Baseball, Giuseppe maintained, was the most excellent game; and his sons (though he wouldn’t say this aloud) played more excellently than anyone else. With each new family triumph, he would gravely receive auguri—congratulations from the other papas at the Wharf. With each new tribute he would modestly concur, claiming nothing for himself. “Figghiu miu ha fattu bravu.” Yes, my son has done well.
Now, if Joe happened to be rising, wanting coffee, just as Giuseppe was anticipating his midday meal . . . well, no longer did the old man think his son a lazy, lag-abed bum. Joe had to get proper rest. Or if Joe happened to be coming home as the sky was growing light (and Giuseppe finished his morning coffee) . . . that was not Giuseppe’s affair. That was strictly Joe’s business. And the old man could have confidence: he’d never hear about that business from others; he’d never have to explain away anything that Joe did. For if his namesake had learned nothing else from Giuseppe, surely, he had taken in Lesson Number One: no one else should ever know your business. Reputation is like currency, to be held in the fist: everybody else wants to take it from you.
JOE DIDN’T SPEND much time in the neighborhood, except at home, except to sleep—or except when photographers had to make his picture. They’d always want a shot of him at Fisherman’s Wharf, holding up a crab, or mending his brother’s nets—like that’s how Joe spent the winter.
But no matter how ridiculous, the pictures were important to Joe—each one a message to the Yankees, about his contentment at home, about his popularity . . . about the hero game. Joe and Tom had sent back the Yankees’ contract. That hardnose, Barrow, was offering no more than Joe had made as a rookie. Then, Barrow sent a second contract—a substantial raise, fifteen thousand dollars. But Joe wouldn’t sign. He wanted twenty.
So, there were more pictures on the wire—of Joe with his old neighborhood pals . . . singing! They put Joe in the front, holding an accordion that he couldn’t play. They got the name of the club wrong; they called it “Jolly Rogers.” But it got the message across: Joe was with friends, unconcerned.
In truth, that was about the only time that Joe got together with the Jolly Knights. His friends were older now. Shirts DeMarco was still around wherever Joe went, joined now by a happy fast talker, a sometimes fisherman named Reno Barsocchini. They were what the boys called “fast clippers.” They didn’t hang around North Beach. That was too close, too many eyes, people who knew Joe—it made him nervous. And they didn’t spend their time singing.
Niggy Marino ran into Joe one time that winter, downtown—Fourth and Mission—in a whorehouse run by a madam named Flo. The place was famous for young girls—none over twenty-one—and Joe had a bevy around him, like a pasha. He seemed glad to see Niggy, even offered to pay for Niggy’s girl. (He owed him one.) But Niggy was Sicilian enough to know, he couldn’t take anything from Joe. “Naw, I done it already,” Niggy said, and got the hell out of the place. Anyone from home was going to make Joe tense.
Joe was more and more nervous as the winter wore on. It turned out people knew him all over town. Everybody asked about his contract. And Barrow, in New York, had him listed as a holdout. Wire photos were all very well but no one, least of all Joe, believed that he was going to hang around mending nets. The ace of the pitching staff, Red Ruffing, was holding out—and Gehrig, the Iron Horse, the MVP. Joe figured those guys would get the attention (and any extra money in the budget, too). Joe was a poker player: he knew when to fold a losing hand. He would settle for seventeen thousand dollars, double his rookie pay.
The truth was, Joe knew, just like his dad: everything he had came from playing ball. And he would hold what he’d attained with a white-knuckled fist. He’d let nothing take it away: no mistakes! No bad contracts, no bad seasons; if he could prevent it, not one bad game; no whispers to dull the shine on his name, no bad stories, not one bad photo.
There was another old friend who saw DiMaggio that winter—when Joe and his entourage left town so they could relax in private. Tony Gomez, the shortstop who was too black to play for the Seals, was playing in the lumber leagues in Reno, Nevada, and working that winter for a Reno garage. A newspaper friend tipped Tony off: “You know who’s in town? It’s your pal, DiMaggio.”
Tony and the newsman found Joe in a nightclub, about five P.M., having a couple of belts. Joe remembered Tony, of course.
“Hey, Gomez, how you doin’?”
“Hey, Joe, let’s take a couple of pictures—you and me.”
Joe was off his stool in a flash. “Not here! Shit! NOT HERE!”
