It turned out, the writer missed the big story (or wouldn’t write it). One of the showgirls on that set was a Minnesota blonde, Dorothy Arnoldine Olson, who used the stage name Dorothy Arnold. Someone brought word to her that Joe DiMaggio would like to meet her.
“Who?” . . . She’d never heard of him.
“He’s a Yankees slugger!”
“So what?” she said. But she went over to meet him anyway. And that was how Joe first broke his smart rule about love.
IT HAD TO BE a showgirl for Joe, of course: Gomez was married to a showgirl—June O’Dea, the song-and-dance artiste. Lefty had seen her in a Broadway musical in ’32—and had to meet her. Now they were the fraternity’s idea of the perfect couple. June was fun, and quite a looker. You could almost hear a buzz through the Stadium when she’d arrive, in her picture hat and makeup, and settle herself in the club seats behind home plate. She understood about nightlife, too, so Lefty still got around with the boys—even in New York—and didn’t disappear with a ring through his nose, like a lot of those poor, henpecked shmoes. (Like, for instance, the dutiful and uxorious Herr Gehrig.)
The way the writers had it figured, Joe did everything Lefty did—from the start, since Joe came up and Gomez adopted him, when the kid didn’t know nothin’. (“What do I do with this jock strap, Lefty? It’s dirty.” . . . “Put it in the basket, dummy. And go tell Pete, ‘I need a jock.’ ”) Joe would show up with a beautiful new suit (he was always in a beautiful suit now), and everybody knew that it came from Lefty’s tailor. Lefty was a bug about fit and finish in clothes—had to be perfect! You’d see them together at the Garden for fights—that was Joe’s favorite night out, the fights—or after a big bout, at Dempsey’s bar, and Gomez would be introducing Joe around like a broad. Lefty knew everybody in the New York sporting scene. They all loved him, told stories about him, or retold his: Lefty was good for a party, even when he wasn’t there.
And what a welcome new member of the club was Joe! He couldn’t tell jokes like Lefty, but he liked a good story, and he’d listen all night. He liked the fight game and the tough-talking boxing guys. Pretty soon they were inviting him; they’d save him ringside seats . . . of course, as their guest—they insisted. That was the point they wanted to show: they knew him—the new star in town. The sporting scene was a betting scene; and with bettors, big players, you were in the know, or you were really a shmoe.
One of the “players” who latched on to DiMaggio was Joe Gould, a sharp operator who was manager to the heavyweight boxer Jimmy Braddock. Gould had an eye for talent—unschooled talent: he’d found Braddock, for instance, on the docks, and made him into the heavyweight champ. (Gould would also make the deal with the mob in Detroit for Braddock’s bout with Joe Louis—the bout that would make Louis the champ.) It was Gould and Braddock who squired Joe to Billy Lahiff’s bar one afternoon, and introduced him to the headwaiter, Bernard “Toots” Shor. Toots was a Philadelphian—he’d only been in New York since 1930—but, by the time Joe walked into his joint, he was already a famous Broadway character—built like a bear, loud, insulting, and beloved. He’d run a couple of speaks for the mob—Lucky Luciano was his boss—and after repeal he bounced in and out of saloon jobs. (No place could afford him for long.) He was actually running Lahiff’s—running it into the ground. Toots took it as an insult if any of his friends tried to pay.
Toots always had a three-way problem: sports, friends, and money. Sports and friends were the only things he cared about—money was just for throwing around. But his friends cost him a fortune. And the way Toots bet, sports cost him even more. For instance, Joe’s first year, ’36, Toots had ahold of Lahiff’s (ready access to the cash in the till), and he was riding a beautiful streak with his first love, the Giants, as they took the pennant in the National League. Toots was sixty grand up on the season—clean at Lahiff’s and fifty thousand dollars in the bank. So he put it on the Giants in the Series . . . which, of course, the Yankees won. By the time Toots met DiMaggio, Joe simply had to be his guest. It was a perfect example of the three-way problem: How could a guy with class, like Toots, worry about a bar tab between friends? Especially when that friend’s a champion! And a champ who already cost Toots Fifty Large! . . . No, Joe couldn’t buy a peanut in his joint.
