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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  “I hear the boos,” DiMaggio said. “I read in the papers that the cheers offset them, but you can’t prove that by me. All I ever hear is boos. Pretty soon I got the idea the only reason people come to the game at all was to boo DiMaggio. And the mail! You would have thought I’d kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, the way some of the letters read.”

  Joe had learned lessons—but not the ones Ruppert intended. He’d learned that the fans could turn against him, and couldn’t hear (or didn’t want to hear) anything about it from him. Maybe if he could talk like Lefty, he could josh the boos away or explain himself. But how, to whom? The writers were all in bed with the club—Joe was convinced of that—they’d turned the fans against him. So, Joe would make statements the only way he could—he would be ever more perfect on the field. And to hell with the fans. They’d cheer, if he won.

  And there’d be no more holdouts: not public ones—never again. Now, Joe understood: they would never pay him what he was worth—not fairly, not willingly . . . and he couldn’t make them pay. Now Joe knew, he was hired help. No one ever made hired help rich. Now he knew, if he was going to get the dough (and by God, he would), he would have to take care of business himself, inside of baseball—or outside. Outside, no one would have to know a thing.

  JOE DIMAGGIO’S GROTTO, FISHERMAN’S WHARF, SAN FRANCISCO.

  THE CENTER OF ATTENTION: DOROTHY ARNOLD AT YANKEE STADIUM.

  JOE AND DOROTHY OUT FOR A SLAP-UP SUPPER—COURTESY OF RICHIE THE BOOT BOIARDO—NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, 1939.

  CHAPTER 8

  WHEN JOE DIMAGGIO CAME TO NEW YORK AFTER HIS holdout, in April 1938, he knew all the writers would be at the station waiting for his train. So he got off across the river, in Newark, New Jersey, and dodged them. He knew their game, now. He would wall off those writers as he would wall away the booing fans, the hateful mail, the oversolicitous teammates who tried to support and befriend him. He’d make his own friends. He wasn’t a bashful big-eyed kid anymore. He was twenty-three. He was the best in the business, and that wasn’t pattycake.

  Now, his teammates began to note that Daig wasn’t around so much, sitting in the locker room or in the lobby. If a new player made the club, someone would take him aside with a brief explanation: “Just cause Dago don’t talk to you, that don’t mean anything. It’s the way he is. Just leave him alone.” Even established players—if they talked to Joe, it was a baseball matter; other than that, it was “Hiya, Joe!” “S’long, Joe.” You wouldn’t even see DiMaggio in the hotel dining room, eating with the rest of the team. Joe wasn’t paid to be a spectacle for the fans in that restaurant. Why should he have to smile and sign napkins while his food was getting cold? In Gomez’s famous phrase, Joe became “the King of Room Service.”

  Gomez was the exception in DiMaggio’s regimen of solitude. No one had to show Joe the ropes anymore, but Lefty still took care of his roomie. And Joe did his best to reciprocate—as Gomez recalled for Maury Allen, in Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? . . .

  “This one time I had pitched in Cleveland against Bobby Feller and I went thirteen innings and I got beat 2–1. Well, if you got beat, McCarthy didn’t want you to blink your eyes. You just spent the rest of the day being quiet and thinking about it. We got on the train after the game and we were going on to Detroit. I really felt down after that game. I had pitched as good as I could, as long as I could, and we still lost. I was really feeling sorry for myself. Now DiMaggio comes along and he asks me to go up to the dining car for dinner. I told him I didn’t feel like going up to the dining car for dinner. I just wanted to sit on the train and look out the window. Joe was trying to get me interested in something and forget about the game. Usually I was always talking to him after he had a bad day and trying to make him forget. This time he was helping me out.

  “For some reason or other, McCarthy always put me near his compartment on the train. I guess he wanted to watch me. Well, anyway, DiMaggio is trying to get me to go with him. I’m in no mood to go. All of a sudden he says he wants to show me something. ‘Lefty, it’s something I’ve just learned.’ He puts his thumb and his first finger on the end of that big nose of his and he begins tweaking it—bong, bong, bong, bong. ‘Don’t I sound like a banjo?’ Well, I started laughing out loud. Hell, he did sound like a banjo. He’s going on like that and I’m laughing like hell and all of a sudden McCarthy sticks his head out of his compartment and starts screaming at me, ‘I bet you think you pitched a hell of a game today, Gomez.’ Well, before he could remind me that I had lost the game I said, ‘Well, it wasn’t bad.’ DiMaggio starts laughing like hell now and McCarthy’s face is just getting red. He really didn’t know what the hell else he could say to these two lunatics he had on his team so he just slammed the door of his compartment. I think it rocked the whole train.”

