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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  It didn’t matter if they were friends. That was worse. Friends shouldn’t make money off of Joe—not the way Joe figured, not if they were real friends. It made him wonder about their loyalty. Why did they want to be friends?

  Consider Joe’s deal on the sixteen-by-twenties: two thousand giant-sized photographs of Joe, signed by Joe—a nice piece, a nice friendly deal.

  Ed Liberatore put Joe in. Eddie was an old Dodger scout, salt of the earth. He was trying to help some friends in his hometown of Philadelphia: a young sports marketer named Milt Beaver, and some partners were in it—all friends of Ed’s. And of course, Eddie was helping Joe. Liberatore had blisters on his lips from kissing the ground Joe walked on. Thirty, forty years, he took care of Joe—like they were married. Well, in point of fact, Eddie had a wife, a home and all. But if Joe called, Eddie would move out of home, and into Joe’s hotel, wherever that was, to be close. Sometimes they’d share a room, and hang a sheet down the middle so it was like two rooms. (Anyway, if they hung the sheet with a string, they could also hang their laundry to dry, so they didn’t pay.)

  But the deal: the way Joe worked it out, he’d get fifty dollars to sign each photograph. That made a hundred thousand up front. But the fellows in Philadelphia were going to sell these beauties for $350 each. So when they sold, Joe would get another $100 for every piece—or, in sum, two hundred thousand on the back end. But getting to the back end was the problem: that small, new company didn’t have its channels of distribution worked out. It was an old story in that sort of business: the piece sold slowly; the partners got edgy; they pulled the money . . . and the company went belly-up.

  So, then, in walked Jerry Romolt. Romolt was from Chicago, an experienced operator. He’d done deals with Joe before. Of course, he knew Liberatore. Beaver, he’d met. He liked them all, as far as that went. And he was going to help out by buying remainders. There were fourteen hundred photographs left. Romolt bought seven hundred right away—at distressed prices (basically at Beaver’s cost). For the other seven hundred, he took an option. Then, he turned around, same day, and placed two hundred photos with the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue people. They stuck those pieces in their spring book—at $500 per—and they were gone in a week. So, Hammacher called Romolt for three hundred more, for the summer catalogue: three weeks, and those were gone . . . . And Hammacher bought out the other nine hundred.

  It was gorgeous! Beaver got his money out, Romolt got a beautiful new Porsche. Hammacher Schlemmer—they were extremely pleased.

  And Joe . . . was livid. They were all makin’ money off of him—and he was getting beat for a hundred a copy. Of course, he didn’t say that. He said they were gouging his public: fans shouldn’t have to pay five hundred dollars. But the way he figured, it was a million-dollar deal now. And they were cheating him: he only got $50 per.

  So Joe was in the airport—Miami International—at the baggage carousel . . . and who was also waiting for a bag? This young woman: a nice Jewish girl—not a beauty queen, but sweet, and smart—she worked for Hammacher Schlemmer. She saw Joe, and she couldn’t contain herself. Normally, she would never bother someone famous, but—she’d been working on his photographs!

  “Oh, Mr. DiMaggio! You can’t imagine what a thrill it’s been to be working with you! I mean, Hammacher works with a lot of very—”

  “Fuck you!”

  That was just Joe’s opener.

  “Fuckin’ cunt! Gives you the right to come up to me? Get the fuck away from me! You’re too fuckin’ ugly to talk to me in public.”

  Well, of course, she was upset. (She complained to her company—tried to complain to Romolt. “What do you want me to do?” Romolt said. “I didn’t raise him.”) . . . She didn’t understand, it was just about money.

  And she couldn’t have known, it was worse for friends: that deal started the unraveling between Joe and Eddie Liberatore. Then, one time, Eddie couldn’t come to meet Joe, or showed up late, or waited in the wrong place . . . Joe decided Liberatore was like all the rest. When Eddie finally found Joe, DiMaggio started yelling—at a dinner, in front of everybody—and then DiMaggio gave Eddie a shove, and almost knocked him over. Liberatore left the room in shame. And Joe never called again . . . which broke old Eddie’s heart.

  SO, THAT WAS the great thing about Joe’s holdout with Score. After Joe drove the price up, Halper and his friends wouldn’t make any money.

