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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was only one problem with Casey’s scheme: the nineteen-year-old pride of Commerce, Oklahoma, couldn’t ask DiMaggio to teach him anything. Couldn’t approach DiMaggio. Couldn’t look at anything but his own shoes if DiMaggio happened by . . . . Years later, the great Mickey Mantle would have his own reputation as a hard man to talk to—as difficult an eminence as DiMaggio, in his way. But in that camp, he was just a shy kid, trying to find a spot for himself. He had no idea how to speak to DiMaggio, unless the Great Man spoke first—and as Mantle would recall (again, years later) that wouldn’t happen until October.

  In April, the Yankees broke camp and went barnstorming—for the first time west of the Rockies. They packed the Pacific Coast League parks. It should have been a tour of glory for DiMag, in his old haunts, with fans who remembered when. But there was only one glorious story with the Yankees that year.

  As the other prime rookie on that club, Gil McDougald, remembered: “Mickey hit one out of Seals Stadium—over the bleachers, off the property . . . . In the L.A. Angels park, Mickey hit a line drive toward right center. The center fielder took off toward right center to grab it. But it never came down. It just kept rising. The guy jumped, but the ball was twenty feet over his head—and still going up as it left the park—home run. The center fielder was in a state of shock . . . .

  “Mickey,” as McDougald said, “had a spring training like a god.”

  At the University of Southern California, Mantle hit one over the field, over the fence, and over the field house behind the fence. It must have gone six hundred feet—no one could even measure it. But after that, at every stop, Stengel would tell a new flock of writers: “I have my outfielder, Mr. Mantle, who hits balls over buildings.”

  Joe? Well, they wrote history about him . . . they wrote about him and his wife . . . there were pictures when he visited Black Foxe Institute and posed, showing Joe Jr. how to hold a bat . . . and they wrote his brave assertions that he felt fine. But mostly—no matter what he said—they wrote that he was quitting.

  Joe had been trying to tone down that story since he woke up the next day and found the writers buzzing like mad hornets outside his door. He’d only meant to say, right now, this looked like it would be his last year. He said he’d see how the season went. He said his knees would tell him. Finally, he said, he wouldn’t talk about it, till after the season—and maybe not then. But he could have saved all that breath. The only thing he’d accomplished was to add a new insult to the litany:

  What about Mickey? . . .

  Joe! Y’gonna get back with the Missus? . . .

  How’s the heels (back, neck, arm, knees, legs, eye)? . . . and:

  Joe! You really think you’re washed up?

  IT WOULD NOT be a happy summer for either of the Yankees’ big stories. Mantle got to the grand Bronx ballyard, took a look at the towering tiers of seats, the monuments to Huggins, Gehrig, Ruth in the vastness of center field, the pennants and World Series flags fluttering in rows atop the scalloped balustrade . . . and he stopped hitting atomic home runs. In fact, he was trying so hard to crush the ball, to be the miracle advertised, to hit as he believed a New York Yankee must hit (harder, surely, than he’d ever hit) . . . he couldn’t hit a thing.

  The Yankee fans got their first look at him, and decided—well, he could strike out from either side. And being New York fans—who expect their miracles right away—they took to booing, which made the boy try to crush the ball harder.

  In the outfield, Mantle had learned a lot from the Yankees’ newest coach, Tom Henrich. In fact, Henrich was delighted with his pupil. Henrich had worked for days with young Mick, teaching him to catch the ball and get rid of it—all in one move. It’s a matter of footwork: you set yourself to catch the ball coming down on your back foot, so you can fire it, right away, with your body in the throw. Then, in a game with the White Sox, Jim Busby was on third base when Mantle caught a fly ball, came down onto his right foot, and fired a BB to the plate. And right over the plate—a strike . . . that got there so fast, Busby stopped halfway home and fell down trying to get back to third. Henrich still laughed about it forty-five years later. “When Mickey came in, I says, ‘You got that down pretty good. I think that’s the best throw I ever saw!’ ”

  But still, in 1951, Mick was green as the grass in right field: he’d never seen these batters—had no idea how they hit, where to play. And Henrich hadn’t quite drummed home the crucial instruction: you play off DiMaggio. Joe was like a Univac out there. He not only knew every hitter in the league; he knew what every Yankee pitcher would throw; and he’d see, right away, if their curve wasn’t biting, if they’d lost a couple inches off the fastball—then the hitter would get around just that much faster, and Joe would be shading two or three steps into the alley where that hitter would pull the ball (right into DiMaggio’s glove). Every other kid on the Yankees learned: Watch the Dago—if he moves, you move. Not Mantle. He wouldn’t look at DiMaggio. Maybe he couldn’t. Joe would be flicking his glove at the kid, like he was shooing a fly—move over! Mantle would stare in at the plate until the ball was hit, and then he’d chase it to the wall.

