Joe DiMaggio

by Jerome Charyn

  And it was this golem baseball player that DiMaggio met. “The only thing I can do is play baseball,” said the Mick. “I have to play ball. It’s the only thing I know.” DiMaggio had to have been spooked. He would invent his own fabled meeting with Mutt that he told to Morris Engelberg (I haven’t found this “meeting” mentioned anywhere but in Engelberg’s book). According to the Clipper, Casey Stengel sent him on a secret mission, asked him on his way home “to stop off in Oklahoma and tell Mantle’s father to lay off the kid.” DiMaggio’s bonus was that the Yankees paid his entire fare to Frisco. But it’s hard to believe that Stengel, who despised and distrusted DiMaggio, would have sent him on a mission to Mutt. Was the Jolter simply bragging to Morris? Or was he obsessed with Mickey Mantle and Mutt? Did he wish, in his secretive, short-circuited way, that he could share something with Mutt, or that he too had had a dad who turned him into a ballplayer?7

  2.

  Mutt’s early death devoured Mantle. “I dream about him all the time,” he told author Peter Golenbock. He had little solace but the game itself. “When he stopped hitting home runs,” said Merlyn Mantle, “the only time he had any self-esteem was after a drink or two.” I met the Mick on Opening Day at the Stadium in 1985. He’d been retired for seventeen years. I was a guest of the Parks Commissioner, the real landlord of Yankee Stadium, and was invited to a luncheon party in the owner’s box. There was a great brouhaha around Yankee boss George Steinbrenner. But I was interested in Mantle, who sat slumped in a corner, away from all the commotion. He had a bald spot and graying sideburns and could have been some farm machinery salesman fresh from Oklahoma in a modest blue coat. It was his first public appearance since Commissioner Bowie Kuhn had banished him and Willie Mays from baseball for having been shills in Atlantic City casinos. But they were the two most beloved players there had ever been, and fans throughout the country were in such a furor that Peter Ueberroth, the new baseball commissioner, pardoned both bad boys as quickly as he could. And so here was the Mick, hiding from himself; he seemed to have no persona other than the savage lines on his face. He was inert even when he signed a couple of autographs.8

  I went down into the ballpark, sat behind the Yankee dugout with all the moguls. And then the Mick emerged in his old Yankee uniform and tossed the Opening Day ball; his shoulders weren’t slumped and he was as visible and strong as a tree trunk. There was bedlam in the house. For a moment, this gray guy was Mickey Mantle again, a timeless quotient, the only hero who had ever lived; the roar had resurrected him. And what connects him to DiMaggio more than any other ballplayer is that they were intensely private men, with an almost pathological shyness, who came alive on the field; they loved to perform in front of a crowd, to be watched.

  DiMaggio, the stingiest of men, who guarded every gesture, gave so much of himself on the field. Every game was a quest for perfection, and that quest was so exciting because he loved to perform and hated to show it; it was the tension in him that thrilled us. He would have liked to live without us but could not: we were his weakness, his one flaw. Mantle knew how to laugh at himself, and the Jolter did not. It crippled him to look bad. The ballpark became his own disturbing mirror; the more he hid from us, the more he revealed. We couldn’t rob him of his mystery; no one could. But he let us into that secret world where baseball was a language and a law unto itself, a kind of mathematics in motion. He was the exemplar of that language, beautiful to behold. And not all the trivia of his mad diary, his so-called “lost poems,” can squander his real language, perhaps the only language he ever had, that of a man whose will could bend baseball into the highest form of art.

  3.

  If baseball is metaphysics and magic, it is also rooted in real time, with a history that can carry us back over 150 years, whether its first game was played in Weehawken or God knows where. But one team seems to dominate that history from the time Babe Ruth put on a Yankee uniform in 1920 and reinvented the home run. In the 44 seasons from 1921 to 1964—through the eras of Ruth, DiMaggio, and Mantle—the Bombers won 29 pennants and 20 World Series. It’s no surprise that these three players should occupy so much of baseball’s psychic and physical space.

