Joe DiMaggio

by Jerome Charyn

  And then something happened. While the Big Guy was in San Francisco for an old-timers’ game in which all three DiMaggio brothers—Dom, Vince, and Joe—were reunited on the same field for the last time, Marilyn spent a wicked afternoon camped out in her own bed, swinging violently from one mood to the next until she fell into a narcoleptic sleep from which she couldn’t recover. It’s unclear what really happened. Did her psychiatrist, Ralph Green-son, feed her a lethal enema by mistake? Did she kill herself over Bobby Kennedy, who may have come into town and met furtively with Marilyn? Was “the President’s whore” killed by a government assassin, as Joyce Carol Oates suggests in her novel Blonde? And was it a humdrum Hollywood actor, Peter Lawford—JFK’s personal pimp and brother-in-law—who first found Marilyn? Or was it Greenson himself and his brother-in-law, Mickey Rudin (Marilyn’s lawyer), who discovered the body? They didn’t quite know what to do. “We took the coward’s way out,” remembered Rudin. “We called Joe DiMaggio.”31

  He was the one who had to identify her body at the morgue and arrange for her funeral. He was the Yankee Clipper again, back in center field, taking care of what had to be done. He would blame “the fucking Kennedys” and Hollywood itself for having killed her. He had them all blocked out of her burial at Westwood Memorial Park—Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Gene Kelly—and it was bitter for Joe that she was buried on August 8, the very day they had picked for their remarriage. But he had one little consolation: it was as if they had always been married, that her years with Arthur Miller were just an unfortunate fluke, a trial separation from her demon lover. He wouldn’t let reporters and other Hollywood ghouls into the chapel. Rudin started to cry that the Clipper was “keeping out Marilyn’s close friends.”

  “If it hadn’t been for some of those friends,” the Clipper told him, “she wouldn’t be where she is.”32

  And while the casket was still open he put three roses into her hands, sobbed, and sang “I love you” three times in a staccato voice that was close to incantation. In spite of his rages, his fear of her as a movie star, he had never turned her into a toy. He loved her the way he had loped around in center field, with all the godliness of a man on fire.

  6.

  The whole world seemed to pity him for his “famous and famously neurotic” wife, as Paul Simon once described Marilyn Monroe. Her biographers, from Mailer to Barbara Leaming, from Donald Spoto to Joyce Carol Oates (in Blonde), considered Marilyn a burnt-out case who either committed suicide or was shut up because, as “the President’s whore,” she might have known a little too much and been delusional enough to imagine herself as the First Lady. She danced at the edge of oblivion, according to Arthur Miller: “The branching tree of her catastrophe was rooted in her having been condemned from birth.” Helpless and hopeless, “she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.” And during her last days and nights “she seemed to embrace self-destruction,” said Barbara Leaming. In this scenario, Joltin’ Joe became a kind of sepulcher to her suicide, the schlemiel who buried his demented wife.33

  Then there was the kiss of death from the New York Times. “The life of Marilyn Monroe, the golden girl of the movies, ended as it began, in misery and tragedy,” according to her obit. Her death, it seems, “capped a series of somber events that began with her birth . . . and went on and on.” She had a rotten family tree, with a grandma, a grandpa, and a mom who suffered from dementia. Poor Marilyn continued her mother’s curse and end up a madwoman who happened to be a movie star.34

  But something happened: she wouldn’t stay dead, and we realized soon enough that our send-off was riddled with clichés. The New York Times, with all its interest in accuracy, claimed that Marilyn “spoke in a high baby voice that was little more than a breathless whisper,” without revealing that Marilyn had appropriated this “breathless whisper.” She parodied the sexual hysteria of the 1950s, made fun of America’s Puritanical streak, and did it with such energy and illumination that she had no rival.

  Marilyn’s resurrection began in the year of her death, when Andy Warhol made his first Marilyn silk screens, replicating a publicity still from Niagara of Rose Loomis, the blond femme fatale with black eyebrows and a murderously red mouth; but for Warhol, Marilyn isn’t murderous at all. He understood her playfulness and her artifice; the silk screens are a series of masks where Marilyn is always different and the same; she’s both distant and near, teasing us with her own delight, forcing us not to be serious as her image fades and reappears: we cannot capture her. She has no essence. Warhol’s screens replicate the movie screen with its insistence upon surface.