THE STRANGE PART WAS, the pressure went away when Joe went east again to play ball. At least it was different, easier. No one could control the game, of course, but Joe was in charge of everything he did. On the field he could do everything right.
He wanted a full spring training, to start the year at the top of his game. But medical woes once again intervened. This time, he played but nine exhibitions. Then, he couldn’t raise his arm without pain. So the Yanks sent him north alone, once again, to the doctors: this time, it was tonsillitis (and the nerve inflammation had spread to his arm). So, there was a tonsillectomy—and once again, a drumroll of three weeks, before Joe trotted out to center field.
On May 1, DiMaggio made his first start, and it looked like a replay of last year’s heroics: Joe went four-for-four against the Red Sox, the Yankees won 3–2, and DiMaggio figured in every run they scored. Daniel crowed in the World Telegram: “DiMaggio is back.” But it wasn’t the same old Joe.
He was better. It was hard to believe, but he was just twenty-two, a growing boy: now he was almost six feet two, close to two hundred pounds, and every extra pound was bad news for pitchers. Joe widened his stance at the plate, cut down on his stride till he was even more motionless . . . and took off on a home run tear.
In early June, he hit two in one game against the hapless Browns to put his season total at eleven. By July 4, he got to twenty, with a grand slam that broke up a tie game, and gave the Yanks a doubleheader sweep. There were sixty-one thousand fans in the park that day, and as the New York Times described the scene, “The stands shook with shouts and stomping, a deafening crescendo of shrieks, cheers, whistling and handclapping. At the plate there began a demonstration of affectionate mobbing that continued on the bench as every player pummeled and thumped the youth.”
This was living! Or this was his life now. In the season, every day, he had things to do—and he did them. No one could ask for more. And no one would ask about anything else. In New York, Joe would take a cab—or even better, get a ride—from his Edison Hotel suite (they gave him a break: five bucks a day—he could pay the whole thing from his meal money) . . . to the Stadium, arriving sometimes by eleven A.M. The game wouldn’t start until three o’clock, but in the locker room, Joe was safe, at home. This was in accord with the Yankee ethic; Joe McCarthy wanted his boys in their roost, talking baseball. “Guys who rush in and out of the clubhouse,” the skipper always said, “rush in and out of the big leagues.” After games, DiMaggio would stay later than anyone else: maybe after two or three hours he’d emerge. That way, even the die-hard kids with autograph books would have given up. He wouldn’t have to talk to anyone.
On a stool in front of his locker, legs crossed, a smoke in his hand, he had everything he needed: a baseball game to think about, guys to listen to, guys who catered to him. The chief of the clubhouse (Clubhouse Boy, he was called, no matter his age) was Pete Sheehy, who’d come running if Joe even looked his way. “Half-a-cuppa-coffee-Pete,” Joe would murmur, like a good-luck mantra, every fifteen minutes or so. Sheehy would appear instantly with the half-a-cup, and some half-baked wisecrack to keep Joe loose. Pete had been around forever—since the days of Ruth, anyway—so he had needling rights. One day, DiMaggio was pulling on his pants, when he stopped, and fingered gingerly at something on his buttock, something that hurt. Joe craned his neck around, trying to see, but that was hopeless. “Hey, Pete!” he called. “Come look at this. I can’t see what the he
ll this is.” Pete appeared, bent at Joe’s behind and announced, rather louder than was required: “It’s a pimple from all the guys kissin’ yer ass.”
Joe took it from Sheehy; he knew Pete loved him. The sure sign was the number on Joe’s pinstripes: Pete handed out the uniforms. The Yankees had invented numbers on the back of the jersey—along with the pinstripes (designed by Col. Ruppert’s tailor, to make the Babe look not-so-fat). The first Yankee numbers reflected, simply, the batting order: so, the Bambino was Number 3, Gehrig was Number 4, etc. But after that first generation of Bombers, Sheehy took over, and the numbers became his judgment call. When Joe came up, Pete gave him a respectable Number 18, which had been worn by the pitcher Johnny Allen until McCarthy exiled him to Cleveland. By the time Joe actually played in a major league game, Sheehy had revalued him to Number 9 (i.e., the best number unworn by the Founding Fathers). And now, Joe had received Pete Sheehy’s highest tribute: there was the Babe, there was Gehrig . . . and Number 5 was DiMag.
