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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  A four-and-a-half-carat emerald-cut diamond: it was a small price to pay—no, not a price, but a pleasure—for the honor that Joe brought to Richie in Newark. You could almost see Boiardo swell with pride when DiMag came around. Richie never liked to have his picture made—especially at the Castle, which was not supposed to be his, and where he was not supposed to hang around too prominently. But just let DiMaggio grace a chair with the back of his suit pants . . . and there was Richie, sitting next to him, smiling for the camera. Those photos were never meant to go public. No one outside had to know a thing. Richie’s people knew.

  And the way Richie treated Joe, it just confirmed for everybody who saw, the worth, the stature, of these two giants: Joltin’ Joe and Richie the Boot. Nothing was too good. Whatever Joe wanted, Richie wanted to have offered it yesterday. More often, it was something Richie thought of without Joe asking one word. That car Joe got at the dinner (sure, Richie helped with that)—he was gonna need someone to drive him, wasn’t he? So how ’bout Peanuts?

  Peanuts was Jimmy Ceres, who was always around Richie’s place, always available for jobs. Driving—sure; personal security; help in a thousand ways: that was Peanuts. Soon, he was always with Joe around Newark, or driving him back and forth from New York. Peanuts would drive Joe’s Cadillac to Florida, so the Clipper could have a car to carry him around in spring training.

  Of course, what with Peanuts driving, Joe had less time for the Spatolas. As a matter of fact, Jerry Spatola tried to take Joe aside and explain to him that maybe Peanuts Ceres and Richie the Boot (and, for that matter, Mr. Abe Zwillman) did not exactly constitute the kind of crowd Joe should hang around with. Peanuts, as they used to say in the Spatola household, never had a job he paid taxes on. And Richie, well, the Spatolas weren’t feeling too friendly about the Boot, either, because Boiardo had decided to help out the mortuary industry. (What a shame if something lamentable should happen to that nice hearse!) . . . Richie had invented “The Car Owners Protective Association.” He was leaning on Spatola to join up and pay his dues.

  But it didn’t matter what Jerry said. Joe would pick his own friends. If they were friends he couldn’t talk about, that was no hardship. When Joe was ready to announce his engagement, the big celebration was held in Newark—hosted at the Castle by Richie the Boot.

  Jerry Spatola would have to wait till that autumn, after the season, to recoup his status as Newark’s Number One DiMaggio Fan. He would wait till November, when he and Rose would ride the train three and a half days out to San Francisco to attend Joe and Dorothy’s wedding and reception—and then, that same night, they would board another train to ride three and a half days back to Newark . . . holding in their laps, paper-clipped in a tent of waxed paper, a piece of Joe and Dorothy’s wedding cake.

  As for Richie the Boot, unhappily the press of business kept him from attending the wedding. Longy Zwillman, too, was occupied and could not attend. But in time, Longy would also become a good friend to DiMaggio. And Longy being Longy, he’d find a way for Joe to be a friend to him, too.

  A GIRL FROM DULUTH didn’t head for New York, thence to Hollywood, to run away from the limelight. Dorothy didn’t mind the fans in the restaurants, photographers outside the nightclubs—she’d never learned to hate the fuss like Joe did. For one thing, she’d never had a chance to get fed up with it. (They’d gone together for two years, but seldom in the same city.) What they’d had together was a lot of dates . . . and all the adulation, the public commotion—that was part of the fun.

  She’d wanted her life to be like that for so long—seemed to her forever—and now it was happening. The first time she announced their engagement, the studio called up the very next day, and gave her the lead in that horror serial, The Phantom Creeps. And then, when Joe finally set a date, there was her picture in all the papers, everybody coming up to say hello, to meet her, congratulate her, get to know her . . . everybody was wonderful. Days before the wedding, in San Francisco, Dorothy came out of a downtown shop, her sister and mom alongside, and people applauded. How could she know that from the wedding day onward, Joe would expect her to run away from the attention she craved?

