He then embarked on what he no doubt hoped would be a long, respectable career as a literary biographer. He earned a degree in hotel management from Cornell, a master's in fine arts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and did work on a doctorate in English literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was a large man, known for chomping on cigars, boasting that he liked to write in the nude (wearing socks) and talking up women about his kinky sexual predilections-just the kind of biographical details that would play so well in his books. His given name was Clemens Claude Oscar Heymann. David Heymann, seen here at Cafe Milano in Washington, Oct. She then declared that 'this is getting ugly' and hung up.īiographer C. She cut me off in mid-sentence, shouting that such questions were improper because she had thought I was calling only to ask about the marketing of a book by a dead author. Nothing troubling turned up, she told me, not even a misspelled name.īestler's mood changed when I told her I wanted to discuss numerous fabrications Newsweek had uncovered in Joe and Marilyn. She told Newsweek during a phone conversation in July that Heymann was 'a true professional' who 'finished the book before he died.' Still, Bestler said, she paid to have the book thoroughly fact-checked just to make sure all was in order. In May 2012, Heymann fell dead in the lobby of his New York City apartment building, but that presented no problem for his publisher, according to Emily Bestler, who edited his last four books. In Joe and Marilyn, Heymann wrote that DiMaggio beat Monroe, wiretapped her home and stalked her by skulking around in disguises, wearing a fake beard and for hours holding up a copy of The New York Times so no one would notice him in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria hotel. It was often titillating and sometimes shocking stuff. In this and his previous 10 books, Heymann served up intimate details no other celebrity biographer could match. The publisher, a subsidiary of media behemoth CBS, says Joe and Marilyn tells 'the riveting true story' of the lusty, tempestuous and brief marriage between the Yankees slugger and the iconic actress.

Bobby and jackie by c david heymann