“Joe DiMaggio Had Cancer Surgery . . .”
“His Outlook Is Very Poor . . .”
“DiMaggio Family Holds Vigil.”
But Morris had become a Big Name in another way—the way he’d always wanted to be. “Every ball,” as the Internet offers informed potential buyers, “will be accompanied by a letter of authenticity, signed by Morris Engelberg, attorney for Yankee Clipper Enterprises.” . . . News of Joe’s cancer had kicked the memorabilia merchants into high gear. Now, in the Christmas rush, prices were sky-high. And Morris himself had become a Signature.
As Christmas neared, Joe woke up from a coma that his doctors had feared was fatal. (Two months into Joe’s hospital stay, they’d discovered that the antibiotics weren’t getting to Joe’s bloodstream—so they gave him the drug intravenously—and miraculously, Joe improved.) He was still in intensive care. He couldn’t talk, unless they unhooked him from his ventilator—and even then it was only a rasping few words. (“No more news,” he told the doctor, one day—and that put an end to the bulletins.) But in this case, no news was good news—or at least better than it had been. Joe needed less sedation. He sat up more. He knew who came into his room. He made signals with his hands.
Morris, for one, noticed Joe’s hands were fine. Later, Engelberg would sell sixty-eight Yankee Clipper balls, with pen marks upon them . . . which were Joe’s attempted signatures on the balls Morris gave him in the hospital.
AFTER NINETY-NINE DAYS in intensive care, Joe DiMaggio was released from Memorial Hospital, January 18, 1999. The glad event was trumpeted around the nation. “Mr. DiMaggio is looking forward to opening day in Yankee Stadium,” said a statement from “his spokesman and closest friend,” Morris Engelberg.
“Joe will certainly toss out the first ball,” said George Steinbrenner, in New York. “It’s a wonderful moment for me personally and for the fans.”
And maybe there were moments when Joe thought he’d be on his feet by April. He was so happy to get out of that hospital, he was even patient with the nurses and technicians who staffed his house around the clock.
There were two on duty at all times—on assignment from Memorial Hospital—a critical care nurse and respiratory tech. A therapist would come, by day, to try to get Joe up, help him take a step or two. At times, the duty staff could take Joe off the respirator—when he wanted to speak, or get out of bed—and they’d wheel him outside in a chair, to sit next to his pool. Joe could breathe on his own for a while, but after ten minutes, the oxygen level in his blood would sink below the point of safety, and they’d have to bring him in, hook the tube into the base of his neck, and “reinflate.”
Ninety percent of the time, Joe was in his bed—a hospital bed installed in the “Florida Room” on the ground floor. (The living room, on the other side of the stairway, might have been more commodious—but it was stacked floor to ceiling with thousands of Joe DiMaggio baseballs.) . . . On Joe’s left, as he lay in bed, there were two sliding glass doors that looked out on the Intracoastal Waterway. Also to the left of the bed stood the IV pole where Joe’s bags hung, along with packs of nutrients that dripped down the tube into his stomach. A few feet away from the foot of the bed, there was a fifty-two-inch television. And atop the TV sat the boom box, to play Joe’s Pavarotti songs, Ella Fitzgerald, or Michael Bolton. Next to the bed, on Joe’s right, stood his breathing machine and four big oxygen tanks—along with a rolling console that held dressing changes, gauze, bandages, baby wipes, gloves, and creams.
Joe needed cream all the time. His skin was breaking down. His face was red and sore. Something was wrong with his left eye—it wouldn’t close. So he had to have eyedrops constantly, or the nurses would tape the eye shut. Then, Joe would rip off the tape. Joe hated to be handled. Everything hurt. The scars on his heels hurt when the staff barely touched them to rub in cream. His ankles were tender. His right knee was delicate. His left shoulder pained him. And his back was always bad. Sometimes, when nurses (especially females) had to turn him over, or haul him up, after he’d slid down with his ankles hanging off the foot of the bed, Joe would wince and roughly bat them away. (There were only two female nurses who did well with him—they’d each had three sons.) Men did better with Joe in general. When they had to do something with him, he might be a sonofabitch about it, but he wouldn’t flinch—he let them do it. And he never whined.
One man did better than all the others—that was DeJan Pesut, who was the butler hired in from a South Florida service. DeJan was a hearty, square-jawed Slovenian Serb, with a brush cut and goatee, both tinged with gray. He spoke English with a Serbo-Croatian accent, and he knew some words of Italian. But from the moment he walked in, he seemed to know Joe.
