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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  OF COURSE, THE old North Beach crowd was excited when Joe came back. He’d been living home (at least half the nights) during the whole season, but somehow they hadn’t seen him.

  Niggy Marino saw him first. Nig was on his way to the whorehouse, Peggy’s, at Columbus and Taylor—Peggy was Niggy’s pal. She’d gone to all his fights, bought him his fightin’ togs, shoes and everything—and that beautiful blue robe. Even after he quit boxing, Niggy was a good customer.

  All of a sudden, Niggy heard Joe’s deep voice: “Where you goin’?”

  “Hey! I’m goin’ to get a piece o’ keister. You wanna come?”

  “Aw, Nig, I don’t have any money.” (That much hadn’t changed.)

  “Awright, you sonofabitch, come on. I’ll pay for ya.” Niggy knew Joe had more money than all of ’em put together. But, hell—what’s a buck and a half? Nig was proud to buy Joe his first girl.

  All the rest of the guys would have done anything—everything—for Joe, too. He’d made them proud. He’d mastered the world that they’d only dreamed about. But they couldn’t think of a thing they could do for him. They thought, maybe, he’d want a job. Most ballplayers had jobs in the winter. But Joe said, no, he just wanted to rest. They would have bought him food—they were always offering. But Joe said he didn’t want to eat extra and put on weight—that could be a problem.

  What they wanted was just to spend time with him, to hang around, like before . . . to hear all about his new world, about the Seals, and the pitchers from the other clubs, and Caveney and Charley Graham, and Portland—and Hollywood! But Joe didn’t say much.

  Tell the truth, he wasn’t around much. And when he did come around, he wasn’t alone. There was a guy with him, a new guy. They knew who he was: he was older, Tom’s age—one of Tom’s friends—Shirts DeMarco. (Everybody called him Shirts; no one knew why. His real name was Tony.) And now he went everywhere with Joe, like a shadow.

  Joe would come out, and the guys would say hello, and they’d be starting to talk—nothing special, just hanging out—but the minute they got talking, Shirts would break in.

  “Joe. You want anything?”

  “Joe—you want a sandwich?”

  “Joe. You want I bring you a Coke? . . .”

  JOE AND LEFTY O’DOUL, 1935.

  BASEBALL, AS GIUSEPPE DIMAGGIO LEARNED, WAS THE MOST EXCELLENT GAME.

  AND JOE GOT STIFFED—HE’S PEELIN’ POTATOES.

  CHAPTER 5

  IT WAS AN ODD WAY TO BECOME A MAN—INSTANTLY and in the public view—but by the time Joe DiMaggio turned nineteen and signed for a second year with the Seals, he was the man on that club, a big man for the league. The Coast League of the 1930s wasn’t like the minors we think of today—a bunch of kids packing dreams and acne cream on the bus for a summer or two. (And, hey, if it doesn’t work out, there’s always college.) The National and American Leagues had not yet pushed west of St. Louis: in the other half of the nation, the PCL was the big league. There were men on every club who’d done their years in Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh . . . and then went west to play out the string—in better weather, often at the same salary. For that matter, there were men who wouldn’t go to the majors: they wouldn’t take a pay cut for Boston, or Philadelphia. There were players who did ten or fifteen seasons, all in the PCL—some always waiting for that big year that would send them back east, but most just working men who made their living from baseball.

  And a serious sort of living it was. The guaranteed contract was fifty years away—if you got hurt, you lost your job, simple as that. (And oftentimes, the doctor bills were yours, too.) You took what you could get from your club, your owner—and earned it. If you lost your spot in the lineup, your pink slip was probably on its way. (A hundred boys were hungering to take your place.) And while you played, you played to win: postseason money was, for most men, the difference between a good year and just another year older. So, Joe had to make the move, in one year, from a boy among boys to a man among men . . . which he did, on the field; what he didn’t know, he covered with his silence.

