Marilyn was close to her stepson, Joe DiMaggio Jr., from the early days of her romance with the Yankee Clipper until her death a decade later.
Sadly, Joe Jr. would never escape his father’s shadow, and after years of drug and alcohol abuse, two marriages shattered by domestic violence, and periods of homelessness, he died in 1999, outliving the man who gave him his name by just a few months.
Of course, there are two sides to every story, and those who knew Joe Sr. in later life said he was haunted by the rift with his only son. Writing for the Washington DC Patch, Joe Guzzardi recalls his onetime schoolmate, long before ‘Joey D’ became a tragic footnote to the DiMaggio legend.
“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 centre and kicker. But even though DiMaggio’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 realised 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 centre fielder.
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 … ‘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.
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 realised that his son may have shared with his classmates harsh, unflattering stories about his father.”
The Marilyn Report 