  Warhol shoves us from the sad face of suicide, and Marilyn with her red mouth, friendly and defiant, becomes an icon all over the world. But it wasn’t until 1990 that someone went into Fox’s files and discovered that Marilyn wasn’t a burnt-out case at all, that Fox had rehired her at a much higher salary to finish Something’s Got to Give. During the last three months of her life she had fought back against Fox and won.

  And finally, in 2004, we have a study of Marilyn that doesn’t see her as a madwoman and a waif but as a phenomenally successful actress who managed her own career and might have been shrewder than we think in her romance with Jack Kennedy. “The idea that Marilyn Monroe, who had grown up in an orphanage in the Depression and fought her way tooth and nail through Hollywood to become the most desired woman in the world, might get a charge out of knowing that she was sleeping with the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world—that she might have been ‘using’ him, as knowingly as he was using her—is not part of [our] myth [of Marilyn and JFK],” according to cultural critic Sarah Churchwell in The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe.35

  Barbara Leaming called Marilyn’s half-naked salute to JFK at Madison Square Garden the “cry for help” of a woman who was sinking into despair. But almost fifty years later it feels like a war cry, where for the very first time a woman could confront a philandering president with the power of her own sexuality. Adlai Stevenson, a former leader of the Democratic Party who had been shunted aside by JFK, was a witness to Marilyn’s enchantment: “I don’t think I had ever seen anyone so beautiful as Marilyn Monroe that night. She was wearing skin and beads. I didn’t see the beads! My encounters with her, however, were only after breaking through the strong defense established by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around her like a moth around a flame.”36

  And as we look back, Marilyn seems much more vibrant and authentic than most of the men who bumbled around her or fell into her flame—Jack and Bobby, Frank Sinatra, Sir Laurence Olivier, Elia Kazan, Otto Preminger, Yves Montand, Arthur Miller. As Norman Rosten said of Marilyn: “It may turn out that Miller was less the artist than she.” He certainly was nowhere as brave or gallant. And he was far stingier than Joe DiMaggio ever was. Miller removed himself from the “hothouse” of Marilyn’s emotions, her childlike vitality, thinking to preserve his own talent. But he preserved nothing at all. He should have fallen deeper into her flame and learned from her fury.37

  It was DiMaggio who fell the deepest and couldn’t recover. He was the one man who never tried to profit from her fame or steal even a little bit of her fire. He wouldn’t take the two million Simon and Schuster offered him to “write” his autobiography. The Jolter knew he’d been offered that money to talk about Marilyn. He could have made much more money than Simon and Schuster’s millions by signing nudie calendars of Marilyn, but he never did. Often the invitations he received were little more than tricks. Asked to Buenos Aires to reminisce about baseball, he soon discovered that the press conference had been rigged to trap him into telling stories about Marilyn. He gave every member of the press his “Sicilian stare” and stormed out of Argentina. His only song was silence.

  NINE

  The Greatest Living Ballplayer

  1.

  1962. After he buried Marilyn, the Jolter didn’t come out of his house in San Francisco for six weeks. He became a recluse,
surly and unforgiving with family and friends. It was this recluse that Gay Talese wrote about in “The Silent Season of the Hero.” Talese revealed for the first time the man behind the DiMaggio myth—DiMaggio’s private life proved to be no life at all; the guy who had guarded his image for so long suddenly had little of an image to guard. But it shouldn’t have come as a revelation. That narrow man had always been there. We just never noticed it. We were too enthralled by his absolute gifts on the field and his devotion to the game. We hadn’t bothered to see that there was little else to give. Talese was the first one to glimpse behind his mask. And it might have moved us, rather than repelled most readers, if only we’d understood Joe’s liabilities. He’d always been absent away from the field.

  Talese is never disrespectful; he worshiped the Jolter as much as most of us did, remembered that haunted face in center field. He sought the Jolter out at his San Francisco restaurant, DiMaggio’s Grotto, where the recluse appeared and disappeared like “a kind of male Garbo.”1

  “I don’t want to cause trouble,” [Talese] said. “I think you’re a great man, and . . . ”

  “I’m not great,” DiMaggio cut in. “I’m not great,” he repeated softly. “I’m just a man trying to get along.”2

  Talese should have listened. There’s a terrifying lament behind DiMaggio’s plea. He didn’t even have the enthusiasm of a restaurateur. Unlike Jack Dempsey, he couldn’t reveal a Chiclets smile and shake everybody’s hand.