  In fact, it wasn’t long after that, Halper and his partners got out of the business, sold the Score company to a Texas group called Pinnacle. The new owners inherited the DiMaggio deal—which they weren’t too happy about, but that didn’t matter: Joe had a contract. DiMaggio and Engelberg, Esq. were particular about contracts. In this case, Pinnacle was going to pay Joe for two days of signing—or they could pay a quarter-million for nothing at all. It turned out Halper and his pals had done the smart thing: they’d sold out at the height of the memorabilia craze. But Joe and Engelberg went on, riding the hot wind. After he signed the Pinnacle cards, Joe wouldn’t do another card deal. Cards were too cheap. Instead, Joe would do a deal with a company called Score Board. And that really did change the business.

  Score Board was the brainchild of a couple of New Jersey guys, big baseball fans: Paul and Kenny Goldin, a father-son act. In fact, Dad got the idea from his boy’s card collection. In the mid-1980s, when the “value” of certain cards shot up, when the first price guides put dollar figures into collecting, the elder Goldin started on a simple scheme. He’d buy card sets from the manufacturers (like Topps, Fleer, or Upper Deck), he’d buy at wholesale. Then he’d pick out the cards with value, and repackage them for dealers at a handsome markup. Soon he was paying the featured players to sign his cards, and he was sitting on a gold mine. The elder Goldin took the company public and raised millions: Score Board Inc. was the industry leader, the Microsoft of memorabilia. Then, they went after Joe.

  How else could they be the Big Dog of “the hobby”? Wasn’t Joe (by actual vote) the Greatest Living Player? . . . What good was a Mays, Nolan Ryan, Barry Bonds—without the Clipper? Not good enough. So, in 1991, they signed the deal with DiMaggio. Joe would sign balls and “flats” (such as eight-by-ten-inch photographs) exclusively for Score Board—at $150 per. It was a new high for the industry (in fact, a nice round multiple of what anyone else was paid). Score Board and Joe were flying high.

  Joe had to be a frequent flier, too. He required Score Board to buy from him twenty thousand signatures a year. So, Joe would get three million dollars a year, guaranteed. In fact, it was more than three million, because when Score Board wanted adjustments to the deal, they had to compensate Joe with Score Board stock options—thousands of shares—and they were flying, too. After the Goldins announced the DiMaggio deal (they said it was worth $10 million in new business), stock in Score Board Inc. climbed to $40 a share.

  But that’s how the Goldins had it figured: they’d established the value of Joe’s autograph at an all-time high—pushed it into the stratosphere. But why shouldn’t they push the value of that asset? It was their asset now. And if the company did well, Joe would do well. His stock would climb along with theirs. They were top of the line. The sky was the limit. They were in business with the Yankee Clipper!

  So Joe started signing, every month, two days straight, in Morris Engelberg’s office. And Score Board started selling—in its catalogue, in the industry paper, at every big card show, and on TV. They cut a deal with the Home Shopping Network, a DiMaggio exclusive: “The keepsake signed baseball, your own little piece of history!” For only $390.

  Sure, it was a little high, but what could they do? The TV network took $190 a ball, and Joe was getting $150. So that only left $50 per for Score Board. (And they had to buy the ball.)

  Well, it’s a great and powerful nation that can suck up thousands of four-hundred-dollar baseballs. But America came through, month after month, all through 1992. Sure, it was a lot of money, but how many people had a baseball that Joe himself had held i
n his hands—and signed it so perfectly? . . . It was like a little piece of him!

  Then, it was 1993, and business wasn’t quite as rosy. The national economy was sour enough that we’d dumped one president for a younger, more vigorous model. The baseball economy was sour enough that owners and players were girding for a shutdown. (Even average players were making millions, and owners said they simply couldn’t go on.) There were a billion regretful or outraged words on sports pages about the pernicious effects of money: it was wrecking the National Pastime! . . . And still, the shopping networks were hawking DiMaggio balls.

  But not quite as many balls as before. True, Joe had a lot of fans, but how many had four hundred extra dollars in the fixed incomes of their golden years? . . . There were thousands of eager collectors, but there were thousands of hero artifacts, too. (How about that cunning resin model of Yankee Stadium, housed in a clear plastic dome and mounted on a handsome woodgrain base, with a genuine replication of Yogi Berra’s genuine signature?) . . . Sure, people wanted a little piece of Joe. But how many wanted two?

