Marilyn Monroe figures prominently among iconography—her hair, her dress, her lovers, her status as a sex symbol—under the scrutiny of the public eye, she lived as one of mid-century America’s most famous women. Jerome Charyn, author of the new Icons of America biography: Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil, now out in 2012 paperback looks at the romance of Monroe’s second marriage to the famous Yankee Clipper, America’s most eligible bachelor.

Jerome Charyn—

The romance between Joe & Marilyn was very strange – and yet, what is it that lasts in that romance? If you go back and look at Marilyn, she was cunning. Her career was hurting – there was this nudie calendar of her, and so she and her talent agent decided, okay, we’ll go to Joe.

So they set up a sort of date with him; then they become a kind of romance, but you have to ask, what really was Marilyn’s part in this whole affair?  Did she love him?

It’s very hard to say. She was already in love with Arthur Miller, who was a married man.  There was a kind of sexual heat between them …

But the problem was that Marilyn was a very curious woman, she was a woman who wanted to go places.  Joe was a guy who liked to sit in front of his TV screen, have his TV dinner and go to bed.  And that was not the woman that Marilyn was.

But he was the only man who never really exploited her. He wasn’t really trying to ride on her fame.  Every other man she was with used her fame to further themselves.

I call him in my book, the Demon Lover, because once Marilyn dies, he remains utterly devoted and faithful to her.

And what most people don’t know is that he had decided he was going to remarry Marilyn, and she agreed to remarry him, but sadly she died a few days before this marriage was going to take place.

He buries her on the very day they were going to be married.

Jerome Charyn is the author of Johnny One-Eye, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, and The Seventh Babe, a novel about a white third baseman on the Red Sox who also played in the Negro Leagues. Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil is on Facebook.