The DiMaggios

by Tom Clavin

  Taking the second game of the twin bill would give the Yankees the pennant. They were leading 7–3 when Joe came up with two on and launched one into the left-field seats. The Sox were finished. In his last at-bat of the season, Dominic flew out to Woodling, who gave the ball to Joe. That would be the souvenir he kept for his tenth American League pennant.

  The New York Giants, left for dead midway through the season, were the opponents in the ’51 World Series. Winning relentlessly in August and September, Leo Durocher’s team had tied the Brooklyn Dodgers and forced a playoff. The Giants earned entry into the Fall Classic on what remains one of the most famous home runs in history, Bobby Thomson’s three-run walk-off wallop. New York newspapers speculated that if the Yankees took the Series, Joe would be back in ’52 so he could repeat his 1936–39 feat of four consecutive world championships.

  But in the first three games it looked like the Clipper had already outworn his welcome. He was 0-for-4 in a 5–1 Game 1 loss, 0-for-3 in a 3–1 win (in this game, Mantle went down with the first of many serious leg injuries), and 0-for-4 again in a 6–2 defeat.

  Joe just wasn’t feeling comfortable at the plate. He was unhappy enough with his regular-season average of .266, but this was worse. He had tied Babe Ruth for most World Series appearances with ten, and he wanted to go nine-for-ten in championships. (He had not been a member of the 1943 championship team.) The Yankees had always looked to the Big Guy to lead the way, but an 0-for-11 collar in three games wasn’t getting it done.

  He was blunt to Louis Effrat of the Times: “I’ve just been lousy . . . I still think the Yankees will beat the Giants if I give the boys some help. Maybe I’ll do better. It’s a cinch I can’t do worse.”

  As luck would have it, Lefty O’Doul was in New York trying to put together a team of major leaguers for another trip to Japan. Joe said he’d join the team if Lefty helped him out of his slump. It was 1935 again as O’Doul became Joe’s hitting instructor. “You’ve been pressing, lunging at bad balls, and your body is ahead of your arms so that you’re pushing the ball,” he told Joe. O’Doul also pointed out that Joe was swinging so hard that he was taking his eye off the ball. He needed to correct that immediately, go back to being a patient batter who swung at the last moment.

  Against Sal “The Barber” Maglie in Game 4, Joe made it look easy. He singled in the third inning, and in the fifth he sent the ball into the upper deck in left for a two-run homer, powering the Yanks to a 6–2 victory. The Big Guy had evened things with the Giants with what turned out to be his last Series homer.

  The Yankees won Game 5 too, 13–1, with Joe batting in three runs. In the finale, a 4–3 win, Joe was 1-for-2 with a run scored. His last hit in the major leagues was a double.

  Because he couldn’t say no to his former PCL manager either, Dominic joined Joe as a member of the troupe that went to Japan in the fall. The visiting Americans played 16 games against Japanese all-star teams. Among the American players were Yankees Billy Martin and Ed Lopat and Mel Parnell of the Red Sox. The “Yanks” won the first 11 games, but in the one on November 10, Japan’s Central League All-Stars led 1–0 going into the top of the eighth. The 50,000 fans in attendance at Meiji Park in Tokyo “were clamoring for what they hoped would be the first Japanese victory over an American visiting team of major leaguers since 1931,” reported the United Press. But the DiMaggio brothers were playing together for the last time, and they would go out winners. In his final at-bat as a professional, in a Yankee uniform, Joe belted a 400-foot home run high into the left-field stands.

  “They kept changing pitchers every few innings,” recalled Dominic. “I hit before him, and he came up to me and he wanted to know, ‘What’s this guy doing? What’s he throwing?’ I told him I had him 3-0 and 3-1 and he threw me a screwball each time. Joe said, ‘Okay.’ He got up and I think it was 2-0, and he threw him a screwball and Joe hit it into the seats. He came back into the dugout and said, ‘That’s it, gentlemen. That’s my farewell. I’m not playing tomorrow.’ ”

  For O’Doul, the success of the trip and the adulation of the Japanese fans—“Banzai O’Doul!” was their favorite chant—took some of the sting out of being fired by the Seals, who had finished the 1951 season in last place. In ’52 he would be managing the San Diego Padres, and two years later would skipper them to first place in the PCL.

