They Were Married for 274 Days — and He Sent Roses for Twenty Years

The short version

Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio married in a civil ceremony at San Francisco City Hall on 14 January 1954. Monroe filed for divorce on 5 October 1954, and it was granted on 27 October 1954 on the grounds of mental cruelty. The marriage lasted 274 days. They remained in contact for the rest of her life, and DiMaggio arranged her funeral in August 1962.

Dates and documents

1. 14 January 1954

   A civil ceremony at San Francisco City Hall, attended by a scrum of press.

2. February 1954

   The couple travel to Japan for a baseball tour; Monroe leaves to perform for US troops in Korea.

3. 15 September 1954

   The subway-grate scene for The Seven Year Itch is filmed on Lexington Avenue in New York before a large crowd. Filming is repeated on a studio set.

4. 5 October 1954

   Monroe files for divorce in Santa Monica.

5. 27 October 1954

   The divorce is granted on grounds of mental cruelty.

6. 1961

   DiMaggio helps arrange Monroe's discharge from a psychiatric clinic and they holiday in Florida.

7. 8 August 1962

   DiMaggio arranges and attends Monroe's funeral; he restricts the guest list to family and close friends.

On the record

• PUBLIC RECORD: the marriage licence of 14 January 1954 and the divorce decree of 27 October 1954, both filed in California.
• CONFIRMED: the New York street filming of the subway-grate scene took place publicly on 15 September 1954 and drew a crowd of onlookers and photographers.
• CONFIRMED: DiMaggio organised Monroe's 1962 funeral and kept it closed to the film industry.
• CONFIRMED: DiMaggio never remarried after the divorce.

What each of them publicly said

Monroe's divorce filing cited mental cruelty, the standard California ground of the period, and she said little else publicly. DiMaggio, famously, said almost nothing at all about the marriage for the rest of his life — a silence he maintained through four decades of press requests.

That silence is the reason this story is told almost entirely by other people. Nearly every vivid detail in circulation — what was said in a New York hotel room, what he thought of the film she was making — comes from third parties, memoirs written decades later, or reporters recalling conversations. It reads as intimate knowledge and is nothing of the kind.

Two kinds of famous

The mismatch was structural rather than temperamental. DiMaggio had retired in 1951 as the most decorated player of his generation, in a sport whose culture rewarded restraint and treated publicity as vulgar. Monroe was at the exact moment of maximum studio pressure, contractually required to appear, pose and promote, with a persona that the studio owned and marketed.

Continue reading · What happened next?Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton: The Love Affair That Became a Legend — What Happened Next?Their love story began on the set of Cleopatra and produced two marriages, two divorces, eleven films and a correspondence that outlived them both. Here is the documented sequence — and what happened after the second divorce.

The subway-grate scene is the collision made literal: a piece of promotional filming staged outdoors in Manhattan, at night, in front of a crowd of onlookers and press photographers, for a shot that was reshot on a closed set anyway. Nine months into a marriage between a man who hated attention and a woman whose contract required it, the divorce filing came three weeks later.

Unresolved

The often-repeated account that DiMaggio arranged for roses to be delivered to Monroe's crypt three times a week for twenty years is REPORTED, widely, but has never been documented by a florist record or a primary source. Reports of an argument in New York on the night of the subway-grate filming are also secondhand. Neither is presented here as fact.

How it ended

Monroe married Arthur Miller in June 1956; that marriage ended in 1961. DiMaggio remained close to her in the final year of her life and was, by every account, the person who took charge when she died.

Where they are now

Monroe died on 4 August 1962, aged 36. DiMaggio died on 8 March 1999, aged 84. He was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955, the year after the divorce.

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