Joe played a few games, then left the tour early, to fly home alone. Even the Japanese fans—the way he figured—were cheering only for what he had been. (At that point, he couldn’t know: that screaming Tokyo crowd was a harbinger of his future, too.)
When he got to the West Coast, he made his arrangements to meet the Yankee owners, Webb and Topping. He’d tell them his decision and announce it in New York. He flew east in early December, and Topping was ready with his last-ditch offers. Joe could have his hundred grand. He could play when he wanted—fill in, pinch-hit. If he didn’t want to travel, he could play only home games. Joe answered: “I’m never putting on that monkey suit again.” . . . The Yankees scheduled a press conference the following day, at the club’s midtown office.
Of course, the papers knew what was up. A few doubters—Daniel in the lead—pointed out that Joe was barely thirty-seven. He could easily play another year or two. True, he’d hit only .263 last year—but his career figure was still .325 . . . and he was still, in Daniel’s phrase, “the equal of any center fielder in the league.” But the writers closer to Joe knew, “equal” was only an insult. They limbered up, with elegiac columns on the Jolter’s history, his impact, grace, and style. The chief topic was “class”—that ineffable quality they’d chewed over so many nights at Shor’s. Class, they concluded, made DiMag the greatest in the game; class would make him leave it, while the memory of him was bright. Cannon stepped out in front of the choir: “If you saw him play, you’ll never forget him.”
The story was too big for one press conference. So many writers, radio men with microphones, television cameras, and newsreel crews packed into the club’s Fifth Avenue suite that it took four rooms to stage the Clipper’s final bow. His writer pals had typed out his statement, and the Yanks’ PR man, Red Patterson, handed out carbon copies for the pencil press. In another room, Joe read aloud for the radio and camera crews:
“I told you fellows last spring I thought this would be my last year. I only wish I could have had a better year, but even if I had hit .350, this would have been the last year for me.
“You all know I have had more than my share of physical injuries and setbacks during my career. In recent years these have been much too frequent to laugh off. When baseball is no longer fun, it’s no longer a game.
“And so, I’ve played my last game of ball.”
Joe thanked the Yankees, the game, and its fans. He answered questions from the writers for an hour. He posed for pictures till the newsreel spotlights blew a fuse and plunged the Yankees’ suite into darkness. When the lights went back on, DiMaggio was gone.
“SO HE TURNED his back on the $100,000 and abruptly walked away,” Arthur Daley wrote for the next day’s column, Sports of the Times. “Only a man with character and an overwhelming pride could take a step like that. The Yankee Clipper has always been a proud man. That’s why he was such a great ballplayer. He was never satisfied with anything less than perfection.”
Those were the other big topics of the day: perfection, pride—and money. From within the game, it was mostly money. Frank Crosetti, now a Yankee coach, said DiMaggio had pushed the salary standard higher all over the major leagues. Now that he was gone, every player would suffer . . . . Gene Woodling, the young Yankee outfielder, was already making little enough—he got by on his annual World Series shares. “Please, Joe, come back next year,” Woodling pleaded in print. “I need more money to buy shoes for my three kids.” . . . Frank Lane, GM of the White Sox, said DiMaggio’s retirement would cost his club some five thousand fans—twenty-five thousand dollars—for every game the Yankees played in Chicago. That meant every team in the league would lose, perhaps, a quarter-million dollars. (For some clubs that was the whole team payroll.)
But for fans, the story was Joe’s own money. How could a guy turn his back on a hundred grand?
Actually, DiMag and Topping already had an agreement. The club would pay Joe his hundred G’s to move into the broadcast booth, to do the interview show after every Yankee game on TV. The announcement of that deal (one day after Joe’s retirement) would diminish the mourning in New York—and put paid (with a satisfying flourish) to all the talk about Joe’s money.