  Dominic would have preferred to return from Japan to San Francisco, but Emily had other ideas about that. “One of the biggest fights of their life was where they were going to live,” says Paul DiMaggio. “My mother really disliked San Francisco, it was too damp and dreary for her. She’d been very homesick there years earlier when they lived there for a few months, so instead, my parents settled into an apartment in Wellesley, and the Boston area was home for the rest of their lives.”

  Dominic also returned knowing what his brother was about to do: Joe retired from baseball on December 11, 1951. The Yankees arranged a press conference at their offices at 745 Fifth Avenue attended by a tearful Dan Topping, Casey Stengel, and several teammates. “I once made a solemn promise to myself that I wouldn’t try to hang on once the end was in sight,” Joe said. “I’ve seen too many beat-up players struggle to stay up there, and it was always a sad spectacle.” He explained that the injuries in recent years had been too numerous and painful. “And when baseball is no longer fun, it is no longer a game. So I’ve played my last game of ball.”

  Somewhat indelicately, Topping told reporters, “I don’t know why he had to quit. Sick as he was last season he did better than most of the players hanging around.” Obviously, the co-owner still didn’t understand—Joe had never seen himself as just another player. If he could no longer be the Big Guy, there was no sense playing.

  A superstar professional career that had begun with the San Francisco Seals almost 20 years earlier was now over. As the writers asked Stengel how he was going to compensate for the loss in center field, Joe left to begin the rest of his life, which included contracts for TV and radio broadcasting, corporate affiliations, and various product endorsements.

  He ended his career with inarguable Hall of Fame credentials: a .325 batting average, 361 home runs, 1,537 RBI, and the still unsurpassed string of nine world championships in ten appearances. His number 5 was retired immediately by the Yankees, joining the numbers of Gehrig and Ruth, and his home uniform and the glove and bat he used in his last game were sent off to Cooperstown. Joe would remain very much in the spotlight, however, thanks to dating another actress.

  TWENTY

  Joe’s retirement made him the second DiMaggio brother to end his professional baseball career in 1951. For Vince it wasn’t voluntary. The phone just wouldn’t ring anymore.

  That left only Dominic on the stage. He turned 35 in February 1952, and it was clear that his chances of getting back into the World Series were dwindling. The upcoming season looked the least promising since he’d broken in as a rookie in 1940. Bobby Doerr had retired. In January the Marine Corps announced that it was going to recall Ted Williams to active duty, and he could be sent to fight in Korea.

  “In my heart I was bitter about it,” Ted confided in his autobiography, “but I made up my mind I wasn’t going to bellyache. I kept thinking one of those gutless politicians someplace along the line would see that it wasn’t right and do something.”

  Johnny Pesky was still in Boston, but not for long. Starting alongside Dominic would be such untested players as Sammy White at catcher, Dick Gernert at first, Faye Throneberry in right, Jimmy Piersall and Ted Lepcio in the outfield, and Ike Delock in the bullpen. Mel Parnell, Mickey McDermott, and Ellis Kinder remained on the pitching staff, joined by young hurlers and castoffs from other teams.

  And there was a new manager. During the off-season, Steve O’Neill was let go, despite a 150-99 total record; he would wind up managing the Philadelphia Phillies in 1952. The Red Sox installed Lou Boudreau. “I’m sorry to see Steve O’Neill go, bu
t we’re glad to see Boudreau named the new manager,” Dominic told the United Press.

  He wouldn’t be glad long. Boudreau said he wanted to give the younger players more time, and Dominic was not a young player.

  “Boudreau was not eager to have veteran players roughly his own age on the team, especially ones with deeper roots in the organization,” wrote David Halberstam in The Teammates. “Dominic DiMaggio was immediately suspicious of Boudreau, sensing that he wanted to bring up his own people. He sensed his own time was limited now and warned Pesky to be careful.”

