The DiMaggios

by Tom Clavin

  Many people were surprised that Joe agreed to the DiMaggio brothers’ reunion that day in May 1986. He did it for Dominic, and to end his estrangement from Vince. He didn’t know yet that Vince was dying. Maybe it was old familial instincts kicking in. Dominic’s son Paul relates an anecdote from that day that sheds some light on Joe’s mood.

  “I was in the clubhouse with my father before the regular game, and it was full of reporters, photographers, players, retired players. The place was packed,” Paul recalls. “Dad and Joe were on the other side of the room, in an office. I figured I’d never get through to see them, so I left. I got outside and began walking around the stadium when a door suddenly opened and someone called to me, ‘Mr. DiMaggio, Joe would like to speak to you.’ I step in, and Joe was in the stairwell. He said, ‘I saw you over there, leaving. I just wanted to say goodbye.’ I was very touched by that, and to me it showed that my uncle was a gentleman and a guy with feelings.”

  Vincent Paul DiMaggio died at his home on October 3, a few weeks after his 74th birthday, with Madeline, Joanne, and Vicki there. He and his wife had been married for almost 54 years. He had enjoyed time spent with his four grandchildren and managed to live long enough to see two great-grandchildren born. He died with his belief in the Bible intact.

  Predictably, obituaries identified him as Joe’s older brother; sometimes Dominic was included. Most obit writers were tactful enough not to mention the strikeouts. A few months after he died, the Sports Heritage magazine published “Vince DiMaggio’s Song,” an appreciation by Jack B. Moore, who in 1985 had visited Vince. Moore was working on a book about Joe (published in March 1986), and Joe had refused an interview. Vince invited Moore to his home in North Hollywood to fill in some blanks about the early life of the DiMaggios. The 1987 tribute did not begin in a promising way: “It must not have been easy for Vince DiMaggio to go through life as the wrong DiMaggio.” Vince spent as much time with Moore as he wanted, and when the interview was over, he and Madeline gave Moore a tour of their backyard garden. Then Vince played tapes he had recorded of himself singing arias and traditional Italian songs like “O Sole Mio.” Moore was entranced. He concluded his piece: “He was a good singer, a gentle and loving person, a very good Fuller Brush salesman, a decent major leaguer, and a truly great Vince DiMaggio.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  What Toots Shor had said in 1955 about Joe being a very lonely man remained true for the rest of his life, especially in his last decade, when he tried (with very aggressive help) to fill the void with money. While he stopped having flowers placed on Marilyn’s grave in 1982—people were stealing them—and had relationships with other women, Joe remained too attached to her memory to find the kind of lasting companionship his brothers had found with their wives. A few friends remained, but others dropped away, died, or were frozen out because they had angered Joe in some way. He and Joe Jr. became estranged. He even showed little affection toward Dom when it was just the two of them left.

  “I always had the sense when I was with him that he was a sad person,” says Paul DiMaggio about his uncle. “And he was an unfortunate person, for all his fame. He was an incredibly shy, self-conscious guy for an American hero. It was hard to believe that he could last as long as he did with all those feelings stacked up inside him.”

  The last thing Joe sought in his seventies was headlines, but there he was in the news as a survivor of the earthquake that struck the Bay Area just after 5:00 P.M. on October 17, 1989, shortly before Game 3 of the World Series between the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants. It was not nearly as devastating as the Bay Area quake that Giuseppe and Rosalie had felt in 1906, yet 62 people were killed by it.

  Joe was spending the majority of his time in San Francisco, living on the top floor of the house on Beach Street, with the sister to whom he had always been closest, Marie, occupying the bottom floor. Once again, despite being in her eighties, she cooked and cared for Giuseppe Jr.

  After the quake struck, Dominic couldn’t reach Joe or Marie. It occurred to him to call Bob Sales, the sports editor of the Boston Herald, who had to have assigned a reporter to be in the Bay Area to cover the World Series. “I’m very worried about my brother and my sister,” Dominic told Sales. “They have a house right where there was so much damage, and we can’t get hold of them.” Sales told his Series reporter, Stephen Harris, to find Joe.