  Yet all three fell into their own kind of ruin after they left the Yankees, betrayed by the very organization they had helped build. Mantle and the Babe would clown, pretend to be buffoons, after baseball deserted them. DiMaggio never clowned, but the three of them were relics the moment they retired—it’s almost as if Yankee management had always been suspicious of their powers and didn’t want the magic they had wielded to corrupt younger players, who had to be kept in line. Suddenly they were a detriment to the Yanks.

  But they were the ones who had turned the team into an all-time success story. The Bombers had become the new American royalty, with a realm that reached beyond baseball or any sport. It wasn’t so much about money. DiMaggio, Mantle, and Ruth rumbled out onto the field before the era of free agents. They weren’t tycoons who could compete with club owners. Mantle didn’t have a dime in his pocket while he patrolled center field. He and the Jolter weren’t really rich until they stopped playing and could merchandize themselves as memorabilia; it was as if they were selling their own stake in the Bombers, their own aura as world champions with their Yankee championship rings. It was a trademark no one could beat. They had created a dynasty and kept it alive.

  But Mantle’s era ended long before he retired. The Yankees tumbled into fifth place in 1965, sat in the cellar in 1966 for the first time since 1912, and remained a second-division team during his last season, 1968, when he was a battered mummy at the plate, bandaged up to his navel. Pitchers took pity and let him slap an occasional home run; too hobbled to roam center field, he now patrolled nothing but first base and couldn’t even do that. When a Cleveland Indian rookie decided to bunt on the Mick, his own team bawled him out. “Hey,” he was told, “we don’t bunt on Mick out of respect for him.” Like the Yankees themselves, he had become a museum piece that still played ball. The policy of blinding themselves to great black prospects such as Hank Aaron or Ernie Banks and Willie Mays had come back to haunt the Bombers. They wouldn’t seize the pennant again until 1976, with a team that had more black Americans in its starting lineup than it did whites.9

  By this time the game itself had gone through an enormous sea change, inspired by Curt Flood, a black center fielder with the St. Louis Cardinals who, in 1969, challenged the reserve clause that had kept every baseball player in bondage to his club. Having been dumped by the Cardinals after the 1968 season and traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, Flood demanded that he be declared a free agent who could negotiate with any team he desired. Commissioner Kuhn scoffed at Flood’s attempt to break the reserve clause; Flood sued the major leagues and lost. His career was broken. He played a few games for the Washington Senators in 1971. The team’s manager, Ted Williams, supported Flood, encouraged him to stay, but some of his teammates did not; he decided to quit the majors. He wandered for a while, lived in Majorca, returned to baseball as a broadcaster, and died of throat cancer in 1997.

  But he had taken on the big leagues as DiMaggio or Mantle never did. By 1976, five years after Flood retired, owners suddenly had to deal with a scrambling world of free agents; the best players would soon become millionaires with a coterie of lawyers, investment counselors, and all kinds of witch doctors, until the players themselves were little kings. It’s no accident that the nostalgia craze began in the 1980s: DiMaggio and Mantle had become antiques, heroes out of a kinder past when baseball wasn’t about being a millionaire, when half the roster consisted of stumblebums who needed a second job. Perhaps Mick and the Jolter had been just as obsessed about money, but they weren’t self-contained corporations that floated onto the field with a leather glove.

  Baseball is now a Bunyanesque world of startling increase and excess; it’s not money alone that has multiplied, but the whole idea of possibility. Poor Roger Maris became a pariah when he broke the Babe’s record of 60 home runs (for one
season) in 1961; but nobody mourned when Mark McGwire, looking more and more like a bull or a bionic man, slapped 70 home runs for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1998. And then baseball pilloried him when the steroid scandal broke, and until recently McGwire had to live like a recluse, “the Howard Hughes of baseball.” For a few seasons he was the most exciting batter in the big leagues, but he may never be elected to the Hall of Fame, even though every single player and every single fan conspired with Mark McGwire. As outfielder Tony Gwynn, elected to the Hall in 2007, said of the rampant use of steroids in the major leagues: “We all knew. All you all knew. We knew. Players knew. Owners knew. Everybody knew. And we didn’t say anything about it.”10

