MARILYN IN KOREA
Pan American Airways’ new Boeing 377 Strato-cruiser was just beginning its descent into Tokyo on February 1, 1954, when a high-ranking U.S. Army officer approached the plane’s most celebrated passengers: Joe DiMaggio, the New York Yankees legend, and Marilyn Monroe, the famous Hollywood star and sex symbol, whom DiMaggio had married just weeks earlier. Speaking with a slight Texas twang, Major General Charles W. Christenberry, the assistant chief of staff at the army’s Far East Command, leaned over their seats to ask a question. “How would you like to visit Korea for a few days and entertain the American troops currently stationed in Seoul as part of the UN occupation force?” he asked.
“I’d like to,” DiMaggio replied, “but I don’t think I’ll have time this trip.”
“I wasn’t asking you, Mr. DiMaggio,” the general said. “My inquiry was directed at your wife.”
Monroe, a bit startled, looked up. “I’d love to do it,” she told Christenberry. “What do you think, Joe?”
“Go ahead if you want,” DiMaggio told Monroe. “It’s your honeymoon.”
Actually, it was their honeymoon, and it had already gotten off to a rocky start. The couple had tied the knot in a civil ceremony at San Francisco City Hall on January 14, after two years of public, often volatile courtship. The former Norma Jeane Mortensen Dougherty had met her famous second husband on an arranged date in Los Angeles in 1952, when she was 25 and he was 37. Now, after years of paying her dues as a low-billed starlet in Hollywood, Monroe was a red-hot celebrity, while the once-treasured “Yankee Clipper” was fading fast, having walked away from the game three years earlier after a stellar 13-season career patrolling center field in Yankee Stadium. Although neither wanted to admit it, even to themselves, they were moving in opposite directions—fast. Monroe’s whirlwind visit to Korea, as it turned out, only hastened that process.
“I wasn’t asking you, Mr. DiMaggio. My inquiry was directed at your wife.”
On the surface, DiMaggio and Monroe seemed to be the perfect couple. Both could stop traffic on New York’s Fifth Avenue simply by walking down the.) Though neither DiMaggio nor Monroe could see it, his attempts to control her career doomed their marriage from the start. Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons predicted as much. “They must resign themselves to the fact that it can’t ever be a completely normal union,” she wrote. “Marilyn will remain in show business and Joe will not be able to take it.”
