Joe and Marilyn.

Joe & Marilyn

by Roger Kahn (Morrow,269 pp., $16.95)

ABITTER disappointment for the couplethemselves but a bonanza for the ravenous Hollywood publicity corps and the press, the romance and failed marriage of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe continue to fascinate. Always difficult to approach, DiMaggio has steadfastly refused to discuss Miss Monroe or the marriage; he once turned down $50,000 from McCall's (which wanted to do an adulatory piece on Marilyn) for a 15-minute interview. Despite this handicap, Mr. Kahn is able to provide as clear a picture of the clouded DiMaggio-Monroe relationship as we're ever likely to get, and he tells their story with the compassion and elegance for which his writing is noted. Examining in much of the book the lives and careers of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe prior to their first meeting, Kahn depicts two very different backgrounds: "He had family, Roman Catholicism, and very tame dances at an Italian-American social club. She had foster homes, fundamentalism, modeling, pickups, rape attempts, and nudity.' Kahn says that what drew them together was each other's fame and simple physical attraction (he notes that both used their bodies in their work). What drove them apart was an ordinary inability to live together compatibly and the failure of each to understand and meet the needs of the other. DiMaggio thought he was marrying the most gorgeous housewife in America, not "that phenomenon of innocence and lust, blond hair and parted lips, the squirming unde on the calendar who aspired to play a Dostoyevsky heroine.' Joe quickly came to despise the overtly sexual nature of his wife's movie acting, and he behaved like anything but the supportive husband. (In fact, Marilyn finally had him barred from the set.) He considered Hollywood "phony' and responsible for Marilyn's suicide. For her part, Marilyn actually thought life with Joe was boring: He didn't like to socialize, wasn't much of a conversationalist, and enjoyed television as much as anything else. She didn't understand his need for the barroom and golf-course companionship of admiring male friends who would remind him of his former greatness, nor, for that matter, did she understand the magnitude of that former greatness. (After entertaining American troops in Korea she insulted DiMaggio with the naive remark, "Joe. You never heard such cheering.' DiMaggio said, "Yes I have.') In debunking many myths (most of them regarding Marilyn's sexual activities) and in identifying many unsubstantiated rumors as such, Kahn achieves a remarkably balanced treatment. Still, he is blunt about the sex, and he shows that he understands Hollywood (its superficiality, its pandering of sex, and its immense pressures on ambitious young women like Marilyn Monroe) as well as he understands baseball. Concerning Miss Monroe's controversial death, he concludes that "a rational reading of the evidence suggests that Marilyn wanted to die more than she wanted to live.' The final image of DiMaggio is one worthy of respect. Referring to Joe's rejection of the McCall's offer, Kahn says that although DiMaggio likes money, "some things are not for sale. Like the memory of love.'