Withal, the real story was never announced. And the few men who knew it were not much for talk. (In fact, the man who knew best, Frank Costello, was already in the federal slam for failure to talk when Kefauver came calling. Now, the feds were threatening to strip his citizenship, and throw him out of the country. Costello still wouldn’t talk.) . . . So, nobody ever wrote about the money in that Bowery Bank trust account—money Joe would have in his hands, when he retired from the game. And even in the mob, there were few men who knew how that money had grown. But a handful of i grandi in East Harlem, a couple in the East Bronx, at least one in Brooklyn, weren’t at all shocked when Joe hung up his spikes. (Nor would they be surprised, one year later, when Joe would dump that stupid broadcast job.) They knew he didn’t need the money—never would. As they said around their own kitchen tables, Joe DiMaggio didn’t walk away from a hundred grand. He was walking into more than a million in cash—all safe and sound, at the Bowery.
With that sort of money, you could have a nice quiet life—just what Joe always said he was after . . . . And he did leave town, soon after his announcement—headed home, as he said, “for some peace and quiet.”
But he didn’t stay around his old San Francisco haunts. No one could find him at Reno Barsocchini’s. Nor at the Grotto. Nor at home. He flew two or three times to L.A. The official story was “business meetings”—that, and Joe Jr. was down there in school. But it soon got around among his San Francisco pals, Joe had some girlfriend down there. Still, no one knew much . . . till one day that spring—as Dario Lodigiani remembered.
Dario had played golf in a charity tournament at the Merced Country Club. After that, all the guys went out to a bar. Dominic DiMaggio was partners in that bar. And Reno Barsocchini was serving drinks—just to help out. “Hey, Dario!” Barsocchini called out. “Go down that hall and turn left, the first door you come to. There’s a guy down there who wants to see you.”
“So I walked down there,” Lodigiani remembered, “and I turned left, walked in. And there in a chair, there was Joe DiMaggio! And there, on his lap . . .
“I said, ‘GOOD NIGHT!’ . . . Talk about a beautiful gal! . . . And of course, that was Marilyn Monroe.”
BOOK III
FAME
* * *
1952–1962
MARILYN SHOWS OFF HER ARM—INTRODUCED BY RALPH EDWARDS, AT L.A.’S WRIGLEY FIELD.
“KISS ’ER, JOE!” . . . SAN FRANCISCO CITY HALL, JANUARY 14, 1954.
CHAPTER 14
YOU COULD SAY THEY MET FOR THE SAKE OF HER fame—it was one of her press agents who set up Marilyn’s “blind date” with Joe. And fame was so tied up in this love story—her fame, and his, and theirs, such a mess of fame—it was both a joy and the sorrow, from the start.
Even those words, “blind date,” didn’t really make sense, in that spring of 1952. By that time, only the truly blind—a man with a white cane, officially sightless—would not have seen a picture of Marilyn Monroe. She had appeared in five films (and would make five more that year). At twenty-five, she was Hollywood’s hottest young honeypot—subject of a full-page feature in Collier’s (with cover shoots for Look and Life in the works), and she was already lighting up the nation’s magazine racks as cover girl for Photoplay (“Temptations of a Bachelor Girl”).
In fact, a few million American men had seen her picture (seen her whole) before they ever knew her name—almost before she had that name. In 1949, when she was still unfamous, out of work, and poor (two studios had signed her and dumped her already), she’d posed nude for fifty bucks. And although those calendar photos weren’t pinned on her for three years, she was the number one pinup girl in gas stations from coast to coast, and for American troops around the world.
It was precisely her photographs (these were the
“clean” sort, studio sanctioned) that drew Joe in that spring. The publicity mill at Twentieth Century Fox had “borrowed” the Philadelphia A’s handsome young slugger, Gus Zernial, to make some photos with their rising star. Marilyn showed up at the A’s spring camp, and took “her stance” in a halter top, very short shorts, and very high heels. Zernial was told to wrap his arms around her, and show her how to hold the bat. It was a winsome photo—made all the L.A. papers . . . and pissed Joe off, right away. “How come that fuckin’ busher gets to meet a beautiful girl like that?”
DiMaggio was in town for a charity game—a team of retired California stars against the A’s—and that’s when Joe asked Zernial about her. Gus gave him the name of the “business manager,” David March. Joe had a pal call March, right away, and the “date” was set up for two days thence.
