Joe DiMaggio

by Jerome Charyn

  Want itself had become an aberration, an illness of the mind, an enfeeblement of the spirit until there was nothing left but the mania of accumulation; he wouldn’t leave a restaurant without a doggie bag, attend a golf tournament without little prizes that he never opened, never used, until his apartments were graveyards of merchandise. But it wasn’t so bizarre. Didn’t the Greatest Living Ballplayer deserve all the paraphernalia in the world? His greed was a phantomatic quest for recognition when he couldn’t really redefine himself. The Greatest Living Ballplayer had to be alive. After Marilyn’s death, the Jolter wasn’t alive at all. His signature became a kind of lifeblood that he had to guard at all cost. It was no less than a magic wand. “DiMaggio’s signature on anything from a restaurant menu to a bat could bring from $150 to $2,000, and that was wholesale,” Morris loved to chant. The Jolter would be filled with fury if any dealer tried to hoodwink him, get him to sign what he didn’t want to sign. He’s like a maddened Lear, without his daughters but with the terrible loss of his suzerainty.3

  “The train stops here,” he’d scream and walk right out of a memorabilia show. God forbid you should cross him, friend or foe. He took you “out of the phone book” and you could never get back in. His entire existence had become a series of slights.4

  Ask him to add anything to his signature, and it was like giving away the most precious item in the world. “I ain’t signing Yankee Clipper.” His bats would become symbols and tokens of his esteem, and he would sign one on the birthday of whatever few friends he still had. “Morris, this is not a piece of wood, it is a piece of my history.” A little before he died, he saw the alarm on Morris’ face, and assured him: “I am going to make it through. There are still gloves to do.”5

  Morris was always there. Whatever we may think of him, Morris Engelberg was the one real witness to the Jolter’s years in Florida. His book on DiMaggio (written with sportswriter Marv Schneider) is a strange mix of fact, folklore, mumbo jumbo, and schmaltz. The only picture we have of the Jolter in his terrible decline is through Morris’ eyes. He adored DiMaggio and made him millions. Perhaps he adored him too much. Morris believed that the bat-signing deal he arranged for DiMaggio in 1993 “was akin to Joe’s 56-game hitting streak.” But it was one more ghoulish ploy that robbed DiMaggio of that relentless grace he had on the field: signing 1,941 bats was a travesty of DiMaggio’s magical season, whether he earned millions or not. The man who had stood alone with his fierce concentration, defying pitchers and fielders day after day in 1941, was buried alive, a moody cash cow.6

  2.

  It might never have happened had Morris not considered himself DiMaggio’s son. He himself was a posthumous child, whose father died three months before Morris was born. He was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn who “desperately wanted a dad” and found him at Yankee Stadium in 1948. He would learn to walk like DiMaggio, dress like DiMaggio, until he grew into a DiMaggio clone; at six-foot-five, Morris was even taller than the Clipper himself, but in the same dark suit, whiter-than-white shirt, and red or blue tie. When Morris finally met his idol, thirty-five years later in Boca Raton, it was much more potent than love at first sight. For DiMaggio, already shrunken with scoliosis, it must have been like looking into a mirror and seeing a most peculiar version of himself. Soon they were Mutt and Jeff, a comedy team prepared to make a killing; they never once shed their conservative business suits, whatever the occasion. No matter that Morris was DiMaggio’s lawyer, confidant, financial adviser, and “son.” He grew into DiMaggio’s schlepper, the guy who paid for his idol’s haircuts, groceries, and gasoline, and every meal they had together. At memorabilia shows, Morris sat beside him, with M&Ms and Diet Coke for the Yankee Clipper.7

  “I lived a Yankee fan’s dream,” whispered Engelberg, who could march through the players’ gate with “the greatest living Yankee,” sit in the owner’s box, and feel that the clubhouse was his very own kingdom. Suppose he did exaggerate DiMaggio’s worth in the memorabilia market. Mantle was as great a king of the card shows, but he never took himself or his signature seriously. “It was like Mickey Mantle had died,” the Mick would moon over his retirement. He didn’t want to look like DiMaggio “in those beautiful blue suits and Countess Mara ties.” He wanted to disappear, and he did, while DiMaggio went on and on with his M&Ms and signature bats and balls. But he was no less forlorn than the Mick, even with all the honors. He was dreaming of Marilyn and his own death. As myopic as Morris was, he wasn’t blind to DiMaggio’s lament. The Clipper might go into a trance in the middle of a memorabilia show or on a fishing trip with an old friend, “and I knew he wasn’t even aware he was on a boat with me. His thoughts were with Marilyn.” As usual with Morris, his exaggerations and half lies hid a greater truth: the Jolter would mourn Marilyn from the day she died and would remain in mourning for the rest of his life.8

