Joe DiMaggio

by Jerome Charyn

  The Clipper wasn’t being too unfair when he said that the Kid “throws like a broad, and he runs like a ruptured duck.” Williams did have a feeble throwing arm, and he did look funny chasing fly balls. But he could also have been DiMaggio’s phantom brother. He too was a loner, a secretive man who lived at a hotel rather than have a real address, and who was quick to anger. But Williams couldn’t control his rage, and DiMaggio did. Williams would spit at the fans who heckled him, wouldn’t tip his hat after he hit a home run. His father was a photographer in San Diego, his mother a religious woman “with a will of steel who gave her life to the Salvation Army” and often neglected him. And he became a wanderer in his own home, and would remain a wanderer, with baseball as his only fixture. He rarely drank anything harder than malted milk. But the farther he ran from his mother, the closer he seemed to get: he had his own will of steel, with baseball as his religion. If she was “the Angel of Tijuana,” who crossed the border to save people’s souls, he was the secret angel of Fenway Park, fighting the demons of baseball—fans, managers, owners, sports writers—to save his own soul and secure his fame.7

  DiMaggio had other demons. He was even more secretive than the Kid, with only the language of baseball to soothe him, as if he were hiding in center field in plain sight of fifty thousand fans. “I guess I know Joe almost forty years now,” Hank Greenberg would tell Maury Allen in 1975, long after he and DiMaggio had retired. “We’ve played hundreds of games against each other. I’ve talked to him hundreds of times at banquets and at [Toots] Shor’s and places like that. In a way, though, I guess I don’t really know him. I don’t know if anybody knows Joe DiMaggio.”8

  It is this strange aura that separates DiMaggio from Williams or Greenberg or any other player. Williams could be read, and DiMaggio couldn’t. Williams was knowable, reachable, in a way that DiMaggio wasn’t. We can understand Williams’ passion and his strangeness. He wants us to marvel at him but not to interfere with his pursuit for perfection at the plate. DiMaggio never lived in such an abstract realm. He was almost autistic. He’s locked inside himself even while he runs like an antelope. No one could really discern him in center field. His gods and demons were utterly his own.

  But nothing seemed to hurt him in those golden years before World War II, not his injuries, not his demons. Fans heckled him for the first time in 1938, when he had a salary dispute with the Yankee management and missed spring training and the first twelve games. It startled DiMaggio to hear all that booing, but he never spat at the fans and he still tipped his hat after hitting a home run. He just crawled deeper inside himself and revealed even less than before. “I woke up in the middle of the night hearing the boos. I got up, smoked a cigarette, and walked the floor. You keep saying you will get used to it, but you never do. I stuffed my ears with cotton, but nothing helped.”9

  He became a nighthawk, spending his time at the Stork Club and “21,” or at Toots Shor’s when it opened in 1940; he would become Shor’s most celebrated customer and client, sitting at Table One, with Shor as a benevolent bulldog who would steer other celebrities to DiMaggio’s table and keep everyone else at bay.

  Shy as he was, he preferred to have a shill around when he was prowling after women. “Ah,” he told reporter Lou Effrat, “you know me, until midnight with girls I’m speechless.” He began to romance a beautiful blond showgirl from Minnesota, Dorothy Arnold, née Dorothy Arnoldine Olsen, and married her in 1939 at the end of the playing season. But that didn’t stop his prowling. Years later, after Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Arnold were both dead, he would say with a certain wistfulness: “You know, everyone talks about how beautiful Marilyn Monroe was, and she was, but people don’t remember my first wife, Dorothy Arnold. She was just as beautiful. I used to run around a lot when I was married to her. I was crazy, fucking around.”10

  But he was riding on that curious and fickle flush of his own fame, and it grew higher and higher until it burst in 1941, and he found himself the most famous man in America: the country adored everything he did. Behind that adoration was a hidden hysteria. Europe was at war, and America would soon be sucked in. A new kind of darkness pervaded America, subtle, often unseen, but reflected on the walls of its movie houses. The screen itself darkened and suddenly filled with shadows. It was only after the war that French film critics, deprived of American films since 1940, would notice this darkness and label it “film noir.”

