“Marilyn and DiMaggio

The Fixer by Josh Young and Manfred Westphal.

The tempestuous marriage of Marilyn and Joe:

“Marilyn and DiMaggio were the gift that kept on giving for Confidential, which would also turn out well for [private investigator Fred ] Otash. After two years of dating, and with [studio executive] Joe Schenck's tight grip loosened, Marilyn married DiMaggio on January 14, 1954, at San Francisco City Hall. They were mobbed by reporters and fans after Marilyn accidentally revealed her wedding plans to someone at 20th Century Fox who leaked it to the press.

“Their honeymoon in Japan was interrupted when she was asked to perform for American soldiers stationed in Korea. She couldn't say no to our boys in uniform and left her angry new husband alone in the hotel suite to stew while she wowed the soldiers with her warmth and outsize sex appeal.

“After the newlyweds returned to the States, Joltin' Joe decided that he didn't like his wife's sexpot image. One night in September, Marilyn was in New York shooting the iconic scene in The Seven Year Itch of her standing over a subway grate with the air blowing up her skirt. Press photographers snapped pictures and onlookers cheered take after take after take, unlike DiMaggio, who was on set watching. And fuming. He became so irate that he stormed off without telling Marilyn, then emotionally abused her when she came home.

“The two separated in late September and Marilyn filed for divorce. On October 28, 1954, she stood in a Santa Monica courtroom and testified that DiMaggio had treated her with ‘coldness and indifference’ when she had expected ‘love, warmth, and affection.’ The presiding judge granted her petition on the grounds of mental cruelty, and she walked out of the courthouse with an uncontested divorce. Her lawyer was, of course, Jerry Giesler.

“Otash's good friend and Marilyn's close confidant, gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, gave him the skinny one day over lunch at Schwab's—the romance was more myth than reality, as Otash had suspected. DiMaggio was in love with Marilyn, but her feelings weren't reciprocal. She never intended to make DiMaggio more than a brief relationship. He also bored her to tears with his desire for her to be a housewife by day and watch TV at home with him at night.

“But DiMaggio couldn't get over her. His obsession was revealed in the powerhouse September 1955 issue of Confidential headlined ‘From a Detective's Report: The Real Reason for Marilyn Monroe's Divorce.’

“During their marriage, DiMaggio was certain that Marilyn was having a love affair with her friend, actress Sheila Stewart. He believed that if he caught Marilyn and Sheila in bed together, she'd come back to him rather than risk him publicly exposing her sexual proclivities. And so in November 1954, he hired Barney Ruditsky, a top-notch, fifty-year-old gumshoe, to bug Marilyn's home, and tail her and call him immediately whenever she and Sheila were together.

l Irwin, kept close tabs on Marilyn. One night, Irwin determined that Marilyn was heading to Sheila Stewart's apartment on Kilkea Drive, a quiet street in West Hollywood, where he spotted Marilyn's black Cadillac convertible in front of the two-story building. He then drove to a phone booth and alerted Ruditsky, who in turn raced over to join him.

“When it was determined they couldn't see into Sheila's apartment, Ruditsky told Irwin to stay put while he went to a phone booth to alert DiMaggio, who it turned out was having dinner with Frank Sinatra at the nearby Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood.

“Ten minutes later, DiMaggio arrived with Sinatra, along with Villa Capri owner Patsy D'Amore, the restaurant's maitre d', and Sinatra's manager/bodyguard as reinforcements. With booze clouding DiMaggio's judgment, he began threatening to go inside and kill Marilyn.

“Sinatra grabbed him by his shoulders. ‘Are you out of your mind?!’ he implored. ‘She's not worth going to the electric chair over. No broad is.’

“But DiMaggio was hell-bent. Ruditsky feared the worst, especially since Sinatra's bodyguard was packing heat. Desperate to defuse the situation, he came up with a sordid plan they'd storm the apartment together and catch the two women in the act. Everyone bought into it.

“The seven men snuck upstairs to the apartment Ruditsky identified as Sheila's. Then he kicked the door in. They went inside the dark apartment and into the bedroom. Irwin took flash pictures with his camera. A woman screamed. Sinatra turned on a table lamp, revealing a woman named Florence Kotz. She was on her bed, wearing a nightie and scared out of her mind. They had broken into the wrong apartment!

“Panicked, the men got the hell out of there, ran down the stairs to their cars, and drove away before the police arrived.

“The police did an investigation, but Florence Kotz was too frazzled to know who had broken in. The landlady claimed she saw a man who looked like Sinatra leaving the scene of the crime. The cops wrote it off as an attempted robbery and left it as an open case.

“But there was another corroborating witness—Marilyn. As soon as she heard the scream, she went onto Sheila's balcony to see what was going on. Once she spotted the cars and watched them flee in terror, she knew who was there and why. But she stayed mum, not wanting to call any attention to the situation."

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