Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book)

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  Praise for Joe DiMaggio

  “Stunning, shocking, meticulously researched . . . It’s fascinating, disheartening, and, finally, sad, but it’s a journey we must take to complete the story of this lonely, but truly larger-than-life icon.”

  —Jerry Gladman, The London Free Press

  “An ambitious new biography . . . gripping from start to finish, exploring the man, the aura, and the interstices between.”

  —New York Observer

  “The first serious, fully researched, critical biography of the man and the myth. It is a brilliant book, sure to turn the head of any baseball buff or reader of good biography.”

  —Bruce Clayton, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “A well-turned and thoroughly reported sports biography . . . the prose powers the narrative irresistibly.”

  —Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times

  “This is an eye-opening, fascinating book, more than five years in the making, that pierces the mystique and the mystery that surround Joe DiMaggio.”

  —Charles Bakst, The Providence Journal-Bulletin

  “I read Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio in a day and a half. The Hero’s Life was compelling and convincing. I couldn’t put it down.”

  —Paul Daugherty, The Cincinnati Enquirer

  “A feat of reportorial endurance . . . a tribute to Cramer’s ferocious skill.”

  —Patrick Beach, Austin American-Statesman

  Thank you for purchasing this Simon & Schuster eBook.

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  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Book I: Destiny 1930–1935

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Book II: The Game 1936–1951

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Book III: Fame 1952–1962

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Book IV: The Greatest Living . . . 1989–1998

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Book V: The Last Deal 1998–2000

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Index

  Picture Credits and Permissions

  FOR MY OWN HEROES,

  BRUD AND BLOSSOM CRAMER

  JOE’S WORLD SERIES RING FROM HIS ROOKIE YEAR, 1936.

  PROLOGUE

  I REMEMBER THE LAST PUBLIC DAY OF JOE’S LIFE, the last day of that splendid Yankee season, a sunny Sunday in the Bronx, September 27, 1998—Joe DiMaggio Day, the mayor had proclaimed it. The Clipper was coming back to Yankee Stadium to receive nine replica World Series rings—a gift from the Kaiser, George Steinbrenner. The story was DiMaggio had left his original rings in his suite at the Hotel Lexington (back in the 1960s, when DiMag kept a place in New York for business), and someone stole them all, except the ’36 ring, from Joe’s rookie year, which was the only one he ever wore—he wore that ring for sixty-one years straight.

  He had the ring on that Sunday as he rode around the warning track in a 1956 Thunderbird convertible. He wore a jacket and tie, of course, and held both hands above his head—half a wave, half a blessing, like the Pope does. He’d part his hands, throw them open toward the crowd, both at once, so his thanks, his acknowledgment—and more, a whiff of his chrism, some glint of his godhood—would fly from him back to the crowd, to all those thousands standing on the steep tiers, in their shorts, with their beer cups, cheering his name in the midday glare. Joe would say he was touched by their welcome. But they were the ones who’d feel touched by the hero.

  That was the last distant view he permitted. I didn’t go anywhere near him that day—didn’t try to intrude, try to ask questions. We’d been through all that. Joe didn’t want to help with biography. He didn’t want to help anybody know his life. It was a smart move by a smart man—canny, anyway. In latter years he cultivated the distance that set him apart from every other person of fame. He was revered for his mystery. We cheered him for never giving himself entirely to us.

  Still, even in that Sunday’s wash of reverence, DiMaggio seemed a sad figure. It wasn’t just the effects of age—the way he’d shrunk—that bent old man who took his rings behind home plate and tottered off the field. (There was no working microphone. Maybe the hero had nothing more to say.) More to the point, it was his cloak of myth that had shrunk. The lies around him were growing cheap. This tale of the stolen rings, for example. Joe didn’t lose those rings to theft. More likely he traded them for free lodging, food, transportation, services of every kind. That whole Joe DiMaggio Day wasn’t about rings, but about history and Joe’s need to win; about Mickey Mantle and the way Joe resented him; and money, mostly money, as it mostly was with Joe.

