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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  She wanted to be a movie star; and that brought her to the Paramount Acting School in New York. She made her way in the city with odd jobs of the show-biz sort: modeling assignments, advertising shoots; she was a staff singer on the radio for NBC and appeared in some Twentieth Century Fox short subjects. She was meeting so many people—young actors, comedians, writers, promoters; her enthusiasm drew them, her smile was contagious. She was particularly friendly with the publicists and columnists, and you might see Dorothy out for dinner with her pal Dorothy Kilgallen, or out at the Stork Club with Walter Winchell—though with Winchell (that hound—and twice her age) it couldn’t be just dinner.

  When she met Joe DiMaggio on the set of Manhattan Merry-Go-Round, Dorothy didn’t even have a speaking part. But she was a young woman on the rise. It wasn’t long before an agent named Mort Millman arranged a screen test in Hollywood for her, and she was signed by Universal Pictures as their Oomph Girl. (You know, like Ann Sheridan was Paramount’s Oomph Girl? . . .) But then, things got serious with Joe, too—and Dorothy had to decide where to put her oomph.

  It never was an easy courtship, not with Dorothy trying to work in Hollywood and Joe in New York. Or if Dorothy came back to New York, Joe might be on the road with the team. They’d told each other that things would get easier after the season. But after the season, things never slowed down. Joe would go home to San Francisco, and then back and forth to L.A. Or Joe would have to go back east for an award, or some appearance that was worth money to him. There was always some reason to go. What was he supposed to do, sit around in Hollywood?

  For a while, Joe wasn’t sure if a steady girl wouldn’t just be trouble, the sort that didn’t go with a baseball life. Even Lefty Gomez and June O’Dea—Joe and Dorothy’s double-date pals—couldn’t seem to make it work. June was suing for divorce. She said Lefty went for an off-season visit to California, and he never came back. He shacked up with some actress out there, wouldn’t even answer June’s letters. Then Lefty was in the papers contending that June was frigid. She charged that he was a violent drunk, and hit her. Lefty said that June’s mom hit him—with a chair! . . . Of course, this was fodder for the sporting press all through the winter, and most of the ’38 season. For Joe, it was exemplary: exactly what he didn’t want—but his hesitancy only drew Dorothy on.

  It was darling how Joe was so bashful—so many people in her world would just paw a girl before they said hello. Joe didn’t even try to sleep with her at first. When he did try, that was even better. (She said they were always wonderful in bed.) Dorothy had never played baseball, but she loved sports (she’d been a champion swimmer), and dove into the New York sporting scene—all the boxers and promoters, bootleggers-turned-bookie, wiseguy fixers, oddsmakers, umpires, ticket-brokers, writers, dandy little jockeys, and stout millionaire owners. When Joe’s loud friend, Toots Shor, opened his new restaurant, just west of Fifth Avenue on 51st, the whole sporting world tried to squeeze into one room. Two rooms, actually: the front was all one big circular bar with men standing three and four deep at the rail, shouting and drinking and laughing. Behind the bar was the big, bright dining room where Joe and Dorothy would sit. Of course, when she walked in with Joe, she was royalty—always the special table in the corner, and everyone would come to pay respects, say hello, tell a story. The only sad part was, Joe preferred to go alone. He was old-fashioned that way: boxing matches, some saloons, most discussions with men—Joe thought they just weren’t right for a girl.

  That was one of the ways they differed (or, as Dorothy liked to say, they complemented each other). She was the small-town girl, three years younger and newer to the city, but more open to anything modern, experimental, or odd. “Intelligent people,” she used to say, “don’t moralize.” Dorothy valued intelligence. She was a reader, always working on a book. For Joe, it was still the sports page (and the clandestine Superman comics). She was the life of any party, a social All-Star. DiMaggio looked at any new acquaintance as a potential misery, or worse still, a mortification. (What if he said something wrong?)

  That’s how Dorothy knew she could help Joe. People thought Joe was aloof, too high and mighty to speak to them. But she thought he was just terribly shy—if he thought he might look bad—he had to look perfect. And if he didn’t know how, he just had to leave. So many times, she felt sorry for him, that year, when they started dating in earnest, and Joe was being booed all over the league. People actually wrote that Joe didn’t care. Dorothy knew he couldn’t stop caring. He had to be that perfect player they wrote about before.