  Boston got off to a good start with the youngsters playing well, Ted still on the roster (though with an ailing calf), and Dominic leading the charge. They jumped off to a 10-2 record. But the last day of April was Ted’s last game. He homered in a 5–3 win over the Tigers at Fenway Park. It was Ted Williams Day in Boston, and before the game the Detroit and Boston players had joined various politicians and club officials on the field to sing “Auld Lang Syne.” Ted admitted later he was genuinely touched. He stood at home plate during the song, his right hand on the shoulder of a wheelchair-bound Korean War veteran, his left hand clutching Dominic for support. At least Ted could report for duty in style, as the Red Sox presented him with a new Cadillac as a going-to-war gift.

  Remarkably, the Sox were in first place on June 2. The next day, for some veteran punch, they obtained third baseman George Kell from Detroit. But among the players given up was Pesky, leaving Dominic as the only remaining member of the four core West Coast players in the lineup. It was a lonely time. He didn’t even have Joe anymore to dine with when the Yankees were in Boston, though they tried for get-togethers when the Red Sox visited New York.

  “Dominic was in a tough position, because he had all these new guys around him, and he could easily have ignored us. But he wanted the Red Sox to win, so he was always there with suggestions based on his experience,” says Gernert. “Ted was good too, but then he was gone, and that left Dominic as senior member of the team. He had to handle a situation like Piersall coming after him with questions, the guy who wanted center field.”

  “I talked to him a lot,” Piersall says. “Yes, a lot of questions. He never told me to get lost. But one day he did say, ‘Don’t ask me any more questions, you’re already better than I am now.’ That shocked me, but also made me realize I belonged in the big leagues.”

  A 4–3 loss to the White Sox pushed Boston out of first. The club would not return there for the remainder of the season. It became as hard to win games as it was to recognize teammates. During the season the Sox would use 48 players, more than half of them putting on a Boston uniform for the first time. Dominic heated up toward the end of summer, clubbing his last major league grand slam on August 2, but the team wasn’t following his lead. They clawed to within three and a half games behind the Yankees and Indians, then went 8-24 the rest of the way. They were no match for the Yankees in the stretch drive. In their worst season since before World War II, the Red Sox finished below .500 at 76-78, an embarrassing 19 games behind the Yankees.

  After retiring from major league baseball, the biggest event in Joe’s life was falling in love with Marilyn Monroe—just what he needed, another actress ill-suited for domesticity. That Marilyn was on her way to movie stardom made it even odder that Joe wanted to have anything to do with her. He was greatly relieved to be out of the limelight. He wanted to be respected for being one of the greatest sports stars ever, but he didn’t want to bake in the glare of the press and public attention. As Bobby Brown said, “Joe’s biggest fear was being asked for an autograph. His second-biggest fear was not being asked for an autograph.” Dating Marilyn would leave him little of his desperately preserved privacy.

  Granted, Joe could not have known how big a star Marilyn would become, or understood at the time how much his being with her contributed to that. They met in March 1952 on a blind date at the Villa Nova restaurant on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. He was in the area to play in a charity baseball game involving other retired players and the Philadelphia Athletics. Marilyn arrived two hours late, establishing herself immediately as the only person on the planet who could get away with keeping the Great DiMaggio waiting. As usual, Joe was dressed perfectly and said little during dinner, even when Mickey Rooney left his own table to discuss baseball. The couple dining with them supplied most of the conversation. They dated again a week later, without another couple this time. Even before they sat down at their table, the columnist Sidney Skolsky announced that the two were an item.

  Marilyn had had a horrendous childhood in Los Angeles that included foster homes and being a ward of the state—very different from Joe’s family-oriented upbringing to the north—and up to that time she had played supporting roles in good films such as The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, along with a bunch of not-so-good films. Not knowing the business or anything about the “buzz” in the gossip columns about her, Joe had no idea that Marilyn would soon take off in such pictures as Niagara, How to Marry a Millionaire, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Joe was not as careful an examiner of people and situations as his brother Dominic. The best explanation is, he simply fell in love with her.

  And there was lust, for both of them. Marilyn told the screenwriter Ben Hecht, who wrote her “autobiography,” that she and Joe slept together on their first date, which may have been their first first date or that second one when it was just the two of them. Joe had had many willing partners during his career, and he was still a great catch, but he had never met anyone as alluring as Marilyn.