  That was another difference with Joe: he wasn’t the Skipper’s perfect boy anymore. Not since McCarthy said he’d get along without DiMaggio. And that was after Young Joe had done everything for McCarthy: ran his laps for McCarthy, shagged his flies for McCarthy—everything McCarthy’s way—well, no more. Now the Skipper could try to get along with him. McCarthy was the boss. Joe wouldn’t disobey an order. But that wasn’t the same as striving to please. That was for kids. And Joe walked away from the kid in himself as firmly, finally, as he’d walk away from anyone else who’d let him down.

  In those days, Joe was listening to another old baseball mentor, in his hometown: Ty Cobb. Cobb had helped DiMaggio even before Joe went to the Yanks, with his contract, some career advice. But Cobb’s hard-eyed view of the game made more sense now, when the glare of the big time had baked away Joe’s illusions. For instance, Cobb had counseled (and now, Joe agreed) that even a strong young hitter should change to a lighter bat around August, so the stress and wear of the long hot season wouldn’t slow him in the stretch, when the money was on the line. Joe also took Cobb’s counsel on daily outfield practice—forget it! Stop shagging flies and sit in the shade. You could catch a million balls in practice and not one would show up in your paycheck.

  It was an accident of geography, timing, and the needs of the press that made Joe “the heir to Babe Ruth.” But Joe had nothing in common with the overweight, roistering, How-Bouta-Beer Bambino. He was always more like the game’s other icon, Cobb. The Georgia Peach was all business in baseball—all about winning, no sentiment in sight. He was Joe’s kind of leader: distant, demanding toward teammates, and toward opponents purely venomous. The difference was DiMaggio would kill the opposition coolly, without a word, and with apparent indifference. Cobb meant to show he hated your guts. He’d open your shin with his spikes, sliding in, even if the play wasn’t close—just so you knew where you stood (and you’d think twice about tagging him, next time). Cobb played against the A’s second baseman, Jimmy Dykes, from 1918 to ’28, and never stood next to him on second base, never passed him between innings, never once saw Dykes before, during, or after a game—for eleven years—without snarling: “You stink.”

  It’s tempting to think Cobb was just vicious, an accident of nastiness, a “sport” in the genetic sense, but he wasn’t far from baseball’s mean main street. Nobody got to the majors, or stayed, by exercise of sweet reason. This was a rough set of boys, mostly poor, uneducated, and possessed of powerful wills which they enforced by intimidation and physical dominance. Every once in a while, like a camel through the needle’s eye, some college boy might arrive in the bigs. On the sports page, he’d forever be linked with his alma mater; but in the dugout, he’d be busy showing that he could be just as know-nothing-tough as the meanest miner’s son. In New York, for example, the Giants employed a summa cum laude second baseman, Frankie Frisch, forever known as the Fordham Flash: he must have written his thesis on tagging a sliding runner in the teeth. When Frisch’s intellectual gifts won him elevation to a manager’s job, he earned eternal fame in St. Louis as skipper of the Gashouse Gang, the most dementedly combative ball team ever loosed upon the league. (In one spring training, ju
st to set the tone, Frisch’s mound star, Dizzy Dean, got annoyed when the Giants scored seven runs off him, and hit seven Giants batters in a row.)