  For that matter, how could Joe know that this lovely young starlet who was so helpful to him in social situations—she was always friendly and outgoing—could embarrass him at home by being so brassy? Dorothy did everything that could be expected: took her instruction in the Catholic faith, made her conversion, and vowed solemnly to bring up their children in the One True Church. She even set herself to learning Italian, so she could have a proper conversation with her new mamma and papa. But the more she did, the more Joe wished she would just . . . pipe down. Not till he saw her in the murmur-zone of the DiMaggio household did it dawn on him that she was loud. (Christ, she laughed like a man!)

  In November, a week before the wedding date, the DiMaggios sent out eight hundred invitations. They could have saved the postage. Everybody in North Beach was coming, anyway. The grand Cathedral of the West, the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, could hold two thousand faithful. But Sunday afternoon, November 19, 1939, the church was nearly full before the first invitee appeared. People had staked out the pews that morning. They’d sat through two or three Masses already. The wedding was scheduled for two P.M.; by one, there was standing room only.

  Parking? Forget it. Traffic was snarled for ten blocks around. The street in front was packed with people like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. There was scaffolding on the front of the cathedral—where sculptures and decoration were still incomplete (fifteen years after the church was opened)—and now the boys of the neighborhood swung from the beams, whooping and calling to the earthbound, below. As the hour approached, there were thousands who couldn’t push onto the street at the base of the church steps, so they spilled out behind, into the park. Inside the cathedral, the side chapels were all full, the choir loft had been taken over; the standees had pushed all the way to the front, past the communion rail, and were threatening to overrun the altar. Kids were perched on confessional roofs—like boys who climbed trees near the ballpark to watch the game. Save for vendors, this was a stadium crowd: happy, noisy, ungovernable. “Remember that you are in the house of the Lord,” Father F. Parolin scolded from the altar. “I beseech you, be calm, be still, be quiet. I ask you in His name to be silent!” The padre might as well have dummied up himself.

  One North Beach signora collapsed trying to squeeze through the front door. Happily, this was the first wedding in San Francisco history to have a city ambulance on standby—a gesture from the health commissioner, who was a guest. Even so, a flying wedge of policemen had to use nightsticks to beat a path through the crowd for the fallen matron’s stretcher. The inside ushers were plainclothes cops, too, a gesture from the police commish, who was another guest—as was the sheriff. And at 1:55, the last shards of solemnity were shattered for good when sirens blared for several minutes as motorcycle cops forced a passage to the door for the Honorable Paesano, Mayor Angelo Rossi . . . newly reelected to another term, with the endorsemenet of San Francisco’s greatest prominento: “Mayor Rossi has been batting nearly 1.000 in the toughest league in the country—the old government circuit,” said the statement from Joe DiMaggio. “Let me tell you now that I am for the Mayor until his last inning is played!”

  DiMag, the political heavyweight, was already in the church, waiting with his best man and elder brother Tom. The newest property of the Boston Red Sox, little Dominic, had also come to church early, with the family, all suited up for duty. As usual, Vince had to shift for himself, and got trapped outside, where the cops wouldn’t let him through; he had to bull his way in through a side door. Still, two o’clock came and went in the noisy church, and there was no bride. The Olsons were in a car, pinned at a standstill by traffic.

  “When the bride comes in,” Father Parolin tried again, “don’t jump on your seats, don’t talk, don’t get excited. Remember you are in God’s house.” Still there was a cheer, low, throaty, and ex
pectant, like the ballpark crowd when the home team takes the field . . . as the big doors at the rear of the church swung open—a half-hour late, Dorothy’s car had arrived.

  And there she was, behind Joe’s four sisters—Nellie, Frances, Marie, and Mamie—and then her own sister, Irene, who was the maid of honor . . . there, in a Hollywood gown of white satin, with a sculptured bodice and a five-yard train . . . behind a coronet veil of gauzy lace, tied with filigree of gold . . . bearing orchids and gardenias in her hands, and a spray of orange blossom on her forehead . . . twenty-one years old, on the arm of her father, and as she would recall, “scared stiff” . . . but looking up, smiling bravely and, as one Duluth newsman noted, “so utterly beautiful that it just hurt to look at her.”

