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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  Georgie was always looking to pump the excitement about DiMaggio. Didn’t matter that Joe D. was the most famous man in the country (short, maybe, of FDR). Georgie was convinced that people didn’t really know how great DiMag was. Toots was the same way—except he made Solotaire look subtle. Toots always argued that DiMaggio could be the biggest in history—bigger than Dempsey, bigger than Ruth. The only thing that held Dago back was he ran off to San Francisco every winter. Now, with the baby, Joe was finally going to stay around town. So Toots showed him off, made it a program. Once Dorothy was up and around, Toots bought dinner every night for a month—every night, a different joint: Joe and Dorothy, Toots and his wife, a former dancer whom everybody called Baby (save for Toots—he called her Husky). Toots was the advance man, squaring things with the owner or maître d’. “Joe DiMaggio’s comin’ in here, but he don’t want a lot of fuss made about it.” Of course, with Toots assigned to keep things quiet, they might as well have hired a brass band. Did you hear? DiMaggio’s coming in tonight! . . .

  Joe said he made the rounds for Dorothy—she liked to get out. But Dorothy told her friends she wasn’t having much fun—Toots was so loud. And she was tired of all that crum bum stuff. Still, when she’d go out alone, or with a girlfriend, no one pointed, whispered, said a word—and that was worse. In later years, when people talked about Joe and Dorothy, they would say he was jealous about her career. But that was true the other way around, too. It infuriated her, the way Joe was such a big deal, and he never lifted a finger for it. And unless she was with him, she was . . . well, nowheresville. One time, she was out with her friend, Lillian Millman, the wife of her theatrical agent, and they stopped for lunch, and the maître d’ put them at an undistinguished table in the back. Dorothy complained to Lillian: “Don’t they know I’m Mrs. Joe DiMaggio?”

  It was a bitter pill when she found out his glory was not transferable. It was so male—and solitary, too. That was one reason the Clipper caught the hero breeze in his sails: Joe walked up to that plate alone, faced the opposing team alone. A hero doesn’t appear in the midst of an army. No, it has to be one knight with only his magic sword (against the fire-breathing dragon); one cowboy with his six-shooter (against a legion of bad guys on some dusty cowtown street); one fighter pilot (low on fuel!) against a squadron of Messerschmitts in the skies over England . . . or one man with a bat. Single combat matched Joe’s style to a T.

  And the way he saw it, sometimes Dorothy just got in the way—or talked too much, or flirted too much—or was just too goddamn present. So he went out alone. If she got on him about that, he could walk away for days. He could always find a hotel room. He’d come home if he had to—for a magazine story on the baby, or an interview (she’d do the talking), or photographers, anything like that. He would never embarrass her.

  “Little Joe . . . is now a sturdy young gentleman of 15 pounds,” observed one Sunday magazine writer early in 1942. “The contentment which has been observed on his face is only the reflection of that which is to be seen on the faces of the elder DiMaggio and his wife, the former Dorothy Arnold. The two have made a big go of marriage. They have a luxurious penthouse in uptown Manhattan. Like their baby, they have a formula—only theirs is for happiness. The DiMaggios believe in home. They do not adhere to the widely prevalent Manhattan theory that home is merely a place to change one’s dress between night clubs. While it is to be true that their Samba and Rumba are possibly a bit rusty, it is equally true that their marriage is as shiny as new.”

  One night at Shor’s, in the spring of that year, the boys were all lifting their glasses to another champ, and another new dad—Eddie Arcaro, the brilliant jockey, had just become sire to a six-and-a-half-pound filly. “Come over to the house some night, Eddie,” DiMaggio said, by way of bonhomie, “and I’ll show you how to hold a baby.” All the fellows thought that was a grand and classy offer. Very few were close enough to hear Mrs. Joe, whose blue eyes held a cold glint of scorn, as she said under her breath: “Whose baby are you going to use for teaching?”

  THE WAR BEDEVILED DiMaggio even before the start of the ’42 season. Ed Barrow sent a contract without a raise—not even ten bucks. Joe had carried the Yanks to a championship; he’d been named the MVP, player of the year, sportsman of the year, named everything except God-incarnate. He’d put more people in the seats than Ruth did, when Ruth was making eighty large a year. DiMaggio filled the grandstands in St. Louis and Washington, where they hadn’t drawn a parkful for twenty years. What did a guy have to do for a raise?