  The real story went back to 1995 and the day the Yankees dedicated to Mickey Mantle the fourth monument in the history of the Stadium. That was a big day at the ballpark, an emotional day—the Mick had just died—and of course DiMaggio had to show up. Joe resented that. When had Mantle ever showed up for him? . . . But what really griped him wasn’t Mickey’s monument in left center field. He’d been offered a monument, but turned it down. (He complained: Were they trying to bury him already?) No, what set Joe to seething was the special ball they used in that day’s game. It was a regulation Rawlings game-ready Mickey Mantle Commemorative Ball, authorized by Major League Baseball. Right away the collectors and dealers in memorabilia bid those balls up to three hundred per. That was twice as much as Joe was getting for his balls—which were autographed! That burned up the Clipper good. From that day forward, DiMaggio (to be precise, Yankee Clipper Enterprises) had angled for a DiMaggio Day and a special DiMaggio ball—also by Rawlings, also regulation-made, game-ready, American League—except, except . . . these could be signed by the Clipper himself. That would be a four-hundred-dollar ball, at least! And for starters Joe would autograph the fifteen thousand balls that he was demanding, free, from the Rawlings Company (you know, for use of his name). Fifteen thousand free balls, a few months to sign ’em . . . and (even at wholesale) that would be a cool three million, cash (in hundreds, please: Joe’s favorite).

  Of course, no one was going to tell that story on Joe DiMaggio Day—or write it in the papers. So they wrote about remembered autumns of glory, about the love affair of the hero and the Yankee fans. For sixty years writers had to make up what Joe cared about. As Joe himself once explained: “They used to write stories about me like they were interviewing me, and never even talked to me.” But now, most of the guys who knew him—who could cobble up a good DiMaggio quote—were gone.

  So Mike Lupica, from the Daily News (Joe’s favorite among the new generation), would settle that day for the wistful “So many memories. So many seasons.” . . . And for the New York Times, Dave Anderson (one of the last guys who knew Joe when) would write: “After the ceremony, he returned to that shadowy corridor behind the dugout, sat down, opened the box with the World Series rings and stared at them. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ he said.”

  The fact was, DiMaggio was never wistful. (At that moment, he was furious.) And he neve
r spent an instant in his life to marvel at the beauty of anything. Except maybe a broad. Which wasn’t marveling—that was wanting. Wanting he did. That was why he’d hauled himself out of bed at four in the morning, coughing up blood from the cancer he wouldn’t speak about . . . to get to the airport, to fly to New York in time for his day. That was want. That was DiMaggio. If you lost track of that hunger, that toughness, you lost his core.

  There wasn’t another eighty-three-year-old in the country who could have held up that day, looking good—not with Joe’s irritated eye (something like chronic conjunctivitis), the old arthritis, the scoliosis that hunched his back into a painful curve, the pacemaker that kept his heart beating, the Lasix (a horse diuretic) that kept the fluid away from the pacemaker (and made Joe pee, seemed like every ten minutes). And now, the cancer that he would only call pneumonia—maybe he had pneumonia, too. That wouldn’t have mattered: Joe was going to make it through. Nobody else had his grit—he always played hurt. Or his focus—Joe would bring those balls home.

  Nothing stopped him. Nothing turned his head. You could admire him for that. He was one of a kind. I also remember the day, five years back, when I was starting this book, first asking about DiMaggio. I had a long, rambling interview with an old baseball man named Frank Slocum. He’d spent his whole life in the game. He’d known DiMaggio for sixty years—saw him when he came up, he’d met Joe’s brothers, parents, wives—saw him every which way. We talked for two hours, then three. Finally, I put away my notebook.

  “I’ll tell you one more thing,” Slocum offered, after I’d stood up to leave. “You go out there and ask around. If you meet any guy who says, ‘Oh, I know someone just like that DiMaggio,’ I’ll tell you this: That guy’s a liar.”

  BOOK I

  DESTINY

  * * *

  1930–1935

  JOE DIMAGGIO, 1920, TAYLOR STREET, SAN FRANCISCO.

  THE NORTH BEACH PLAYGROUND, SAN FRANCISCO.

  NORTH BEACH IN THE 1920S.