  From Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane to John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon to Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra and They Died with Their Boots On, there was a moodiness that hadn’t been seen before in American films, a nervous twitch that hung over a scene like some portent of doom, so that we could predict Humphrey Bogart’s death in High Sierra from the opening shots of him; disaster seemed embedded in every frame of They Died with Their Boots On and Citizen Kane. Even Walt Disney’s Dumbo had a touch of noir, as the little band of crows sit on a wire and mock the action around them. Male stars, such as John Garfield in The Sea Wolf and Victor Mature in I Wake Up Screaming, looked like sleepwalkers upon the screen, barely able to keep their eyes open, while female stars such as Gene Tierney in The Shanghai Gesture had a beauty so fragile it felt as if the screen would shatter around them like shards of glass.

  Into this dark, ambiguous time landed the Yankee Clipper, a most unambiguous hero, like some warrior in pinstripes capable of a magnificent feat, something that could be sustained for two months and stir up a frenzy, shove that sense of foreboding away. A virtuoso of consistency during the summer of 1941, he would get at least one hit in 56 consecutive games, from May 15 until July 16, when he was robbed of two base hits by the spectacular stabs of Cleveland third baseman Ken Keltner. He then started a second streak of 19 games. But the numbers didn’t matter so much as the Clipper’s appearance day after day, his willingness to defy the demons of baseball and their stingy law of averages. Les Brown and His Band of Renown would record a hit song, “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio,” in the midst of the streak, to help Americans celebrate “Joe the One-Man Show” while the hits and home runs multiplied: he would wallop 15 homers during the streak, drive in 55 runs, bat .408.

  The nation needed a one-man show that felt like it would go on forever, as if the streak itself was a kind of talisman that could keep America out of the war. As usual, no one could read DiMaggio’s face. It reassured America to see that the Big Guy went about his business as calm as ever. Of course it wasn’t true. “I was able to control myself. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t dying inside.”11

  That would always be his problem: he could show nothing except his narrowest side, and it would seem like cunning and calculation as he tried to guard his myth. When Gay Talese chased after him in 1966, all Talese could ever see was a DiMaggio without grace and charm, and he would reveal this sour man to America in “The Silent Season of a Hero.”

  DiMaggio wasn’t so sour in 1941, but that bottling up of feeling had already given him ulcers. Still, the Bombers went on to win the pennant by 17 games, then beat Brooklyn in the World Series 4 games to 1. And on October 23, his first and only child, Joseph Paul DiMaggio, Jr., was born. He lived in a penthouse with Dorothy on West End Avenue (not far from where the Babe lived); he was more celebrated than any athlete had ever been, but it was only years afterward that his two-month stretch of hits would be immortalized as The Streak. It wasn’t a powerful part of his vocabulary while he was still an active player. But as Stephen Jay Gould points out in “The Streak of Streaks,” it begins to look more and more like an impossible feat.

  Gould feels that a lifetime of labor means very little, “especially in sport or in battle,” since “posterity needs a single transcendent event to fix [someone] in permanent memory.” And DiMaggio’s 56 games was such an event, “both the greatest factual achievement in the history of baseball and a principal icon of American mythology.” It should never have happened, according to Gould. A streak, he says, must be absolutely exceptionless: “You are not allowed a single day of . . . bad luck.” As t
he tension mounts, “your life becomes unbearable. Reporters dog your every step; fans are even more intrusive than usual (one stole DiMaggio’s favorite bat right in the middle of his streak). You cannot make a single mistake.”12

  Still DiMaggio was able to triumph, to continue without his lucky bat until it was returned (some say with the Mafia’s help). A long streak must be “a matter of extraordinary luck imposed upon great skill.” It must also be a prodigious act of concentration and courage. DiMaggio had both, perhaps more than any other player; here, for once, his ability to hold in his rage kept him in good stead.13

  It might also have been his curse, his mark of Cain. The Jolter was completely bottled up. He could never play the clown or taunt fans who had taunted him. The Babe was a performer who loved every moment of his performance. His nostrils flared at the first sign of excitement. But the Jolter was so concentrated, so deeply inside himself, that some little distraction might throw off his game. He was much more fragile than Ted Williams or the Bambino, and was wounded in some essential way. That’s why the myth of DiMaggio remains with us. He was unlike any other ballplayer—he’s defined by his isolation, his inability to reveal anything other than his unique and mysterious maneuvers in front of fifty thousand fans.

