The book "Joe and Marilyn" covers in detail one of the most famous marriages
Review some of the most turbulent chapters of the marriage that lasted 274 days
At first, their relationship was passionate and crazy.
He did not agree that Monroe was taking advantage of her physical attractiveness.
"You're nothing but a piece of meat to them," he went so far as to tell her about Hollywood.
It happened one night. Joe DiMaggio, with his monumental shyness behind him and his scant cultural background, managed to seduce the most famous blonde of all time, the woman he wanted to meet after seeing her in a photo with a baseball bat in her hands, her another great passion DiMaggio called a friend and he got him an appointment with the blonde, with Marilyn Monroe, intrigued to meet a man she hadn't even heard of until then despite being the great figure of the New York Yankees.
Presumably the promiscuous character of the actress helped the date forge and they saw each other at the Villa Capri restaurant in Los Angeles, a meeting in which the chemistry was evident. The year was 1952. Monroe finally gave in after driving around town for three hours with his new conquest, eventually taking DiMaggio to his hotel.
The rest is history, 274 days of a marriage marked by the baseball player's desire to turn Monroe into who she was not, a dedicated housewife who would cook for him and take care of a future family, which never happened. . There was also jealousy and physical violence, abuse from the athlete, who hit his wife when he lost his temper.
These are the main revelations of a book about the couple by C. David Heymann, "Joe and Marilyn", which has just been published and which covers in detail one of the most famous marriages in American culture.
Heymann refers to the insecurities of both when they met, the fact of not being cultured people at all, but coincidental in the greatness of their figures, a legendary actress as an icon of golden Hollywood and the most important player in baseball history together to Babe Ruth.
That is why they understood each other, passionate at the beginning of their relationship like few others, to the point that DiMaggio risked being excommunicated in order to make his dream of marrying Norma Jean come true. He nearly did that after he failed to get the Church to recognize his divorce from his first wife, Dorothy Arnold, while he was planning the details of the wedding to Monroe.
"I'd rather go headlong to hell than give up my own Garden of Eden," the Yankee player said about it. "Let them excommunicate me if they want." Monroe, for her part, did not want to be less before the wedding. "What Joe is to me is a man whose physical appearance and the way he is drives me crazy. I love him with all my heart. We knew it would be an easy marriage."
Nothing is further from reality. "I never for one minute thought that she and Joe DiMaggio would last," said Jane Russell, the wife of Los Angeles Rams football star Bob Waterfield, both good friends of the couple. "They were in love, very much in fact, but they didn't understand each other. They both came from different universes and that was the tragedy, that's why they couldn't stay together. It was written in the stars."
The differences between the two made an appearance from the beginning of their marriage. Monroe had no problem flaunting her curves with N- for Playboy magazine or the "Golden Dreams" calendar, something DiMaggio couldn't stand.
He accused Hollywood studios of making millions of dollars by exploiting the erotic side of the actress without her getting what she deserved from her. "Don't you realize that they are using you?", She argued to him then. "You are nothing more than a piece of meat to them."
But Monroe never wanted to leave the trail of the cinema and the kind of contacts that it provided him. Many of them lovers like the director Elia Kazan, the jazz musician Mel Torme, or the Greek actor Nico Minardo, with whom she got along even when she was with DiMaggio.
Of all that list, the most destructive name for the relationship was that of Arthur Miller, the playwright with whom Monroe had a notorious affair while she was still married to the baseball legend. He would later become the actress's third husband in 1956.
Nor did Di Maggio's verbal abuse or physical aggression help. On one occasion, she was angered by a dress Monroe wore to the Miss America pageant in 1952, too provocative in her opinion. "You look like a whore," DiMaggio told her, still crying like a child when his ex-wife committed suicide in 1962 with an overdose of barbiturates.
"A sound came out of his body, something inhuman, almost like the roar of a lion. Then he leaned forward and started sobbing," recalls a friend who was with him when he heard the news. After all, she was not just any woman. She was Marilyn.
