Page 45 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

“If I die before you, will you put fresh flowers on my grave, every week after I am gone? I would hate to lie there on my own, all cold and forgotten.”

“I promise.”

CHAPTER 34

FIFTEEN HOURS LATER, the newlyweds emerge.

They climb back into the Cadillac and continue driving south on US 101, stopping around 2 p.m. for lunch at the Motel Inn in San Luis Obispo.

A newsman from the localTelegram-Tribuneis finishing his meal when the couple takes a corner table.

“You’re kind of lost, aren’t you?” he asks them. “Nobody seems to know where you are between here and San Francisco.”

“No,” DiMaggio says, “but it won’t take them long to catch up.”

The newsman calls in the chance celebrity sighting to his editor, who sends a photographer over to the Motel Inn.

The cameraman takes a sympathetic approach. “I would like to shoot your picture but I know you’re on your honeymoon. You name it.”

“My wife doesn’t have any makeup. I’d really rather not,”DiMaggio says, rejecting the photographer’s idea to shoot Marilyn with her back to the camera.

“We’ve had so much of this,” the new husband pleads. “I’ll appreciate it very much if you don’t shoot us at all.”

Remembering the Yankee great as being generous and decent with the press, the photographer lowers his camera.

Two hundred miles to the south, 20th Century-Fox has issued a fresh round of stern correspondence with its star actress.

“You are hereby instructed to report … on January 25, 1954 … for the purposes of rendering your services in connection with our motion picture tentatively entitled Pink Tights, in respect to which you have heretofore been assigned to portray the role of Jenny.”

Mrs. Joe DiMaggio, now sporting a new platinum eternity band set with thirty-six baguette-cut diamonds, has other plans. As she told reporters outside San Francisco’s City Hall yesterday, she’s an actress who’s “looking forward to being a housewife too.”

At San Francisco International Airport, the B-377 Stratocruiser, Pan American’s “flying hotel,” is preparing for its January 29 flight to Tokyo.

On the passenger list are Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe, and baseball ambassador Lefty O’Doul. Marilyn’s never traveled as far as Japan, but DiMaggio has, in 1950 and 1951, as a member of Larry O’Doul’s American exhibition team, the All-Stars. The baseball pros are embarking on a three-weekjunket for the Japanese professional baseball league, which will double as a honeymoon trip for Joe and Marilyn.

Marilyn arrives with a splint on her thumb.What’s happened to her hand?Reporters’ concerned whispers swell into pointed questions that Marilyn is finally forced to answer.

“I bumped it,” she says, gingerly holding up her bandaged hand as she wraps her black fur coat more tightly around her. “I have a witness. Joe was there. He heard it crack.”

“Joltin’ Joe” doesn’t know his own strength,she tells herself. He didn’t mean to push her away as she came to hug him, interrupting a conversation with his friend George Solotaire, but the force had been powerful enough to break her thumb.

By the time the Stratocruiser touches down for a fueling stop in Honolulu a few hours later, thousands of fans on the tarmac are all screaming Marilyn’s name.

“How are you, Marilyn?”

“Do you like Hawaii, Marilyn?”

“Are you happy to be here, Marilyn?”

“Are you pregnant, Marilyn?”

“Are you going to have a baby?”

The questions come thick and fast. The flashbulbs are blinding. She shields her eyes and smiles.

“What’s next for you, Marilyn?”

“What are your plans?”

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