  But the lonely outfielder who ranged in center field, who was always alone, on the field and off, could defy statistics. Perhaps some of his fierce timing came from his batting stance. Mickey Cochrane, Detroit’s star catcher who played against DiMaggio in 1936 and ’37, believed that the secret of DiMaggio’s consistency and power was derived from “the way he keeps those wrists cocked until the final stages of his swing. . . . It’s like a steel spring at work, or some form of explosion. The natural tendency is to hit too soon. [But] DiMaggio seems to wait longer than anyone I ever saw.”14

  Because of this ability to wait and watch the ball, he had fewer strikeouts than any other power hitter, whether Williams, Gehrig, Mantle, or Babe Ruth. Some baseball aficionados believe that this statistic—361 home runs vs. 369 strikeouts—is even more startling than The Streak (Williams had 521 homers and 709 strikeouts, Mantle 536 and 1,710). And DiMaggio improved on his own ratio during The Streak—15 homers vs. 7 strikeouts—which made him even more consistent and dangerous as a hitter.

  Steven Jay Gould keeps coming back to the art of warfare when he describes DiMaggio’s prowess in 1941, claiming that The Streak “is the finest of legitimate legends because it embodies the essence of battle that truly defines our lives. DiMaggio activated the greatest and most unattainable dream of all humanity, the hope and chimera of all sages and shamans: he cheated death, at least for a while.”15

  Gould is right, but if we rely too much on chimeras, we reduce DiMaggio’s art to an act of magical powers. He may have been godlike, but he was also “the Walloping Wop,” hiding his jitters as he stood there with his wrists cocked, waiting for the perfect pitch.

  4.

  In 1988 Michael Seidel, a professor of English literature at Columbia and lifelong baseball addict, pinpointed DiMaggio as an American icon and a mirror of what was going on in the country and much of the world as the Jolter was in the midst of his streak. “I am not charting the biography of a man but the rhythms of a legendary sequence, perhaps the most admired in sports history,” Seidel writes in Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of ’41. But in doing so, he lends a poignancy to the DiMaggio legend.16

  “The days of the streak record the energies in a land preoccupied by war but as yet untested and unscarred by it,” Seidel tells us. America was in a kind of dream state as DiMaggio rode across the public domain. He was a silent warrior in a nation on the verge of war. The gigantic footsteps and grand drama of Ruth wouldn’t have worked in 1941, as “the land distrusted the self-aggrandizing bluster of the roaring twenties and the heroic figure whose demeanor suggested the flamboyance of something already done and not the steely anticipation of something yet to be encountered.”17

  The nation longed for a quieter hero. “Whether in sports, the movies, or the armed services, the image of accomplishment in the uncertain months before war drew on the intense but not the hysterical, the skillful but not the boastful, the graceful but not the mannered.”18

  And that’s how DiMaggio stepped into history during the days and nights of the streak. “Baseball is played in counterpoint,” Seidel tells us, as if the games themselves both quickened and quieted the nation’s underlying hysteria. America searched for some consistent sign within the warlike panoply of baseball, where the outcome of a game was never really predictable. It needed a hero to tame the capricious gods and devils of the game, to accomplish the impossible in a quiet, resourceful way. And here was the Yankee Clipper, relentless in his batting stance, “head motionless and dead level,” our very own dragon slayer.19

  Had the streak happened in any other year, it might not have been so poignant or memorable, and wouldn’t have reached beyond the realm of baseball. But as Seidel reminds us, “It is the cusplike quality of 1941,” its dreamlike, uncertain atmosphere, “that helps account for the nostalgic strength of the year’s appeal today.”20

  In the afterword to a new edition of the book, published in 2002, Seidel talks about his own “encounter” with DiMaggio on the telephone, while he was writing Streak. The Jolter had been reluctant to talk to any writer or researcher, who might tread upon his personal life and ask him about the late Mrs. DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe. But Bart Giamatti, who was president of the National League at the time, had persuaded DiMaggio to talk to Seidel about the streak. DiMaggio was suspicious at first on the phone. Then he began to open up. “The legendarily silent DiMaggio was almost abuzz.” And Seidel realized that the Clipper “spoke more animatedly than he had intended because he so clearly missed the era he helped to define.”21