  Morris was with DiMaggio while he lay dying of lung cancer, and according to him, DiMaggio’s last words were, “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn again.” Somehow I don’t believe him. It’s a little too close to a Dickensian tale. I suspect that DiMaggio’s sufferings were much more private: all Morris can describe are the doors of hell, with memorabilia shows as the different rooms of DiMaggio’s endless nightmare. The Mick’s nightmare was that he had failed his father, Elvin “Mutt” Mantle, who had died of Hodgkin’s disease at the age of thirty-nine; he had shamed Mutt with his shenanigans, his strikeouts, his temper on the field, and his inability to become the faultless player Mutt had dreamed of; that shame would devour him, and soon his whole life was an imagined dialogue with Mutt.9

  DiMaggio had no such dialogue with Marilyn. He was much too secretive a man. Perhaps he did hallucinate that Marilyn was still alive: while he was in the hospital, he pinched a nurse’s cheek and called her his wife. But that was the confusion of a dying man. He’d been inhabiting his own tunnel ever since Marilyn died. If Arthur Miller was the robber bridegroom of his first marriage to Marilyn, as Mailer said, then DiMaggio himself was the ghostly bridegroom of the second marriage, which never took place. What did it matter if he allowed Morris into his realm as a schlepper and a clown? He had need of a clown, and what a powerful clown was Morris, who would become the sole executor of DiMaggio’s estate. Cramer sees him as malicious and mercenary in each maneuver he made for DiMaggio. I do not. Morris was “protecting” the Big Guy in his own limited, unimaginative way, and he did a lot of harm, as if by releasing DiMaggio’s dross—a diary that read like bird droppings—he was somehow adding to the mystery of a great man. For Morris Engelberg, nothing DiMaggio did could ever have been mean or small, even the doughnuts he counted religiously and wouldn’t share at his memorabilia shows. Perhaps Engelberg was more cunning than I thought. The picture he offers up to us might be nothing more than a portrait of Morris himself, the portrait of a hungry man who ends up feasting on his own psyche.

  But without Morris we couldn’t have entered DiMaggio’s hell, couldn’t have conceived the Clipper’s appalling nonexistence away from Marilyn. Perhaps the Jolter was only fooling himself, and his second marriage to Marilyn would have been as disastrous as the first, but at least he would have been alive.

  That long, isolated watch in center field had ennobled him somehow, lent him a kind of purity that none of Marilyn’s other “husbands” ever had. Having baseballs thrown at his head humbled him, gave him a sense of limits that rarely betrayed him while Marilyn was still alive. He didn’t suffer in the same way as Mantle after he retired. Mantle had an aura of unreality. The Jolter never did. He never doubted who he was or the player he had been. The DiMaggio I saw in center field wouldn’t have had to carry that swaggering title of the Greatest Living Player upon his withered back. When he visited hospitals and battle areas of Vietnam in the late 1960s with Pete Rose and other big leaguers, Rose would bark at him, “Hey, the world’s greatest player, let’s get going,” and the Jolter had just enough humor about himself to laugh. But he might not have had the same sense of humor after he moved to Florid
a and fell into the arms of Engelberg.

  Morris encouraged the Jolter to keep a diary and keep a diary he did, stuffed with all the fulsome details of a man without a mission, who went from place to place with little else to keep him afloat but his own madness for money or his next tuna sandwich.10

  And a concern for his grandchildren, Kathie and Paula, who weren’t of his own flesh but were the adopted children of a son he despised as listless and lazy. Joe Jr. had dropped out of Yale, gone into the Marines to prove his manliness to the Big Guy, gotten married and divorced, drifted from job to job, and now had the life of a hobo without a tooth in his head. When Joe finally tracked him down, Joe Jr. ran from him and shouted, “You don’t know me. You don’t know who I am. Leave me alone.”11

  Joe could have been looking at the mirror image of his own face in Joe Jr.’s lament. He didn’t know himself any better than he knew his son. They were both outlaws, removed from any real human connection, but Joe was an outlaw with money.