It was always “Joe” with DeJan—never “Sir” or “Mr. DiMaggio.” Or sometimes, when he’d get his face up right next to Joe, it was “boss,” or “my man.” And he wouldn’t mince words or prattle about the weather—he’d tell Joe what was going on. “Joe! Hey! You gotta let ’em get the blood pressure now—and then you gonna take the medications, and then you gonna eat something. Okay? You gotta get this done now.” Once the portly nurse had taken blood pressure and left the bedside, DeJan would be back with a growling whisper in DiMaggio’s ear. “Joe—my man—she’s weighing five hundred pounds that one! You want me to fire her for you?” Joe couldn’t speak. But he smiled a little.
DeJan would try to feed Joe apple sauce or pudding—or a little ice cream—but Joe’s throat couldn’t separate the food from air. Still, DeJan would be back the next day with tomatoes from the local green market. “Joe! Looka these. You see that? You know I’m gonna make you pomodoro. You want the pomodoro? . . . My man! You gonna get better! You gonna be strong! Siciliano!” DeJan would lift his arms like a muscle man, showing off. And Joe would smile and nod.
But Joe wasn’t getting better. And after a while, he knew it. They’d take him off the collar so he could talk to a granddaughter on the phone, and after five minutes, he’d have to hang up and go back on the breather. As they got him settled and reached again for the ventilator tube, Joe said, “Is that thing keeping me goin’?” And they couldn’t deny it. “S’no way to be,” Joe said, before they hooked him on again.
People wanted to visit. Morris kept almost all of them out. Joe had signed a paper making Morris his “medical surrogate” under Florida law. (As Morris told one pal who wanted to see Joe: “I call the shots.”) . . . But truly, Joe didn’t want anybody to see him—not like this. DeJan brought potted trees to block the view from the Intracoastal Waterway. Joe thought people would sneak up by boat to take pictures of him. And he knew he looked bad.
When George Steinbrenner won consent for a visit, DeJan had to work Joe over for hours, with a haircut, shave, a crisp white shirt. (“Lookit my man! Like a bran’ new Cadillac!”) . . . But Steinbrenner was there only a few minutes before Joe got tired again. A couple of old Florida pals did get in to sit with DiMag. Joe Nacchio, who was a pal since the 1940s, came several times—and so did Al Tordella, who’d been Joe’s steam room buddy at La Gorse Country Club for the last few years. Once, when Tordella came, Joe ordered everybody else from the room. (Only the nurse refused to go.) Joe had something important to tell Tordella. But by the time Joe got off the tube and shooed everybody out, he was exhausted and couldn’t speak . . . .
Mostly Joe was alone, save for staff and the huge TV. That was how he could see his son—who did an interview with Inside Edition (for fifteen grand). Joe Jr. said there were no problems between him and his dad—they just hadn’t talked for a few years. But Junior was glad the old man was better . . . . The granddaughters, Paula and Kathie, shuttled back and forth from the West Coast several times—as did their husbands, Jim Hamra and Roger Stein. But they had businesses and children back home (February was a school month), so they couldn’t stay . . . . Dominic DiMaggio had a house in Florida, so he came more often—and he was admitted. Despite the silence between brothers that had lasted for years, Joe had ruled now, he wante
d to see Dom. They were the last of the breed. And only a few months before, Joe had told Dick Burke, his New York pal, that he wanted Burke and Dommie to be his executors. But that was never going to happen. Morris was always there when Dom got in.
Morris would stop in on his way to the office in the morning, or on his way back home at night. If he allowed somebody to visit Joe, Morris would arrive with the guest in the afternoon. And he’d hang around to make sure nothing untoward was said. If Joe was safely alone (save for staff), Morris would issue a few orders and then walk across the street to his own house, for dinner.
Soon, Morris would begin to write the dramatic story—“five months spent away from my law practice to be at DiMaggio’s bedside making life and death decisions in an effort to prolong the life of my friend and the nation’s hero, Joe DiMaggio.” (In fact, the saga of Morris’s care for his friend would form a chapter in a book—a “tell-all,” as Morris called it—that he would offer to New York publishers for a million and a half.)
But somehow, Morris still found time to take care of a few business details. For instance, there was some nasty correspondence to Jerry Romolt, warning him of dire consequences if Romolt continued to criticize the handling of DiMaggio’s business affairs . . . . There was also, in those same weeks, a letter to inform Barry Halper that Joe had never really liked him. And by the bye, Morris accused Barry of stealing Joe’s ’51 World Series ring.