  We all worshiped the same gods of excess, as if we dreamt of a whole country of Babe Ruths, forgetting that there had been only one Babe, one Mantle, one DiMaggio, not a surfeit of them like pets in a gigantic collection box. Rather, they remain powerful ghosts in some hidden arena, haunting us, joggling our minds. David Halberstam believed it was radio that added to the Jolter’s allure. “It is no coincidence that DiMaggio’s fame was so lasting, and that he was the last great hero of the radio era,” who didn’t have to suffer that curious reduction of the little tube.11 But I’m not convinced. He was no less a god when I watched him on TV for the first time in 1947, from the window of a neighborhood bar. He was unlike any other ballplayer; even the dull grimness of television couldn’t spoil DiMaggio; he stood in center field along some invisible line, with a terrifying tightness, until he leapt into motion without the least warning, the whole of him unfurling like a relentless spring.

  But this silent and secretive man didn’t owe us that same authenticity off the field. We just couldn’t believe that the Jolter wanted so little to do with us. He was the kind of “Isolato” whom Herman Melville often wrote about, an Ishmael with a baseball bat, who fell in love with Marilyn Monroe, came out of his dark corner for a little while, and went back in after she died. We shouldn’t have to punish him for that.

  He gave us what he could: the gift of his game. Once, when sitting with Henry Kissinger in the owner’s box at Yankee Stadium, the ever-silent DiMaggio burst into chatter about a left-handed relief pitcher who had been brought in to replace another left-hander. Both lefties seemed the same to Kissinger. “No, look,” said the Jolter. “It’s a different arm angle. You gotta look at the release point. See this guy comes three quarters, he’s gonna curve you on the outside—unless you move up a little, get the bat out to hit it before the break.”12

  DiMaggio’s art was all about the violence of form, the breaking of some imaginary scrim, going suddenly from silence into song and back into silence again. He had a nervous poetry on the field that no one else had—a lonely lyricism that jolted us out of our seats. That’s why we celebrate him seventy-five years after he first started to patrol center field—never a rookie, and never really retired.

  4.

  Sportswriter, novelist, and baseball fan Bob Lipsyte has his own story to tell about the Jolter, whom he met more than once. In the mid-eighties, when DiMaggio was already so misanthropic, with a lifelong reticence about most reporters, he agreed to sit for an interview with “Lippy,” as he liked to call Lipsyte with a kind of rough affection. Bob cringed at the mention of that nickname. “I spilled a lot of blood as a kid not to have people call me Lippy.”13

  But he had to forgive the Jolter. It was Old Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium, and Bob showed up an hour before the old-timers’ game, as scheduled. The Jolter wasn’t wearing pinstripes. “He was fully dressed,” in his signature white shirt, impeccable suit and tie. And he sat around, “tapping his toe.”

  “Where were you, Lippy? I’ve been waiting for you half an hour,” he said, though Bob was barely a minute late.

  The loudspeakers were crackling, and Bob couldn’t even hear himself talk. The Jolter picked up a mobile phone and barked into it. Bob had no idea whom he called, but the loudspeakers went dead and stayed dead during the entire interview. Yet, as Bob remembers, the static hadn’t come from the loudspeakers alone. “DiMaggio had nothing to say.”

  He’d grown into a man of one too many masks. But Bob had also met him sometime in the sixties, when the Jolter served as “an honorary hitting instructor” at the Yankees’ Florida training camp. He was still mourning Marilyn Monroe, and no one dared approach him. “He was there to be looked at. You were not supposed to talk to him.”

  But one cold day that spring, when the ground was so wet that planks were put across the infield, Bob and the Jolter “almost bumped heads . . . both our heads jerked up. He had a startled look in his eye. He was sure I was going to say something about Marilyn.”

  Bob looked at the sky and said to the Jolter: “I guess this is not a good day to play the outfield.”

  “It’s not true,” DiMaggio told him. “That’s an outfielder’s sky.”

  And the Jolter began to rattle off a litany of problems and conditions that an outfielder had to face: Wind, sun, lights . . . “It was like talking to Michelangelo about the decisions he made for the Sistine Chapel,” Bob recalled.

  Seeing Bob shiver in the cold, DiMaggio shouted at one of the younger Yankee players. “Rook, give my friend Lippy your jacket.”