  Stengel hadn’t done the boy any service by bringing him to New York that year. Within a couple of months, Mantle would be so shaky that Stengel would have to send him out to Kansas City. (And there, Mick would come within an inch of quitting.) . . . By that time, DiMaggio had decided Mantle wasn’t worth all the talk. Not that he’d spent any talk on the kid. Joe told Lou Effrat (who, of course, wouldn’t write it): “He’s a rockhead.”

  By that time, Joe had problems of his own—and unlike Mantle’s, these could not be cured by experience. His big comeback, his grand finale, was passing in a bad blur. He wasn’t even out of April before his shoulder and neck went stiff and started aching. He could barely swing, couldn’t throw without pain, and had to sit out. He came back in mid-May, played for about three weeks, until a pulled muscle put him out of the lineup again. He was still riding the pine, June 16, when Dorothy arrived in New York, with Joe Jr. To the waiting press at La Guardia Field, she called it “a Father’s Day visit.” Joe clearly hoped it would be more.

  But the next day, he got word from San Francisco: Rosalie DiMaggio had slipped into a coma. And he went back to La Guardia, to catch a plane—alone. Maybe if Dorothy and the boy had come with him, things would have been different—his future and his hopes. But he flew by himself across the country. Dominic flew from Boston all that night and into the day, but arrived minutes too late. Joe got there while his mother was still breathing. But that was all. She never regained consciousness, and died that morning, June 18, 1951.

  The aftermath of her death was so much louder than her life that she probably would have been embarrassed. The newspapers called her “Rose Dimaggio, the sturdy Italian peasant woman whose three sons grew to baseball fame and fortune.” All her boys were there, of course: the three famed outfielders, big Mike, and her eldest, Tom—all carried her casket past the crowd, down the steps of the great Sts. Peter and Paul’s, where she had slipped unnoticed into early Mass, so many mornings, for so many years. For a few days, they would all be home, with their four sisters—together in the old Marina house, as mourners. Only later would anyone realize: that would be the last time they’d be all together, home. It turned out, without Rosalie, it wouldn’t be home.

  Joe flew back to New York to take his place again at Yankee Stadium. He hadn’t hit worth a damn yet that year. Couldn’t play the outfield without pain. His back was so stiff, his shoulder so tender, Rizzuto or Coleman had to run halfway out to the fence to take his cutoff throws. It hurt Joe even to bend over, to scoop up a ground ball. But he wanted to play. Now was when he needed his place. And that was his place . . . . Alas, no one thought to remind Casey Stengel.

  July 6, at the Stadium, a big crowd, a big game with Boston. The Yankees weren’t playing well—in the midst of dropping five out of six (including three losses to the Red Sox), the Bo
mbers were stumbling out of first place—and Stengel was snappish. In the first inning, DiMaggio had misplayed a ball in the field, while Boston runners circled the bases—and the Yanks had fallen behind 6–1. Now, as the second inning began, DiMaggio was at his post in center field, when Johnny Hopp, the veteran National Leaguer who’d come over to the Yanks that year, emerged from the dugout. Hopp trotted toward the outfield, to tell DiMaggio he was out of the game. Stengel wasn’t waiting till the end of the inning. In the most visible and humiliating way, he was going to yank the Clipper right off the field. Joe’s face darkened in fury, and he waved Hopp back to the dugout. “I’ll tell Casey when I want to come out.” As Phil Rizzuto remembered: “When that inning was over, DiMaggio came back to the bench and went right past Stengel, into the clubhouse without a word. I don’t think they ever talked again. From then on, things got worse. Casey couldn’t wait until DiMaggio quit.”