  CHAPTER 1

  JOE DIMAGGIO SAT ON THE TAR OF THE PLAYGROUND, with his back against the wall on the Powell Street side, his legs cocked in front of him like a couple of pickets. At fifteen, Joe was mostly legs—leg-bones, more like it—and a head taller than his friends. It was Niggy Fo who gave him his nickname, Coscilunghi—that meant “Long-legs” in Sicilian.

  All the boys on the North Beach playground had names—that meant you were in, you belonged there. There was Shabby Minafo and his brother, Bat (he only wanted to bat), and Hungry Geraldi (he could really eat); Friggles Tomei had those fancy feet at second base; Lodigiani they called Dempsey, because he once decked a guy in a fight; and Niggy, of course, got his name for his dark skin. They were always on the playground or on the street. Who had room at home? On this spring afternoon, in 1930, they were playing Piggy on a Bounce—one guy with a bat, everyone else in the field, and one guy would hit till someone caught the ball, or caught it on one bounce, and then the batter had to take the field.

  Joe was at the playground most days, too . . . but like today—not exactly with them. He’d come out of his house, down the hill from Taylor Street—but he’d sit apart, watching in silence, arms draped across his knees in a pose of solitary sufficiency. Or maybe it wasn’t all pose. Joe was different from the other guys. They always wanted to play ball. They were desperate to play ball—even if they could barely play. Joe could play. But you had to get him to play.

  Bat Minafo and Frank Venezia always picked the teams. They were little guys, but pretty good players. They’d flip a coin, and whoever won would pick Joe. Guys would actually say, “Oh, you got Joe, you’re gonna win.” It wasn’t just the way Joe could hit. (Even those mushy city-issue softballs, Joe could hammer them the length of the playground, a block and a half, into the swimming pool.) . . . But more than that, it was the way he was in a game. He had to win. That was the reason he’d play—he wanted to win something. Sometimes, Bat and Frank would make everybody throw in a nickel or a dime, and they’d play winner-take-all. Then Joe would play, for sure. But playing just to play . . . well, mostly he’d sit.

  In the long fingers of his right hand, he’d dangle a smoke in front of his shins—if no one was looking. There were rules about smoking, but not for Joe. The playground assistant was a guy named Rizzo. He only had one arm, but he played a mean game of tennis. He’d throw that ball up, whip his racket around with the same hand, and bang—the guy could murder the ball. No one but Joe could return his serve. So Rizzo let Joe smoke—sort of a tip of the cap. Still, Joe was furtive, so no one would mooch. If he had a pack, he’d keep it in his sock. If anybody saw it, that pack was a goner. Mostly he’d roll his own. A pouch of Bull Durham cost the same five cents, but he could roll a hundred smokes. A nickel was something to hold on to in Joe’s world.

  At that Powell Street playground wall, he was at the center of everything he knew. There, arrayed in front of him, chasing that city softball, laughing at each other, tearing up their shoes on the tar, were the boys who were personages in his life—apart from his family, it was almost everybody who mattered. That day, it was Niggy Fo, Shabby, Bat; there was Nig Marino watching from the side (Niggy was a fighter, not a ballplayer); big George Solari in the outfield; Hungry, Friggles, and Banchero in the infield; Ciccio LaRocca on the mound. And the batter was Frank Venezia, who was slapping line drives all over the lot (and laughing at Ciccio, who usually got him out with five pitches) . . . that was one reason Frank would remember the day—he never thought he was that good with the bat.

  They all lived within ten tight blocks. Joe knew their little brothers, who tagged along and tried to play. He knew their sisters, who played rotation basketball at the hoop past left center field. (Well, he knew the sisters by sight: Joe never said five words in a row to anybody’s sister.) He knew all their houses, and who slept where. He knew their mothers, and where they shopped. He knew what their fathers fished.

  On the left, past third base, was the boys’ bathroom. Joe spent a lot of time in there, playing cards. Joe was good at cards. But that was like baseball: he wasn’t just playing. Joe and Niggy Marino used to box the cards—fix the deck—or they’d play partners, and kick each other to signal for discards: five kicks meant to throw the five, two for the deuce, etc. By the time they finished, their legs were black-and-blue. But they went home with a few extra nickels—money from the patsies. Poor Frank Venezia! He played all the time and never caught on they were cheating him. But that was Frank. He just thought he was lousy at cards.