  Seidel also realized how unkind Richard Ben Cramer had been to the Clipper in his 2000 biography. DiMaggio’s misadventures were “charted without charity” in a book which made “this quiet, insecure, and somewhat sad man into a much worse human being than he was.”22

  Cramer could never quite deal with the idiot savant in DiMaggio. In reality, the Clipper had nowhere to go after 1941, not even back to baseball. The world had gotten far too ambiguous and complex for him. He wanted to live forever within the unambiguous territory defined by the streak, where he had to worry about nothing but his next hit, and where his duels with Bob Feller could hold an entire nation in its thrall. And so, in the summer of ’45, before he returned to the Bronx Bombers, he brought his three-year-old son, Joe DiMaggio, Jr., to a Yankee game. People began to chant “Joe, Joe DiMaggio,” until there was a tumult in the entire Stadium for “a single ballplayer whose presence embodied prewar memory and postwar relief.” The Clipper was moved as he had never been moved before and would never be again. Joe Jr. smiled and said, “See, Daddy—everybody knows me.”23

  THREE

  Joltin’ Joe and the Ghost of Lou Gehrig

  1.

  Lou Gehrig lay dying while the Jolter was in the midst of his streak. There were reports that the Iron Horse was so ill “he couldn’t lift a cigarette.” He died on June 2, the day the Jolter had two hits against the Indians and kept the streak alive at 19 games. On June 3, in Detroit, the Tigers and the Bombers paid a silent tribute to Gehrig. “DiMaggio stood alone, facing the flag with his head bowed.” He’d been fond of Gehrig, had often smoked cigarettes with him in the tunnel at Yankee Stadium—two silent men who never had the Babe’s pizzazz or rollicking sense of humor. Both of them spoke in monosyllables, both brooded a lot.1

  DiMaggio brooded all the way through the winter of ’41–’42. A prince without history or antecedent, he was safe only in center field. His wife had given birth to “the year’s most publicized baby”; Joe and Joe Jr. were celebrated in every newspaper and magazine. Dorothy was pictured as the model wife, Mrs. Joe DiMaggio. But there were already deep cracks in the marriage. Sometimes the great brooder wouldn’t talk to her for weeks at a time. That winter, he lived at T
oots’ Table One rather than on West End Avenue; often he wouldn’t come home at all. There was always some insult, some wound, real or imagined; if Dorothy wanted to go out to dinner in a dress with a neckline a little too low, he would rage until she wore something else, or to punish her he wouldn’t go out at all. As Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto recalled: “Joe was rough to live with. His whole world was baseball. When you marry a beautiful woman she wants to be seen. I think Joe never really understood that.”2

  Dorothy did some brooding of her own. She ran off to Reno, and the Big Guy began to worry. As a married man with one child, he was classified 3-A—with little danger of being drafted. But if Dorothy divorced him, he would lose his deferment. He started the 1942 season in a kind of limbo and remained there. Even when Dorothy returned to West End Avenue in June, he was still in a slump. That golden warrior of ’41 with his magnificent strides and batting streak was gone. And to make things worse, he had to compete with a ghost.

  On July 16, Pride of the Yankees was released, starring his favorite actor, Gary Cooper, as Lou Gehrig. It was an enormous hit, nominated for eleven Academy Awards, and had the Babe and Bob Meusel playing themselves as erstwhile members of Murderers’ Row. When Joltin’ Joe had arrived like that crazy comet in 1936, Gehrig found himself “leading the league in nearly every category, including invisibility.” He was no more shy than DiMaggio, yet what seemed “colorless” in him somehow made DiMaggio seem “sexy.” The Iron Man had to retire in 1939, having fallen victim to a mysterious disease that was later diagnosed as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a debilitating illness where the muscles waste away: Gehrig got weaker and weaker until he could barely swing a bat. He died at the age of thirty-seven. The film had great appeal because it was like a war story, according to Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, with a hero “at the height of his glory” who is “touched by the finger of death.”3