Joe DiMaggio

by Jerome Charyn

  It was Cramer’s biography of the Yankee Clipper, published in 2000, that seemed to deflate DiMaggio, to tarnish him for the twenty-first century. Subtitled The Hero’s Life, it attacks the “hero machine” that helped create DiMaggio and reveals a man who didn’t want to go to war, who was utterly friendless except for a coterie of sycophants, who stalked Marilyn after their divorce, who sold his World Series rings to pay for his lodging, and who never spent an instant marveling “at the beauty of anything. Except maybe a broad.”3

  Cramer’s book is itself a marvel that digs deep into the DiMaggio myth as it unmans him piece by piece. But its picture of the Jolter is far too reductive and bleak. DiMaggio was much more than the blind apparatus of a machine that spat out heroes and ruined them in the process. He wasn’t as calculating as Cramer loves to think. He was like an idiot savant whose magic was born on a baseball field and abandoned him once he left it.

  No one, not even Cramer, doubted him in center field. “It was a special place—not just the vastness in the Bronx, but every center field: the largest suzerainty in the game’s realm, it had to be patrolled by a prince.”4

  DiMaggio was that prince, alone in his suzerainty, unrivaled, a hunter waiting for his prey. DiMaggio land was not simply center field but right-center and left-center, so that the other two outfielders were appendages who didn’t dare enter his territory unless the prince gave them permission to do so. “He was a world by himself,” recalls Henry Kissinger, who first saw DiMaggio patrol the outfield from a seat in the bleachers in 1938, when Kissinger was a German Jewish refugee living with his parents in Washington Heights. “There was nobody who could take over a ballpark like he could.”5

  And Kissinger wasn’t an exceptional witness: so much of DiMaggio’s almost magical fame comes from his own fans, from those he marked for life, whether it be Ernest Hemingway, who wrote about “the great DiMaggio” in The Old Man and the Sea, a sports writer such as Jimmy Cannon, a social critic such as David Halberstam, a literary critic such as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the biologist and baseball aficionado Stephen Jay Gould, or the rest of us, who were astonished by what we saw, and were able to find a language to tell others about it, to describe DiMaggio’s own language, his economy of motion, his lyricism as he roamed center field. There was a kind of heartbreak, as we worried that he might disappear in that enormous expanse of space, that no one man could withstand all the wind, not even the Yankee Clipper, that the leaping gazelle we saw was some aberration, a phantom put there by our own wish to create some creature more perfect than ourselves. No fellow human being could possibly look that good, but DiMaggio did.

  2.

  He wasn’t good-looking in a conventional way. He had a pointy nose, like Pinocchio, and a terrible overbite. He had the face of a handsome horse. When he first began to play for the San Francisco Seals in 1933, he was burdened by two buckteeth. One of the scouting reports called him “a gawky, awkward kid, all arms and legs like a colt, and inclined to be surly.” But the awkwardness went away, and it was the colt that remained, that incredible sense of a constant, dancing motion. Still, he wasn’t coltish off the field. He had little social grace. He never smiled and couldn’t banter with his teammates. He seemed frightened of language. He had no real education to speak of outside baseball itself. The son of Italian immigrants who had never mastered English, he left high school after one year, worked on the docks, and played a little baseball. Unlike Ted Williams, a beanpole who lived only to hit a ball, DiMaggio fell into a career, followed his older brother Vince to the Seals, and quickly took his place on the team. It wasn’t out of arrogance or some cruel calculation: it was that absolute sense of his own gift. “On the ball field I was never uncertain. I knew what I was doing out there.”6

  In 1933 the Seals were all the baseball San Franciscans could see, since the major leagues reached no farther west than St. Louis, with the Browns and the Cardinals; and the Seal team, managed by former Dodger and Phillie batting champion Lefty O’Doul, was like a major league all of its own, with a mountain of fans and sportswriters. By the end of his first season with the Seals, DiMaggio was already a minor myth, with a sixty-one-game hitting streak. The Seals had never had a player like DiMaggio. “I wanted to be the greatest I could be. I burned in my belly to be the best there was.”7

  And he played with this intensity, with this fierce will, throughout his career. Ted Williams also “burned in the belly,” but with Williams it was more of an abstract ideal, a search for perfection that often did not include teammates or the fans. Even John Updike, Williams’ greatest fan, had to admit: “Seeking a perfectionist’s vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it.”8

  But DiMaggio was never quixotic as a player, never lost inside his own cocoon; the perfection he sought was within the immediate parameters of a game, with all its smells, its cries, and the hurly-burly of the moment. He played to win and wore himself out trying to win. There were other ballplayers who were just as complete, but almost none who had that moment-to-moment concentration and control, as if he were connected by some invisible string to every other position, every base, from his outpost in center field.