Morris also found time to do some business with Scott DiStefano, who was the front man on the sale of five hundred bats (all signed “Yankee Clipper”) to the Shop At Home Network, which would offer them to Joe’s fans on the Internet and on TV, starting at two A.M., February 14, 1999. Those were bats rejected as defects by Romolt, in his bat deal six years before. But now, as the Shop At Home Network announced: “Each bat comes with a certificate of authenticity signed by Mr. DiMaggio’s personal attorney Morris Engelberg.”
Maybe Joe was channel surfing in the wee hours, and stumbled across the Shop At Home Network. Or maybe—as the staff assumed—he was talking in a daze, when he startled his nurse by rasping out: “Morris is an ass-hole. Let’s get out of here.” The nurse and the tech on duty tried to calm Joe—they told him to relax—this was his home. “I know,” Joe said. “I want to get outa here.” But by that time, late February, Joe knew he wouldn’t get out. Or he’d get out only one way.
“I don’t want to be like this anymore,” Joe told the nurse one night.
To DeJan, he said simply, “It’s no good. I wanna die.” DeJan wouldn’t hear it. “I don’t wanna have this bullshit from my man. Where is my hand? . . .” And roughly, he grabbed Joe’s hand, bent down and kissed it.
Monday, March 1, Morris brought in a nurse from Hospice Care of Broward County. That was Javier Ribe, a Spaniard who had worked for five years helping people to die in ease. Once hospice care began, either the respirator or the feeding tube had to be disconnected. In Joe’s case, they pulled the feeding tube.
DeJan came down the steps of Joe’s house wearing a chef’s hat and waving an Italian flag. “Boss! You gonna eat!”
He cooked crab and farfalle for Joe, and Joe ate.
Next day, it was chicken. “Joe!” said DeJan, appearing with the chicken. “You gonna point it what piece you want. You touch the chicken what piece you gonna eat.” Joe touched the chicken and ate what he could.
Third day, Thursday, March 4, was lobster. But Joe didn’t eat. And he would not eat again.
Morris put the plan in place to “let Joe go” Saturday night. The doctor pals had prescribed morphine suppositories every other hour. The medical staff gave Joe one suppository and he slept for hours. They wouldn’t give him more. It would have killed him. That was the idea—but they couldn’t do that.
There was an uneasy feeling in the room. Dominic was there. But Paula and Kathy were both absent. Paula’s husband, Jim, had just arrived, and Kathie’s husband, Roger, had left. It was like some hockey team changing on the fly . . . with Morris “calling the shots.” He ordered the staff to shut down the ventilator’s pressure support. Oxygen would flow, but without pressure to fill Joe’s lungs. When Joe’s blood oxygen level fell into the seventies, Dommie couldn’t help himself. He said, “You’re killing him!” And the staff balked again—and turned the pressure back on, pushed in eight breaths a minute. Joe was brought back to life. That ventilator could have kept him going for years.
But the next night, nothing would be left to chance. The staff that came on at seven P.M. was asked at the start if they would have problems “letting Mr. DiMaggio go.” The hospice nurse, Javier, was on scene. Dominic was excluded. Kathie had made the trip across the country. Paula was on her way. Her husband, Jim, was there, still. And Morris, of course, who arrived to give orders, after his dinner.
Javier Ribe sat in front of the breathing machine, holding Joe’s hand. (Ribe said the human touch was a beautiful sensation that should never be denied.) For a while, DeJan took Joe’s other hand, and talked to his man. “Joe, you leavin’ us,” he was whispering. “But you gonna be in my thoughts. I’m gonna dress up alla time, like my man!”
“How long will this take?” Morris asked the staff.
Pavarotti was singing “Ave Maria” at low volume, from the boom box. For once the TV was off. The lights were dim. Kathie and Jim were standing at the bedside, sniffly with tears. Morris bustled around the bed giving hush-hush orders. “Make sure you don’t tell anybody about this till eight in the morning,” Engelberg instructed the staff. “That’s when I’m going to announce it. And I don’t want a lot of press calling, waking me up.” (He had a big day tomorrow—a will to file.)
Joe was lying on his back, propped up slightly, his head lolling to the side. He was out of it on morphine. He didn’t speak. He didn’t wake up. Javier would call it the most peaceful and beautiful death he had attended.
