Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book)

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  How could he be any better than this? . . . That red-headed wildman, MacPhail, decided he couldn’t wait for spring training. The Yanks couldn’t wait till Florida warmed up. No, he’d get an airplane, and whisk eighty players to the Panama Canal. They could work out in tropical heat through February, maybe play a few games against the U.S. service teams. Then all the boys could fly back to St. Pete, already tanned and limber. The war had brought a new age of airpower, a world made small: what was the point of doing things the old way?

  The press played the trip for laughs, dubbed it “MacPhail’s Flying Circus.” A lot of fellows didn’t like the flying. McCarthy considered the whole scheme a dangerous tomfoolery. There wasn’t anything about MacPhail that McCarthy didn’t hate. The war years—trying to field a team with cripples, senior citizens, and bush-league kids—had taken their toll on the Skipper. Then old Col. Ruppert’s heirs finally sold the Yankees to a pair of high rollers, Del Webb and Dan Topping, whom McCarthy considered undesirables. In his view they were war profiteers, or worse. (He heard they had connections to Las Vegas!) For the last straw, they took a third partner—the loudmouth, MacPhail, who would run the team. McCarthy tried to quit, without avail: MacPhail held him to his contract . . . . Still, from the mainstay of the squad, there was not one squawk about Panama, about the airplane, the new owners—about anything. DiMaggio was all smiles.

  He was working harder than anybody else, and hitting the ball harder, too. There was a Canal Zone tradition at the ballpark in Balboa. In each game, the first man to hit a home run would win a white linen suit. DiMaggio would come home with a trunkful. The Yanks would manhandle some “Canal Zone All-Stars” 10–3, or 14–2—what the hell, the game score didn’t mean a thing. The news was in the agate type below the story: HR—DiMaggio . . . or in a headline above: “DiMaggio Again Clouts Home Run.”

  By the time the boys were airmailed back to Florida, all the new trappings didn’t seem so threatening. It felt like the good old times were back again. The Yankees were loaded with returning stars: DiMaggio, Keller, and Henrich in the outfield; Rizzuto and Gordon were a peerless middle infield. And somewhere they’d find a place for the wartime second baseman, little Snuffy Stirnweiss—all he’d done the year before was lead the league in hitting.

  They rolled untroubled through some grapefruit games, and then went barnstorming—a zigzag through Dixie that would last for weeks. Red Smith called this “MacPhail’s weird Chatauqua tours.” But there was nothing mystical about the count at the turnstiles: thirteen thousand paid fans in New Orleans, twenty-one thousand in Atlanta . . . . Their train would pull into some little Gritsburg, and the town fathers would let the schools out! There was a hunger in the country for things that were great “before the world went nuts.” . . . Eight thousand fans in Beaumont, Texas.

  The press settled happily into good old traditions, too. In San Francisco, the columnist Prescott Sullivan made pilgrimage to Fisherman’s Wharf for a bowl of crab cioppino and a chat with one proud new citizen of the U.S.A.

  “Citizen Giuseppe DiMaggio, only man ever to sire three major league centerfielders, spoke with cool deliberation, as he sized up the part the most illustrious of his sons, Joe, is likely to play in the forthcoming campaign . . . .

  “ ‘Joe,’ the old fisherman said, in a voice made husky by years of combat with the tossing seas. ‘Joe—he gonna hit thirty-six homa runs.’ ”

  The New York writers also settled into their good old habits—counting up for fun and profit the statistics of the Jolter:

  “Joe DiMaggio carried his batting streak through ten straight games . . .”

  “Joe DiMaggio got his fifteenth homer of the spring in the eighth inning, after having made four singles.”

  (That was fifteen taters in thirty games!)

  “DI MAG IN HIT FEST!”

  At last, the Yankees came home to New York, where the real fest was supposed to begin. But instead, that’s where the good times stopped.

  It turned out Dorothy hadn’t finished making their family home. There wasn’t going to be any home for DiMaggio—not with her. In fact, she was going to make her home in the Waldorf-Astoria with that stockbroker, George Schubert. She and Schubert would be married that summer. Dorothy and Joe were quitsville.

  IT WAS A LONG SEASON, but a short story. Joe went in the tank, and the Yankees with him. Joe was like a fighter getting punched out: there wasn’t time for his head to clear before the next haymaker landed. Dorothy was the start, or maybe the cause, no matter how he tried to put her perfidy behind him. How could he see himself a winner at the Stadium when he slept in failure at the Edison Hotel?

