Executor of Joe DiMaggio’s estate blocks publisher’s use of photos with Marilyn Monroe

More than a decade after Joe DiMaggio’s death, his friend and attorney Morris Engelberg is still playing hardball with anyone seeking to exploit the Yankee Clipper’s love for Marilyn Monroe.  Engelberg, who became the executor of DiMaggio’s estate when the baseball star died in 1999 – and, in the process, the zealous gatekeeper of Joltin’ Joe’s legacy – has fired off a letter to Yale University Press warning that he will pursue “all legal remedies available” if the publisher persists in using a photo of the baseball great and the blond bombshell for the jacket of a book it’s planning to issue next spring. “Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil,” by Jerome Charyn, is slated as a volume in the Yale publisher’s “Icons of America” series. In an earlier letter, Yale assistant general counsel Pamela Chambers assured Engelberg that Charyn’s book “is a scholarly work of quality” before noting, “we believe that the Press’ proposed use of the DiMaggio image is a permissible use” under the applicable law. Engelberg was not swayed, though.  “We will not authorize any photo of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe … to be on the jacket of any book,”  he responded in a letter dated Sept. 28. “This was a ‘no-no’ in Mr. DiMaggio’s lifetime,” the attorney wrote.  “We have respected Mr. DiMaggio’s wishes that there be no commercial or other venture depicting” Joe and Marilyn. — NY Daily News