  No wonder North Beach cheered. Their guy, their Joe, had gone from this altar to the wide world, and now he’d come back a conqueror, a hero. One look at this American girl, with her golden skin, golden hair, trumpeted his triumph—just as clear as if a parade of chariots filled with treasure had rolled up Columbus Ave.

  Now, Father Parolin’s Latin gave way to orotund accented English: “My dear friends, you are about to enter a union . . .” It was noted that Dorothy’s bouquet trembled. A tear was descried on Mother DiMaggio’s cheek. Somewhere in the back of the church, a girl’s voice broke into hysterical giggles. Joe DiMaggio remained stone-faced. Father Parolin was speaking: “Joe Paul DiMaggio? . . .”

  “I do.”

  It took the DiMaggios ten minutes to get out the church door, twenty minutes more amid the police wedge to get across the sidewalk, while yellow spotlights glared, flash powder splashed lurid blue-white over all, movie cameras whirred, and people clung and shoved, tried to grab Joe’s hand, tried to touch Mrs. Joe’s gown, and roared a thousand times, “AUGURI . . . CENT’ANNI . . . BRAVU GIUSEPP’.”

  The wedding couple had to stop at the photographers, in the approved North Beach manner. But for the rest, it was down the hill to Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto, where the family was laying on a buffet, open bar, orchestra, Italian tenor—a spread like those neighborhood folk had never seen. As Ciccio LaRocca, one of Joe’s groomsmen, remembered: “They had ice—the first time I ever saw something like that—I was in awe, you know? I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—ball players sculptured in ice!—and you could see them getting smaller and smaller as the night goes. They just melted away, you know? It was beautiful.”

  Joe wouldn’t hang around for the melting—not in that crowd. He got to the restaurant, right away he wanted the cake cut. So the orchestra played, they wheeled out a cake three feet high—and Dorothy cut it. Cut her finger, too. Joe was upset. He wanted to get going, take off for the honeymoon.

  He was cagey about that: wouldn’t tell where they were headed. “Down south, toward Hollywood first, I guess,” Joe said when reporters quizzed him. “Then maybe to Mexico. And maybe across the country to Miami . . . and maybe New York.” Mostly he just wanted to go. What with the hoopla over cutting the cake, and the music and drinks and the mountain of food, very few people saw them slip away. But Ciccio was there to help.

  “She drove,” Ciccio remembered, “Joe’s blue Dodge, the ’38. He was in the back.

  “No, not the back seat—way in the back, where they had the rumble seat. He didn’t want to talk to her. I don’t know why. But he was mad. They weren’t talkin’.”

  NUMBER ONE ON THE HIT PARADE, 1941.

  JOE, JOE, JOE . . . WILL YOU SIGN MY BOOK?

  GRIFFITH STADIUM, 1941.

  CHAPTER 9

  ONE OF THE BOYS ON THE SCAFFOLDING IN FRONT OF the church was Dino Restelli. He was ten years younger than Joe and lived in Valparaiso Alley, just around the corner from Joe’s old Taylor Street home. He had the same rangy frame, same build as DiMaggio. He played center field at the Horses’ Lot (and later for the Seals and the Pittsburgh Pirates). He tried to run like DiMaggio, and catch the ball like DiMaggio. He stood at the plate like DiMaggio. Of course, everybody on his team stood at the plate like DiMaggio. Every kid with a dime for the movies saw Joe in the newsreels. They’d be acting out his slide that same afternoon. After that, it was a short dream to where they were him, in the brilliant World Series they’d win that night as they fell asleep.

  And it wasn’t just San Francisco, or major-leaguers-to-be. Three thousand miles across the country in East Harlem, Salvatore “Sonny” Grosso would grow up to be a New York cop (one of the hardboiled heroes who’d take down the French Connection drug ring). Still, the pole star in his boyhood sky was DiMaggio. When Salvatore played ball he had to be Number 5; football, he was Number 55. That was since he could remember, since that first day his father took him across the Harlem River to the Bronx, to Yankee Stadium. Papa Grosso had box seats, but he sold them off so he could buy bleacher tickets. He and Sonny would be close to Joe D.