  Past the outfield, past the basketball and tennis courts and the open swimming pool, Columbus Avenue cut the playground off at an angle. Nothing was exactly square in North Beach—a neighborhood of odd intersections and acute hillside corners—because Columbus sliced through the street grid diagonally, from the office buildings downtown, north and west to Fisherman’s Wharf. Columbus was the hub for Italian San Francisco, and the boys’ window on the ways of the world. On Columbus, at the corner of the playground, they’d catch the F-car downtown—Stockton Street, all the way to Market. After school, kids rode two for a nickel.

  A block and a half up Columbus lay the expanse of Washington Square, the gran piazza, like a carpet of green spread in front of the great Sts. Peter and Paul’s Church. The Italian Cathedral of the West was at that time only five years old—Joe had seen the whole thing built. But its massive twin spires, the solemn gleam of the grand marble altar, even the bright modern classrooms for the School of Americanization, were designed to bear witness eternally to proud Italianità and the achievement of his parents’ generation. On the grass in front of the church, the men of the community gathered every afternoon for coffee (maybe a little wine) and argument—though Joe’s dad seldom made an appearance. Giuseppe DiMaggio wasn’t much for talk.

  Near the church on Columbus stood the other institutions of the grown-up world: there was the Valente-Marini Funeral Home (you could pass from your christening at Sts. Peter and Paul’s to a coffin—hopefully
not too fast, but all within a couple of blocks). Up the street, there was the community hall, Casa Fugazi, named for Commendatóre John F. Fugazi, a banker and one of the early Italian-American prominenti. At Columbus and Stockton stood the Bank of America, whose founder, A. P. Giannini, was most prominent of all prominenti. On Columbus, too, there was the library—but no one Joe knew went to the library. The boys were more interested in other cultural sites on Columbus, like LaRocca’s Corner, where the wiseguys played cards all day over cups of LaRocca’s homemade wine. (Prohibition was an approximate science in North Beach, and Vince LaRocca, Ciccio’s uncle, was “well connected.”) And nearby were the nightclubs, the Lido Cafe and Bimbo’s 365 Club, with their showgirls—tall gorgeous girls, who’d come from all over . . . though not from North Beach. No Italian family had showgirls.

  From Columbus came food for the neighborhood tables—from Molinari’s big new deli, and Caligari’s bakery on Green, just off the Avenue. On Columbus at Green was the Buon Gusto Market, and off Columbus, on Powell, there was Celli’s, where they made the best pasta and let you buy on credit. In Joe’s crowd, there were months when everybody ate on credit—say, before crab season began. Clothes, same way: without credit, you’d wear your big brothers’ stuff forever. Every family ran a tab at Tragone’s, on Columbus, for clothes and shoes. You could get the shoes cheaper at Gallenkamp’s, on Kearny Street—but that was all the way downtown. (And it was some kind of Kraut chain, strictly cash-and-carry.)

  Three blocks west of the playground was Joe’s first school, Hancock Elementary, just up the alley from his house. The school was built into a downslope, so the recess yard in front of the school was a flat pad of concrete below street level. And a pathway, like a little bridge, led from the street to the school’s main door. In that recess yard, the boys used to play a kind of baseball—but with no bat: you’d just whack the ball with your hand and run like hell to first base, which was a basement doorway. Joe was the only boy who could smack the ball over the bridge. He had long arms and big hands he could swing like a hammer. That was his main distinction at Hancock. That and penmanship. One of the teachers, Mrs. Lieboldt, made her kids do every exercise in the workbook—perfect round O’s, straight lines crossing T’s . . . then she gave out fancy certificates: “For acquired excellence in practical BUSINESS WRITING by study and practice from The Zaner Method of Arm Movement Writing. (The Zaner-Bloser Co., Columbus, Ohio).” It was the only school honor Joe ever won. (But everybody got one, even Niggy Marino—and Niggy got thrown out of all his schools. Even the Ethan Allen School for tough kids, they threw him out.)