Joe was everybody’s favorite guest: quiet, mannerly, never any trouble, self-possessed but never full of himself. Wherever he went, he gave the place distinction—as long as they didn’t make a show, introduce him from the stage or something like that. If they did, he was out of there. But in New York there were plenty of places that could take care of a guy in a quiet way. And plenty of people took care of Joe.
Polly Adler, for example, ran the best whorehouse in New York: beautiful appointments, gorgeous girls, the best food, best booze, satin sheets in every room—everything the finest, and most discreet. Joe’s new Broadway friends used to bring him in, thought he’d love it. But Joe happened to mention, he had a complaint. It was those shiny sheets—his knees kept slipping! Well, not for nothing Polly was the best madam in New York. Immediately she sent out for a set of plain cotton sheets. Those were kept in a closet, at the ready, and called ever after the DiMaggio Sheets.
The fact was, the writers had it only half right: Joe did learn from Gomez. But Lefty, in truth, wasn’t out on the town quite as much as they thought. And pretty soon, Joe was getting around to places even Lefty didn’t go. Maybe Joe would have been better off if he’d stayed at Lefty’s knee. For when Joe started talking to his new pals about things that concerned him—money, the Yankees, the sports business—well, of course, they helped out with a world of advice. And Joe took on, as his new brain trust, Joe Gould, Jim Braddock, Toots Shor . . . a mob-connected boxing tout, a heavyweight champ on his way down, and the most spendthrift barkeep in New York.
JOE BACKED OFF gracefully from his quest for Ruth’s record. In August, as his pace slowed, DiMaggio confided to Dan Daniel, he’d be happy if he got to fifty home runs. He said he was more interested in runs batted in: “My goal is to sweep the sacks,” he was quoted. “ . . . I get a thrill in sending runners home.” Privately, Joe groused that he could have hit seventy homers, if he played in a park that was fair to right-handers. And he might have, too: he hit at least a score of huge drives—four hundred feet to left center, four-ten, four-twenty . . . that were just loud outs in the grand Bronx ballyard.
Even so, his forty-six homers led the league—led both leagues, and handily: Hank Greenberg (with forty) and Gehrig (thirty-seven) trailed in the AL; the closest National Leaguer was Mel Ott, with thirty-one. DiMaggio finished with an average of .346, leading the league in runs and total bases; he was second in hits and runs batted in. And after the Yanks had disposed of the Giants in a lopsided Series—five games, it was never close—Joe fell only four votes shy of the highest individual honor in baseball: Most Valuable Player. (He was aced out by the sentimental vote for Charlie Gehringer, the esteemed Detroit second baseman, a veteran of fourteen years who’d won the batting crown with .371.)
No one in the history of big-league ball had broken in with two years like DiMaggio’s. In fact, you had to know where to burrow in the books to find two consecutive years as spectacular—from any man, at any time. No less an oracle than Connie Mack, the septuagenarian sage of the A’s (who’d seen his first ballgames during the Civil War), said Joe could be the greatest ever—and was already the greatest drawing card: “He has attracted a new type of fan to our games. He has made the Italian population baseball conscious.” At twenty-two, with a baseball lifetime ahead of him, Joe was money in the bank.
So where was his?
After that ’37 season, Joe and Tom did open a big new restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf. (They’d found a partner—but still, there were a thousand costs to get Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto open and up to speed.) . . . And then, too, Joe spent almost his whole salary to buy the family a new house in the Marina District. That was a major league move for the DiMaggios. The old neighborhood of Nor
th Beach—the four-room flat on Taylor Street—lay only a mile away. But the Marina was another world. There, his mother would have her first living room, over the garage (a garage!), a washing machine, an electric icebox, a backyard, and only the finest neighbors. They didn’t bring a thing from Taylor Street; not one chair. It had to be new: furniture, carpets, draperies, new kitchen things, new bedding—a new life.
Joe had responsibilities now—and he wanted to be paid like the greatest in the game, too. So, at the start of 1938, he didn’t just send back Barrow’s first contract, he asked for a meeting, face-to-face with Col. Ruppert. Joe said he was headed back east anyway—you know, to pick up a couple of awards, and to see his pal Jim Braddock fight Tommy Farr at the Garden.
It’s possible that Joe thought, if he could fairly present his record (just man-to-man, you understand), the beer baron might take an interest, and offer a contract that made them both look good. Or it’s possible Joe believed that just as no pitcher could stand up to him, no owner could either.
