Joe DiMaggio

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Joe DiMaggio Page 7

by Jerome Charyn


  Still, it must have troubled him that Ruth had vanished so completely from a game he himself had transformed, so that every home run was now considered Ruthian or not. The Babe had been much more clever than the Yankee Clipper, much more of a showman. Yet the Yanks had relinquished him to the scrapheap of baseball history. Would the Jolter end up on the very same heap?

  While he’d been in the service, baseball had transformed itself into the national myth. Every single record of attendance was broken in 1946, almost as if wartime baseball had never existed; its roster of clowns disappeared in an instant, and Joe, the reluctant warrior, was transformed into a kind of war hero. He was now even larger than the player he had been; spring training in ’46 had become a circus, with the Yankee Clipper its only star; he signed more autographs than he’d ever done in an entire season of play. Who cared if he had a lousy year in ’46? It reassured his fans, proved that their god was human, that he had as many faults as they did. And as his injuries multiplied in ’47 and ’48, it only added to his allure. He was their wounded warrior.

  3.

  And wounded he was; he’d had another operation in November 1948, to remove the bone spurs on his right heel. The operation seemed to be a success. He reported for spring training on March 1. The Bombers had a new manager, Casey Stengel, a fifty-eight-year-old wanderer who’d managed the Dodgers and the Braves with no success at all and had been a journeyman outfielder on five different clubs, including the Giants, from 1912 to 1925. His shoulders were hunched over and he looked like a ragged clown. He would never get along with the Jolter, called him “Mr. De-Madge,” with a measure of respect and spite.

  The Clipper had played under two managers for most of his career: Joe McCarthy and Bucky Harris. McCarthy respected DiMaggio right from the start. “He was the best rookie I ever saw break in. . . . Joe had this marvelous sense of anticipation. That’s because he studied the game.” And the Jolter had little trouble with Bucky Harris, whom he treated like a kid brother. The Bombers belonged to him, not to Bucky. Stengel was much more stubborn; hiding his venom behind a garbled language that reporters loved to call “Stengelese,” he would salaam to DiMaggio whenever he hit a home run, and realized he’d never be able to rebuild the team until DiMaggio retired. But Stengel needed the Jolter right now. He couldn’t knock off the Red Sox without him.7

  But by the second day of spring training the Jolter had a noticeable limp. He would miss the season’s opener for the eighth time. He had a kind of infection in his right heel that made it pulse with heat, as if there was a furnace right under the skin. He was flown to Baltimore with his inflamed heel. Reporters dogged him right inside the hospital at Johns Hopkins; wherever he was, “wheelchair patients would roll in and gawk.”8

  He appeared at opening day in his signature camel’s hair coat and then withdrew inside his suite at the Elysée Hotel, would see no one except Toots Shor. The Yanks were paying him a hundred grand—more than Ruth ever made—and he had to hop around in a hotel room like some antique. He grew more and more depressed. And then, one morning in June, the Jolter stepped out of bed, put some pressure on his damaged heel, and felt no pain. The heel wasn’t hot any more. And at the end of month, he appeared in the locker room at Fenway Park without warning, didn’t say a word to Stengel, and trotted out to the field in a special shoe with cleatless cleats.

  DiMaggio, who had missed the first two months of ’49, proceeded to demolish the Red Sox, hitting 4 homers and driving in 9 runs as the Bombers swept Boston in a 3-game series. The team was suddenly alive. “One thing about Joe that nobody really understands,” said Yankee pitcher Allie Reynolds. “He gave a thousand percent every game, day in and day out, for a lot of years. That takes a great deal out of a man.” And in the last two games of the season, with Boston in first place, the Jolter arrived at the Stadium with walking pneumonia, played as well as a sick man could; and somehow, that limping gazelle inspired the Yanks to steal the pennant away from the Sox.9

  He was a sick man in the World Series too, batted an anemic .111, but the Yanks still smothered the Dodgers, 4 games to 1. The Associated Press voted DiMaggio’s June “resurrection”—his return to baseball on a damaged heel—the greatest comeback of 1949. It was one more accolade for the wounded warrior.

  4.

