Another day, another tell-all book that promises new secrets about Marilyn’s life.
This time, we have a doctor, Dr. Rock Positano, who claims Joe DiMaggio confided in him the secrets of his marriage to Marilyn, right down to an eyebrow-raising description of their sex life. The New York Post’s equally sensational headline “Botched Surgery Made Joe DiMaggio Impotent” screams money-maker, and the article about the upcoming book is bound to create a whole new set of commonly held beliefs about Marilyn and Joe’s ill-fated nine-month marriage.
Let’s start with the fact that Joe was famously tight-lipped about Marilyn. He refused to speak of her, never gave interviews or talked about her to the press, and friends have said that he would become angry when asked about her. But we’re to believe he said this to his doctor about their sex life:
“When we got together in the bedroom, it was like the gods were fighting. There was lightning and thunderclouds above us.”
Next, we have a claim that the marriage ended because of Marilyn’s infertility, which doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. Marilyn was at the height of her career and in no way ready to settle down and be a housewife. While nobody knows for sure whether or not Marilyn and Joe were making a real effort to have a baby, most tales of the marriage’s trouble center on Marilyn’s unwillingness to settle down and give up her career, and Joe’s desire for a good housewife to stay home and cook for hime like his mother. That doesn’t add up to infertility being a major issue in the marriage, particularly since the couple was barely married long enough to have made a real effort at having a baby and spent much of the marriage either traveling or on a movie set (Marilyn filmed The Seven Year Itch during their brief marriage).
Without a doubt, infertility and failed pregnancies contributed to the end of Marilyn’s marriage to Arthur Miller, which might lead one to believe the same was true of her marriage to Joe – but there’s no evidence to support that idea.
Finally, we bring in the Kennedys, because nothing sells better than that tired old the-Kennedys-killed-her song and dance. Did Joe hate the Kennedys? Maybe. Did he believe they actually murdered her? I sincerely doubt it.
But even if this doctor is telling the truth – even if Joe did tell him all about thunderclaps in the bedroom and Marilyn’s inability to conceive (and I sincerely doubt that he did), to put it all in a book is an egregious lapse in both professional and personal trust, capped by telling the world Joe suffered from erectile dysfunction, too. If in fact this doctor is the one person Joe chose to open up to about Marilyn – after decades of refusing to speak of her – then to take that trust and write a book is downright despicable.
But once again, the promise getting in on the money to be made of sensational stories involving Marilyn matters more than trust – or the truth.
