She called him, commiserated, and suggested he return to the location. Slatzer answered the summons and followed her to California when shooting ended.