  Call it 1950. The Jolter was now thirty-five, and the grandpa of baseball with his hobbled heel; he still managed to play 139 games and drive in 122 runs. He had the highest slugging average in the American League at .585. But he was miserable. He had a constant battle with Casey Stengel, who wanted to platoon the great DiMaggio, have him sit out some games. “I really think Casey hated him,” said second baseman Jerry Coleman. Once, while the Jolter was limping in center field, Stengel sent outfielder Cliff Mapes to replace him, but DiMaggio sent Mapes right back to the dugout with a message to Stengel: “I’ll tell Casey when I want to come out.” At the end of the inning DiMaggio walked right past his manager and went into the clubhouse. “I don’t think they ever talked again,” said Phil Rizzuto.10

  And then, in a game against the Senators at Griffith Stadium, Stengel plucked DiMaggio from the outfield and put him on first base. The Jolter seemed terrified. He made no errors, but he stumbled once or twice, fell on his face, his uniform soaked with sweat. Stengel just couldn’t understand his fear of looking bad in front of a crowd. The Jolter never played first again.

  “The Ol’ Perfesser,” as Casey was called, did not belittle DiMaggio’s brilliance. “He made the rest of them look like plumbers,” Stengel once said about his star center fielder. But he wasn’t out there playing with the Jolter; nor did he ever feel that particular rush of adrenalin DiMaggio could give to a team. “There was one thing about Joe that nobody ever came close to,” said Charlie Keller, who played in the outfield with DiMaggio for nine years. “That was the kind of competitor he was, how he took responsibility for winning or losing, how he got the big hits in the big spots.”11

  Vic Raschi, stalwart of the pitching staff during DiMaggio’s final years with the Yanks, said that “just having him out there, as sick as he was, had to be important to all of us.” And outfielder Hank Bauer remembered DiMaggio’s ire, how it could fall upon a teammate who fell asleep in the field. “DiMaggio never said anything to anybody about not hustling. He’d just look at you. That was enough. Nobody wanted to risk DiMaggio’s displeasure.”12

  Risk DiMaggio’s displeasure.

  That was so much akin to his greatness. You didn’t want to disappoint the Big Guy no matter who you were—a batboy, a scrub in the infield, a star at second base. Somehow he could carry a team with his concentration alone, with his fierce will, until his own powers began to fade and he was like a husk in center field with his clawless right shoe.

  5.

  It didn’t really happen until the summer of ’51. The season began and he could no longer pull the ball into his power alley in left center. The menacing swing Mickey Cochrane had talked about—that sense of a steel fist about to explode—was gone. He could only hit “piss homers” to right. “I could piss ’em right over that wall.” But even piss homers were hard to find in ’51. His body had started to creak like a rusty suit of armor. It hurt him every time he bent to pick up a ground ball. He would mumble to himself whenever he walked from the tunnel to the playing field, his back stooped, a dark rage burnt into his eyes. He stopped talking to reporters, and had withdrawn into a shell that was “virtually impenetrable,” said Milton Gross, who followed the Bombers for the New York Post.13

  But he wasn’t such an enigma, after all. Someone else had become “the big thunder that spring,” a blond bumpkin from Oklahoma who could hit home runs “that never came down,” whack them from either side of the plate like some ambidextrous muscle-bound magician: his name was Mantle. Not only had he become Stengel’s darling boy, but Toots Shor had been photographed with his arm around the kid. For a while the Jolter boycotted his own table at Shor’s and wouldn’t even answer Tootsie’s phone calls. Meanwhil
e, Stengel crowed about his future replacement for the Yankee Clipper: “I have my outfielder, Mr. Mantle, who hits balls over buildings.”14

  I also crowed, but for a different reason. I didn’t have Stengel’s Machiavellian touch, though I was a little selfish—for DiMaggio’s sake, convinced as I was that he and Mantle would make a terrific duet, that the Jolter would be less lonely with Mick around. I was wrong. There wasn’t a moment of rhythm between them, but a kind of civil war, as DiMaggio banished Mantle to a far corner of right field with a blistering look. But it didn’t really matter whether Mantle was there or not.