But no man on the mound ever kept Joe waiting six days before throwing him a pitch—which was how long Joe had to cool his heels in New York, before Baron Ruppert found time to see him. And when Joe finally did get an appointment, he was iced outside of Ruppert’s office for an additional forty-five minutes. Worse, Joe was stuck with a gaggle of newsmen who were after him the whole time for comments and pictures. (Hey, Joe! Stand over there and make like you’re rappin’ on the door to his office. . . . Bravely smiling, Joe did.)
The papers were all over this story. And why not? Gehrig wasn’t signing, DiMaggio wanted a talk. It looked like the World Champs might come apart over money. Some of the newsmen wrote that DiMag would hold out for whatever Gehrig got. (Joe denied that.) One writer bid for a huge scoop when he wrote that Joe had already signed: his “holdout” was actually a Yankee trick to keep Gehrig from asking for the moon. (Joe hotly denied that, too.) DiMaggio was so busy denying, correcting, and explaining his case that Ruppert and Ed Barrow were already miffed: that upstart was trying to make the club look bad in the papers! The much-heralded meeting lasted only minutes. Ruppert, Barrow, and Joe looked grim as they emerged. The gap between them was “substantial” . . . and Joe went back to San Francisco with nothing in his hand.
Ruppert had warned DiMaggio to stop discussing his demands with the writers—but the Baron coyly broke his own silence. “I suppose there’ll be no end of wild guessing among you fellows,” Ruppert said. “So, I might as well tell. It’s $25,000 and I think that is a very fair salary. I don’t intend to go any higher.” . . . With a top-drawer dinner (“in the French manner”) advertised at a buck and a half, with a new V-6 Chevrolet retailing at $648, with the papers complaining that the average WPA “dole” had risen to $33 a month . . . Ruppert knew his offer sounded like a fortune.
And when it emerged that DiMaggio wanted forty thousand dollars, the word “greed” started cropping up in the papers. No third-year player had ever been paid like that. Gehrig was approaching two thousand straight games, and his last contract was thirty-six thousand dollars. After Lou’s ’37 season—a .351 average, thirty-seven homers, and a hundred fifty-nine runs knocked in—the Yankees offered Gehrig a three-thousand-dollar raise. And he took it. Lou settled for thirty-nine thousand. And Joe wanted forty? (Who does this kid think he is?)
Worst of all, news of DiMaggio’s demands came to the writers from his pal, Joe Gould. So, that’s his brain trust! Aha! . . .
(Bravura was Gould’s bargaining style. For instance, one year before, when Gould was trying to put Braddock in the ring against Max Schmeling, Gould went into public negotiation with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Gould announced his three demands: 1) five hundred thousand dollars on deposit in a U.S. bank, 2) an American referee, and . . . 3) stop kickin’ around the Jews. Of course, that deal never got made, either.)
All through February DiMaggio kept his heels dug into the San Francisco hills. Some writer would get under his skin—suggesting, perhaps, Ruppert wouldn’t go any higher. “That’s what he thinks,” DiMaggio would snap. “I won’t accept $25,000, and I’ll stick right here until I get what I want.” Then he’d fall silent for a week or so, and there’d be photos on the wire of Joe in an apron, cooking spaghetti at DiMaggio’s Grotto.
By the end of the month, the Yankees were assembling in St. Petersburg. And no DiMaggio. Joe said he still had his unsigned contract. He’d mail it back, “when I get around to it.” He never did get around to it. When next he was asked, he said that contract was “gone with the wind.” Gone where? . . . To the city dump.
Everything he said got him in deeper. But the truth was, Joe was right. In any given baseball game, he was every bit as valuable as Gehrig. And for the first time since Ruth retired, the Yankees had drawn a million fans. Wasn’t Joe their hero? . . . But that wasn’t how the big game was played.
“DiMaggio is an ungrateful young man, and is very unfair to his teammates, to say the least,” Col. Ruppert said, as he boarded his private railroad car for his annual visit to the training camp. “I’ve offered $25,000 and he won’t get a button over that amount. Why, how many men his age earn that much? As far as I’m concerned that’s all he’s worth to the ballclub and if he doesn’t sign we’ll win the pennant without him.”