  That’s why she arranged for her friend Dorothy Kilgallen to do an interview with Joe. That would show his human side. In a syndicated article, Miss Kilgallen led with the news that DiMaggio had “wonderful brown eyes,” and followed up with description of his widow’s peak (like Robert Taylor’s), “and quizzical eyebrows, to say nothing of eyelashes a yard long.”

  “Goodness,” she exclaimed, “he’s divine!

  “Maybe there is something in this baseball at that. Of course, I have a lot to learn but with a little help from Joe, say a couple of hours a day—I think I could catch on to some of the fancier plays.

  “I had lesson one today, but I’m afraid I’ll have to go all over it again because I became rather confused—I might even say flustered—at the part where Joe was helping me hold the baseball.

  “ ‘This,’ he said, looking meltingly at the ball, ‘is what we call the stitched potato, or the apricot, whichever you like.’

  “ ‘I like you,’ I said dreamily . . . .”

  The surprising part was, Joe took right away to that lover-boy image. Of course, he laughed and shrugged it off with his fellow players. But he didn’t do a thing to discourage that rep. If people saw him around town with that beautiful young actress, and talked him up as some debonair lady-killer . . . well, that was okay with Joe. It went with his determined attention to his new suits—he’d go back to the tailor a dozen times, till everything was perfect—that put him on the list of the Ten Best Dressed. It offered a harmless explanation for the way he would kill a couple of hours after games—standing in front of the locker room mirrors, working on the knot of his tie, or the part of his hair. (Look out! Dago’s got a hot date tonight!)

  It was better than harmless, actually, because the reputation brought its own fulfillment. Once the idea took hold that Joe D. was quite a hand with the ladies, well, what do you know? Ladies started showing up—presenting themselves. (They’d read in Walter Winchell’s column: Joe knew how to show a girl a good time.) The best part was, Joe began to believe it himself—or at least to consider that people really might want to spend time with him, that he wasn’t just the dumb Dago slugger . . . . But isn’t that the way with love? Joe could see himself better when he saw himself through Dorothy’s eyes.

  The way she looked at him, he was terrific. And if there was room for improvement (say, with the way he spoke or wouldn’t speak), that was just the proof that she was needed. Years later, people would ask why she had given up on movies for Joe. But the way Dorothy saw it, she wasn’t giving up a career—just taking on a new one. The way she saw it, Joe simply hadn’t had the benefit of schooling. But there were books to teach him all the words he needed. And for the rest, she could show him how to mingle socially, how to act at ease. It all went back to something Joe said that first day, on the set of Manhattan Merry-Go-Round. “The toughest part about this whole business of acting,” he said, “is being nonchalant. That’s a pretty tough thing to be.”

  But Dorothy knew how—she seemed perfectly at ease. No one from Joe’s world ever remembered Dorothy displaying a moment’s anxiety—except a couple of Italian girls in Newark, daughters of one of Joe’s friends, who walked in on Dorothy after dinner, in the ladies’ room. There was the golden girl starlet bent over the bowl, with her finger down her own throat, throwing up her dinner. Dorothy did it all the time. No one in those days knew the word “bulimia,” or thought about that sort of thing as sickness. D
orothy would have laughed at that—a girl had to keep her figure.

  BY HAPPENSTANCE, Newark was a big part of their social life. Somehow, that soot-stained New Jersey town offered the relaxation that DiMaggio never could find across the river in towering Manhattan, nine miles away. In New York, Joe was under the eye of public and press, prey to Gotham social lions who thought he ought to know them, visiting dignitaries who wanted to meet him, people who wanted to do him favors, people who acted like they’d done him favors, friends of the new friends he could barely keep straight—and more on the way, always more coming at him . . . . Newark was quiet, smaller, more manageable in every way. For Joe, it was like going back to North Beach. Everybody knew everybody, everyone knew who was who—especially in the First Ward, the Italian quartiere, where Joe was treated like a visiting Pope. (Well, not exactly like the Holy Father: Newark was small but it yielded to no town in the worldliness of its delights.)