  So, Kenny Goldin, executive vice president and son of the founder of Score Board Inc., made pilgrimage to Florida to have a talk with Joe. Score Board was still very excited to be in business with the Yankee Clipper . . . but, couldn’t they—possibly—make the excitement last longer? You know, stretch the business out?

  No.

  Maybe Joe could just sign, you know . . . an eensy bit fewer balls. You know—this month. No? . . .

  No.

  But what about the stock analysts: what would they say? Score Board’s sales were leveling off, but inventories were climbing through the roof. (There were warehouses full of DiMaggio balls.) If they downgrade the stock, we all get hurt. We’re all in the same boat on Wall Street! . . .

  No, DiMaggio had his own boat. He had unloaded the stock the minute he was able. There was nothing in the contract that said he had to hold it forever. (Why should he be in business with them?) . . . And there was nothing in the contract that said he had to listen to a lot of whining.

  In fact, nothing in that contract said he had to do anything—except sign balls and flats . . . and, hey! There was nothing in that contract to keep Joe from signing something else—like bats . . . Call Romolt!

  SO, RIGHT IN the middle of the Score Board deal, Joe signed another contract, this one with Jerry Romolt—and this one the Mother of All Deals. Romolt would commission Hillerich and Bradsby (makers of the Louisville Slugger) to make two thousand DiMaggio bats—strictly a limited edition. In fact, Romolt would issue a guarantee that only one thousand nine hundred and forty-one bats would ever be sold. See, get it? 1941—The Year of The Streak . . . . This would be about baseball’s one unbreakable record, the sacred fifty-six games—a once-in-a-lifetime Joltin’ Joe commemorative!

  Romolt had a flair for this sort of business. He could manufacture rarity, just as he could manufacture sentiment, solemnity, authenticity, art. From the basement of his house in a new and treeless Illinois suburb, he’d made millions from the fans of the Great Game, because for his part, in his own heart . . . well, he didn’t give a shit—he wanted the money.

  All the memorabilia in Romolt’s house was inventory, nothing more, nothing less. Jerry was not a collector. He dealt with a lot of sports heroes. If they wanted to be friends, fine. That didn’t change what Jerry did. Romolt would make sure that every bat coming off the line at Louisville was perfect. That was a matter of his own reputation. He would prepare on bonded paper (with the salutation, in Italian: “May You Stay Forever Young”) an elegant Certificate of Authenticity. The retail buyer had a right to that. He would make sure there were pictures—no, better yet, video—of DiMaggio signing the bats. That way, no one could even suggest a fake. But most of all, Romolt would make sure he had every one of those bats sold, before he even paid his first plane fare to Kentucky.

  Romolt would turn those bats around (at a substantial profit) to a New York company called Madison Sports. It was a new company, small, but with big plans. Madison had just started selling shares to the public. When they announced the acquisition of America’s largest sports film library (“valued,” said their press release, “at more than $10 million”) their stock shares nudged above one dollar on the OTC Bulletin Board, and they were on their way. Now, Madison would buy Joe’s bats and turn them around again, to the Home Shopping Network, where the bats could be retailed to Joe’s many fans.

  So, the whole deal was done in three or four months, more or less the time it took Louisville Slugger to make the bats. After that, it was clear sailing. DiMaggio and Engelberg, Esq. were flown into Kentucky. The Home Shopping Network brought a video cameraman. Romolt was on scene with a fistful of Sharpie pens. The Hillerich and Bradsby company had a splendid signing table, with a built-in rack to hold a bat. That way, Joe could sign a couple of thousand—he could sign all day—and his arm, his hand, wouldn’t even get stiff.

  Employees of the factory shifted bats in and out of the rack, each bat numbered, recorded, and witnessed by a notary on scene. With a fresh Sharpie, Joe could sign forty or fifty bats before the tip of the pen would splay. Then he might take a break for tea, or he might take a new pen, and keep rackin’ up bats. It was August in Louisville, hot as hell in the factory, but Joe didn’t mind. They brought a portable fan for him, but he shifted it away, to the notary, Jan Isaacs. The Louisville Slugger people all admired his diligence (and laughed when he wouldn’t let them throw away the used pens). It took ten hours of signing—then, Joe was on his way—with more than three million dollars for his labor (and the used pens—hey, they still had plenty of ink).