  For nine innings, every afternoon (or in the evenings, Tuesdays and Fridays), he was the best player on the Seals—smarter every day in right field, fast and clever on the basepaths, and the best hitter his teammates had ever seen. But it wasn’t just the skills: on the field, he did everything right—seriously, like a veteran. Before the game, he shagged his flies, took ground balls, and loosened his arm properly. He took his turn in the cage and worked on his stroke, with purpose. He learned the pitchers (not just the opposition, but his own pitchers—where to play behind them). He ran out his ground balls and pop-ups. He backed up his center fielder, hit his cutoff men. When the Seals needed runs, and he had a chance to drive them in, he wouldn’t pass the buck and work a base on balls. He wanted to win, and he had a winner’s instinct. And even more: he was correct in those matters that went beyond that day’s game. He didn’t beef, and make enemies of umpires. He never riled the other team, and made them play harder. If he hit a home run, he ran it out, all the way to the bench, and didn’t make a show that some pitcher would remember.

  One time (once in his life) he got in a fight on the field: that was his first year, after his batting streak had made him persona non grata with a lot of pitchers in that league. The game was at Oakland, and the Seals were hammering the Oaks’ southpaw, Roy Joiner, early and often that day. In the first inning, on a play at the plate, Joiner had to cover; DiMaggio came streaking down from third, and slid in hard. Joe was out, but Joiner said something (it was about Joe’s mamma, or pretty near). So Joe squared off and tried to hit him. But Joe couldn’t fight, and Joiner could. He floored the kid with a left, the benches emptied, everybody stormed the plate, pushing and shoving . . . until Joe stood up, and Joiner hit him again. Joe went down with Joiner on top of him; the other players finally pulled Joiner off, and the game resumed. Joiner pitched six scoreless innings after that. But DiMaggio still went two-for-four.

  And that was his only problem on the diamond. Apart from his poor fisticuffs, he just got better. For the first two months of his second season, he was hitting .370, knocking in an average of a run every game. But baseball wasn’t just a job, it was a life. And off the field, Joe couldn’t quite catch up. He’d left most of his old friends behind. New friends—he didn’t seem to want to make any . . . or he just didn’t know how.

  OTHER THAN JOE, the star of the club was Sam Gibson, a big right-hander who’d win twenty-one games with the Seals that year. But Gibson was fifteen years older than Joe—he’d already spent five years with the Tigers, Yankees, and Giants back east—a fussy old Southerner who never talked much to the kids he now played with . . . save to pace the dugout, clucking: “Gimme some runs, now. Git some runs, y’all. Ah need ’em.”

  The other famous Seal, in ’34, was Noble Winfield “Old Pard” Ballou, one of the first relief-pitching specialists in organized ball. He had a big overhand curveball—he called it his drop-pitch, or downer—that was murder on anxious late-inning hitters: they’d just beat it into the ground. Pard had also done four years in the majors, with the Senators, Browns, and Dodgers (and with indifferent success). He was thirty-seven, even older than Gibson—who used to reward him, when he saved a win, with a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, the whiskey from Pard’s home state of Kentucky. Alas, by the time Joe came along, Grand-Dad was Pard’s best friend. You’d see him in the early innings, asleep in the bullpen from last night’s exertions; and then around the middle of the game, Pard would disappear. In the late innings, if a pitcher got in trouble, the batboy, little Artie Dikas, would have to jump in a car and race around the left field fence to the Double Play Tavern, where he’d find Ballou, with his head on the bar. “Pard! Come on! You’re goin’ in!” So Pard would get back to Seals Stadium, take ten or fifteen warm-up throws . . . they’d bring him in—bases loaded, no one out—and after nine or ten of his famous downers, Pard would have them out of the inning.

  (The other guy who drank was
Frankie Hawkins, third baseman for Oakland, and then for the Seals. If he didn’t drink, he would have been great—but he drank ugly. Jigger Statz, the L.A. Angels center fielder, robbed him of hits three times in one day, and after the game, when Frankie’s wife came to get him at the locker room, he punched her in the mouth. She left him.)

  Most of the younger guys stuck to beer after games, except for special occasions. A lot of them were family men who’d disappear after home games, and you wouldn’t see them till BP the next day. On the road, they went to a ton of movies. Guys who’d been around the league a few times would have friends, people to see, dinners to go to in this town or that. Even rookies would get dined around—ballplayers were royalty everywhere they went—by friends, friends of friends, or some ethnic or fraternal group. Steve Barath, a young third baseman who was Joe’s roommate on the road for a while, used to get invitations from Hungarians in every city. The Italian groups wanted to feed and fete the second baseman, Art Garibaldi—and, of course, most of all, they wanted Young Joe. But only Garibaldi would attend. Joe turned down all invitations. There’d be strangers. He wouldn’t know what to say.