  But Barrow said, “Doesn’t he know there’s a war on?” Why should DiMaggio get a raise on his salary—thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars—when so many young men had put on uniforms of olive drab for one one-hundredth the pay? Was DiMaggio so much better, so much more valuable, than those brave boys who’d give their lives to defend our shores?

  Of course that was a specious argument—immaterial, underhanded, insulting. It called into question DiMaggio’s patriotism, when Italian-Americans were in a ticklish spot. The fact was, DiMaggio knew plenty about the war. In the weeks after Pearl Harbor, he got word from his brother Tom that the restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf was dead—might as well lock the doors. Tourism was a thing of the past. Local people stayed away from the Wharf. (A Japanese attack was expected any day, now.) Even men who’d spent their lives at the Wharf were restricted—they couldn’t come near. The whole California coast was a military zone—off-limits for “alien Italians.” Most of the old papas (like Giuseppe DiMaggio) had never got U.S. citizenship—they couldn’t read or write. Now they were illegal anywhere within a half-mile of shore. There was a curfew every night, eight P.M. to six A.M. The “suspect aliens” couldn’t travel more than five miles from home. They weren’t even supposed to have radios. Hundreds of the immigranti were carted off to guarded camps in Montana. Some of the old North Beach families could no longer live in their homes. Fishermen couldn’t get to their boats. And old Giuseppe could no longer get to the family restaurant.

  For the past five years, that restaurant had been Giuseppe’s joy. He made it a point of honor to prepare his specialitá, the spicy fisherman’s stew, crab cioppino, for all the visiting baseball people. He’d give them big bowls, a towel for their hands, and urge them on—“Mangia, vai!”—no silverware required. But now, Giuseppe had nothing to do but sit around his house. Even when he was visited there by the baseball press, he could barely manage a smile. There had developed a tradition in San Francisco—a preseason pilgrimage to Papa Giuseppe, who would then predict how many “homa run” his boy Joe would hit that year. The old man wasn’t a bad savant. In ’37, for example, he’d invited jeers with his confident prediction: “forty-fi homa run.” But Joe finished that year with forty-six (and if the season had been one day shorter, Papa would have been on the nose). Alas, by spring of ’42, Giuseppe was too sad to play along.

  “ ‘Itsa no use,’ ” he was quoted in the Examiner. “ ‘I no can do.’

  “ . . . Best we could get out of him was the admission Joe might hit ‘one homa run’ this year. ‘One is gooda ’nuf,’ he said.

  “There was a note of resignation in his voice.

  “We took it to mean he just didn’t give a hoot.”

  There was a similar want of joy in another DiMaggio household, this one three thousand miles east, in a rented beach house in Florida. Joe had gone down early, he said, for a few weeks of “fishing and loafing.” Actually he meant to be on hand, to go to camp with the Yankees once he and Barrow had come to terms. The last time Joe was branded a holdout, it cost him almost a grand in docked pay just to get himself across the country. This time, Joe was going to be ready, if negotiations got nasty—and it looked like they would.

  A few big guns like Bob Considine—the national columnist for the Hearst chain (and, of course, a Toots Shor pal)—had weighed in on Joe’s behalf. Considine called DiMag “the $80,000 a year ball player who’ll probably sign for half that sum.” But when Barrow se
nt a contract for precisely half—an even forty G’s—Joe steadfastly refused to sign. Barrow’s comments about the war hadn’t wakened Joe’s spirit of cooperation.

  When the New York writers arrived for spring training, they tracked DiMaggio to the beach house. “There he sat playing cards while McCarthy burned,” wrote Dan Daniel. “Not even Bill Greene, World-Telegram cameraman found asylum in the DiMaggio homestead. ‘I will not pose for pictures or talk to anyone,’ Giuseppe insisted. ‘I have not signed my contract, so I do not belong to the Yankees, and you can’t make me pose for you,’ DiMaggio vehemed. The gentle knight of the lens was flabbergasted. ‘Maybe in a couple of days there will be something doing,’ DiMaggio added, as he returned to his gin rummy with the newly arrived Toots Shor, his No. 1 confidant.”