  As Harris told David Cataneo: “I got to the closest point to where his house was. His house was located on a street that was right at the point where some of the worst damage happened. There was a house right across the street that sort of pancaked down on top of itself, totally destroyed. Right on his corner, about three doors down, an eight-unit apartment building exploded because of a gas main. Several people got killed, I think.” Joe emerged out of the chaos, telling Harris, “I’m looking for my sister. We haven’t been able to find her yet. She’s very old, and we’re worried about her.”

  Marie was at a friend’s house, shaken but uninjured. While Joe did use his hero status in the city to get contractors working quickly on his damaged house, he otherwise waited like everyone else on lines for food and water being dispensed at Red Cross stations. Perplexed and awed residents of the neighborhood would notice a tall, distinguished-looking gentleman they recognized as one of America’s greatest sports heroes.

  Between the earthquake damage, the dampness of the climate, and the taxes in California, Joe sought another home. He bought a place on a golf course in south Florida—ironically, in the town called Hollywood. He played there and stayed mostly to himself, though his adoptive granddaughters—Joe Jr. had married a widow and adopted her children—inspired him to establish a wing at Memorial Regional Hospital in his new hometown, the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital.

  South Florida attorney Morris Engelberg met Joe in the mid-1980s and became one of the Clipper’s few confidants. In 2003 he published a book titled DiMaggio: Setting the Record Straight, “a story of deep friendship, of unquestioned loyalty by a middle-aged man exhibiting a boyish devotion to a graying American idol.” Much of the book was intended to repudiate how Engelberg had been characterized in some published accounts, especially Cramer’s biography, as a money-grubbing leech who made millions on a sports hero he viewed as a cash cow.

  It is indisputable that he helped Joe make a lot of money. Engelberg surveyed the landscape of a booming sports memorabilia market and realized that few if any autographs would be more valuable than the Great DiMaggio’s. He came up with one scenario after another, and Joe, seeing how each one made more money than the last, became a willing actor in them. At an appearance in Atlantic City in 1988, you could buy Joe’s autograph for $15. In 1993 he sold 1,941 bats on the QVC channel for $3,000 each. By the late 1990s, a signed DiMaggio baseball was worth $300. It could be argued that Joe, given the boom in sports memorabilia and collectibles late in his life, would have earned a lot of money anyway, but Engelberg made it easy for him.

  Engelberg and his entourage enforced Joe’s strict rules about what he would sign: no original art, books, round objects, bats, uniforms, advertising items, or anything to do with Marilyn. He wasn’t being paranoid. A year after Joe died, there was an auction of baseball-related memorabilia. Apparently, Joe had been unaware when he scribbled his signature that he was affixing it to the cover of the first Playboy issue, which had devoted a few pages to Marilyn Monroe. It sold for $40,250.

  Engelberg continued to wheel and deal, turning the Joe DiMaggio name into an ATM. To be fair, there were show promoters who were making Joe offers he couldn’t refuse, up to $100,000 for an appearance. If you had the greatest living ballplayer, your event had to be top drawer. And such fees were perhaps the only way Joe had left, other than the once-a-year ovations on Old Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium, to measure the endurance of his fame.

  Joe had to know that however much money he earned, he couldn’t take it with him. That didn’t mean, though, that Jo
e Jr. was going to get it. Joe had pretty much written his son off. He told hangers-on that he was ashamed of the bum.

  Joe Jr. always had the odds stacked against him. He was the only child of one of the most famous sports stars the country had ever produced. His divorced parents had fought over him. At 12, he had gone to live with his father and Marilyn after they married, and then they were divorced. Marilyn died. His mother had divorced again and married again. (Dorothy Arnold would pass away in November 1997.) He himself had married and divorced and was estranged from his children. He seemed to have met none of his father’s expectations, and his father made no secret of it. Junior had to think that was the reason his father spent less and less time with him as the years went on.