  The Yankees weren’t rowdy like the Cardinals, they weren’t alley fighters like the Tigers, or loud and daffy like the Brooklyns. But they were just as tough. They weren’t born to those suits and ties, swank hotels, and Pullman cars. Red Ruffing, the big sorrel-haired son of the coal fields in Nokomis, Illinois, might have become one of the great power-hitting outfielders of the age if not for a mine accident that robbed him of four toes on his left foot. So he became a pitcher, the sort who’d fire a fastball at your chin if you looked at him funny with a bat in your hand. Ruffing wasn’t going back to those coal mines . . . . Spud Chandler, the other big right-hander, was such a nasty competitor that no one would go near him on days he was supposed to pitch. In the year of Joe’s holdout, Chandler pitched most of the season with bone chips in his arm. After he pitched he’d sneak out of the clubhouse without a tie, his shirt collar open, because he couldn’t raise his arm to fasten a button. But he wouldn’t go for an operation till he’d finished the year—at fourteen and five . . . . Early in Joe’s rookie year, the catcher, Bill Dickey, almost died from kidney damage after a collision at the plate. But Dickey came back to hit .362 that year. And in the field, Dickey gave as good as he got: when the Senators’ outfielder Carl Reynolds tried to run him over at home plate, the quiet gentleman from Little Rock stood up and broke Reynolds’s jaw with one punch.

  There were a number of ballparks in the league with only one tunnel from the clubhouse to the field—often that led through the home team dugout. But that didn’t mean opposing players would stop and chat, or nod hello as they took the field. Guys on the other team were enemies, pure and simple. By the end of the 1930s, Commissioner Landis turned custom into law with a baseball edict, “The Non-fraternization Rule.” If you had something friendly to say to a player on another team, you could say it after the season. Meantime, you were at each other’s throat.

  That’s what it meant to play for keeps. There were four hundred jobs in the major leagues. You fought to keep one. Gomez used to tell the story of Burleigh Grimes, the old spitballer who came over from the National League to the Yanks at the age of forty. He was warming up in Detroit, and the next hitter, Goose Goslin, was leaning in from the on-deck circle, trying to get a good look. So Burleigh threw one at Goslin—twenty feet in foul ground! Decked him! . . . Sure, Burleigh was near the end. But you were gonna have to pry that job out of his dead fingers.

  It wasn’t all lovey-dovey with your own team, either. Every kid who came up from the bushes had to fight his way into the batting cage. And even if he made the club, that didn’t mean you were going to cuddle up with him. What if he got hot and took your spot in the lineup? One day, Selkirk complimented Gehrig on the way he started a three-six-three double play. “Nice goin’, Lou!” Said Gehrig: “Shuddup, you fresh sonofabitch.” No one was going to bump stomachs and slap high-fives all around the dugout because he laid down a proper sacrifice bunt. There were no group hugs on the field when you won, or kneeling in a circle to pray when you lost. You want to pray? Go to church. It was a big deal if someone on the bench shook your hand. If they shook it where anyone from the other team could see, you might as well walk up to the plate with a neon sign, flashing: “HIT ME.”

  Now, surely it’s too much, and too mechanical, to say that Joe took on the hard edge of the business in which he throve. He’d only been in the league two years. But it would also be a mistake to ignore how precocious he was in the ways of baseball—how he drank it in.

  It would be a mistake to underestimate the living crammed into each baseball year—experience of a high-wattage sort. There was the constant scorekeeping, when a win was affirmation for you, your team, and the city as a whole—and loss was condemned in thunderous judgments, printed in fist-high headlines by the millions every day . . . the joy, the rush, when mastery on the diamond gave your every act a godly grace—till a slump, an error, bad luck, or incapacity plunged you into hopeless, worthless woe . . . the physicality, the body shock, when you’d hurl yourself across dirt and stones, kicking for the base, while skin flayed off your thigh and hip till they were pinkish red like a tropical fruit (they called this, in fact, a strawberry), and the trainers would slap on alcohol till it burned like hellfire—but, of course, you’d do it all again, next day . . . the confrontations—how many battles?—every day, every play, every minute, between the pitcher and batter, batter and fielder, fielder and runner, runner and baseman . . . . How could they not make his model for living, when that was the only living on his own that Joe DiMaggio had ever done?

  Why wouldn’t he see life from his own point of view, the position in which he spent his most alive moments, that perch with the whole world that mattered before him—that was center field. It was a special place—not just that vastness in the Bronx, but every center field: the largest suzerainty in the game’s realm, it had to be patrolled by a prince. He was the man on the field most unconstrained by others; he had the greatest distances to roam, and the farthest from home. Perhaps that’s why Joe so often was the first to burst from the dugout, running, head down, on a beeline, with the other men spraying out behind, as if they’d been pulled, uncorked by the Dago’s force. In center field, he had every twitch of every play in front of him: the bent back of his pitcher, the batter’s swing and the ball-jump, and the crack of the bat to confirm his first step, with the infield in scurry, and the ball in flight, past their upturned faces, up, up . . . till it hung at the top of its arc, dead still in his sky for an instant, because he was moving perfectly toward its path, to intersection, yelling “I got it! Mine! Mine!” (In center everything he could reach was HIS!) . . . and slowing, now, to the glide that would let him leisurely raise his glove and bare hand (always two hands, to take care of business) and put it away . . . so he could trot in, ball in his glove, deadpan, confident, controlling, gathering teammates ahead of him homeward, a strong shepherd, to the dugout again.