  Clearly, in wartime, the Secretary of State had to take a stand for the Baseball Nation. Joe, as Daniel said, was “a full-fledged hold out . . . .

  “It’s an old role for him, but somehow it doesn’t become him quite as well as it did before . . . . People just don’t like to hear a ballplayer grumbling over being asked to work for a paltry $37,500 a year when the base pay for privates is 21 clackers per month.”

  Barrow knew how to push a winning hand. Within days, he arrived in Florida, went to Joe’s house that same night, and signed his star for forty-two thousand. What else could Joe do? Three months after Pearl Harbor, he wasn’t risking just accusations of greed, but of cowardice, too. He was booed once before. This time, he’d be branded as a public enemy. So Joe smiled for pictures as he signed his contract. He professed himself “well satisfied.” He announced that he’d be putting five thousand dollars into war bonds right away. And he predicted that ’42 would be his best year ever.

  THAT WAS NOT to be. Joe started off in a slump, started worrying—and then things did get nasty. Even when he seemed to break out with a couple of homers against the A’s, there was an invidious tone on the sports page. Daniel, for example, wrote him up as “Joe ($42,000) DiMaggio,” and could not fail to mention Joe’s “emaciated” average, .213.

  Well into May, Joe was still struggling: convinced that he had to lead the club, but for some mystifying reason unable to achieve any consistent hitting. It seemed like his great streak had used up his luck. Or at least that was one cause the writers considered. Or maybe the Jolter was bothered by the uncertain times, the war news, or the draft . . . . But Joe was still classified 3-A—married, father of one—in no danger of imminent call-up. One way or another, the draft was hanging over every man on the club—and the rest of the fellows were doing fine. The Yanks were winning two out of every three games and running away with the pennant. The second baseman, Joe Gordon, was leading the league with the bat, hitting homers, driving runners in—having exactly the sort of year that everyone expected from DiMaggio.

  Of course, there were comparisons. As May turned to June, Daniel took stock of the strange Yankee season: “Past the quarter pole, eight lengths in front and breezing, the Yankees today had adapted themselves to a change in field leadership which might well endure through the season . . . . Going into the June campaign with Giuseppe hitting a lack-lustre .253, and their new bellwether Joe Gordon, who had batted successfully in 18 straight games.

  “In the Sunday double-header in Philadelphia . . . in eight trips to the plate, Joe achieved one single. In his eight efforts, Gordon hit his sixth home run, a double, two singles, raised his league-leading average to .380.”

  That didn’t do much for Dago’s mood either: DiMag was worse than teammates had ever seen him—mean as a snake. One sweltering day in New York, Joe hit four huge drives. But in the big Bronx ballpark, they all turned into outs. Joe came back to the dugout and launched a vicious kick at a bucket of ice on the concrete floor. McCarthy wheeled around on the bench: “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” And Joe started cursing out the Skipper . . . . McCarthy saw there was no margin in this fight. He said mildly: “I was just worried you might have hurt your foot, Joe.” But that was about the last thing he’d say to DiMaggio that year.

  Even Toots, who never had a bad word to say about Joe, conceded that Daig was “really tough to handle.” As he remembered for Maury Allen, in Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?: “Then if Joe would have two oh-for-four days in a row and the Yankees would lose both of them, look out . . . . He would really sulk. Like I say, he felt the whole team depended on him. He never showed it, but Joe worried a lot.”

  In the hardest times, Joe wouldn’t show up at Shor’s; he’d try to stay home. But he and Dorothy would start scrapping, then screaming, or someone would slam the door and walk out. She used to make her agent come get her in a cab; she’d stay the night on the Millmans’ couch. One night, she slammed out and took the elevator down to the lobby. And there was Joe, waiting for her. He’d run down the stairs—from the penthouse. (Dago could always cover ground.) . . . But now, with the baby, she couldn’t just leave. And Joe couldn’t go out—didn’t want to show his face. So both of them were cooped up, and things got ugly on West End Avenue.