  The Clipper couldn’t prevent his own fall. He’d become an aging behemoth, a magnificent relic. He didn’t have to pretend, like Casey Stengel, to look into a crystal ball. He’d held sway over the Bronx Bombers for fifteen years; even now rookie infielder Gil McDougald would stare at him in awe and say: “It was as if you were playing with somebody you had only read about in storybooks.” But that didn’t stop every reporter on the Yankee beat from measuring Mantle’s home runs. The kid cooled considerably after spring training and was sent down to the minors, but he still came back to haunt the Clipper: the line of succession could have been scratched into the dirt. The Babe had worn the number 3 on his blouse; Gehrig was number 4, while the Clipper had claim to number 5; and in the spring of ’51 DiMaggio could see the number 6 on Mickey Mantle’s back (Mantle would later switch to 7).15

  In a slump all season, he suddenly began pulling the ball again; in a crucial series with the Indians, Bob Feller tried to rifle a fast-ball past the “relic,” who smashed it into left-center for a three-base hit. But Durocher’s Miracle Giants, who had swiped the pennant away from the Brooklyn Dodgers, seemed to have little fear of DiMaggio during the World Series; Giant pitchers threw the ball right into his gullet, and DiMaggio hit a home run over the left field wall at the Polo Grounds in game 4. The Bombers took the Series, 4 games to 2. But there was nothing memorable about the games except that the three greatest center fielders of the modern era were all on the same field for the first and last time: DiMaggio, Mantle, and Willie Mays.

  A week after the World Series, a story broke in Life magazine that revealed why the Giants had been so cocky about the Clipper. They had been given the scouting report that the Dodgers had prepared on the Bombers. It was a devastating critique of DiMaggio that said the Clipper couldn’t field or hit or run. “His reflexes are very slow, and he can’t pull a good fastball at all.”16

  DiMaggio, the great brooder, was mortified. There was no chance that he would ever step out onto the field again. When asked by a photographer friend why he was retiring so soon, he said: “Because I don’t want them to remember me struggling.”17

  6.

  But he had always been struggling, even when he didn’t have bone spurs and could run like a gazelle. Behind all that grace was a ferocity that would have crippled most men. The Jolter wasn’t noiseless whenever he galloped across the grass, chasing after a fly ball. “He sounded like a giant truck horse on the loose,” recalled Yankee left fielder Gene Woodling.18

  I never heard that sound from my seat in the upper deck. None of us did. I grew up a dozen blocks from the Stadium, could watch a game from the roofs of Walton Avenue, where the rich lawyers lived on their own tiny hill, but I preferred to pay the price of a ticket, at least after the Clipper returned from the war; I wouldn’t have watched those wastrels who pretended to wear a Yankee uniform in ’45, those ne’er-do-wells who couldn’t even buy a hit off army rejects. But ’46 was a different matter. I gave up my blood to go to a game. I delivered cartons of groceries that left me with a hump on my back—I was nine years old, and already the fanatic of fanatics. I knew every player in the American League. My tongue would curl around the majestic oddity of their names: Jimmy Outlaw of the Tigers, Catfish Metkovich and Rip Russell of the Red Sox, Taffy Wright of the White Sox, Zeke Zarilla of the Browns. They were much more American in their multitude than the heroes of the Revolution whose names I had to memorize for school. What were Sam Adams and that silversmith, Paul Revere, compared to the Yankee batting order?

  I could see some of that batting order—Tommy Henrich, “King Kong” Keller, or Johnny Lindell—walking from their roost at the Concourse Plaza Hotel down the hill to Yankee Stadium. If there had been no Clipper, Henrich would have been my hero. He was from Massillon, Ohio, right in the middle of America. He never seemed fanciful at the plate, never showed off, and could be relied upon to start a rally that DiMaggio would finish with a double or a home run. But without the Clipper, of course, I wouldn’t have broken my back to pay for that addiction. I wouldn’t have gone to the Stadium at all.