  There was an uproar in the sporting press. Jimmy Cannon—who had always spoken for DiMag—fulminated in his column: “There has only been one truly great baseball player in this generation. Some one should remind Casey Stengel the man’s name is Joe DiMaggio . . . . It was a mean little decision. It was a thoughtless act of panic and insensitivity. It was nasty and petty and follows the pattern of cheapness which has assumed shape since Lonesome George Weiss, the friendless General Manager, took charge. The prestige of the Yankees diminishes rapidly.”

  The Yankees had to issue a statement denying all intent to insult the Great DiMaggio—and denying any feud in the Bronx clubhouse. Stengel played dumb: claimed he only meant “to rest the Big Fella.” He said he tried to make the change before the inning began—but gosh, he looked around and Joe was already out on the field . . . . Stengel tried to make amends by naming Joe to the All-Star team—even though the fans hadn’t voted DiMaggio in with their ballots. But then, Stengel said Joe was injured—and stuck him on the bench for the whole game. That took the story national.

  Dissension was the sportswriter’s stock-in-trade now. And even some of Joe’s erstwhile boosters took this chance to pin the Yankees’ slide onto the back of Number 5. Not just for his woeful hitting—his average bouncing around the .250’s . . . . No, it was the Cold War that Joe had brought on with his silence.

  The lead Yankee writer for the Post, Milton Gross, told his readers: “I did recognize a profound difference in the personal climate which surrounds DiMaggio and the Yankees this season. It is a frigid one, all because Joe, who always was a strange man, difficult to understand, is now living in a shell that is virtually impenetrable.”

  After that, the Cold War extended to most of the writers, too. If they were headed across the locker room toward his stool, Joe would get up, turn his back, and leave. It was only two steps to the passageway that led to the trainer’s room. They weren’t allowed there. Joe could wait ’em out, until his pal, Bernie Kamber, arrived to drive the Dago downtown. That summer, Bernie left work every day at four P.M., to get to the Stadium with his big Chrysler—and make sure Joe was protected as he left for home.

  Home was still George Solotaire’s suite at the Elysee. Joe was the only Yankee who still lived in a midtown hotel. Most of the young guys, who’d just gotten to New York (and couldn’t be sure if they’d stay), lived at the Concourse Plaza in the Bronx. It was cheap, clean, and safe up there—and they could walk down the hill to the Stadium. More and more of the established Yanks—Rizzuto, Berra, Bauer—had their own houses in New Jersey. That was the postwar Yankee style: a nice new house in the Jersey suburbs. It wasn’t Joe’s style—not by a long shot. But of course, all those guys were married. And now it looked like Joe never would be. For a long time, he’d kept a picture frame—one of those folding double frames that opened like two pages of a book—propped open on the dresser of his room. One side had a picture of the kid, the other side was Dorothy in a glamour pose. Now that frame was folded up in a drawer. That was the surest sign the reconciliation was finito.

  Now, his room in the Elysee was as bare of personal affect as if he’d moved in that morning. If he took his clothes from the drawers and closet, some businessman from Milwaukee could have checked in that afternoon without a hint that Joe had ever been there. Oh, and he would have had to move his Victrola, too. That’s what he did late at night, when the TV quit, when sleep wouldn’t come, when he sat and smoked, smoked and sat. He’d play his song, over and over. He wore the grooves of that record into ruts.

  There’s a somebody

  I’m longing to see . . .

  It was an old Gershwin tune, sung simply, over mournful strings, by Frank Sinatra—or Sinat, as he was known to all the pals at Toots Shor’s.

  Won’t you tell her please,

  To put on some speed,

  Follow my lead.

  Oh, how I need

  Someone to watch over me . . .

  Solotaire and Kamber were there to watch over him, to feed him, get his things at the cleaners or the deli—or they’d grasp his arm and pop it back into the shoulder, as Joe would grunt and sweat with the pain. But they couldn’t put the fun back in him—or the appetite. He didn’t want to go out to eat, or see a show, take in a club—not even if they were paying into the account. Joe thought, he’d done enough for those wiseguys. And it wasn’t safe anymore. Half the time he’d turn on the TV, some hood he half-knew would be runnin’ his mouth to Kefauver and his posse of snoops—trying to send Frank Costello up the river. (Joe would grunt up out of his chair and turn the channel, try to find a decent western.) In those days, you couldn’t even get Dago up for a girl. He’d been spooked off broads, when one went crazy and started writing him notes every day—how she was going to kill herself if he wouldn’t love her, come to her, be with her . . . . Joe didn’t even want to see the guys at Shor’s. Fact was, he wouldn’t talk to Toots. In a way, that was about broads, too.