  “The gossip press following Joe and Marilyn during the early 1950s quenched a national thirst and kept their names constantly before the public,” wrote Roger Kahn in Joe & Marilyn. “This generally pleased Marilyn and delighted her bosses at 20th Century-Fox. DiMaggio’s comment on the furor sounded like a remark at Toots Shor’s bar: ‘Never mind the publicity, honey,’ he told Marilyn. ‘Just get the dough.’ ”

  Joe was making some pretty good dough himself, enough to support a comfortable lifestyle and the ongoing child support payments to Dorothy. He often had to travel to earn his pay. He was in Florida as a special hitting instructor for the Yankees during spring training in 1952, and then he had his broadcasting duties. He told the press that he was “as jittery as a scared hen” when he did his first 15-minute interview program before New York’s game on April 11. His guest was Charlie Dressen, manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and to help him prepare Casey Stengel presented Joe with a dictionary. He wanted it back eventually, though, because “I haven’t finished reading it.”

  But as often as he could, Joe returned to Marilyn, whether she was in Los Angeles or on location making a movie. She liked and admired the man she called “Slugger,” and she told friends that the sex was great. Still, there’s no doubt he fell a lot harder for her than she did for him. When she had her appendix out in April, she woke up to find her hospital room filled with flowers. The following month she flew to New York so Joe could introduce her to the gang at Toots Shor’s, who had become more of a family to him than his own family was.

  A library’s worth of books have told the tale of the doomed movie star. All agree that Marilyn was exactly the wrong woman for Joe. In all likelihood, the only advice he sought in the matter was from Dominic, who didn’t try to talk his older brother out of it. During their early courtship, Joe and Marilyn saw Dominic when they were in New York; later, Joe brought her to visit Dominic and Emily in Massachusetts. According to Dick Flavin, a longtime friend of Dominic, “Emily and Dom liked Marilyn Monroe very much. They saw her as a vulnerable woman who was, beneath all the glamour, very sweet. And they marveled that she could keep Joe waiting for hours and he wouldn’t say anything. No one else kept Joe waiting for even thirty seconds and got away with it. So it was love for sure.

  “There is a wonderful photograph of Joe and Dom just emerging from Locke Ober, one of Boston’s great old restaurants. It’s a winter night and in the f
oreground ahead of the brothers, in fur coats, are Emily and Marilyn. I once said to Dom, ‘Those were two pretty good-looking girls you had with you.’ Dom smiled and said, ‘I’ll take Emily over Marilyn any day.’ Not for a moment did I doubt he meant it.”

  And so, with Dominic’s approval, the courtship continued. He just wanted his brother to be happy, and if this actress was the one, so be it.

  Lou Boudreau made it clear that he would continue to give playing time to the younger Red Sox in the 1953 season. Obviously this didn’t bode well for Dominic, now 36. Still, he had no idea how difficult things would get. He suffered from an infection in his right eye during the off-season that was bad enough to require a stay in Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and his vision still wasn’t quite right when spring training began. His eye doctor had advised him to delay going to Florida and suiting up, but Dominic believed his job was in jeopardy. How right he was. He struggled through the exhibition season, with Boudreau trying different lineup combinations and using players ten or more years younger.

  Ted was flying and fighting in Korea. Given that he was seeing actual combat, some in Boston feared he might never return. On February 19, he had crash-landed his bullet-riddled, flaming F-9 Panther jet and jumped out before it could explode. He would not be back in a Boston uniform until that August, having been in 37 combat missions, half of them with future astronaut John Glenn as a wingman. Billy Goodman and George Kell were still effective players, but Vern Stephens was gone, traded by Joe Cronin to the White Sox. Piersall, who had struggled with well-documented emotional problems in 1952, was back and healthy. And Boston still had Dom, its All-Star center fielder, on the roster.

  But not on the field. On opening day, the Boston center fielder was Tom Umphlett. “That really hurt Dominic, not being in the opening day lineup,” recalls Gernert. “He kept mostly to himself after that.”