2024-03-09 00:26:57
He left behind unattainable records: he had at least one hit in 56 consecutive games, hit 361 home runs as a middle outfielder, and was named MLB MVP three times. Nevertheless, his brief marriage to Marilyn Monroe is still remembered most in the media. Joe DiMaggio died exactly 25 years ago of lung cancer.
A few months into his career, he was flipping through a newspaper when his eyes caught a picture of a beautiful blonde in a baseball jersey. Marilyn Monroe.
He had to talk to that girl. He had to meet her. But who could arrange it for him? He immediately picked up the phone and called one acquaintance after another until someone promised him a meeting with an American movie star.
Succeeded. It was 1952, and the brightest name in American baseball met Hollywood’s hottest beauty. At first, Monroe was reticent and considered the 12-year-old athlete a cocky boy, but she soon changed her mind.
“He respected Marylin immensely and was the perfect gentleman in her company,” Positano, a family friend of DiMaggio, who later wrote a biography, told People magazine Rock Positano.
After more than a year, the couple married in January 1954, causing a huge sensation in the media world. Two superstars of their fields, symbols of American culture side by side.
“It is one of America’s ultimate fantasies. A tall, dark and handsome baseball hero conquers a woman who embodies Hollywood beauty, glamor and sexuality,” The New York Times wrote about them.
A similar story connected them. While Monroe grew up in a foster family, orphanages, and during the war, she worked in an aircraft munitions factory, where she modeled the first campaign to support the morale of working people. So she took her first step into show business.
DiMaggio grew up in a large family of Italian immigrants. The father was a Sicilian businessman who made a living as a fisherman and believed that all his sons would carry on his legacy.
But he miscalculated. Both older brother Vincent and younger Dom fell under the spell of baseball. At the same time, Joe took hitting the ball the most lightly.
“Baseball didn’t appeal to me that much, but it was a lot better than helping my dad scrub a stinky dovetail boat. I told him I didn’t have the stomach for it, but he told me I was just lazy,” Joe recalled.
As a teenager, he preferred to earn money in a juice factory or deliver newspapers. His brother Vincent, who was already playing for the San Francisco Seals regional team, eventually introduced him to professional baseball.
The middle of the DiMaggio brothers immediately shot up. In four years he made it to Major League Baseball and straight to the New York Yankees club.
His stellar career was interrupted by the Second World War, when he even enlisted in the army, but did not participate in the fighting. Rather, he used his sportsmanship and lifted the spirits of his compatriots in uniform.
Paradoxically, while he was an elite player for the Yankees, his family was struggling. The father refused to change his citizenship, so after the attack on Pearl Harbor he was taken as an Italian as an enemy of the state and was not allowed, for example, to enter an American port to work as a fisherman.
But after the war, his son’s star rose even higher. He helped the team win the World Series nine times. The player nicknamed “Joltin Joe” and “Yankee Clipper” ended his career in 1951.
The marriage with Monroe met him at a time when he made the most of his sports career and could devote himself fully to his wife.
His previous relationship with actress Dorothy Arnold, with whom he had a son Joe, broke up precisely because, according to his wife, “they had a home, but he didn’t spend much time in it.”
But it was the excessive care for the young actress that apparently also meant the quick destruction of the second marriage.
“He felt that she was too naive, that some people manipulated her too easily,” Positano recounted.
Monroe was on a tear in 1954, gracing American troops in Korea with her presence, filming the iconic scene with her dress billowing over a canal. And DiMaggio was jealous.
In October 1954, nine months after the wedding, the actress filed for divorce.
He never forgave Sinatra
The former baseball player was heartbroken, never remarried and did not speak to Monroe in public.
The mysterious death of the famous actress changed everything. The official version of the police was: an overdose of barbiturates and probably suicide.
DiMaggio never believed it, even though Monroe was known to struggle with substance abuse and depression.
“I know who killed Marilyn, but I never said it out loud because I didn’t want to cause a revolution here,” Postano quoted his famous friend as saying.
He said he never forgave the singer Frank Sinatra for introducing Monroe to the Kennedy brothers, the controversial figures of the American political scene. “All the Kennedys were killers and they always got away with it,” DiMaggio commented.
Anyway, it was DiMaggio who arranged the funeral and for the next decades supplied her grave with fresh flowers.
Even according to The New York Post sources, he was dying at the age of 84 with her in mind. “Finally I will be with Marilyn,” he is said to have declared shortly before his death.