  The Yankee Clipper glommed onto his granddaughters, fussed over Kathie and Paula, said he was doing all the memorabilia shows for them. Perhaps he was as sincere as so secretive a man could be, or it was just a screen for his neglect of Joe Jr. Had Marilyn not died of an overdose, she might have provided the glue to reconcile father and son—both DiMaggios were wild, stubborn creatures, each caught in his own destructive void. Without her Joe was a lone wolf in the wasteland of wherever he happened to be.

  3.

  When he was still a Yankee, he would walk down Fifth Avenue with his tailor, Otto Perl. “Men reached out to shake his hand, people on the other side of the street were calling his name, cars were honking their horns, cab drivers were shouting at him. And he was walking along with his big stride, smiling and acknowledging people.” And as soon as he appeared in the shop, Perl’s twelve tailors and all his customers would go a little crazy with delight. Perl, who had fled the Holocaust and founded his own shop in Manhattan, asked the Clipper what it took to be a baseball player in the big leagues. And DiMaggio told Perl what he had told several others.

  “You have to be hungry.”12

  Now the hunger was gone, replaced by an old man’s relentless want, eating a meal while he dreamt of the next, burying himself under a mountain of golf balls in his gated community until his whole life had become one vast garden with gates. This was the monotonous song of his diary—trivia rather than silence.

  Engelberg did a lot damage by auctioning off the jottings of a man already demented with grief. Political satirist Andy Borowitz savaged these jottings in a little piece entitled “The Lost Poems of Joe DiMaggio,” published in the New Yorker. Borowitz’s DiMaggio is a miserable, penny-pinching pirate who stuffs his suitcase with assorted treasure—soap and washcloths swiped from phantom hotel rooms.13

  It’s a sad epilogue, almost forty years later, to Paul Simon’s poignant lines about the Jolter. Has Joltin’ Joe really left and gone away? Or was it just a sad retreat, the emptied hours of a hero running as far as he could from the California income tax? Whatever damage Morris might have done, DiMaggio was much, much more than the ghoulish collector described by Borowitz.

  I believe DiMaggio will survive the collateral damage of his own collapse. He remains in our mythology as Marilyn’s prince, who had his own beauty and needed less of hers, who followed her into the inferno of a madhouse and escaped with his blond Eurydice in his arms; with her and her alone he recaptured at least a little of that mysterious grace he had on the field, a grace beyond any notion of grandeur, as natural and divine as a man in a woolen shirt racing like an antelope into the endless reach of a stadium in the Bronx . . .

  While revising this book, I thought of another famous recluse, J. D. Salinger, who was as much of a penny pincher as Joe D. How simple it would have been to satirize Salinger, a health nut who supposedly drank his own urine and sat like a monk in an Orgone box. Reclusive or not, he would attend church dinners in Hartland, Vermont, and sit at the head of the table “near where the pies were placed.” Like DiMaggio, he would become one of the most celebrated and sought-after recluses on the planet. Salinger’s seclusion had a curious spin, according to Jennifer Finney Boylan. “By the end of his life, he may have been better known for his solitude than for his imagination.”14

  “Nothing succeeds like invisibility,” she tells us. “In America, we revere artists who won’t do the thing they’re famous for. We revere Glenn Gould, who gave up performing; Greta Garbo, who gave up acting; and Michael Jordan, who not only gave up basketball (at which he was gifted), but then, perversely, took up baseball (at which he was not).”

  And, she continues, “the more steadfastly they refuse us, the more infuriatingly desirable they become,” as it was with DiMaggio. The less available he became to his fans, the more we wondered about him and recalled what it was we missed—he was the Glenn Gould of baseball, a virtuoso unto himself. We will never see another quite like him.

  Finale

  An Outfielder’s Sky

  1.