  My part of the West Bronx was a big Jewish garden, and I’m sure that our Goliath, Hank Greenberg, born and raised in the Bronx, must have had a large chunk of the Stadium devoted to his fans whenever the Tigers came to town. But I did not see them or hear them once. Perhaps I was in some blind alley where Tiger fans did not exist. None of us bothered to heckle the Jewish giant. We did not hate him. Perhaps in Detroit or in his neighborhood near Crotona Park he was the Messiah, but the guy I saw lumbered along, the different parts of his body moving with their own erratic rhythm, like some crazy machine with a cover of skin. He was thwacking home runs at an incredible clip, while DiMag was caught in a slump. We feared for the Jolter and that brooding blackness around his eyes that looked like some shimmering mask from where we sat. We worried that he might abandon baseball altogether and never show up again from his downtown hotel. We chortled with great glee when Goliath struck out, his body turning into an improbable telescope with arms and legs, or a clothes tree that had tilted too far and could not correct itself. And to tell the truth I loved to see the Clipper strike out. It was a rare event and we might wait for weeks for it to happen; considering my budget, I was lucky to see it once in a season. His body would whip around with one fluid motion, and he’d stand with his toes twisted out, stuck there for his own little eternity, as if he could take us with him into DiMaggio land, bend time to his own will, live outside the laws of batting averages, in the crispness of pure form.

  But how could we have known that he would have such a hard time after he abandoned baseball, or baseball abandoned him? He wasn’t really suited to become a relic. He didn’t have the temperament. He couldn’t pretend to be a clown, as the Babe had done. But he would be demoted to the very same scrapheap. He, who’d been one of the greatest tacticians the game had ever had, who could control the team from center field, had been bumped out of the way by a journeyman outfielder, Casey Stengel. He would brood and brood about this. Yet what role could there have been for a hero who was isolated by his own uniqueness? The Yankee management was as nervous about him as it had been about the Babe—their sway was much too large for the hucksters and showmen who had to run a club. But the Jolter had an additional burden, that blazing sensibility of his. He was so quick to wound. And without his suzerainty in center field, the Jolter would leap from wound to wound for the rest of his life, trapped by the very skills that had once sustained him. There wasn’t much place for an ex-gazelle.

  PART II

  The Demon Lover

  SIX

  The Princess of Yankee Stadium

  1.

  Hammerin’ Hank Greenberg hardly suffered when he retired from baseball after the 1947 season. He walked right out of the batter’s box and into his own kind of aristocracy. He’d already married an heiress, Caral Gimbel, whose father owned Gimbel’s department store; he would soon become general manager and part owner of the Cleveland Indians and then a successful stockbroker. He’d had a bit more education than DiMaggio and the Babe (he finished high school and started college), but that was not his real advantage: he was the first Jewish baseball star, which lent him an immediate cachet, and a war hero who could mingle with the upper crust of Gentiles and Jews.

  The Babe also had friends in high society, but he was a renegade and a loudmouth, and the Yankees would shun him the momen
t he stopped wearing pinstripes. Greenberg was never a clown, Greenberg would go to the synagogue on high holidays even when the Tigers were in the middle of a pennant race, Greenberg was a mensch, while the Babe was unpredictable, could eat a straw hat or collect a trophy after he won a farting contest. The Dodgers might hire him as a coach to perk up their ticket sales, but they had no interest in his expertise, and he had nothing to do at the baselines but sniff the wind. He died of cancer, with a bit of a broken heart—“famous but useless,” as his biographer said.

  And what about the Jolter? He wasn’t generous or flamboyant, like the Babe. And he wasn’t much interested in heiresses. How could he mingle with the upper crust when he was always so silent? “If he said hello to you, that was a long conversation,” Hank Greenberg recalled. He liked showgirls—beautiful blondes—but preferred male company at Table One: Hemingway or Jackie Gleason, who always made him laugh. Toots Shor had his own aristocracy of novelists, sportswriters, gossip columnists, athletes, and rich lowlifes. Charlie Chaplin had once showed up at Shor’s with a coterie of friends and Toots treated him like a dog, told him to entertain all the other people on line. “There was fame outside Shor’s, and there was fame inside,” according to David Halberstam.1

  But the Jolter couldn’t spend his entire life at Table One. He had expected a job in the Yankee front office after he retired, and the Bombers brushed him off. They banished him to a television pre-game and postgame show in the bowels of Yankee Stadium, where the great brooder would have to talk. He was terrified; you could see him sweat under the lights, his eyes shrinking into some island inside his head. He couldn’t even pronounce his own name without glancing at a cue card. All the old grace was gone, that quickness. He was wooden inside that booth, without life, like some puppet DiMaggio, the facsimile of a former player.

 

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