By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
A pair of initials carved into a wooden bar at a historic Chicago hotel have taught me about the myriad ways people express their love.
During a recent long weekend autumn getaway, my wife Vicki and I spent a night at the famed Drake Hotel on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Perched on the shores of Lake Michigan, the Drake first opened its doors over a century ago.
Almost immediately, the resort was a popular gathering spot. According to the hotel’s website, on any given day “Bing Crosby, Walt Disney, George Gershwin, and Charles Lindbergh could be seen sipping a cocktail and listening to Herbie Kay” in the Drake’s Gold Coast Room.
Other notable guests over the years included Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, several American Presidents, Prince (now King) Charles and his former wife Princess Diana Spencer, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Julia Roberts.
Notwithstanding that glittering celebrity guest list, the most interesting visit (besides our own, of course!) likely occurred without too much fanfare in 1954 and ended with those carved initials on the hotel’s wooden bar.
After a two year courtship, retired baseball hero Joe DiMaggio (then age 39) and rising movie superstar Marilyn Monroe (26) surprised the world in January 1954 by getting married at San Francisco’s City Hall. It was the second marriage for each of them.
After a short honeymoon in Japan, the couple settled in Los Angeles. Sometime in the Spring or Summer of 1954, they visited Chicago together.
It must have been a rather low key and private visit. I’ve not yet found any archived contemporary news stories about it despite many searches in my newspapers.com account.
The Drake Hotel website briefly mentions the visit, “[S]een laughing over drinks, newlyweds Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio would carve their iconic initials into the [Cape Cod Room] bar’s world famous wooden counter.”
Another blogger reports that before leaving the Drake, Monroe wrote a love message for DiMaggio and left it in a bottle at the bar, promising that the newlyweds would retrieve it on a return visit. They never returned.
Seven decades later, both the bottle and the Cape Cod Room are gone, but the famous wood countertop is still there. We saw it—and the famous initials “MM JD”—in what now is the hotel’s breakfast nook.
The moment when DiMaggio carved those initials probably was the high-water mark of his and Monroe’s nine month long celebrity marriage.
When the marriage ended in October 1954, The Los Angeles Times reported that Monroe had appeared in a Santa Monica divorce courtroom. She told a judge that she’d hoped for “love, warmth, and affection” from DiMaggio but mostly got “coldness and indifference.”
Her 20th Century Fox studio also released a statement from Monroe indicating, “Our careers just seemed to get in the way of each other.” Apparently, DiMaggio did not want to be part of her Hollywood PR scene but Monroe wanted him there with her all the time.
News reports also suggest that the widespread photo distribution in September 1954 of Monroe with her skirt blowing upward while standing on a subway air tunnel in New York City disturbed DiMaggio.
The now-iconic photo was a publicity stunt for what then was her new movie “The Seven Year Itch.” The couple argued about it and he reportedly bruised her arm during an ensuing scuffle.
DiMaggio did not appear at the ten to fifteen minute long Santa Monica court hearing or contest the divorce. The decree ending the short marriage did not involve any distribution of community property or award of alimony.
Afterwards Monroe said publicly that she and DiMaggio had parted as friends. A spokesperson for the couple said they’d reached a “pleasant understanding.”
If the story had ended there, the carved initials at the Drake Hotel probably would not have impressed me. But the divorce was not the end of the Monroe/DiMaggio love story.
DiMaggio never married again. He underwent therapy and stopped drinking alcohol. And watched over Monroe from a distance.
Monroe went on to marry playwright Arthur Miller in 1956. After that third marriage failed in 1961, Monroe was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.
She called DiMaggio to help get her out of the psychiatric institution. He did, and also was at her side later when she woke up from emergency gall bladder removal surgery.
Life magazine magazine says that DiMaggio “desperately tried to bring some stability and calm to an existence that was veering dangerously out of control” and to “pull her back from the brink of depression, drugs, and disastrous affairs with married men.”
When Monroe was found dead at her home—at only age 36—on August 5, 1962, DiMaggio planned her funeral and bent over her casket to repeat “I love you, I love you.” He sent roses to her grave every week for the next 20 years.
Although Catholic church leaders berated DiMaggio for a divorce in his first marriage and even for marrying Monroe, the Catholics in the pews were more understanding. Applause often broke out when they recognized him during appearances for Mass at his beloved St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
After Monroe’s death, DiMaggio refused to discuss her publicly. He said privately, however, that he would regret and blame himself for what happened to Monroe for the rest of his own life. DiMaggio died twenty-five years ago on March 8, 1999.
The New York Times eulogized him this way: “[N]o one more embodied the American dream of fame and fortune or created a more enduring legend than Joe DiMaggio. He became a figure of unequaled romance and integrity in the national mind because of his consistent professionalism on the baseball field, his marriage to the Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe, [and] his devotion to her after her death.”
According to DiMaggio’s attorney, the baseball star’s last words before he died were, “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn.”
It’s a fact of life that we tend to remember and talk about people because of their failures, for their worst moments alive.
I’ve been guilty of the same offense.
Whatever little I understood about DiMaggio and Monroe—who lived all/most of their lives in another era—I certainly knew that their marriage had failed after only just a few months.
But there’s a lot more to the story.
And some carved initials in a corner of Chicago’s historic Drake Hotel, have reminded me that it’s important to remember people for their best moments too.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