  The Stadium crowds got ugly, too. DiMaggio was playing like a mutt—and the fans let him hear about it. They had no idea what was wrong with the Clipper . . . at least until June, when the papers reported cryptically that Mrs. Joe DiMaggio had returned home, and had no intention of divorcing her husband.

  As the story dribbled out, it came clear that Dorothy had been for some weeks in Reno, Nevada—“where,” as the Mirror helpfully noted, “women with grievances sometimes go to get divorces.”

  DiMaggio was on a road trip to Cleveland and Detroit—eight games, wherein he hit .172. He had not a word to say about his situation.

  Then, it was even more vaguely reported that “the management had taken a hand” to rescue Joe from “his depression.” Only later would Ed Barrow confirm on the record that he “had talked to Mrs. DiMaggio and persuaded her to come back home.”

  Now two plus two was starting to add up—to .257, which was Joe’s woeful average. There were even veiled hints in the press as to why Barrow had stepped in: if Joe got divorced, he’d lose his deferment; the precious center fielder might have to go to war.

  Well, then the fans climbed all over Joe’s case—and stayed on it. They booed him every time he stepped on the field. They wrote letters: Why didn’t he go back to Italy with the rest of the coward wops? Joe stopped reading his mail again. He tried to tough it out with the writers—he said, sure, he wasn’t hitting, he understood the fans. The writers understood, too, and piled on.

  “DiMaggio maintains they are entitled to boo if they aren’t satisfied,” wrote Whitney Martin, columnist for World Wide Sports. “Most citizens would be willing to let the fans stand outside their windows and boo all night if they were getting the $40,000 or so a year DiMaggio is supposed to be getting.

  “Getting $40,000 a year and hitting .257? B-o-o-o-o.”

  There were two All-Star contests that year, and DiMaggio was booed at both. One reason was, he was only there for reputation’s sake. He wasn’t having an All-Star year. But the other reason was, in the big hero game, Joe was now on the wrong side.

  The second game pitted the AL stars against an All-Star service team—major leaguers who were already wearing Uncle Sam’s uniforms. Chief Boatswain’s Mate Robert Feller took the mound against the AL—albeit without much success. The major leaguers beat the servicemen 5–0, and DiMaggio started Feller’s woes with a single to knock in the first AL run. Nevertheless, as The Sporting News remarked, the Clipper “had nearly been blown off the field by jeers every time the customers got a look at him.” After the game, Joe was “morose.” He was quoted in the locker room: “I can’t understand why the crowds should be on me. I do not know anything that I have done to deserve it.”

  Actually, it was what he hadn’t done. He hadn’t signed up for the armed forces, and the public patience was running out. Greenberg and Feller—big stars—they were in. Johnny Sturm was on that service All-Star team. Henrich had signed u
p. Dominic DiMaggio announced that he’d be going in, too . . . so what the hell was wrong with Joe?

  Dorothy was telling him every day (or every day they were talking) that he ought to be signed up, that the boos were never going to stop till he enlisted. Joe said she didn’t know a thing about it. If he got a few hits, there’d be nothing but cheers. Dorothy said that was the trouble with him, that’s all he thought about. (He had to broaden himself! . . .)

  Joe told his pals he couldn’t figure her out. First she complained nonstop any time he wanted to get out of the house, have a cup of coffee with Toots, whatever. She said he didn’t know how to be a husband, and left him—turned over his whole apple cart. Then, finally, he got her back, they were going to make a go at the marriage, he promised he’d stay at home . . . and then she wanted him to disappear for a year or two. They couldn’t see eye-to-eye on anything.

  One time that summer, they got an off day in New York, so Lefty and June planned an outing. Lefty would drive everybody out to Jones Beach, they’d spend the day, get some sun, have a picnic—it was gonna be great.

  So, came the day—June and Dorothy had a hamper packed, everybody had a swimsuit, sunhat for Little Joe, basket, towels, everything. As Lefty recalled, it was a beautiful day. Joe was hitting again, and everybody was happy. So they got to the beach, unloaded the car, spread out the blanket. The boys ran off for a dunk in the water, the girls were going to lay out the picnic. Then, Joe came back and saw Dorothy’s swimsuit—a two-piece beauty, bare midriff—it cost a small fortune, but it was quite the latest. “Put your blouse back on,” Joe said.