Misfit (5 page)

March formally introduces them, reiterating,
Joe DiMaggio. From the New York Yankees
. She cocks her head, trying to recall why she knows his name. “Of course,” she says, “of course.” She confesses she really doesn't know much about baseball, as though saying that absolves her from having to have any conversation with him. And for a moment the table has a perfect silence.

The waiter arrives with a bottle of champagne and four glasses. “Thank goodness,” she says, breaking the quiet. She turns to March and begins talking shop about the film she's negotiating. And as she prattles on about the movie business, Joe senses himself falling behind. As useless as March's date. So he tries to regain his focus. Breathe. Put all the distractions and chatter out of his mind.

He can tell she really has nothing to say to these people. It's all just surface noise. But the difference is that she's been better trained on how to make them feel as though they're interesting. And most maddening and insulting to him is they obviously don't give a shit about what she says, only that she's saying it to
them
. So they keep her talking. And it makes him sick, watching that. For a moment he wishes he could just
lean across the table and tell David March and his date to shut the crap up, and let Marilyn enjoy her meal, and just be. Can't they see she's just a child, and not some blow-up toy? Not everything has to be about desperate business interactions. But then he would lose his mental edge. And he knows the difference between winning and losing is all in your head.

She turns to Joe and says she's sorry. “This must be a bore. It's just that I don't know much about sports.” He says it's okay, and dips his spoon into his water, stirring and looking for ice shards.

Out of nowhere, Mickey Rooney approaches the table. March and his date look right to Marilyn, expecting he's come to say hello to her. But Rooney zeroes in on Joe, rubbing his hands together, lacing his fingers in and out of each other. He says he was just seated a few tables over, and he couldn't believe what he saw when he looked across the room. The Yankee Clipper, on the Sunset Strip of all places. And Rooney starts in about the Yankees, and he wants to know what Joe thinks their chances are. Will Ford and Lopat win twenty this year? Is Mantle the real deal? Each time Joe pauses after giving a polite answer, Rooney looks around the table and declares Joe to be the greatest athlete of all time. He tells the table he still can't believe the “streak,” that baseball itself might have hit its peak when Joe broke that record.

From the corner of his eye, Joe can see Marilyn watching with a new interest. Just like March and his date, Marilyn has the keen ability to home in on the
spot where the attention is, and to move herself toward its center. It's the gift of the Hollywood players. She scoots in a bit closer to Joe, putting her palm on the bench for support as she moves over, just beside his leg. He moves toward her a little, just enough to feel the heat coming off her hand.

After Rooney leaves, Marilyn turns all her attention to Joe. He understands she now sees him as being something more than just a ballplayer.
Tell me how to hit a baseball. What's it like to hit a home run? Have you ever won the championship of baseball? Do you know Babe Ruth?
She can't control the phoniness. It's that conditioned. But it doesn't bother him. He knows what the entertainment business can do to a person. Looking at her, he doesn't see a movie star or even the sexy pose from her publicity photos. He sees just an ordinary girl who's been hamstrung and seduced into acting like some kind of hand puppet, and who is all the more miserable for it. Someone who needs to be looked out for.

And as she prattles on at him, he stares past her into the darkening room, his eyes glazing. In his head, he's imagining taking her up to San Francisco, where he could free her from the cycle of mutual sycophancy by giving her a quiet, respectable life. Show her a routine. Home meals. Quiet nights. Allow her the freedom to be just a homemaker. He'd offer her the chance to let her true nature come out—a decent, caring girl. Because he knows what it's like to be barely out of childhood, and still owned by the grownup world. The
recognition is almost heartbreaking. But the need to protect is even more compelling.

She keeps talking at him about Hollywood nonsense. He barely says another word through dinner, instead slowly turning his thoughts into plans.

Finally, she stops for a moment and says, “You don't have much to say on these topics, do you?” which, at least to Joe, couldn't make him feel more connected to her. And that much more committed.

On the day of her wedding to Joe DiMaggio at San Francisco City Hall, Marilyn's horoscope in the
San Francisco Chronicle
reads: “Ferreting out best way to improve emotional delights and getting more desirable system in practical relations with others yields big returns, by quickly putting conclusion into execution.”

 

Page one of the same paper warns of shifting weather. The weather bureau forecasts a cold winter storm coming down from Alaska, predicting occasional rains and cooler temperatures—somewhere between 51 and 56 degrees.

 

The wedding was supposed to be a secret, but it's not much of one. Having been suspended by Twentieth Century-Fox the past week for failing to show up for filming on a new picture called
The Girl in Pink Tights
,
Marilyn has been staying in the Marina district with Joe's sister. It was the role that bothered her, a lead she referred to as a “cliché-spouting bore in pink tights [who] was the cheapest character I ever read in a script.” There were rumbles of agreement within the studio, but the front office had no intention of letting Marilyn Monroe dictate the terms of how the studio's decisions and its movies were made. She took the suspension with some pride, and went north. With Joe's encouragement, she is willing to be out of the business altogether, if that's how they see her. Rumors of a wedding have already circulated. The speculation is that one took place somewhere in Nevada. Another bit of scuttlebutt places it in Hollywood. And among many watchers, suggestions of a settled domestic life in San Francisco have made the rounds. It's rumored that Joe has had it with show business, telling television producer Jack Barry that he won't do another TV gig like
The Joe DiMaggio Show
again, and, following the nonsense of
The Girl in Pink Tights
, he's encouraged Marilyn to do the same with Fox. Neither of them needs it anymore. The word is they are cashing in Hollywood for an ordinary life.

Gossip reporters claim the couple now spends their evenings at home in front of the television. The occasional night out finds them in the back of Joe's restaurant. Eating quietly. Hardly conversing.