  No one could remember how Joe came to Newark for the first time. Some people said he had cousins in Jersey, but no one ever produced the cousins. He might have come for official Yankees business. The Pinstripes kept their number one farm team in Newark—the Bears, of the Triple A International League. Or Joe might have come with another Yankee player. In those days people came across the river to take in a certain show, to hear some music, or especially to eat at the Italian restaurants on Eighth Avenue, the heart of the First Ward.

  But everyone agreed: when Joe first caught on in town, that was the doing of Jerry Spatola. That was one of Jerry’s talents, spotting brilliance—as he’d done, for instance, with Abbott and Costello. They were just a couple of local comics—used to do their routine on the corner, standing in front of the trolley—nobody paid them any attention. But Jerry thought they were a knockout, a scream. And everybody with a radio knew the rest of that story. So Gerardo was well known for spotting the best of the best, and for him, the sun didn’t rise until DiMaggio woke up.

  You could almost call Spatola himself brilliant—though that’s a word seldom heard about a mortician. But the way Jerry looked at it, he was only in that business by accident. His grandfather had gone to City Hall one day for a dog license. But the old man didden talka too gooda de English—so he walked out with a livery license, a permit to operate a horse and cart. Well, in those days, there were two ways into the funeral business: either you were a carpenter and had coffins to sell, or you had a livery license and could carry the dead out of town to their graves. Enough said. The Spatolas became the morticians of choice for the First Ward. Even so, their mortuary business didn’t come to full flower until the passage of the next generation—with Jerry, so to speak, undertaking affairs.

  It wasn’t just that Jerry was professional, though he was—he’d gone to school for embalming and everything. The key was, this younger Spatola understood that a great burial involves being buried by somebody. That’s where Jerry was a standout—he looked like a million bucks. He had those suits, made for him by his tailor on Fifth Avenue. (Not Newark’s Fifth Avenue, the one in New York.) Plus, he had the latest in hearse equipment, with side-loading liftgates that could lower a coffin like a mother puts a baby to sleep. One of Jerry’s hearses had a Victrola, so you could have Caruso singing Ave Maria right there in the graveyard, which raised the Spatola name to a new level of modern mortuary excellence—despite the one time Jerry got the neighborhood boys to clean up the cars, and the next dear-departed went into the ground to the tune of “A Tisket, A Tasket (A Green and Yellow Basket).” Even that was notable, which was more or less Jerry’s goal.

  Everything he did raised the family name in Newark, and the glory of the town itself. It was a Spatola (Jerry’s granddad) who ordered from Italy the splendid statue of San Gerardo for St. Lucy’s Church on Sheffield Street. Now, Jerry would continue the tradition, by bringing Joe DiMaggio to Newark for a slap-up dinner at Vesuvius on Eighth Avenue—to which dinner Spatola would invite other prominenti, and for which dinner, of course, Spatola would pay. Jerry was a great one for grabbing checks. He might not be paying his coffin suppliers, but it would be dishonor if so great a paesano as DiMaggio was to pay for even one spaghetto. And that was, of course, a comfort to Joe—still smarting from his holdout and the pay he’d been docked while he got in shape.

  The other great comfort was that Joe didn’t have to say a word. People used to marvel how Jerry Spatola could talk with anyone. But there was this simple explanation: Jerry talked—whoever else was around, that was an accident. So Joe (or these days, Joe and Dorothy) could enjoy dinner among the prominenti and listen to Jerry’s tales of his trade and town. Who’d have thought an undertaker had so many stories? There was the time the shoemaker, Russomanno, came to him to make a funeral for his pet canary. Poor grieving cobbler wanted the works—a tiny satin-lined casket, a procession, flower cars—an orchestra! Problem was, Russomanno wanted a church funeral. But the priest balked. How’s he gonna give a bird the sacraments? . . . So Jerry fishes up a C-note, tucks it into the Padre’s cassock. “Oh,” says the priest, “why didn’t you tell me this was a Catholic canary?”