  DiMaggio’s hidden persona was swallowed up by the brouhaha that surrounded Talese’s article in Esquire. What he told Talese seems much less cryptic now. It was 1966, and he was still in mourning, though he lived like a retired king amid a horde of sycophants who hung on his every word. He did have a poetic language—baseball—but it had no relevance beyond the range of center field. His narrowed life had robbed him of whatever curiosity he might have had. Even when he wandered near or wide, he saw nothing. Returning from a trip to Moscow in the 60s, he said: “It’s OK, but you can’t get a corned beef sandwich there.” The man who had the eyesight of a hawk, who could spot Bob Feller’s best curve by the way the stitches spun around on the ball, could not lend us one syllable about the particular fall of sunlight on the Kremlin’s spires or describe the crowds in Red Square.3

  “Don’t say I’m a recluse or a hermit. It bothers me when people say that,” he told one journalist. But he was a recluse and a hermit. For a period of nine or ten years Marilyn had pulled him out of his self-absorption, forced him to confront her needs, beguiling him perhaps but shaking him so far out of his torpor that he had to look and feel. And then he drifted back to sleep, or hid behind some insignificant mask, unless his anger was aroused—most of all against the Kennedys, who had killed his Marilyn, he said. He knew how to hold a grudge. He was good at that. Talese tells us about the time when the Jolter returned to Yankee Stadium on September 18, 1965, after the Yankees had begged Mantle not to retire—a broken man with broken knees and a batting average of .255—seduced him with a Mickey Mantle Day, as Cardinal Spellman presided over “the canonization of a new stadium saint” and fifty thousand fans cried, “We Love the Mick.” There were gifts that included a Winchester rifle and a hundred-pound Hebrew National salami that had to be rolled out in a cart. And there was DiMaggio in his somber suit, like a dark prince of a former time, leading Mickey Mantle’s mother to the microphone, and all the other dignitaries standing in the infield. And suddenly Senator Robert Kennedy appeared in the Yankee dugout and shook the hand of every Yankee he could find, while DiMaggio introduced Mantle as his successor in center field, “and from every corner of the stadium, the cheering, whistling, clapping came down.” The Mick, as inarticulate as ever, mumbled a few words into the microphone. Then RFK came roaring out of the dugout, posed with the Mick, and shook hands with one dignitary after the other until DiMaggio stepped back and gave him a “Sicilian stare”—his evil eye—and RFK could do nothing but move down the line and reach out for someone else’s hand.4

  2.

  Did the Jolter really survive Marilyn Monroe? He lived another thirty-seven years with all the trappings of success: awards, honorary degrees, money in the bank, two seasons as a coach and vice president with the Oakland Athletics, lucrative contracts as the public persona of Mr. Coffee and the Bowery Savings Bank, his service as grand marshal of several parades, and his own last seasons as king of memorabilia baseball shows. In 1969, at a dinner in Washington, D.C., to honor baseball’s centennial year, local sportswriters voted him the game’s Greatest Living Player by a landslide—ahead of Williams and Mantle and Willie Mays.

  It was his worst misfortune after Marilyn’s death. Wherever he appeared—at a banquet or charity ball, memorabilia show or Yankee old-timers’ game—he had to be introduced as the Greatest Living Player, and always be the last in line so that he would have the largest echo. Perhaps he’d always been a peacock who thrived in a center field he didn’t have to share. But his peacocking far from the field robbed him of some essential humanity, killed the timid streak that had once made him so appealing. The idiot savant of baseball had become a handsome sleepwalker.