  It was tough to feel right at the Stadium, too. So many changes—that relentless MacPhail. More seats hemmed in the outfield, more fans screaming for Joe (but no, they wouldn’t cut one inch off left center, where so many of his best shots went to die). The clubhouse was all new, and Joe got himself off in the corner, with an escape route to the trainer’s room, right there next to his locker. He didn’t want to sit around and answer: Joe, what went wrong? . . . If he had the answer, it wouldn’t have gone wrong.

  By the time the season had run for a month, the streaking Boston Red Sox were already in front of the Bombers by four and a half games. They came to the Bronx for a showdown series, and that’s when MacPhail chose to spring his first “promotion”—Ladies’ Day! He papered the town with free passes, gave away five hundred pairs of free nylons, and staged a pregame fashion show, with models riding around the field in open Jeeps. Jesus, the Yankees took a raft of shit from the Bostons! (Yoo hoo, Rizzuto—Phillis!—what’sa matter? You forgotchur fuckin’ NYLONS!) But with the powerhouse lineup that their owner, Tom Yawkey, bought, the Red Sox could also back up their talk. They won that day, won two out of three, and left the Yanks five and a half games back.

  After that, things went from embarrassing to miserable. MacPhail chartered airplanes for their road trips: revolt in the clubhouse! Crosetti wouldn’t fly, made his own way by rail, and took a group of grousers with him. The Crow, by that time, was almost a coach: he’d be thirty-six that year, and couldn’t play much. Bill Dickey turned thirty-nine; he could barely bend his knees. They’d put him in to catch and (at six foot one and a half) he’d stand taller than the batters. The pitching staff was stuck together with kids. (And worse for Joe, Lefty Gomez was retired and gone.) Spud Chandler, the ace, got hurt (and just before he faced the Red Sox, who shelled him). Joe Gordon (.210!) couldn’t hit at all. Rizzuto wasn’t much better. Henrich had an off year, Keller was subpar . . . you could go on forever.

  McCarthy started riding the White Horse hard. One trip out west, late May, there were games where McCarthy didn’t even show up. When he did it was worse. On the travel leg between Cleveland and Detroit, all the guys had to stare into their laps, pretending that they didn’t hear, as McCarthy stood in the airplane aisle and screamed abuse at the problem-child pitcher, Joe Page. “You know what I’m gonna do with you, don’t you? I’m gonna send you down, back to the minors. How much money d’you think you’ll make there? PEANUTS!” And that was just the start. McCarthy ripped into anyone he could see, or even think of—including that meddling SOB, MacPhail. When they landed, the Skipper went on a Homeric bender, left the club, disappeared, and after three days resigned by telegram. Dickey would be the new manager.

  It was also May when Joe noticed, rounding second one day, that pain in his heel: it wouldn’t go away. And then, about a month later—sliding into second this time—he caught his spikes, sprained an ankle, tore cartilage in his knee, and had to be helped off the field. For the first time, he’d miss an All-Star Game. (And worse, Dominic would take his place.) Joe was only hitting .266—he would have been booed, anyway. They were booing him in the Bronx, which he couldn’t understand. (Did they think he wasn’t trying?)

  He pushed himself, came back too fast, still favoring the knee, and the heel got worse. He wouldn’t say a word about that. Joe DiMaggio didn’t alibi. “In my case,�
�� he told one writer, “it generally looks as if somebody had shortened the distance between the plate and the box, and the pitcher is right on top of me. The result is that when I swing, my bat is back here when it should be out there and I’m not able to get it out in time to meet the ball. I worry. My stroke is off.” . . . Worry was too mild a word.

  He’d talk, if there was someone he could trust, who wouldn’t blab, who didn’t want anything. One morning, on Chicago’s South Side, the old Del Prado Hotel, he stopped the young radio man, Mel Allen, in the lobby. That was the first year broadcasters were traveling with the team. (That was MacPhail, too.) “What’re you doing?” Joe said.

  “Uh—nothing.” They had a night game, and about seven hours to kill before that.