Joe lasted till midnight. Then he was gone.
When he died, Kathie and Jim couldn’t look. They left the room, and talked quietly together.
Morris stood by. But he didn’t approach, he didn’t touch Joe. The nursing staff was preparing the body for the funeral guys, who were to arrive at two A.M., by prearrangement with Morris. The nurse had folded Joe’s arms, and was about to wrap him in a sheet.
“Wait,” Morris ordered. “You need to take that ring off for me.”
“His ring?”
“Yeah, get that ring off.”
The nurse reached for Joe’s left hand, and pulled at the ring. But it wouldn’t budge. He couldn’t stretch out the finger and pull the ring at the same time.
Morris asked sharply: “Can’t you get something to take that off?”
“Well, yeah—we could lube it up . . .” But just then the ring came free. “What is it?” the nurse asked.
“Thirty-six World Series, rookie year.”
The nurse turned the ring over—“Can I look?” . . . But he had only a glimpse before Morris yanked the ring out of his hands, and left the room in a hurry. All the nurse would remember was the weight of the gold, the edges worn smooth, and on the face, the soft sparkle of diamonds.
THE YANKEE OLD-TIMERS, AND THE CLIPPER ALONE.
EPILOGUE
THREE DAYS LATER, AT JOE’S FUNERAL IN SAN FRANCISCO, Engelberg was wearing the ring. He would say Joe gave him that ring, on his deathbed—before Joe died in his arms.
Morris didn’t like the funeral. Dominic DiMaggio was in charge. All the other brothers and sisters were gone. Marie was the last sister to go. She had died in 1997, and since that time, the house on Beach Street had stood empty and hushed. Joe’s funeral was quiet, too—only thirty people in the church, mostly cousins. Dominic spoke the only eulogy. In the “tell-all” book that Morris would later attempt to sell, he would call it “the fiasco of Joe DiMaggio’s funeral . . . .
“DiMaggio’s estranged relationship with his brother, Dominick [sic], is detailed,” as the book’s preface promised. “Especially the fact that Dominick DiMaggio was not at J
oe’s bedside when he passed away and was not mentioned in his Will.”
Morris wanted it known that he was Joe’s real family. “I devoted the past sixteen years of my life to the Yankee baseball legend, Joe DiMaggio,” his book would claim, “and have been referred to by the media as ‘the man behind the great DiMaggio,’ ‘DiMaggio’s closest friend and confident [sic],’ ‘DiMaggio’s attorney and close friend,’ among others. DiMaggio divulged stories and facts to me relating to his life that this ‘private man’ never told anyone before. In reality, Joe was the father that I never had; the father I had always wished for and wanted, and in turn, I was the type of son he wanted but never had in his son, Joe DiMaggio, Jr.”
Joe Jr. did attend his father’s funeral. Joey had his gray hair pulled neatly into a ponytail. He wore a new suit, and a new set of teeth, that a cousin had bought him for the occasion. Morris told Joey that he’d take care of him now. Junior wouldn’t have to live at that cousin’s junkyard anymore. How about a nice condo in Florida? . . . Joey didn’t want any condo. He took the money Morris gave him (from the twenty-thousand-dollar annual stipend specified in Joe’s will). And six months after his father’s death, Joey was dead, too—from an overdose of crank, heroin mixed with crack cocaine.
Morris did not attend last rites for Joey. Engelberg was busy as the personal representative and lawyer for the estate of the Yankee Clipper—under the terms of the will that Morris filed in Fort Lauderdale on the day of Joe’s death. By June of 1999, he had sold “for a price in the millions” Joe’s bats, balls, pictures, lithos, posters, pins, magazines, jerseys, baseball cards . . . to a North Carolina businessman (originally from Bayonne, New Jersey) by the name of Ralph Perullo. Engelberg told the AP that he knew Joe would not have approved “carving up his collection strictly for the money.” That was why he’d sold it all to Perullo. “I know Joe is watching all the moves I make,” said Engelberg. The next weekend, Perullo started retailing at an autograph show in Philadelphia, where the items that caused the most comment were sixty-eight Yankee Clipper balls with the wavering pen marks Joe had made in the hospital. “On some of them you can’t make out his name,” Morris told reporters. “But I know he signed them because I was there.” And every item in Perullo’s sale came with a certificate of authenticity with the personal signature of “Joe’s attorney and closest friend.”
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book) Page 63