  The connection to DiMaggio was more than a rooting interest. It had little to do with the Yanks, and went beyond hometown loyalty. In St. Louis (in the interstice between Medwick and Musial) the hero was DiMaggio. On Dago Hill, half the boys stepping up to the playground plate had their hands jammed down on the bat knob, feet spread wide, deadpan stare, as they tried to hold their bats still with DiMaggionic menace. One of those boys, a promising catcher named Joe Garagiola, remembered DiMag as a figure of such godly goodness, “it wouldn’t have surprised me if I’d gone to church and they had him in the Litany. They’d have said: ‘Joe DiMaggio,’ and we’d have said, ‘Pray for us!’ ”

  For older paesani, DiMaggio transcended baseball: his virtue was success, and vice versa. On a cash-poor farm upstate in Garrison, New York, just across the Hudson from gray West Point, Frank the Mason (so he was known by the locals) used to punctuate his laboring days with the periodic comment, to no one in particular: “Joe DiMajj he getsa fifty tousan’ dahll’ for t’row da ball.” An organization of Italo-Canadians sent word to Yankee Stadium that they were changing the name of their club to Davedi, so it could bear one precious syllable from each of history’s three greatest Italians: Dante . . . Verdi . . . DiMaggio.

  For kids (especially kids at Ground Zero, New York City), DiMaggio-love hit with such heat that it could blister away even tribal distinctions. Saturday afternoon in East Harlem, at the Fox Star Theater, 107th and Lexington, a shout of joy would greet DiMaggio when he showed up on the Movietone News, and hysterical applause echoed from the theater walls, while he ran the bases after his home run, or gunned down a runner from center field. It didn’t matter that 1940 was an off year for the Yanks. (They would finish behind both Detroit and Cleveland.) It mattered not at all that the Fox Star was uneasy neutral turf between Italians and Puerto Ricans. The shouts for DiMaggio came from all sides. The Puerto Ricans didn’t have a lot of models of their own. And Joe, he looked right, he had that “o” at the end of his name. He was Latin. He was their guy, too.

  Those were the days when the newsreel cameramen were working out their own tricks. (Just because a newsreel was news—kinda—that didn’t mean it wasn’t also showbiz.) They’d get to the Stadium early, get close-ups of DiMaggio, and maybe the pitcher, maybe one or two other big names. And then, when DiMag did something in the game, they’d cut to the close-up, like the camera had caught him just at that decisive moment. That also meant DiMaggio was much more likely to be the hero. Once they had the close-up of his face, they might as well make his hit (or his steal, catch, throw . . .) the turning point of their story. The other effect was that Joe’s cool persona was reinforced with every close-up. As far as the newsreel viewers could figure, they saw Joe’s face just at the instant he was going to take that pitcher deep, or he was just heaving that ball home . . . and he looked as calm, matter-of-fact as if he was waitin’ for the M-1 bus.

  The point was, they were always going to sell Joe—because Joe sold. Of course they were going to show his face. That was the face that had graced the cover of Life magazine, one face on the ballfield that everybody knew. That’s the same reason Joe was on the cover of the Baseball
Register. It wasn’t just that he had a big year, he was MVP, or a World Series winner. It was that face, that persona—that picture was the story. They could have run the portrait and left off the name of the magazine. That face said Baseball.

  Radio built its audience with hero power, too—and with its constant repetitive flow, it cut deeper in the streambed of consciousness. That day in ’39 when Arch McDonald thought of that new Pan American airplane, with its unequaled power, range, and style, and linked it to the center fielder: “Batting clean-up, Joe DiMaggio—the Yankee Clipper . . .” that was just one of a dozen nicknames with which Joe had been festooned. There was Dead Pan, the Wallopin’ Wop, the Roamin’ Roman, the Little Bambino, Dago, DiMag, Joe D., Big Giuseppe, and the most propitious, Joltin’ Joe, or the Jolter. But McDonald had the power to make a nickname stick: specifically, fifty thousand watts on WABC, where he broadcast the Yankees’ (and Giants’) home games.