  DiMaggio was a Spatola family project. Jerry would pick Joe up after games at the Stadium, and drive him to Newark. Sometimes there’d be a visit to one of the Italian social clubs, or the Victory Bocce Club; everyone wanted to honor DiMaggio. Sometimes it was a big festive dinner at Vittorio’s Castle—top-of-the-line in Newark, a place with turrets, painted murals, statuary (profusely cascading grapes)—and then off to a show or a club, or Jerry’s home, where his wife, Rose, would serve peaches and cream. The Spatola kids would show Joe their scrapbooks with all the clippings about him. (Above a funeral home, you’ve got to have quiet hobbies.) And when Joe got tired, or full, or bored, he’d jerk his head and Jerry would make for the car to take Joe back to New York. One time they planned to go out to a club after dinner, but Joe spilled wine on his shirt. So they went back to Jerry’s, where Joe put on one of Jerry’s shirts (Joe had five inches of wrist past the cuff) and Rose set to washing out the stain. They understood—Joe had to look perfect. The more perfect he looked, the better for them.

  After a while, DiMaggio was a First Ward project—almost an ornament to the city as a whole. Jerry organized Joe’s visit to the Crippled Children’s Home, and then there was a testimonial dinner—had to be the biggest night of ’39. Gehrig, McCarthy, Bill Dickey all came; along with the ex-champ Jimmy Braddock; the comic Jimmy Durante, screen star Jack LaRue; Miss Dorothy Arnold of Hollywood, seated with Mrs. Rose Spatola (Joe and Jerry, of course, were at the head table), along with a thousand honored local guests who so admired DiMaggio that they gave him a diamond-encrusted watch—five hundred dollars’ worth of timepiece—and a new car.

  For Joe this was a watershed. He’d just, warily, come to accept that people of attainment might want to be with him. Now he had to learn to accept their tributes—and to speak about it. At the Newark testimonial, Joe would have to stand and deliver—more than just “thank you.” He obsessed about that for weeks. Dorothy was consulted, dismissed, and reconsulted. Sportswriters were enlisted as ghostwriters and then ignored. In the end, Joe spoke for about two minutes. As the Newark Ledger reported:

  “Betraying his usual nervousness behind a stiff shirt, DiMaggio was brief in his thanks, and expressed the wish that the friendships he has made in Newark and Essex County will always be among his most valued.”

  Under inspection, it was a peculiar sentiment: DiMaggio hoping that he would not someday kiss these people off. But it went over fine, and when Joe concluded his remarks—“And I thank you”—he was cheered as if he’d just smacked a grand slam. When he sat down he had attained, in one evening, emoluments equivalent to a year’s work for his dad. From the adoration of these Jersey faithful, he had recouped for two minutes’ talk just about as much as he’d lost in his holdout. Clearly, there was money to be made without even lacing on a pair of spikes: people would pay him just to be Joe DiMaggio. If he had to learn to accept—well, he was le
arning. It started with that big testimonial in Newark. And it would continue at other dinners—at Vittorio’s Castle, with Richie the Boot.

  THE WAY JOE FIGURED, he earned everything he got that year. Before the start of the ’39 season, the Yankees once again showed DiMaggio the back of their hand and sent him a contract without a raise—as if they meant to insist he still wasn’t worth more than twenty-five thousand. But this time there would be no histrionics. For one thing, Jacob Ruppert took sick and quickly died. For both the Yankees and their center field star, it would have been unseemly to scrap about money over the Colonel’s grave. For his part, DiMaggio was determined to sign early, to give himself (for once) a real spring training, and a full season to prove he was the greatest in the game. Alas, he only made it through the first six games before he was hurt again: his calf muscles torn away from the bone near his ankle. DiMaggio would be laid up for more than a month.

  Much worse for the Yanks, the spring training jokes about Gehrig’s old muscles turned to horror as the season began, and Gehrig couldn’t answer the bell. He couldn’t get the bat on the ball, and when he did he hit weak grounders. He couldn’t make the plays at first, couldn’t turn, catch, throw hard—and couldn’t hide those ugly facts, certainly not from himself. Gehrig had played in every Yankee game since 1925. But by early May 1939, the proud captain had twenty-eight at bats, and only four hits. In Detroit, after two thousand one hundred and thirty straight games—a record, it was said, that would stand forever—Gehrig went to Joe McCarthy and took himself out of the lineup.

  The Yankees had now lost the heart of their attack, lost Gehrig, their captain, and DiMaggio, their star. Another team might have folded, or at least bided time. But the day Gehrig sat down, the Yankees beat the Tigers 22–2. The Yanks then won twenty-eight of thirty-two games.