Joe & Marilyn: A Memory of Love
Written by Roger Kahn
Narrated by Dick Hill
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
He was the most famous and best ballplayer of his generation. She was America’s blonde. They were intense, impassioned lovers, and, long after that, gentle and loving friends. The only thing that didn’t work between Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe was their marriage. Joe & Marilyn is a portrait of DiMaggio, as godlike as his legend on the field, but vulnerable and intensely human off and of a stormy Marilyn of whom it was said, “She doesn’t need a husband. She needs salvation.”
After DiMaggio retired from baseball, he saw a publicity photo of Marilyn and his courtship began. She was reluctant to meet him fearing an old, vulgar ballplayer and instead finding a poised and graying man—"a little shy, like me"—impeccably tailored and financially secure. When they married in 1954, reporters called them “Mr. and Mrs. America.” But their married life was strained from the start. She was messy. He was compulsively neat. He wanted a certain primness and she liked to show her storied body. The marriage lasted nine months.
In later years as Marilyn drifted through mental illness, DiMaggio reappeared as a stalwart friend. But even he could not rescue her. In the end all that was left for him was to plan her funeral. He barred some of Hollywood’s most famous names. Why? "Because they killed her," he told a friend.
Roger Kahn
Roger Kahn, a prize-winning author, grew up in Brooklyn, where he says everybody on the boys' varsity baseball team at his prep school wanted to play for the Dodgers. None did. He has written nineteen books. Like most natives of Brooklyn, he is distressed that the Dodgers left. "In a perfect world," he says, "the Dodgers would have stayed in Brooklyn and Los Angeles would have gotten the Mets."
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Reviews for Joe & Marilyn
10 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not sure I’d classify this as a love story. At least not about Marilyn and Joe. Certainly one can learn much about DiMaggio, baseball as an organization in its infancy and a period of time (the 30s and 40s) and how people lived and what society was like. It was fascinating listen but the Joe & Marilyn love story? They were married nine months and they seem ill-matched from the start. Perhaps like the rest of America, Joe & Marilyn hoped that Mr. America and Miss America would be Mr. & Mrs. America and live happily ever after. Sadly, that was not the case.