Free Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love by C. David Heymann

said: “So you’re the fellow who runs interference for Joe and pries the girls loose when they become inconvenient.”
    “I guess that’s me,” agreed the Broadway ticket broker.
    Comparing notes, it developed that Solotaire, like Marilyn, had spent several years of his childhood in an orphange. Their sharedexperience created an immediate and lasting bond between them. Of DiMaggio’s pals, Solotaire remained the one to whom she always felt closest.
    During the meal, an elderly gentleman approached them from another table. His name was Henry Rosenfeld. A wealthy clothing manufacturer, Rosenfeld had known Marilyn since 1949, when she arrived in New York to help promote Love Happy , a Marx Brothers comedy in which she’d been handed a small role—one of her first—as the dumb blonde. From the way Marilyn and Rosenfeld spoke to each other, it became obvious to DiMaggio that the pair had once been on intimate terms.
    Rosenfeld’s brief appearance at the table sent DiMaggio into a tailspin. He stopped speaking. Matters grew worse when Solotaire, making idle conversation to fill the void, told Marilyn he’d known Johnny Hyde, the powerful William Morris Agency vice president and agent largely responsible for launching Monroe’s film career by landing her roles in The Asphalt Jungle , directed by John Huston, and All About Eve , directed by Joe Mankiewicz. Her skillful performances in these projects led to a studio contract and more vital roles in future films.
    Hyde noticed several minor cosmetic imperfections in Marilyn’s face and paid to have them corrected, most notably the removal of a sliver of cartilage from the actress’s nose and a slight enhancement of her chin and cheeks to improve her close-ups. It can be said that without Johnny Hyde, whom she’d met at the Racquet Club in Palm Springs in 1949, there would have been no Marilyn Monroe. More than twice her age, he fell passionately in love with her, fled his family (including a wife of long standing), and set up a household with Marilyn on North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills. Repeatedly, persistently, he’d asked her to marry him, but, just as persistently, she declined, insisting she loved him but wasn’t in love with him. He nevertheless wooed her by being kind, talking to her openly about his intimate life, and listening to her stories about hers. Above all, she stayed with him because she felt he really needed her. Then in December 1950 Hyde suffered a massive heart attack and died. Once again a father figure had vanished into thin air.
    The mere mention of Johnny Hyde’s name by Solotaire brought tears to Marilyn’s eyes and concomitantly caused DiMaggio to explode in a fit of anger of the sort that was fast becoming all too familiar to Monroe.
    “Do we need to discuss all of her fucking ex-lovers?” he yelled. “This Hyde jerk sounds like just another Hollywood vulture out to get laid.”
    Marilyn had heard enough. Now it was her turn to vent. “Johnny Hyde was a lovely, warm, caring man,” she said. “He gave me more than his kindness and love. He was the first man I’d ever known who tried to understand me. How dare you question his integrity?”
    Then, with neither malice nor regret, Marilyn embarked on a lengthy account of the men in her life that had played instrumental roles in her personal and professional development. The list—from Joseph Schenck, cofounder and chairman of the board of Twentieth Century–Fox, to Fred Karger, her former vocal coach and lover—seemed endless to DiMaggio, but having been properly and thoroughly chastised by Marilyn for his outburst, he sat there and listened. “He took it like a man,” George Solotaire later told his son. “Then again,” he added, “what choice did he have?”
    As her most intense liaisons—and even some of her nonsexual interludes—demonstrated, Marilyn usually sought out older, stronger, more distinguished, and powerful male figures as opposed to those who were solely