  The veterans (married or not-anymore) would have “special friends” around the circuit—ladies whom they’d visited over the years. But that was strictly a winking matter, seldom talked about and never flaunted. That delicacy wasn’t about their wives back home, or morality of any sort—except the baseball sort: with curfew at midnight (or two hours after a night game), you weren’t supposed to be partying too hard, or too long. (When Rabbit Maranville, the old Boston shortstop, made manager, he used to tell his players: “If you can’t get in her pants in two hours, you call me.”) But, tell the truth, women just came—or came and went—with the life.

  Most night games at Seals Stadium were Ladies’ Nights. Any female got in for fifteen cents (just the price of the tax). In fact, that was one big reason there was a new Seals Stadium. Up until 1931, the Seals had played at Recreation Field, the aptly named “Old Rec.” One feature of that park was the betting section in the upper stands. (It wasn’t exactly legal, but no one bothered the bookies up there; they took wagers on the game, the inning, or the batter.) And then, too, down the first base line, there was the “Booze Cage,” a section of seats separated from the field by only ten or twelve feet and a chain link fence, where the price of a ticket also bought a shot or a beer. (In Prohibition, that turned illegal, too, but they’d serve mixers, and you could bring your own bathtub hooch.) Old Rec was a great place to watch a game, but it was a stag affair. With Mr. Graham’s new million-dollar “palace,” baseball bid to become—had to become—a respectable entertainment for “mixed company.”

  Since the Great War, and through the 1920s, more and more girls had gone to work outside their homes—at least, until they married. They had money, independence, and free time. Why shouldn’t they be fans? It wasn’t a feminist matter: there was no parallel interest in a women’s league, or girls teams at school. In fact, the ballpark was alluring, especially, as a male place—as smart and stylish for a girl-about-town as smoking (over highballs!) at a table near the dance floor, or showing up in furs at a heavyweight fight. In fact, for most working girls, the ballpark was even better—cheaper, for one thing (and you could tell your parents you’d been there)—the kind of place you could go with your girlfriends, all dressed up in heels and gloves, or a sundress with a picture hat on weekend afternoons. So there they’d be, laughing together, pointing, or waving at the boys in those caps and flannels—especially at that shy, slender hero, Joe DiMaggio. “Joe! Joe! Hit a home run!” . . . “Yoo hoo! Joe! Hit one for me?”

  Mostly, Joe wouldn’t even look up. (What if she talked to him, and he had to talk back?) . . . On the road, his roomie, Steve Barath, used to go to the dime-a-dance joints. But Joe didn’t know how to dance, and he wasn’t going to pay a dime to learn. “He was just backward,” Barath recalled. “He’d just sit in the hotel with The Sporting News from St. Louis, checking a lot of guys’ averages. I lived with him for weeks and we never even had a conversation.”

  Still, there was one girl at Seals Stadium, a local girl—and not just local San Francisco, but North Beach. That’s how he found out her name: Lucille. He knew the people she was with. And she was gorgeous. And then she started coming to all the games—he knew she was watching him. So for a few weeks, he was on alert about that. He looked up Ciccio LaRocca (Ciccio knew all the girls, Joe figured) and asked about her, actually talked about her! But then it got to talking with her, and that was harder. And she was Italian, so that meant parents—you had to meet the family. And she was North Beach, so the parents knew parents who knew parents . . . and it got to the point, someone asked Joe: How was Lucille? And that was the end. Joe shied like a startled horse. He liked girls fine, as far as that went. But he liked it better when no one knew his business.

  See, Joe had to have a private life, almost before he had a life. He was, after all, Giuseppe’s son; and if the old man wouldn’t reveal his sins, even to a priest, well, neither would the son—though in Joe’s case, his sins were hardly mortal. Joe had a funny attitude about people watching him. He was sure they always did. That was fine on the ballfield, where he could be perfect, or pretty near. But any other time, anywhere he might show at a disadvantage—well, it made him edgy. From the start, he had to have it both ways: he wanted to be well known at what he was known for—and for the rest, he wouldn’t be known at all.