  “You saw him standing out there and you knew you had a pretty damn good chance to win the baseball game,” recalled Yankee pitcher Red Ruffing. Outfielder Tommy Henrich recognized how much DiMaggio gave of himself with every single play, so that his presence alone created “a considerable edge.” Perhaps the greatest treat of DiMaggio’s era were his duels with Bob Feller, the Cleveland Indian ace, whose fastball and wicked curve were almost as mythic as the Yankee Clipper. Feller arrived the same season DiMaggio did, in 1936, a seventeen-year-old farm boy from Iowa who struck out fifteen batters in his very first game and was soon baseball’s preeminent pitcher. According to Cleveland catcher Jim Hegan, who crouched right behind the Clipper during many of these duels, “Feller had a great deal of emotion and excitement about him when he was facing DiMaggio. DiMaggio never showed any of that against Feller. You couldn’t tell if he was facing Feller or . . . some kid up from the minors five minutes ago.”9

  But Yankee outfielder Charlie Keller captures a very different DiMaggio during these duels. “You could actually see the veins and muscles in DiMaggio’s neck stand out,” Keller recalled to David Halberstam. “They were like red cords. His whole body was tensed.” Thus DiMaggio himself was a curious contradiction, a man whose play seemed effortless while he suffered on the field, his expression often “as sad and haunted as a matador’s,” according to Gay Talese. He was, to his worshipful fans, “long and lean, like a holy man in an El Greco painting,” writes George Vecsey of the New York Times.10

  If DiMaggio looked haunted, it’s because he played like a haunted man, a hunger artist who was utterly spent after a game. “He always gave so much of himself on the field that there wasn’t much left when the game was over,” recalls Yankee pitcher Ed Lopat. And stories began to abound about his life off the field, where he was as much of a mystery. A month after the 1936 season began, DiMaggio was mobbed wherever he went and could not leave Yankee Stadium without a phalanx of policemen and security guards to protect him from the fans. “I think DiMaggio was the loneliest man I ever knew,” according to Lopat. “He couldn’t even eat a meal in a hotel restaurant. The fans wouldn’t let him. He led the league in room service.”11

  He would visit the best whorehouses in Manhattan, where he could prowl behind locked doors, but he had to eschew satin sheets because “his knees kept slipping.” Eventually he would find a few watering holes where he could sit at a select table and not be seen. He could not shake his own shyness. He almost never spoke. He preferred to hide in some corner and read comic books—a little later he would fall in love with Superman. His sudden, almost violent fame, which had pulled him right out of obscurity, must have made him feel akin to a comic book hero with supernatural powers.12

  Once he left baseball, he became “a lege
nd without a purpose,” a sleek Pinocchio in expensive suits, obsessed with the way he looked, but with no real imagination and little to do. He was a television commentator who could not even repeat his own name without looking at a prompter. A lack of education had left him stranded, distrustful, frightened of other people, a man without curiosity.13

  Enter Marilyn Monroe. She met him on a “blind date” in the spring of 1952. Marilyn’s career was about to crash-dive. The nude calendar she had posed for in 1949 had suddenly surfaced: there was not a single starlet who had posed in the nude and survived. And so her mentor, Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, hit upon a plan to save her career: Joe DiMaggio, the retired prince of baseball and the nearest thing to royalty America had ever had. The commotion surrounding her dates with DiMaggio smothered all the flak over the nudie calendar. And there he was: Pinocchio and Prince Charming.

