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The following is from Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, broadcast on PBS in "The American Experience" series.

NARRATOR: Friends told Joe he had to pick himself up, move on, forget her. Joe forgot them, instead. For the next five years, he tried to forget himself. He traveled, he drank, he dated not well, but with athletic vigor: movie stars, debutantes, beauty queens. And always voluptuous blondes: an actress who won a Marilyn look-alike contest; a Miss America whose talent was impersonating Marilyn; and a Miami Beach artiste, the Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque. The real Marilyn's marriage to Arthur Miller had broken up. She was anxious, depressed. She checked herself into a Manhattan psych-ward and now they wouldn't let her go. She was trapped, terrified -- and she called Joe DiMaggio. Joe was there, next day -- fierce, proprietary - as if he and Marilyn had never split up. "You release my wife," DiMaggio growled at the front desk, "or I'll take this place apart piece of wood by piece of wood." Suddenly they discovered, Miss Monroe was all ready to go.

JERRY COLEMAN: The only time that I saw them together, outside of spring training, once, I was doing shows in New York and I was walking down Park Avenue to get to my car. And I saw this couple coming down and Joe's got his head up in the air and his arm around Marilyn. And they're just daydreaming along and never even saw me (laughs). And so, I didn't bother to stop and say hello. I thought he was happy as he was, leave him alone.

NARRATOR: It was when they weren't together that Joe worried. The minute she went back to work; she fell in with Sinatra's posse -- they knew how to have fun -- and the Kennedy's. Sure, Joe knew about that -- more than he wanted to know. It was like he couldn't turn away. How could he save her from herself?

BRAD DEXTER: She was a very, very unhappy girl. She felt that she had come to the end of the road, you see. And she was drinking heavily and she was also taking upper and downer drugs. She was lost.

NARRATOR: Marilyn didn't know what she wanted. Joe helped her get a house back in Hollywood. She'd promise to stay off the booze and pills. She'd talk about getting back together -- they'd have another chance. Joe talked to friends like it was all settled. They were getting married again.

When Marilyn died of a drug overdose, no one came to the house but doctors and lawyers. And they didn't know what to do. So they called Joe DiMaggio.

And he walled away all the Hollywood players -- producers, directors, acting stars, studio chiefs. And the public. How much more did he owe them? The fame had eaten up his life. And now it took from him the one person who might have understood. The way Joe said it, they'd killed his girl. So in the chapel, safe for the moment from prying eyes, alone, embittered, Joe kissed Marilyn goodbye.

BRAD DEXTER: Frank says: "You know, Joe hates Hollywood, and hates everybody in the picture business, and hates anybody who ad anything to do with Marilyn, or even said hello to her." But I firmly believe that all the years that he made those visitations to her gravesite and left flowers was out, he was still in love with her but also out of a great sense of guilt. Because I think he helped contribute to her demise. I'm firmly convinced that if he had behaved differently, they would have had a good marriage. He destroyed it -- and he felt that guilt.

DARIO LODIGIANI: Never mentioned her. Never. No matter what. He would never say anything about it. And we dared not say anything to him about it. You know, because that was something that wasn't easy to, I guess, to just let go.

NARRATOR: For decades, Joe DiMaggio retreated from us. After Marilyn died, he relied on pure distance -- spent a lot of time out of the country. In later years, he learned to run away without even moving.

© 2000 PBS/WGBH

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