The Night Sinatra And DiMaggio Heard Marilyn Was Humping Some Guy

Sixty years ago today, Joe DiMaggio married his girlfriend of two years, Marilyn Monroe. Here, the happy couple are seen leaving San Francisco's City Hall, site of their nuptials. It was a short-lived union: The two divorced in October of the same year.

They did have an eventful relationship. There was plenty of humping, of course, though Monroe would later express sadness at never having had a real orgasm with Joe (she always said she would have won the Academy Award for faking it, if such an award existed). Richard Ben Cramer, in his iconoclastic biography of the man, tells one story about the night the freshly divorced DiMaggio thought he had caught Monroe with another man. He was dining with Frank Sinatra, who as a favor to his friend had a detective keeping tabs on Marilyn. The detective called up Sinatra and gave him an address in Hollywood where he believed Monroe had entered with a man. The two lit out for the love nest. This actually happened. In America. Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio, together, skulking around a building where they thought they'd find Marilyn Monroe boffing some musician.

Here's Cramer:

Frank was trying to calm Joe down. At about eleven-fifteen P.M., everybody in the building heard a splintering crash, as Sinatra's men broke down the door to one apartment. The noise was most fearsome to Mrs. Florence Kotz, a fifty-year-old woman who was asleep, alone, in that apartment. When the door crashed down, strange men rushed in, taking pictures, shooting off flashbulbs—but their pictures would only show Mrs. Kotz sitting up in bed, clutching her bedclothes around her, her mouth open to loose an ear-splitting scream .... Meanwhile, through a door just a few yards away, Marilyn Monroe and Hal Schaefer left the apartment of the actress Sheila Stuart (another of Schaefer's clients)—and they got away clean.

"Attempted burglary," the cops called it. A cool $7,500 kept Mrs. Kotz quiet and kept the incident under wraps, at least for a while. A couple years later Confidential magazine got ahold of the story. The California State Senate opened an investigation, forcing Sinatra and the detectives to testify. DiMaggio, all the way in New York, couldn't find a reason to attend.

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