  They were both childlike in their cultural void, a void with a great deal of sexual heat; yet that was not enough to bind them. Marilyn wanted to crawl outside her narrowness, and DiMaggio did not. He preferred to sit at home and eat dinner off a tray while watching Westerns on TV. All his adventure, all his shrewdness, had been on a playing field, and he had no more caverns to race across, no more balls to catch, no more duels with Bob Feller. Nothing in his background of a fisherman’s family had prepared him for the whirlwind of Marilyn Monroe. “She’s a plain kid,” he told Jimmy Cannon. “She’d give up the business if I asked her. She’d quit the movies in a minute. It means nothing to her.”14

  He’d looked into her eyes and seen a mirror of himself, as if she did not exist outside his want and his will, while she danced around him with her own ambition. He’d never understand how bright she was, how much more subtle than he would ever be. “I’m not interested in money,” she said in the very last interview she gave. “I just want to be wonderful.” DiMaggio’s life had become all about money and the things it could measure, whether it was the mink coat he bought for Marilyn, his worth as a baseball player, or the price of every baseball he signed at memorabilia shows.15

  Norman Mailer is the one who best understood Marilyn’s dilemma as Mrs. Joe DiMaggio: “She has to be suffering all the anguish of living with a man who will save her in a shipwreck or learn to drive a dog team to the North Pole (if her plane should crash there) but sits around the apartment watching television all night,” and “wishes to end her movie career!”16

  But when she dumps DiMaggio after 274 days of marriage, she forgets how prone to shipwrecks she really is, how the storm center of her own energy leaves her in a constant state of chaos: it’s DiMaggio who will get her out of the madhouse, DiMaggio who will bury her, who will clean up all the mess, who will have roses sent to her crypt religiously for twenty years. “Rain or shine those flowers [were] delivered.” She will haunt him for the rest of his life. She was the one woman who was larger than his own calculations, who shook him out of his shell. When he brought her to his watering hole, Toots Shor’s, the most misogynistic bar in Manhattan, where husbands were not supposed to bring their wives more than once or twice, “the place went electric,” hummed with Marilyn’s own electric life, so that for a moment he wasn’t some sad-faced matador, that sufferer on and off the field, that man of measurements. But it did not last long. Without Marilyn he went from the Yankee Clipper to Mr. Coffee, who could measure our lives in coffee spoons, and the king of memorabilia shows, whose life was limited to the signatures he sold.17

  On the day I began writing this book (July 17, 2007) there was an article in the New York Times entitled “Hard to Figure: The Drab Legacy of Jottin’ Joe.” It seems that the Clipper had kept a “journal” of his daily activities from 1982 to 1993: twenty-four hundred pages bound in twenty-nine folders to be sold by Steiner Sports, a Westchester company that trades in memorabilia. Steiner Sports called this treasure trove a marvelous means for DiMaggio to “convey his feelings and emotions.” But it is rather a testimony to the sadness and the loneliness of an idiot savant. His scribbles are filled with the details of a demented man, with jottings about when he woke up, if and when he took a steam bath, his negotiations with Mr. Coffee.

  The one fleck of emotion seems to come from all the celebrations in 1991 honoring the fiftieth anniversary of his fifty-six-game hitting streak that “immortalized” him as the most famous man in America. He’s bothered by the brouhaha and intrusions upon his privacy. And he says with a certain pique that had he known beforehand about all this fuss, he would have ended his streak “after 40 games.”

  There’s not one mention of Marilyn, only the trivia of signing baseballs, as if he had no interior life. And then we realize what is lacking. He isn’t senile. He is a man who had no language outside the lyricism of his own body. He danced for us on a playing field with a terrifying power, in spite of the bone spurs in his heel. Part of this fire came from the deep insecurity of a man who had a fear of words. Marilyn had much the same fear. She would freeze in front of a camera whenever she had to mouth a few lines.

  While making Some Like It Hot (1959), Billy Wilder had to tape the simplest bit of dialogue to the nearest prop if he wanted her to say her lines. But she hypnotizes us as Sugar Kane, the warbler in an all-girls band. Just as she hypnotized Joe, held him in a trance. She was the one person on the planet who seemed to wake him up, to rouse his mind and his emotions. It was a brittle romance with many interruptions, but still a love story we can’t seem to forget, between the mute man whose glory came while he pranced around in pinstripes on an endless field and the finest, funniest actress of the fifties, who was dismissed in her own time as a freak and a sad case.

  Joe’s jottings are the ravaged songs of a troubadour, the ravings of a man who fell into trivia while he mourned Marilyn in some part of him he did not care to show. The signings were subterfuge. He never lost that exquisite edge he had on the field to lock out unimportant details. He cloaked himself in memorabilia shows, the minutia of signing bats and balls, wore the disguise of Mr. Coffee. He burned in his belly until the very end, but would share it with us only for a little while, on the playing field, where his galloping and the wonderful whip of his bat revealed his pride and his love of the game and never intruded upon this most private of men.