  Richard Ben Cramer is convinced that DiMaggio was a disciple of Ty Cobb, one of the meanest players who ever lived. Cobb had moved to northern California after he retired from baseball in 1928 (with a lifetime batting average of .366), and kept an eye on Joe when he was with the San Francisco Seals. It was Cobb who helped Joe craft his first letter to the Yankees, who taught him to be a penny pincher and never pay for a meal. It was Cobb who told him to soak his bats in olive oil so that they would have more spring. And like Cobb, Joe was “distant, demanding toward teammates, and toward opponents purely venomous.”1

  I’m not so sure. It was Joe’s concentration that often made him seem icy and indifferent. He was always in pain, long before he hurt his knees and his heels and his throwing arm: he patrolled the outfield or stood at home plate as if in the middle of some deep crisis. The Stadium’s suffering Christ, he had the gallop of someone consuming himself. He wasn’t “all business in baseball,” as Cramer would have us believe. Like many immigrant sons he was obsessed with money, but that obsession didn’t follow him onto the field. He was a morbidly sensitive man who could not bear to make a mistake. If he seemed to come out of some dark swirl and run half a mile to catch a fly ball, it was because his life depended on it—the Clipper had to get there. One of the few times he ever took himself out of a game was when he missed a fly ball because his lousy legs could no longer get him where he had to go.2

  DiMaggio had more in common with Mantle than he ever did with Cobb. It has long been part of the Mantle legend that DiMaggio spooked him during the year they played together, that he could never look Joe D. in the eye or utter a single word in his presence. The same legend would have us believe that the Clipper’s coldness to Mantle was out of pure jealousy and spite, that he was up to mischief and looking to harm him in some mysterious way—Mantle did have one of his worst injuries during the second game of the 1951 World Series when he rushed into DiMaggio country to chase after a routine fly ball hit to short right-center by Willie Mays. “I knew there was no way DiMaggio could get it so I hauled ass.” But DiMaggio was parked right under the ball. And as Mantle tried to slow down in order not to bump into DiMaggio, his right shoe got caught in a sprinkler cover buried in the grass. His right knee collapsed and he plummeted to the ground. “A bone was sticking out the side of my leg.”3

  DiMaggio told him not to move.

  “I guess that was as close as Joe and I had come to a conversation,” Mantle would recall. “I don’t know what impressed me more, the injury or the sight of an aging DiMaggio still able to make a difficult catch look easy.”4

  He would bear a grudge against the Clipper all his life, convinced that DiMaggio’s showboating—his need to look good—was the real cause of the injury. But it was Stengel’s mischief, not DiMaggio’s. The Ol’ Perfesser had whispered into Mantle’s ear that it was time to poach in DiMaggio’s terrain. “Take everything you can get over in center. The Dago’s heel is hurting pretty bad.” But no
one had bothered to tell the Dago.5

  He’d arrived at Yankee Stadium in 1936 as batting champion of the Pacific Coast League. He knew he could hit in the majors. The fans had never seen a kid like that. He broke into the starting lineup, batted third, just before Lou Gehrig. DiMaggio felt no rivalry with the Iron Horse. Lou had welcomed him onto the club, had shielded him the best way he could: with the power of his bat. Pitchers were frightened to death of Lou. And DiMaggio saw some of the fattest pitches he would ever see while Lou was kneeling on deck, waiting to bat behind him.

  DiMaggio could never shield Mantle the same way. He didn’t have Lou’s generosity of spirit. And by 1951 he didn’t have Lou’s prowess. He couldn’t even pull the ball into his power alley. And his rage against himself ricocheted onto Mantle. He wouldn’t help the rookie because he couldn’t even help himself. He’d been a master of baseball, who could read every nuance of the game, while Mantle was the bumpkin who could hit home runs. “I just got up there and swung for the roof ever’ time and waited to see what would happen.” Yet his raw power had a majesty that must have shaken the Clipper, and he had a deep core of silence that was closer to DiMaggio than he would have liked to imagine. The Mick had grown up on a dirt road outside an obscure Oklahoma mining town that wasn’t even on the map. His dad was a miner who had a crazy love of baseball and was himself a teenager when Mickey was born. “The feeling between Mutt Mantle and his son was more than love,” according to Merlyn Mantle, Mickey’s wife. “Mick was his work of art, just as much as if his father had created him out of clay.”6