Anyway, Joe liked wiseacres. They made him laugh. They said the things he wouldn’t or couldn’t say. If some of the jokes were on him, that didn’t bother the Daig (as they called him—short for Dago, of course). Actually, the Yankees had a nickname problem. With Lazzeri and Crosetti still anchoring the middle infield, Lazzeri became Big Dago, Crosetti was Little Dago, and Joe was simply Dago, or Daig. One day, the best joker (and star left-hander) on the club, Vernon “Goofy” Gomez, was holding a lead against the woeful Browns—late innings, one man out, and one Browns runner on first. The next batter slapped a comebacker to Gomez, who wheeled around to start the double play . . . but fired the ball way over second base, into center field—straight to DiMaggio, who was charging in to back up the play. That put Brownies on first and second, and in the Yankee dugout, the skipper was furious. When the inning ended—Gomez pitched out of the jam—Joe McCarthy climbed all over his pitcher.
“We should’ve had a double play! What the hell are you thinkin’ out there?”
“Someone shouted, ‘Throw it to the Dago,’ ” Gomez replied mildly. “Nobody said which Dago.”
McCarthy turned to the dugout at large and barked: “From now on you’ll specify which Dago, you hear me?”
Then, he noted all his boys laughing into their hands. Gomez was the only one who could needle McCarthy.
Gomez was Joe’s road roomie now, and El Goofo took care of the kid, like Joe was his silent little brother. In every town, the Knights of Columbus, the Verdi Association, or some other Italian-American club, wanted Joe to grace their meeting, their dinner. Joe couldn’t turn them all down . . . but he wouldn’t go without Lefty.
“We would sit through these boring dinners,” Gomez recalled to Maury Allen, in Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?, “and finally the guy would get around to introducing all his cousins and uncles and friends in the audience. Joe would get up, the crowd would give him a big hand, and he would say, ‘Thank you for inviting me. Now you can hear Lefty tell some funny stories.’ Then he would sit down and I would have to entertain them for twenty minutes before we could go home. Then they would load him down with presents and that would be the evening. He’d come home with a dozen shirts or a golf bag or a watch or a toilet set or luggage or something like that.
“ . . . Everybody who knew Joe in those days knew he didn’t talk. I remember a two-week road trip—New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis. Two weeks, not one word. I’ll tell you what he did do. He would take along one of those small radios on the trip and listen to the radio, the big-band music and those old quiz shows. Dr. IQ and things like that. He’d read the sports pages and he’d read—well, he’ll probably kill me for this but he loved to read Superman comics.
“One day we were walking down the street of some town and he suddenly turns to me and says, ‘Lefty, you know what day today is?’ I say, ‘Yeah, Wednesday.’ Then he says, ‘No, no, today is the day the new Superman comes out.’ Every Wednesday there was a new issue. So now he sees this newspaper stand and looks to see if they got comic books. He points to it and wants me to get it for him. He stands off to the side. Hell, he was Joe DiMaggio and if the newsstand guy saw him buy Superman comics it would be all over the world. I got one of those faces nobody could ever recognize so he wants me to buy it for him. ‘Joe, is this what you want, the Superman comics?’ He looks around at a couple of people there and he says, ‘No, you know I wouldn’t buy that.’ Then I walk away and he motions again. I finally buy it for him and he stuffs it into his pocket. He spends the night with Superman.”
IN HIS SECOND YEAR, DiMaggio was threatening to break the greatest record in American sports—Babe Ruth’s mark of sixty home runs—and the wires flashed his every at bat to fans across the nation. Joe had twenty-three by mid-July, when sixty thousand Cleveland faithful paid their way into Municipal Stadium, rooting for their own kid phenom, Bob Feller, to shut DiMaggio down. Rapid Robert threw harder than any man in the game. And with an unhittable curveball to match his heater, the eighteen-year-old ace was on his way to four consecutive years as the AL strikeout king. But Feller wasn’t too bright. Instead of working Joe with that wicked curve, Feller kept trying to throw the fastball by him. Joe touched him up for a double and a triple, and then in the ninth, two outs, game tied, DiMaggio smashed a grand slam.
BULLETIN:
NY 5, Cle. 1; HR DiMaggio (24); DiMaggio 5 RBI . . .