  We remember him now as an icon out of our own rumbling past. It’s not his hitting streak that haunts us, but what that streak represents—his fierce concentration, his fierce will. Gay Talese wasn’t wrong to compare him to a matador. There are no bulls on a baseball diamond, yet there might as well have been. DiMaggio lived in that constant danger zone where a bull might gore a man. He took us with him into that realm of the absolute. It was a ride we would never forget.

  3.

  Perhaps no one understood the Clipper as well or worshiped him as much as Toots Shor. Born in South Philadelphia in 1903, Bernard “Toots” Shor grew up in a tough Irish neighborhood and learned to protect his own little territory. His roughhousing would hold him in good stead when he became a bouncer and doorman at several Manhattan speakeasies, including the Five O’Clock Club, a mob front on West 54th. He was “the only Jew kid” who ever worked for mobster Owney Madden. Shor was six feet two and had the shoulders of a football player. He also had the ability to make and keep good friends. It was at the Five O’Clock Club where he first met James Cagney and George Raft and where the boisterous myth of Toots began. “If he doesn’t insult you, he doesn’t love you, and if he doesn’t love you, you have missed a chunk of life,” said one of Toots’ coterie, actor Pat O’Brien.18

  The Five O’Clock Club morphed into a restaurant and saloon that opened in 1940 on West 51st Street. Nothing was ever the same after that. It was where boxers, baseball players, and sports-writers ruled rather than presidents, politicians, and other kingpins, though Harry Truman and J. Edgar Hoover were always welcome at Toots Shor’s, along with mobster Frank Costello, who may have owned a piece of the saloon. Toots adored the New York Giants, even while they hobbled around in last place, but he had one hero—Jo
e D. It was like a love affair between a loud-mouth and a lonesome, silent center fielder. Joe called Toots every day while he was on the road, and when the Yankees were in town, he would often go directly from his perch in center field to “51 West 51.” DiMaggio lived there, ate there, and learned to deal with his shyness at Table One. He belonged to Toots’ little gang of “solid-gold crumb bums.” Toots prized “palship” over everything else. There were “civilians” who ate and drank at his saloon from time to time, but his “crumb bums” had to be there every day. If they happened to be out of town, Toots would cry into the phone: “I miss you. Come on home. I love ya, ya creepy bum!” And he missed DiMaggio most of all.19

  DiMaggio may have been a skinflint who expected others to pay for the pleasure of his company, but he wasn’t a skinflint at Toots’ saloon. He never balked when Toots donated cash to some charity in his name. He was loyal to Toots’ clubhouse with its circular bar, and he was loyal to Toots. It didn’t matter how often Yankee president Larry MacPhail feuded with Toots. If MacPhail wanted to have dinner with DiMaggio, it had to be at the clubhouse. Joe wouldn’t meet him at the Colony or “21.”

  Toots’ gang had to have “class,” which Toots himself defined. “Class is a thing where a guy does everything decent.”20 But this was a subterfuge. Almost all of Toots’ crumb bums, including DiMaggio, had a dread of anything “high-tony”—Toots’ sense of character or class was a workingman’s dream. Most of his pals, from Owney Madden to Jackie Gleason and George Raft, had their own private chivalry and primitive code; they were knights of the lower depths, men who had not been born into privilege and who prized loyalty above all other things.

  Toots loved to say that “a saloonkeeper in the city is like a minister in a small town.”21 For his devotees, Toots’ saloon had a small town’s convivial lines and rules, and within this narrow world, DiMaggio was a godlike champion with the greatest class of all. He never made one phony gesture on the field, never showboated, or got into rhubarbs with other players. Toots could be a bit sentimental about Joe. “You have given me more thrills than all the rest of the champions put together. You are the biggest guy I know and the biggest thing about you is your heart.” But Shor was a keen observer behind his sloppy, sentimental mask. He attended every home game, saw the dreamlike moves of a man on fire, that stillness as DiMaggio woke with the sound of a bat and seemed to burn himself alive galloping after the ball. DiMaggio didn’t carouse after a game. He returned to Toots Shor’s, where all the solid-gold bums had their home base.22