  That was about as intimate as the Jolter could get. Bob was a Yankee fan, but he didn’t see his first game until he was thirteen. And when I asked him whether DiMaggio has remained an icon for him, he said: “An icon, yeah, like someone in a photograph that’s fading. . . . He was so tightly buttoned.”

  Bob talked about “the beauty of his movements. He’ll always be a kind of Baryshnikov—not Nureyev. His timing was impeccable. Mantle was much more of a human story. He was flawed in ways we can relate to and understand; his flaws hobbled him. DiMaggio’s flaws made him a better player.

  “Mantle has an enormous emotional pull. With DiMaggio, it was as if someone wheeled in a statue of [Michelangelo’s] David; everyone gasped at his beauty. But you didn’t cry.”

  Yet the Jolter’s charisma lay in the distance he demanded between him and us. He was there to be looked at and to knock our breath away. Mantle never had that power over us.

  “Our emotion about Mantle,” our connection to him, “was based on not knowing him. The man was a stone prick. But there were interesting grooves and depths in DiMaggio. DiMaggio was capable of surprising.”

  If he couldn’t make us cry, he could still move us. “As the most avid curator of his own legend,” he wasn’t allowed to slip. He was reluctant to play in old-timers’ games, “because he didn’t want to disappoint.”

  “As explosive as his early fame was,” he never did disappoint us as a player. Nor did he disappoint his teammates. “He helped make them winners,” whereas the Yankees of the twenty-first century have yet to find another Jolter. “A-Rod doesn’t help you [as much as DiMaggio did],” Bob said about Alex Rodriguez, the Yankee star third baseman and home run king.

  “The modern ballplayer emerges with DiMaggio—he’s historical. He marked his era” in a way that A-Rod never will. Like A-Rod, the Jolter was the highest-paid player of his time. But A-Rod never played in such constant pain. Bone spurs haunted the last half of DiMaggio’s career. Yet we grew to love his tortured ballet; he could still beat young Mickey Mantle to a fly ball in his own vast territory of center field. No other player ever filled us with such a sense of the unknown. If he continues to bother our psyche, it’s because no one has ever really replaced him. He wouldn’t move to first base, as Mantle did, and fumble around like some half-man. Crippled as he was, the Jolter had the stride of a wounded wolf. We never doubted his devotion. Broken down or not, “DiMaggio was doing his very best for us. Mantle wasn’t, and Williams was only doing his half-best for us,” recalls Lipsyte.

  “The world changed around him.” Lipsyte remembers “the terrible shit he took when he held out briefly” before the start of the 1938 season. The fans, who had loved him in ’37, turned against their darling. It took him weeks to woo them back. And it
only added to his suspicious nature. He’d fought with the Yankees over a few miserable thousand dollars and had to give in. “He never made the kind of money he would have made” had he patrolled center field ten or twenty years later. “He was getting a lot of crap” for his Mr. Coffee commercials, while players’ salaries began to jump over the moon. “He lived into another generation, saw what everybody else was doing,” and it filled him with rage.

  In his own lifetime, baseball had gone from a sport—with teams of nine men toiling on a lonely field—to a carnival show where players are “an extension of the entertainment industry.”

  And what a price we’ve had to pay, as all of baseball has become a band of greedy Methuselahs who want to remain on the field forever with their pumped-up bodies while they collect fatter and fatter checks. Harvey Araton of the New York Times believes that Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire and the other “juicers” “were only symptoms of an insidious culture,” a culture of want that was willing to forgive any abuse, any infraction, if only McGwire or Sammy Sosa would hit another Ruthian home run. But McGwire and Sosa and Bonds were not Yankees, not members of that elite club. It took the Mitchell Report, released on December 13, 2007, and its investigation into the rampant use of steroids in the major leagues to out Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Chuck Knoblauch, and eight other Yankees. And in 2009 Sports Illustrated revealed that A-Rod himself had tested positive for testosterone and anabolic steroids in 2003, while he was still a Texas Ranger.14

  “I was young. I was stupid. I was naïve,” A-Rod confessed to ESPN. It was all part of “the loosey-goosey era,” when players thought they had an elixir that could make them immortal on the field. But there’s no such elixir, and there never was, not even for A-Rod, who would help the 2009 Yankees win their first World Series in nine years.