  Joe Jr. and Marilyn, on the other hand, had genuinely hit it off. She tried to serve as a bridge between the boy and his reticent father. If she and Joe had been together longer, a lot might have turned out differently. For the rest of her life, she and Joe Jr. stayed in touch. The night she died they spoke on the phone; he said later there was no indication that she had only hours to live. While his childhood wasn’t as awful as Marilyn’s had been, Joe Jr. experienced his share of abandonment, often shuffled off to camps and boarding schools. He had gone to Yale, then dropped out and enlisted in the Marine Corps, but even that structured environment didn’t help. He drank and drugged his way through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Joe Sr. said the hell with him.

  Dominic, as was his way, tried to help. He had to know something of what life was like for Joe Jr., being always compared to the incomparable. When Joe Jr. was looking for a job after the Marines, Dominic gave him one at his plant in Lawrence. He also offered his nephew a room in his house, but Joe Jr. slept on a cot in the factory. He was diligent enough at his job that Dominic sent him to Baltimore, with a promotion, to help get a new factory there off the ground.

  That factory was destroyed by a fire. Joe Jr. fell in love with a widow in Baltimore. He and Sue married, and Joe Jr. adopted her two young daughters, Paula and Kathie. Joe Sr. never warmed up to Sue, another reason for father and son not to see each other. However, Joe did embrace his new granddaughters. For the rest of his life, he spent as much time as he could with them and helped them financially after he had washed his hands of their adoptive father.

  After Joe Jr. and his family moved to the West Coast, his drug use put a strain on the marriage it couldn’t bear. When he and Sue divorced, he drifted away from his daughters, his eventual granddaughters, and especially his father. Every time Joe Sr. heard from his son he had a different address. Joe Jr. would occasionally accept money from his father, but he wasn’t really interested in money. He wound up living in a trailer and working in a junkyard. That was where he was when he was told that his father was very sick.

  Entering their eighties, one might think that Joe and Dominic, the only two sons of Giuseppe left, would want to be as close as they could be. Instead, Dominic was collateral damage as Joe’s world contracted and he came to trust fewer people. And the avarice Joe displayed selling his signed memorabilia bothered Dominic.

  “To my recollection, my father went to one signing when he kept the money, but otherwise he never took a penny for his autograph. Yet they weren’t free either,” says Paul DiMaggio. “For many years he had a standard letter that would be sent to anyone asking him to autograph a ball, photo, whatever, to send a check made out to the Association of Professional Baseball Players of America, which helped retired baseball players, especially those who played before there was a pension. I can’t tell you how many of those letters I had to copy and send out. Then he would sign what people wanted and turn all those checks over to the organization.”

  For his part, it bothered Joe that his brother had such a Midas touch. Dominic had made a lot of money on commercial real estate in the Bay Area, including DiMaggio’s Grotto, which wouldn’t have existed without Joe’s sweat and stardom. Dominic had it easy in other ways too: a long marriage, all three of his children were college graduates, and he wasn’t always on his guard in Boston or at the vacation home in Florida. Pretty good life for a guy without a single World Series ring or MVP Award.

  And there had been the Mamie situation. When their sister had gotten too sick to care for herself, “Joe was sitting in San Francisco, and he didn’t lift a finger,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer. “So Dominic had to fly across the country, to put her into a nursing home. Dom wasn’t happy about that episode. And neither was Joe. Because Dom flying all that way to take care of Mamie—that shamed Joe. And shame was what he hated worst.”

  In his final years, Joe had little contact with his remaining brother. Even in Florida at the same time, they often stayed apart. “We saw Ted Williams more than we saw Joe,” says Paul DiMaggio. “I really don’t know what the problems between the brothers were. Joe was just a very unhappy guy, and it didn’t take much for there to be a problem.” The more Joe was involved with Engelberg and the unseemly chase for money, the more Dominic felt shut out. It was like his brother had become a captive of his own cult.