  Joe used to let Ciccio see him with girls, because Ciccio knew girls—and he’d known Joe forever. They’d gone to school together, they’d played for Rossi Oil. They used to fight all the time—wouldn’t talk for weeks—but they’d still play together. The fact was, Joe now had use for Ciccio’s style, the way he talked to girls, the way he’d drive them around. (Ciccio was just a fisherman—thirty-five dollars was a good week for him—but he always could get a car. And he knew how to drive. Joe couldn’t drive worth a damn; it made him nervous.) Ciccio used to needle him about being tongue-tied. “You don’t know what to say? How ’bout, ‘Hello’?” Joe would just smile, shrug, and take it. That’s why Ciccio was the only one who knew about Vi Koski. She was the first girl who stuck.

  She was about Joe’s age—eighteen, nineteen—when Joe saw her at the ballpark. Violet Koski was from Finnish stock (she lived in West Portal, safely out of Joe’s neighborhood)—slender, with brown hair and fair skin. She was lovely, and she had spunk. Violet worked at Stein’s Drug Store at Stockton and Sutter streets, and on her days off she’d come to Seals Stadium. Joe saw her sitting behind the dugout. “C’MONNN JOE! HIT A HOME RUN!” She talked to him one day, and when he didn’t answer, she talked to him again. That’s how it was: she kind of asked him out. He made Ciccio go with him to the drugstore to see her. (As Ciccio says, “He wouldn’t go no place alone.”) And then Joe wanted to double-date: Ciccio would take out Vi’s little sister, Toinie.

  Ciccio and Toinie would go with Joe and Vi to the Steins’ house. They were the drugstore owners, and lived on the far side of the Twin Peaks tunnel. Joe would just sit there, silent, and Violet would talk—she could chatter—or Ciccio and Toinie would talk. Sometimes, the four would go out on the boat, if Ciccio got a trip organized. It was okay for Ciccio to see that, too. He knew how Joe was supposed to hate the sea, didn’t like to fish, couldn’t stand the smell . . . all that was true, sort of. But Joe didn’t mind the smell if he was fishing just to screw around. He liked a boat fine if it was Ciccio’s boat, taking Joe and Violet, Toinie and Ciccio, out to Paradise Cove, behind Alcatraz, toward Strawberry Point, with a big pot for pasta, and some Dago bread, and wine. (Joe’s father still made wine, just as Ciccio’s had before he took sick.) They’d cook the pasta, picnic, swim, and drink. And then the couples would separate, to “explore” some recondite bit of terrain.

  After a while, Toinie and Ciccio started fighting. So then Toinie went with Ciccio’s brother, Pete. Ciccio would bring along Mickey Nichols, the dancer from the Lido Cafe. Cic
cio had to be there, not just for the boat, but so Joe would be easy. Joe had to have one of his guys along, mostly Ciccio or Shirts, or he’d be nervous. When the Seals were in town, and Joe got an off day, Ciccio would stay home from fishing. Joe would get up and get breakfast by ten or eleven, then walk the block and a half to Ciccio’s house to pick him up. They’d go straight to LaRocca’s Corner and play Briscola all day. It was a four-man card game—you made points, taking tricks: the Queen counted two, Jack and King were four, Ace was eleven, and treys were worth ten. It was complicated, but Joe was sharp, a good gambler, a card-counter; he’d win all the time. Every couple of weeks, Joe would have to go for an interview—with Prescott Sullivan, the columnist at the Examiner, or the Ernie Smith Show on the local radio. (Smith liked to put Joe on at least once a month.) Then Ciccio couldn’t go fishing. First of all, he had to drive. And anyway, Joe wouldn’t go alone. In the interviews, Joe would answer the questions: “yes,” or “no.” (Radio or print, it was all the same.) “Well, Joe, you certainly have gotten off to a wonderful start. To what do you attribute your success?” And Joe would say: “Aw, I don’t know.” . . . But afterward, he’d ask Ciccio two or three times: “How was that?” Ciccio had to tell him, “You were fine.” “You sounded great.” Joe would ask: “You don’t think it was too much?”

  In all, it was a neat system, well controlled, the prototype of the DiMaggio life. At home, he had his family to take care of his person and his business. (Tom had worked out a nice raise for Joe’s second contract.) He had Ciccio and Shirts as buffers against the predations of society, whenever he left the house. On the road, he was always with the team, among whose members no one knew him well. He had Vi, and no one at home (or on the team) knew anything about her. His tracks were covered—as they would always remain. But then, late May, in his second year with the Seals, Joe’s new life almost crumbled.