And now, a nice little sports show you can watch to catch up on all of the local sporting news:
I saw this print in a restaurant last weekend:
We have a running question about whether it is true that Marilyn Monroe came home from that USO tour to her new husband and said “It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering.”
“Yes,” Joe DiMaggio said, “I have.”
It’s a great line, because Joe DiMaggio. But it was apparently first written in a Gay Talese essay, so it almost seems too perfect. The nature of quotes is a fickle thing sometimes, but if we will them into being we can sometimes will disbelief into submission.
I don’t know. I wasn’t there. It’s interesting to think that it happened, because it says so much about Marilyn Monroe. But to think that it is just a manufactured line, that she would know better, would say an awful lot more. Which is why I like to think it didn’t happen, that that wasn’t the exchange between an aging ball player and a young starlet.
I do know this. She’s just glowing in pretty much the entire photo collection, and she’s got that little dress on, in Korean, in the winter. All of the troopers are bundled up. It is February and some 30 degrees, at best. But there she was, soaking in that adoration and lust. A shot of home in a place very much not.
And of course I see this photo on the side wall of a hallway heading to a restroom.
You know, it isn’t as easy to track down the photographer of a 63-year-old photo as you might imagine. Surely the rights to that photo belong to an agency by now, but they’re all buying each other up and none of that helps gets you back to the actual photo zapper.
I think she’s singing Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend in that shot. You can see the same gesture here:
And if you watch the whole thing you might have to re-think everything you know about the 1950s.
I don’t really have a way to end this piece. I’ve looked for loops to repeat and curious, out-of-this-world trivia hooks that you wouldn’t believe. But everyone in the story is from somewhere else, or did other things. But I’ve watched that video a few times and I imagine Joe DiMaggio had a … different sort of adoring crowd.