  In his later years, Joe refused most honors, still shunning the spotlight and people—other than Engelberg—whom he thought were trying to make money off his name. He said no when the town of Martinez wanted him to dedicate Joe DiMaggio Drive and baseball fields within the city. He also said no to the ceremony dedicating Joltin’ Joe, the speedboat he had been given by the Yankees in 1949, which Martinez officials had restored. (He didn’t avoid Martinez itself. He sometimes went to Long Drugs there to chat with one of his granddaughters, and he’d stop for a meal at Amato’s.) He did not pick up his honorary degree from the University of San Francisco. He did, uncharacteristically, serve as the grand marshal of the Half Moon Bay Halloween Parade in 1994, a few weeks before he turned 80.

  The next year a San Francisco newspaper assigned a reporter to see if DiMaggio still spent time in the city. “It’s an odd task, tracking the ghost of a man who is still alive and well, but Joe DiMaggio is more ghost than real guy,” wrote Scott Ostler. “The man who packed and rocked Yankee Stadium for 13 years, who married Marilyn, who was San Francisco’s No. 1 son and gift to the world, moves about quietly, slipping in and out of old haunts, barely rippling the water.” Ostler reported that some of Joe’s grade school buddies could be found playing cards at the Italian Athletic Club every afternoon, across the park from Saints Peter and Paul Church, where all the DiMaggio funerals had been, and “Dario Lodigiani, who played big-league ball for six seasons and still scouts for the White Sox, runs into DiMaggio now and then at a golf course in Napa.”

  Ostler concluded his article, “In every sighting of Joe DiMaggio, he is well-dressed, natty and dapper, coat and tie, shoes shined.”

  Until his health failed him, Joe continued to visit San Francisco from Florida. Arthritis and a pacemaker did not stop him from traveling. (The installation of the pacemaker in 1987 had caused him to miss his first Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium in 35 years.) There were no fishermen left of his father’s generation, of course, but some of the kids he remembered from the old neighborhood, as well as men he’d become acquainted with over the years, were still around. Lefty O’Doul’s was an old haunt to visit, and Liverpool Lil’s (now co-owned by Gil Hodges III). Joe might sip Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and chat about baseball. He was sometimes seen in his car parked by Fisherman’s Wharf, reading his mail. He could no longer linger at the restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf. It had closed in 1986, after 50 years in business.

  He remained close to Marie, who, despite health issues, plugged along through her eighties. (Mamie had died at 88 in 1992.) She turned 90 in July 1996, then, the following year, she was gone. She left behind her daughter, Betty, who lived in Los Angeles, and her two brothers. Dominic flew west, and they went through the burial process once again.

  Joe would accept invitations to be at Yankee Stadium, and not just for Old-Timers’ Games. George Steinbrenner, owner of the franchise since 1973
, treated Joe like the Bronx Bomber royalty he was. In October 1996, the Yankees had just won their first world championship in 18 years (a drought unthinkable in the Yankee Clipper’s day), and Joe accepted Steinbrenner’s offer to ride in the first car in the ticker-tape parade through the Canyon of Heroes in Manhattan. On Old-Timers’ Days, he’d see the few fellows left of his generation of Yankees—Berra, Rizzuto, Henrich, Silvera, Bobby Brown, a few others. He enjoyed seeing them, but he didn’t linger with them. After the ceremonies, he was gone.

  On Old-Timers’ Day in July 1998, Bob Sheppard announced the last participant: “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise and welcome the greatest living ballplayer, the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio.” Joe strode out in a dark blue suit, and the fans roared, though few at the Stadium that day had seen Joe play. Two months later, he was back in the Bronx for Joe DiMaggio Day and to celebrate the team’s record-breaking 114-victory season. The highlight was being presented with replicas of his nine World Series championship rings, which had been stolen from a hotel room many years earlier. But Joe looked frail, and word started to spread that the Big Guy was seriously ill.

  Indeed, it was his last public appearance. Joe had lung cancer, but he didn’t learn that until the following month when he checked into Regional Memorial Hospital in Hollywood to battle a bout of pneumonia. A cancerous tumor was discovered in his right lung. It was removed on October 14. There were more procedures during what turned out to be a 99-day stay in the hospital.

  Joe did not go easily. Given that his dignity had always been so extremely important to him, it might have been a blessing if he had died suddenly. But the lung cancer that killed him took its time. His body betrayed him again—this time by being too tough to give in.