Joltin' Joe, His Son and Marilyn Monroe

During the 1960s, young Joe and I were classmates at a New Jersey high school. Interestingly, DiMaggio, Jr. never talked about his father. Not until long after we graduated did I learn that Joe and his father had a strained and often hostile relationship.

After DiMaggio, Sr. divorced his first wife Dorothy Arnold, they nevertheless agreed to send Joey D., as his family knew him, to several military academies, summer camps and eventually to the high school where I met him. Joe, the mirror image physically of his father, never touch touched a baseball bat. Instead, Joe played varsity football. An outstanding athlete, Joe made the All–New Jersey team as a center and kicker. But even though Di Maggio’s father lived in nearby Manhattan, he never came to his son’s games or visited on Parent’s Day. At the time, none of Joe Jr.’s friends realized the wisdom behind his decision not to play baseball. No matter how skilled he may have been, Joey D. could never remotely compare himself to his Hall of Fame father, the New York Yankees’ beloved center fielder.

Joe entered Yale University but by then, already troubled, his life unraveled. After a year at Yale, Joe dropped out, returned to his native California, worked menial jobs and then entered the United States Marines Corp. After completing his Marines’ commitment, Joe then married a 17-year-old San Diego girl. Their union lasted only a year. More odd jobs followed before Joe moved to Boston to work for his uncle Dom, a Red Sox icon. Young Joe met and married Sue Adams, a divorcee with two daughters. Joey D.’s union with Adams led to happiest days with his father who doted on his stepdaughters.

Save for those few blissful interludes, Joe felt that he could never please his dad. Gradually, he fell into drug and alcohol abuse which caused vicious battles with Adams that left her battered and bloody. In 1974, they divorced. Two years later, Joe was in a serious automobile accident that resulted in the removal of a blood clot from his brain. The surgery left Joe more emotionally unstable and drug-dependent than ever.

Although Joe didn’t visit his father during DiMaggio’s final days battling cancer, he was a pall bearer at the funeral. Five months after DiMaggio’s 1999 death, Joe entered the bleakest, final days of his still-young life. At age 57, his drug usage escalated, he had periods of homelessness, worked at a junkyard, and had minor scrapes with the police. On August 6, 1999, Antioch police found Joe’s near-lifeless body on the street. Despite resuscitation efforts, Joe died shortly after arrival at the Sutter Delta Medical Center; days later, his ashes were scattered at sea. DiMaggio’s ex-wife Sue summed up Joe’s tortured life: “They threw the man away.”

Young Joe’s happiest days may have been those that he spent with Marilyn Monroe. One early fall day, when we all had returned from our summer vacations, Joe told of his stepmother Marilyn making his breakfast and serving it to him. Usually, when teenagers recount their vacation adventures, they exaggerate. But we knew Joe’s touching story about Monroe was true. The childless Monroe loved Joey D. as if he were her own son.

By most accounts, Joey D. was among the last people to speak to Monroe before she died. As he recalled, Monroe laughed repeatedly during their conversation. That same evening, Marilyn tried to reach Joe Sr., but was unsuccessful. "If anything was amiss, I wasn't aware of it," Joe Jr. told "Inside Edition." "She sounded like Marilyn." Joe’s few brief and carefree days with Monroe hardly compensate for the decades that DiMaggio spurned him. Even in death, DiMaggio dismissed Joe by leaving him a token sum in his will, the smallest amount of any of his heirs.

The consensus about DiMaggio Sr.’s character is unanimous; he was cold, distant. In the early 1980s, when I lived in Seattle, I got into an elevator at the Washington Athletic Club. DiMaggio was the only other passenger. I extended my hand, introduced myself and told him that I was Joe’s classmate. DiMaggio didn’t utter a word. As I walked away, I wondered if DiMaggio realized that his son may have shared with his classmates’ harsh, unflattering stories about his father.

An icon to baseball fans, DiMaggio was so insensitive to Joe’s filial needs that he denied his son what could have been a productive life and instead helped put him in his early grave. Commenting on the estranged relationship between father and son, a cousin said that Joey D. “lived in the shadow of his father and could not rise above that.”

Ironically, when Joey D. was born, DiMaggio spoke glowingly about the infant. But soon afterward and for years to follow, hostility kept them apart. When asked why he didn’t visit his cancer-stricken father, Joe Jr. said that if he had received a call, he would have been at his father’s bedside in an instant. No one knows what went wrong between father and son, but the outcome left family and friends wondering what might have been.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com