  “Come on,” said DiMaggio. They sat in the coffee shop and drank coffee all afternoon. There was DiMaggio telling—almost asking—all about the troubles with Dorothy. Mel was pinching himself under the table. He was just a kid from one of those Gritsburgs in Alabama, didn’t even have a girlfriend. And the great Joe DiMaggio was asking him about marriage? . . . Even fifty years later, Allen’s voice held a tinge of wonder and sadness, as he recalled: “Joe was depressed. He just didn’t want to be alone.

  “Everybody knew they were going to get back together. And then she dumped him. And he had this kid and all. Joe had this great sense of loyalty. And the fame . . . . He hated to strike out—just put it that way.”

  As the summer wore on, Joe talked less. He clamped down, as if he could squeeze his life back together, if only he put on enough pressure. All he had now was baseball. But even the old baseball life was gone. There were the first night games at the Stadium, there was radio everywhere, and promotions, giveaways—like a cheap carnival. In and out of airplanes, losing, squabbling . . . the big comeback season had turned into a bad blur.

  The Red Sox lead grew to double figures. Joe couldn’t hit the ball out of a ballpark to save his life. That damn Ted Williams was a hundred points ahead of him . . . .

  Dorothy married that moneybags, Schubert—there it was in all the papers. Well, Joe would make more money than any bastard broker. But how could he ask for a dime more, now—like this? Forget it! You had a bad year and MacPhail didn’t know you . . . .

  Sure enough, MacPhail wanted Gordon benched. Dickey wouldn’t do it—he hated MacPhail, too. Dickey couldn’t stick it out. The Yanks would get their third manager of the year: the coach Johnny Neun filled in for the last month.

  The Pinstripes would finish in third place, trailing the Red Sox by a humiliating seventeen games. Joe would wind up his worst year ever, at .290, with twenty-five home runs. (Only five in the last half of the year.) Doctors told DiMaggio he’d need an operation in the off season to cut away a bone spur—that pain in his heel was a jutting shard of calcium digging into flesh.

  But Joe didn’t want to go under the knife. In those days, guys got an operation, maybe it worked, maybe not. He’d see if the pain eased after the season. And still he waited—he’d give it till Christmas . . . . His room at the Edison was stacked with toys for Butch, but he only saw the kid alternate weekends (Dottie’s court order) . . . . MacPhail had a doctor picked out at Beth David. Probably got a deal. (Joe thought he had that bastard redhead figured out, now.)

  Joe only found out later the deal that MacPhail really wanted: he tried to shuck DiMaggio off to the pitiful Washington Senators, in a trade for last year’s batting champ, Mickey Vernon, who was three years younger.

  And the Senators turned it down.

  JOE’S OWN STORY, WRITTEN WITH TOM MEANY.

  WITH “SPEC” SHEA: “FRANKIE, YOU PITCHED A HELLUVA GAME.”

  ALONE AT NIGHT, IN GEORGIE SOLOTAIRE’S SUITE.

  CHAPTER 11

  THAT SPRING, 1947, IT WAS SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO; Caracas, Venezuela; Havana, Cuba: MacPhail’s Flying Circus was a three-ring extravaganza. But Los Yanqui de Nueva York appeared without Número Cinco. More than a month after his operation, DiMaggio showed up with a five-and-a-half-inch gash around his heel, still raw, and now infected, oozing fluids. As Daniel wrote in the World-Telegram: The Clipper had the “calcium chiseled out,” and it looked like that might have been the tool MacPhail’s surgeon used. The Yankees’ new traveling secretary, an eager young acolyte from Pittsburgh, Frank Scott, picked up the Great DiMaggio at the airport. “Joe came off the plane with a cane. His heel was grotesque. It was stitched up like a bad shoemaker had fixed it.”

  In San Juan, DiMaggio could only drag himself to the ballpark—couldn’t walk on the heel, much less run or play. Sixto Escobar Field was just across the street from the Normandie Hotel. Even so, Joe needed a police escort: he was besieged by excited fans, with only a carpet slipper to protect his wounded foot. Every day, team doctors would cut away more diseased flesh—the hole in his heel was growing. After two weeks, Joe was flown to Baltimore, and the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

  The new wonder drug, penicillin, worked no magic upon the Clipper. Maggots were sown in his heel to eat away the dead skin. With opening day only a month away, the doctors at Hopkins wheeled Joe in for another operation. This time, a patch of skin from his thigh (as the AP noted, “a piece . . . the size of a Special Delivery stamp”) was grafted over Joe’s wound. Then, he had to lie around for two more weeks, while the doctors watched to see if the graft took.