  In the 1970s, a few years after he had written “Mrs. Robinson” and asked us all where Joltin’ Joe had gone, Paul Simon happened to meet DiMaggio at an Italian restaurant in New York. The Jolter had been upset about the song, had considered a lawsuit, and grumbled that Simon “never paid me for using my name.” And he lamented to Paul Simon: “What I don’t understand is why you ask me where I’ve gone. I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial. I’m a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and I haven’t gone anywhere.”5

  He couldn’t understand the abracadabra of his own invisibility—that Mr. Coffee and the Bowery Savings Bank had buried him in a kind of horrible minutia. It’s hard to imagine Marilyn Monroe’s Slugger wanting to live this way. Why did the greatest center fielder of his time molt into Mr. Coffee? He never understood how much it diminished him. The recluse had come out of his lair as a huckster and glorified flimflam man, and couldn’t see the wreckage of his own vanishing act.

  The Big Guy was unconscious half the time, going through the motions, without the least spark of fire. It’s no accident that Richard Ben Cramer in his biography of the Jolter skips over the years from 1963 to 1998 with the knowledge that nothing internal happened to the man; the mark of these years on him was as minimal as the diary he would keep, whether he visited the White House or was waiting in an airport lounge. It would even get worse as he went from memorabilia show to memorabilia show that was a peculiar kind of hell; he was a performer in his own living death and never even knew it. He’d been mourning Marilyn all along, in spite of his little flings and fixations on former Miss Americas. He missed Marilyn beyond reason—he couldn’t repair himself.

  His two defining roles—as “Mrs. Marilyn Monroe” and the reembodiment of Babe Ruth—had been created by others, not by him. He hadn’t really captured Marilyn. She captured him, and could discard her Slugger at will. And if there had never been a Sultan of Swat, would America have hungered for Joe with such frenzy? His panoramic Stations of the Cross in center field were utterly his own, and that’s what he clung to after Marilyn was gone. The only role he had left was the Greatest Living Player. And he performed it with a vengeance, like some madcap diva in a white shirt and red, red tie.

  TEN

  The Biggest Fan of Them All

  1.

  He loved to rail at Marilyn’s “enemies,” real or imagined. But there were very few chances in those last thirty-seven years of his life for the Big Guy to deliver a blow for Marilyn’s sake. He had no more Kennedys to revile after Jack and Bobby were killed. And he couldn’t worry about other phantoms. Either he was at some god-forsaken kitchenware show for Mr. Coffee or accumulating caps and T-shirts and golf clubs from his celebrity tournaments until his sister Marie told him that their house on Beach Street in San Francisco would soon cave in, or cramming other T-shirts and golf carts into one of the apartments or houses
in the gated communities where he lived after he moved to southern Florida to escape the California income tax. It’s appropriate that his final destination in Florida was another town called Hollywood, with its own sirens of doom. Now he had more paraphernalia—ten thousand bats and baseballs in his living room—and Morris Engelberg, Esq., the biggest fan he ever had.

  He met Morris in 1983. Richard Ben Cramer considers him a small-town shyster lawyer. But Morris is much more than that. He had a brand of magic that the Big Guy could not resist. He knew how to weave a spell. It was all about money, of course. The Big Guy was worried that the Bowery Savings Bank might drop him after fifteen years, and he brought Engelberg along to renegotiate his contract. They flew to Manhattan on separate planes. Morris met with “the Bowery brass,” got tough, and gave them his own laws concerning DiMaggio: “You don’t embarrass him, you don’t trade him, and you never cut his salary. He is a Yankee.”1

  The Bowery caved in, offered Joe the sweetest contract he ever had. Morris went to celebrate with him at the Stage Deli, on Seventh Avenue. The crowd at the Stage went wild. “Joe D., Joe D. is here.” Morris shouldn’t have been startled: Joe’s enduring power was that he was always aloof, absent even while he was present; he created hysteria wherever he went as people tried to clutch at some portion of DiMaggio.

  Joe signed a $20,000 check as Morris’ commission on the deal, but Morris returned the check. It was an incredible coup. Joe was constantly suspicious that others were “making money on my back.” Here was a lawyer who seemed to want nothing from Joe and would soon turn him into a money machine that overwhelmed the memorabilia business. Morris liked to boast that the Clipper could earn more money in a single day signing bats than he had earned in his entire career as a Yankee, without ever comprehending that the Jolter’s reign in center field had never really been about money. It had been about the absolute will of a man on fire to beat the phantoms of fate. But forlorn as he was without Marilyn and the Yankees, his appetite was endless. “Morris, I keep telling you. It’s never the need of money that people do things for; it’s the want of money.”2