 

The press arrives at Municipal Judge Charles S. Peery's chambers well ahead of the 1:00 PM scheduled ceremony,
as do somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred people, turning an otherwise respectful city hall office and entryway into what local columnist Art Hoppe deems a “madhouse.”

Then in comes the couple through the Polk Street doors, slowly moving across the marble floors. Their presence alone seems to light the gilded trim and molding of the great hall. The groom wears a dark blue suit with a checked tie. The bride teeters between city style and homemaker elegance in a brown broadcloth suit with an ermine collar; her nails are freshly done with a natural polish, and her fake eyelashes, long and dark, obscure the disquiet in her eyes.

All of city hall has stopped. The secretaries, the bureaucrats, the local legislators. Paperwork stays on their desks. Telephones ring, unanswered. No one can say why; there is just the sense of splendor in the building. Someone will lean across a service counter in the real estate department on the third floor and say to his colleague that it feels as if the earth is stuck, paused on its axis, and then they'll both, along with the others in the division, spill into the hallway in front of the judge's chambers.

The only person who can't stop working is a deputy county clerk named David Dunn. He's running from office to office with a blank marriage license, unable to find access to a free typewriter so Judge Peery can have the paperwork in hand once the nuptials begin.

The couple walks two steps ahead of their guests, a tightly knit train of an entourage: Mr. and Mrs. Tom DiMaggio (Joe's brother), Mr. and Mrs. Francis “Lefty” O'Doul (Joe's first baseball manager from the Seals), and Mr. and Mrs. Reno Barsocchini (Joe's restaurant partner).

The
Examiner
doesn't neglect to report that Marilyn was raised in an orphanage.

 

“Are you excited, Marilyn?”

“Oh, you
know
it's more than that.”

“How many children are you going to have, Joe?”

“We'll have at least one. I'll guarantee that.”

 

The day of the marriage, the
San Francisco Chronicle
runs its column called “Hints for Homemakers.” It offers many fine bits of advice, including

 

It's impossible to see behind her heavily made-up eyes that she is only twenty-seven. In a roomful of reporters, seated across from her husband-to-be, nearly a dozen years his junior, she's like a little girl at her mother's dressing table for the first time, smudging on makeup, almost clownlike in bright reds and silvery blues. On the day of her wedding in city hall, she's but one of a million babes who suddenly finds herself living in the middle of her wishes, unable to stop wondering whether it's equally possible to will them away.

 

“Marilyn. Miss Monroe. Are you planning on giving up acting for homemaking? Care to comment?”

“What difference does it make, I'm suspended . . .”

“This is no time to talk of suspensions. We've got to get going. We got to put a lot of miles behind us.”

“Is that right, Joe? Tell us, tell your fans, where you two going, Joe? Where's the honeymoon gonna be?”

“North. South. West. And east.”

 

Sometime after 1:30 PM, Judge Peery's chambers are cleared. The couple enters, and waits. Reporters are moved to an office just outside the room, and the swelling crowd jams the hallway.

One reporter, standing tiptoe on a desk, is able to glimpse into the chambers through the transom. An
anxious silence quells the area, as the report of his observation is anticipated. “They're not getting married,” he calls to the crowd. “They're drinking martinis.” A cheer goes up, if only because it seems as though a cheer is in order.

Deputy county clerk David Dunn is still running from office to office, blank license in hand, trying to find a machine to type on.

 

That same day, at about the same time the wedding is taking place, Albert Einstein's grandson is pleading guilty to petty-theft charges in Pittsburgh, California. According to the
San Francisco Examiner
, the twenty-three-year-old, along with an accomplice, was arrested “in the act of pilfering money from a soft drink dispenser coin box.” The amount was $1.10. They were set free on bail, to await their sentencing from the district judge. The judge's final sentence is not reported in the paper. And there appear to be no reporters on site to get the reaction of the defendant or his family. Receiving attention is all a matter of perspective.

 

Deputy county clerk David Dunn runs into the judge's chambers, reportedly having to “beat his way through the crowd.” He comes back out within a minute or two. The blank license is still in his hand. A “great howl” begins to swell, with the crowd chanting, “Machine. Machine. Machine.”

Once Dunn finally locates a typewriter at an empty desk, he types out the license in duplicate, carefully
and hurriedly, looking at each letter as it strikes the page; not in admiration, more in a submissive fear.

The ceremony starts at 1:45 PM. It ends at 1:48 PM.

 

An advertisement in the daily paper offering new mixes from Duncan Hines claims that Hines himself has “achieved what he set out to do: bring you homemade quality without the work of making homemade cake.”

 

Following the ceremony, the couple poses for photos and answers some questions. They kiss playfully, shy away, until a news photographer suggests one more for the paper. “Aw, shucks,” Joe says. He looks down, then at her, and shrugs, “Well, okay, then.” The photos have a certain intimacy to them, as though capturing the center of a raw moment between very public people. It is that privacy exposed that unsettles. The way she smiles unsurely. As if she understands the expectations of happiness but can't quite call them up. And Joe, looking oddly flat-footed, more proud than joyful, at times kisses her the way passionless parents would kiss at the marriage of their daughter, utterly practiced. But there is one picture in which both his hands grip her back while her left hand nearly rests on his lapel as though it might pull away at a moment's notice, and neither looks as though they're really holding on, and she seems to be slightly leaned back, stretching her face out to meet his, which is cocked and pushed forward; and what's there is not romance but the belief in it, the
willingness to try. After the sounds of the shutters fire and die, Joe pulls away. “Let's go,” he says. “Let's go.”