At the end of July, DiMaggio hit three in one weekend, two in one game, to raise his total to thirty-one homers.
DiMaggio One Ahead of Ruth Pace in ’27 . . .
Two days later, almost sixty-seven thousand fans came to Yankee Stadium—on a Tuesday—for Gehrig Appreciation Day, Lou’s 1,900th straight game. Lou got a pocket watch presented by the Broadway star George M. Cohan; the Yankees got a doubleheader sweep over the White Sox; and Joe got the cheers for his thirty-second home run.
Poor Larrupin’ Lou. For thirteen years, he’d played every game at first base—played through seventeen different fractures of the small bones in his hands and fingers. He’d been friendly to his fellow players, modest with the writers, a sterling model for the city’s youth . . . but he never could be the star.
Not that he didn’t try. Gehrig (actually his smart wife) hired a publicist and business manager—Christy Walsh, an aggressive tout who’d kept Babe Ruth out of bankruptcy by booking him for exhibition games, shows, promotions, and moving pictures. Walsh said Gehrig should change his public image, and offered him to the movie world as America’s next Tarzan. Alas, the Coast producers took one look at Lou in lion skins and decided he looked better in knickers. His legs would never make the grade. Lou did land an endorsement deal for Huskies Cereal, from Quaker Oats. But it only made him famous as a boob. On a nationwide radio show, Lou was asked what he ate of a morning, and in his nervousness blurted out, “a heaping bowlful of Wheaties!”
Walsh finally got Lou into a picture show, a modern-day western, wherein Lou appeared as Lou (in pants) and routed the bad guys by hurling billiard balls at their heads. Reaction was more or less summed up by Jack Miley, the New York Daily News writer, whose comments were reprinted nationwide: “As an actor he’s a good first baseman. He oughta let it go at that . . . .
“Lou is a helluva good ballplayer,” Miley wrote, “but he lacks color and you can’t smear that stuff on with a brush . . . . If anybody is going to replace Ruth and overshadow his teammates as an individual attraction with the Yanks, it will be DiMag and not Gehrig . . . . When it comes to that personal magnetism, you’ve either got it or you ain’t. Like love, you can’t buy it in a store. Roosevelt has it; Hoover hasn’t. Dempsey has it, but not Tunney. DiMaggio, like Ruth, has; but not Gehrig.”
Gehrig acknowledged his deficiencies in the “color” department. He thought the cause was his shyness, the lack of a snappy line: “When these writers would ask me questions,” he was quoted by his biographer, Ray Robinson, in The Iron Horse, “they’d often think I was rude if I didn’t answer right away.
They didn’t know I was so scared I was almost shitting in my pants.”
But Joe was as shy—and just as silent—as Gehrig. The difference was that Joe was aware from the first moment, aware at every moment, of the hero game. He was alive to the power of the camera: he made himself available, he could smile, and he knew when to smile. With writers he was as alert, as poised and pent as he was in center field. Positioning was the edge in both games.
Joe didn’t have to say much. Any words from him were like a confidence that he bestowed, not to be misused. If Joe talked to a couple of writers, they felt like they were on the inside. “Get a load of that blonde,” Joe would say—and they’d never forget it. They’d never forget: “DiMag said that to me!” He could bring them in—just enough—so they could play the big game together.
The morning after Gehrig Appreciation Day, Joe was out early, off to the Bronx—not to the ballpark, but farther uptown, to the Biograph Studios on East 175th. He was going into the movies, too, with a cameo as a would-be singer in Manhattan Merry-Go-Round. A reporter from the Telegram watched Joe sit for makeup, then pose amid a gaggle of showgirls—one of them combing his hair, another giving him a manicure. And Joe leaned over to the newsman (just man-to-man, of course), and whispered: “This is hotter’n a ballpark!” After the manicure, Joe confided: “The smart thing I do is never fall in love. I just talk a good game with women.”
Joe only had three lines in the movie, but he screwed them up enough to require twelve retakes. Plenty of fun could have been made of that. But in the paper, next day, there was no mocking “analysis” of Joe DiMaggio, thespian. The writer mentioned the twelve takes only to inform his readers: “All the girls whispered that Joe improved with every one of them, and that should be enough for you. They said he was only colossal at first.”
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book) Page 13