To the fans in New York, that was still unthinkable: the Yankees without DiMag? . . . But Ruppert might have made good his threat. The Yanks were better all around than the club that couldn’t win before Joe showed up. If DiMaggio chose to cook spaghetti in San Francisco, the Yankee outfield still had George Selkirk (who had hit .328 the year before), Myril Hoag (who would hit .352 that spring), and a terrific kid right fielder, stolen from the Cleveland farm clubs, Tommy Henrich, who had joined the Yanks in ’37 and hit .320 in his rookie year. Still, Joe didn’t believe that the Yankees would give up on him and let him rot all year in San Francisco. He just couldn’t believe that . . . until he read in the paper what Joe McCarthy said. “The Yankees can get along without DiMaggio. And that $25,000 is final.”
How could McCarthy say that? His skipper! How could he take sides? That day, a wounded DiMaggio retorted in the press: “Well, maybe McCarthy knows what he’s talking about. Maybe he doesn’t. But they’re going to pay my price, or else.”
Or else what?
Joe had been spending his days at the Seals’ training camp, trying to get in shape, or just to keep busy. Lefty O’Doul was still managing, and glad to have Joe around as inspiration for the kids. Charley Graham, the owner, was more than glad: he arranged for Joe to get extra BP before the games—then Graham would advertise a “Special Hitting Exhibition by the well-known Major League Star . . .”
But now Joe dropped that charade. He didn’t want to be on exhibition. He didn’t want to be seen. Now he had come to believe that the Yanks really might forget him—his new life could be over—and that was the only thing that ever caused him fear. He went to ground in his new house—well, his parents’ new house. He didn’t show up with the Seals, or at the restaurant. There were no more cute photos. The Yankees started north. Writers called the new house in the Marina. “No, Joe da home . . .”
He didn’t know how to climb down. Losing gracefully was an art in which he’d never had to train. Four days before opening day, reporters staked out the San Francisco station. If DiMaggio was going to throw in the towel, it would take him three and a half days to cross the country. But Joe didn’t show at the railroad station, or anywhere else. Grimly, he read of the Yankees’ opening day loss in Boston. Grimly, Ed Barrow, in New York, squelched the hopeful rumors that kicked up among the press and public: “We have received no communication from DiMaggio that he has changed his mind . . . . All I can add to this is that if he doesn’t accept terms ten days from today he will, under baseball law, become automatically suspended.”
On the third day of the season, DiMaggio folded. He wired Barrow at the Yankees office: “Your terms accepted. Leave at 2:40 P.M. Arrive Saturday morning.” Ruppe
rt released the wire to the press.
Graceful denouement was not the Baron’s specialty, either. In a series of triumphal announcements, he revealed that DiMaggio would get the proffered twenty-five thousand dollars: no bonus clauses, nothing extra. And Joe would not get a dime till he got in shape at his own expense: about a hundred fifty a day in lost wages. Meanwhile, if he wanted to travel with the club, he could pay his own train fare, hotel, and meals. Said Ruppert: “I hope the young man has learned his lesson.”
What could Joe do but swallow it down? The Yanks went on the road and DiMaggio worked out at the Stadium, with the baseball clown Al Schacht as his BP pitcher. With the boys Joe had rounded up to shag flies—amongst them Joe Gould, the boxing fixer, and one of his middleweights, Walter Woods—DiMaggio felt like a clown act himself. And he’d never trained for that either. The indignity (and the $1,850 he lost trying to get in shape) would rankle him forever. But what could he do? . . . Joe hit until his hands bled. Still, two weeks passed before he could rejoin the Yankees in Washington. And at that point, things got worse.
It wasn’t that his game had suffered: he would hit safely that first day back with the club (and in the eight games to follow). But he was totally unprepared for the boos, the jeers—the hate. (They threw things at him from the center field stands.) . . . On that first day back, Joe ran in on a pop fly, and Joe Gordon, the second baseman, came streaking out—Thukk! They collided head-to-head, with a sickening thud that silenced Griffith Stadium. Both fell unconscious on the outfield grass. Both stayed in Garfield Hospital overnight. DiMaggio was back the next day, but Gordon was out of the lineup with shoulder pains . . . . And then the fans really let Joe have it: he wasn’t just a greedy prima donna, but a menace, too selfish to train—he might have killed poor Gordon! And it wasn’t just in Washington, but everywhere around the league—even in the Bronx, all he heard was raspberries . . . .
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book) Page 14