  That’s how fast things were moving for Joe: now he led them out, he brought them in, he led without anyone having time to notice that DiMaggio had taken over. Now, in ’38, as McCarthy fretted through a long Gehrig slump, the Skipper made a change: Gehrig would bat fifth. The new cleanup man for the Yanks was DiMaggio. It just made sense. No one said a word. No one much remarked when the season ended, and Joe had posted another splendid year: .324, one hundred forty runs batted in, thirty-two home runs (and only twenty-one strikeouts). There were even some suggestions that Joe had been a tad off his game, a bit disappointing. You know, he hadn’t led the league. (Expectations were moving fast, too.) . . . But another World Series ring muted the critics. How could anyone argue with three in a row?

  Even Joe himself could not quite keep up—the changes in his life all happened so fast. Or maybe it was the one big change. In New York, his life was like center field—anything he could reach was HIS! . . .

  In his rookie year, Joe used to write home to his friend, Ciccio LaRocca, about this girl he’d fallen in love with. She was gorgeous, blond, a movie actress—Madeleine Carroll. And of course, Joe had never met her, never been anywhere near her. He was like ten thousand other guys in other towns—hayseeds, clerks, and gas-pump jockeys, dreaming in dark theaters—just a boy with a screen crush.

  Now, after twenty-four months (some three hundred games as a Yankee) Joe had found another movie actress—blond, beautiful, only twenty-one—with riveting gray-blue eyes, and a girlish smile that made the camera love her. But this one he knew—she was as real as rain . . . and she wanted him.

  IT WAS AMBITION that took Dorothy Arnoldine Olson from Duluth, Minnesota, first into vaudeville around her home state, and then to Chicago, New York, and (who could tell?) maybe a big break. Perhaps she didn’t have the overwhelming talent that would make her name (the name she chose, Dorothy Arnold) a prayer upon a million lips . . . but she was always in demand as a model; she could sin
g and dance, she was sure she could act. She had the all-American idea that she could do anything she set her mind to. That’s why she thought she could make a life with Joe.

  There was a candid can-do air about Dorothy from the time she was a little girl. She was always ready to entertain for her schoolmates, their parents—for anyone who asked. And from that first day, when she sang and danced at a party for the neighbors, and they passed the hat, and she came home running with her big grin and that money in her hand, and she was so amazed, delighted . . . well, there was candor to her ambition, too. She wanted to be a star.

  Her father was a railroad man; the Olsons were all working people. Even so, the way Dorothy went to work on this show business gave her parents pause. She was enrolled in Mrs. Geraldine Butler’s School of Dance, where she met another Dorothy—Dorothy Tetsman—and the two girls made up a peppy stage act: “Dot and Dot (With a Little Bit of Dash).” Mrs. Butler wanted to take them around to dance their buck-and-wing at hotels and clubs, parties and smokers. That seemed a bit racy to Dorothy’s mom. “You’ll never get to heaven on a dancing floor,” Mrs. Olson used to say. “But you’ll dance to the devil’s door.”

  There was another moment’s pause, when vaudeville scouts from Chicago saw Dorothy’s act in Duluth, and asked her to join the Bandbox Review. She was only sixteen, still in school. But she begged, cried, cajoled for the chance. She’d make up the school, or take the tests early. The teachers just had to let her graduate!

  Her determination won out at every turn; she was that sort of take-charge girl. Once at a club in Duluth—she was performing in a New Year’s Eve show—the straps on her bodice broke. Dorothy didn’t even pause, but danced and sang through the act, clutching her breasts, and got the heck off stage. In Chicago, and on tour with the Bandbox Review, it was three shows a day, six days a week, and sometimes buses or trains all night. But the grind never wore her down. She just wanted something more.