  Look magazine got a broad of its own, by the name of Isabella Taves, to root around into Joe’s love life. Then, they promoted her story like a circus-come-to-town. “A facet of his personality we never suspected,” as the press release from the magazine claimed. “Joe is a heart-throb, a lady-killer, the ideal male from the feminine point of view!

  “Just bashful enough to be effective . . . Joltin’ Joe is so attractive to women he has to wait in the clubhouse after each game to avoid being mobbed.

  “And yet, for all his devastating charm, DiMag, Miss Taves reports, remains a shy kid at heart. He still blushes at the sight of a pretty face and his best friends are men, notably Toots Shor. To Mrs. Shor, Joe is ‘Toots’s Other Wife.’ . . .

  “Oh, fudge! That’s enough for us. If you want more, read Miss Taves in Look.”

  Well, that sent Dago around the bend. Fudge her! And Toots, too! Where the hell did he come off? (Toots’s Other Wife!) . . . But the part that put Toots into the deep freeze was a blind quote—had to be Shor, who else?—about how Joe couldn’t hit one year, because he was mooning for his faithless wife. Toots had no business talking about that . . . . It just confirmed what Joe had been thinking—late at night, when thinking was all he could do—how Toots had made himself a big man, a Big Name, on Joe’s back. It was that spring, it all started to figure—about the time of those pictures in the paper—Toots, with his arm around his pal, Mickey Mantle . . . . After that, when Shor called the suite, Bernie would answer, and silently mouth the word: “Toots.” Joe would shake his head, no. And Bernie would say, smooth as silk, “He ain’t here, Tootsie.”

  There were days when Joe seemed like his old self—you could see it at the Stadium, the way he hit the ball. Or maybe it was the other way around. He’d get a few hits, maybe smack one over the wall, and he’d feel like himself again. The Yankees had been trailing the White Sox half the season . . . until a doubleheader, end of July, when DiMag woke up and started smacking their pitchers around. Two home runs, five runs driven in—that took care of game one. Game two was tighter, a pitchers’ duel, but DiMaggio broke the Chi-Sox’ back when he raced from first
to third on a single, and then slid around the catcher’s tag on Gil McDougald’s squeeze bunt. The Yankees won 2–zip, took the double-dip, and swept the series. Chicago would never threaten again.

  The Yanks might have put away Cleveland and Boston with the same dispatch, if DiMaggio could have kept it going. But that consistency—the weeks-at-a-stretch when no one could get him out—that’s what he couldn’t seem to find. He’d have a good game or two. Every at bat a shot to left: bang, bang, boom . . . he might even smile, if one went out. Then, next day, he’d show up, same as always, and all he could do was pop up a fat pitch . . . or a stinkin’ grounder on a checked swing (a doubter doesn’t pull line shots) . . . then, he’d be mumbling in the tunnel again. One time, that August, it got so bad, he actually told those Yankee kids how he used to hit a ball so hard—he could hit it dead on the third baseman’s glove, didn’t matter—it would handcuff the guy. Joe said he wasn’t trying to brag, but no one could field those shots. One time (it was just a couple of years ago), he hit that goddamn ball so hard—right at the Tiger third baseman, George Kell—it broke his fuckin’ jaw. No lie . . . . The kids couldn’t believe it—not the part about Kell—but Dago talkin’ about old times.

  But he couldn’t turn on the ball and power it to left now. And those kids couldn’t look at him without hurting for him . . . . Sometimes, even though he was late, he’d catch a ball clean, and hit it out toward the short right field fence—two or three, he hit over that fence. The Yanks would gather to greet him on the dugout steps. “Attaboy, Joe!” “Way to go, Daig!” But DiMaggio bridled at the praise. “People don’t pay to see me hit to right.” He called them “piss homers . . . I could piss ’em right over that wall.”

  Many more of his hits were just flares to right: they’d kick up chalk on the line behind first, or drop because the other team was playing him to pull—they hadn’t caught on yet. But word got around, sure enough, that summer. Then all the pitchers were killing him with fastballs. (What were they supposed to serve him? Tea and cookies?) DiMaggio didn’t expect sympathy. No, he said his swing would come back. By will, he was going to make it come back.