Joe DiMaggio by Jerome Charyn

Author:Jerome Charyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Mr. Marilyn Monroe

1.

How can we explain what happened next? Marilyn captured him in the whirlwind of her persona—with all its porous, vulnerable masks—and he never quite recovered. There’s one little anecdote that’s repeated in every book about DiMaggio and Marilyn. I’ll steal it from Maury Allen’s Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? We all know some little piece of the tale. The Jolter, always a practical man, was scheduled to leave on a baseball junket that January with Lefty O’Doul, his former manager on the San Francisco Seals who had remained a friend, and he decided to take his bride along and turn the junket into an extended honeymoon. It was a colossal miscalculation, but he couldn’t have known. He’d been on a previous junket to Japan, where he was treated as a baseball god and called DiMaggio-san, and was sent on a goodwill mission to Korea (near the end of 1950); he visited hospitals and had lunch with General Douglas MacArthur. And now he was returning to Japan, still the prince of baseball, retired or not, and the legitimate heir to Babe Ruth, or Bay-ba Ru-tu. He expected much the same adulation and was willing to share some of it with his bride.

But it didn’t happen quite that way. Marilyn was mobbed, and he was not. While he conducted a baseball clinic, Marilyn entertained troops in Korea, visited 113,000 soldiers and Marines on ten little sorties through murderous mountainous terrain. As Maury Allen tells it:

She . . . was thrilled as pictures of her were flashed around the world. Joe was sullen when she returned.

“Joe, Joe,” she exclaimed, “you’ve never heard such cheering!”

“Yes, I have,” Joe said quietly.1

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