  With writers who made the pilgrimage to Baltimore, Joe put on his best Gary Cooper act (the quiet courage they expected from the successful author of Lucky to Be a Yankee). He joked about the skin graft. (He hoped it didn’t grow hair on his heel.) He showed up in the Vanderbilts’ box at Pimlico Race Track, betting with the easy élan that was expected from the hero: twenty dollars on the five horse—his number—whatever its name was.

  But no one saw him awake in the wee hours, churning about his time, his season, his money. Almost as soon as he’d got back from the war, the IRS came calling. What about his income from 1942? Dorothy had the records, Joe had to scrape up the cash. He even sold out of the restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf. Of course they didn’t give him what he should have gotten—his name made the place. So he fixed them good: he made brother Tom take the “Joe” off the sign (now it was just “DiMaggio’s Grotto”). And he made them take off the neon baseball player at bat—even though it was Dommie who would buy out Joe’s share. (That was Joe’s stance!)

  Ten years after he got to the majors, and he felt like he was starting from zero. Five world championships, two times MVP . . . all old news. He hadn’t had a raise since the winter of ’41 (Teddy Tantrum Williams was making twice Joe’s pay). And at the moment, DiMaggio didn’t know if he’d ever get another dime. How could he know if he would ever run on that heel? It could all be over already. How could he sleep on that? . . . When the Johns Hopkins doctors released him to travel by train to St. Petersburg, they told the writers to expect Joe in center field by June or July.

  DiMaggio had other plans. There was only a little hole left in his heel. Two days after his train got to Florida, he’d ordered up a special padded shoe, and he was running. “This is my most critical year,” he told Dan Daniel. “I’ve got to get going. I’ve got to make good—otherwise, where will I be? Where will I stand when it comes time to sign a contract for 1948? If it’s up to me, you’ll see me in there before May 1.”

  “Doubtless the most worried baseball player in the major leagues today is Joseph Paul DiMaggio Jr. of the Yankees,” Daniel wrote on opening day. “Giuseppe sat on the bench in the Stadium while the Bombers were celebrating Bucky Harris’s debut as their manager by taking a 6-to-1 trouncing from the Athletics, undisputed candidates for the American League cellar.”

  The Yankee lineup was full of holes—they were in much worse shape than the year before. Henrich was hurt, and the “frightened” rookie Larry Berra was exploring the mysteries of right field. (Berra would also catch fifty games, relieving Aaron Robinson—that was an even more frightening experiment: the Yanks had to bring back Dickey to train him.) The infield did
n’t promise much punch: not one starter had hit over .260 the year before. The aged journeyman George McQuinn had been acquired for first base; Billy Johnson was the regular at third, and Stirnweiss, the utility man, would start at second (now that MacPhail had traded Gordon to the Clevelands for the no-name pitcher, Allie Reynolds).

  This was the Yankee dynasty? . . . Nothing was settled, the team was all moving parts, and every name was still on the table. One night in Shor’s, the owners of the Yankees and Red Sox, Dan Topping and Tom Yawkey, set in for a night-long drinking bout, during which they agreed to a straight swap—DiMaggio for Ted Williams. This would set the American League on its ear! The Splendid Splinter would get Yankee Stadium’s short right field porch, and the Clipper could shoot for Fenway’s Green Monster. They’d both break Ruth’s record of sixty home runs—and both owners would be turning away fans at the gate . . . . In the morning pall of his hangover, Yawkey got cold feet—he’d be tampering with a pennant-winning club—Boston fans might kill him. He got Topping on the phone and called off the deal.

  Five days into the season, the Yanks were in Philadelphia for a twin bill, when DiMaggio defied his doctors, and announced to Bucky Harris, “the boy wonder manager,” that he was going back into the lineup. All he did that first game was break up the contest with a three-run homer—to show thirty-three thousand fans that the Yankees were back, starting that day. But in fact, it wasn’t that easy. In the first game, the kid, Berra, bowled into right center and knocked DiMaggio on his ass. (He was roundly jeered by the A’s faithful, who by that time thought of DiMaggio like some fragile Ming vase.) In the second game, one of the Yanks’ rookie pitchers gave up the tying run in the ninth to bring on extra innings (which Henrich, fortunately, ended with an RBI double in the tenth). The fact was the Yanks were a .500 ball club—and even a month after the Clipper came back, every day was a struggle.