  Actually, the money was kind of a hassle. As it turned out, the Home Shopping Network only bought a few hundred bats—and Madison couldn’t come up with Joe’s cash. So Romolt had to step back in, and wire the rest of the cash into Joe’s account. Romolt held on to the bats for security (and took a hundred bats for his trouble). Then Joe got mad—though he got his money—because at that point he realized, Romolt already had those bats sold. Romolt wasn’t even taking any risk, and he was going to make a million! So, to calm him down, Joe got some extra bats, too. (For the grandkids, as Joe said.)

  And in the end, Romolt got his money back. It came in dribs and drabs from tax-cheater banks in Dubai, Panama, the Cayman Islands—and without any mystery about how it was raised. With the right whisper on the DiMaggio deal to Dan Dorfman (who wrote up Madison Sports in his popular USA Today column), Madison’s stock climbed 500 percent in a year—it was nearly ten dollars a share.

  Alas, it was a stock that was jacked up, just to come down. Within a year, the stock price had crumbled: it fell back to a dollar and change. The main problem was no one wanted the bats—not at four thousand dollars a pop on TV. The Home Shopping Network brought in Whitey Ford (in a tuxedo) to thump the tub for the Dago’s bats. They said the bats “normally” sold for eight thousand dollars. (But tonight only, the chance of a lifetime, three thousand nine hundred ninety-five!) They had the bats carried on stage by a pair of armed guards (in white gloves) . . . and still they couldn’t move the damn bats. Home Shopping couldn’t even unload the few hundred they already owned, much less the remaining thousand that were weighing down Madison’s balance sheet.

  Madison had other problems, too. For instance, there were the two principal officers who jumped ship (one took the name Madison with him, and the other took a couple of hundred bats). There was the “nation’s largest sports film library”—which, the company announced, might actually, umm, not exist. And then there was the matter of the lawsuit from Score Board Inc., alleging that Madison was selling forged autographs.

  Of course, Paul and Kenny Goldin at Score Board were generally in a sour mood, since their pal, partner, and asset, Joe DiMaggio, had swamped the market with some eight million dollars in new autographed merchandise (i.e., his bats). And meanwhile, they were sitting on five million dollars’ worth of unsold DiMaggio autographs (i.e., his balls). The Wall Street
analysts had by now discerned Score Board’s problem, and the Goldins watched helplessly as the value of their company was cut in half. It killed the old man: he died in 1994. It was left to Kenny Goldin, the son, to deal with DiMaggio.

  Actually, to cut off the deal. Score Board was glad to let its DiMaggio “exclusive” lapse in 1994. And Kenny Goldin also traded a bunch of useless baseball cards to the Home Shopping Network, in exchange for their leftover bats. Those bats, Goldin dumped on the market for about eight hundred bucks a copy. Why not? He’d gotten them for nothing, and he could raise some cash. But even better: it was a price so embarrassingly low that no one could miss the insult.

  Joe’s retaliation was instant, and lethal. He started carting his seventy-nine-year-old frame around to card shows, all over the country, and selling his own autographed balls at one-fifty, or one-seventy-five. He said he was trying to make sure the public could get his signature “at a reasonable price.” But he also made sure Score Board Inc. would never make a nickel on its thousands of DiMaggio balls.

  So what could Goldin do? Well, he dumped out the rest of his DiMaggio balls even lower than Joe would go. Why pay $150 to stand in line for the old bastard, when you could phone up Score Board’s 800 number and have the same DiMaggio ball for . . . well, how ’bout a hundred bucks?

  Of course, that didn’t do much for the company. They were losing money on every ball they sold. Within a couple of years, Kenny Goldin had to jump ship, too. And soon after, Score Board went bankrupt.

  And they never could really get at Joe. He’d got his money up front: close to nine million from Score Board, more than three million on the bats. And that didn’t even count the shows. In the end, Joe and Morris were bragging to pals, how they’d been shorting that Score Board stock, all along. (What’s it tradin’ now, five cents a share? Hah!) . . .