Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio
Joe DiMaggio was retired from professional baseball when he began dating Marilyn Monroe, though he remained one of the most recognizable men in the United States. Famously proud but disdainful of celebrity, DiMaggio dated Marilyn for nearly two years before the two of them were married. He was one of the few men in her life at the time who had no involvement with Hollywood and the studio system. Even her doctors were part of the Hollywood world, answerable to the powerful heads of the studios at the time.
DiMaggio preferred privacy to celebrity, but Monroe’s carefully crafted image demanded the opposite. When she filed for divorce from DiMaggio, Life Magazine published photographs of her arriving to file the papers. The photos depict her in tears, clearly fraught with anguish over the end of her marriage. She cited mental cruelty as a cause for divorce, and some claimed the marriage was physically violent. Following her divorce from Arthur Miller she rekindled her friendship with DiMaggio, who never remarried.