For propriety’s sake, it was a double date: March and another actress were going to tag along. It was set up for dinner—seven P.M., at the Villa Nova, a dark Dago joint on the Sunset Strip. March and his date were there on time. Joe came by cab, fifteen minutes later. Then, another hour expired in uncomfortable near silence, and still, Miss Monroe didn’t show.
March had to excuse himself—he called her at home. She was vague about whether she was coming, at all. She hadn’t been keen about meeting a sports star. “I don’t like men in loud clothes, with checked suits, and big muscles, and pink ties. I get nervous.” But March told her, Joe wasn’t like that. And this dinner was all set up—for her own good.
She was two hours late, when she floated in. DiMaggio stood as she got to the table. He was so different than the man she’d imagined, it shook her up. As she recalled for the writer Ben Hecht, when he was attempting to compile her memoirs:
“I found myself staring at a reserved gentleman in a gray suit, with a gray tie and a sprinkle of gray in his hair. There were a few blue polka dots on his tie. If I hadn’t been told he was some sort of ball player, I would have guessed he was either a steel magnate or a congressman.
“He said ‘I’m glad to meet you,’ and then fell silent for the whole rest of the evening . . . . I addressed only one remark to him. ‘There’s a blue polka dot exactly in the middle of your tie knot,’ I said. ‘Did it take you long to fix it like that?’
“Mr. DiMaggio shook his head. I could see right away he was not a man to waste words. Acting mysterious and far away while in company was my own sort of specialty. I didn’t see how it was going to work on somebody who was busy being mysterious and far away himself.”
She was seated next to DiMaggio, but had no idea what else to say to him. (As she later recalled, she’d never seen a baseball game.) So she chatted to March about the picture she was shooting by day, Monkey Business. In fact, all the talk was about the movie business—and all excluded Joe—until Mickey Rooney spotted the Great DiMaggio across the dining room, and pulled up a chair at the table.
Rooney was an ardent fan, and started asking Joe about his famous feats. What about that huge home run off Sal Maglie? . . . What about the comeback in Boston, in ’49? . . . What about that day you broke the record—remember, in The Streak?—when your bat got stolen? . . .
Marilyn was still a bit vague on who DiMaggio was. (Baseball? Or football? . . .) But Rooney, she knew, was somebody big. In fact, he had been Hollywood’s number one box office draw, before the war, when she was the miserable little foster-child, Norma Jeane Baker. In those days, her guardian, Grace Goddard (the woman who came closest to a parent in her life), had stowed her every afternoon in some darkened cinema palace, and fed her relentlessly on the fantasy that someday she—Norma Jeane—would be a great screen star, too. The decade since had mostly been a narrow, all-excluding quest to make that fantasy into fact. Marilyn was painfully aware that all her life had been around Hollywood, about Hollywood—and nothing else. That’s why she’d signed up for a literature course at UCLA—and why she was always broke: if she had cash, she’d spend it on “great books.” Now that the dream of her girlhood was coming true—or starting to come true—the wider world she’d never known was her new hunger. And as the great star, Mickey Rooney—and for that matter, her friend, David March—turned their eager attention upon this dignified stranger from that wider world, it came clear to Marilyn that this was somebody big, too.
As Marilyn remembered for Ben Hecht: “The other men talked and threw their personalities around. Mr. DiMaggio just sat there. Yet somehow he was the most exciting man at the table. The excitement was in his eyes. They are sharp and alert.
“Then I became aware of something odd. The men at the table weren’t showing off for me or telling their stories for my attention. It was Mr. DiMaggio they were wooing. This was a novelty. No woman has ever put me so much in the shade before.
“But as far as I was concerned, Mr. DiMaggio was all novelty. In Hollywood, the more important a man is the more he talks. The better he is at his job, the more he brags. By these Hollywood standards of male greatness my dinner companion was a nobody. Yet I have never seen any man in Hollywood who got so much respect and attention at a dinner table. Sitting next to Mr. DiMaggio was like sitting next to a peacock with its tail spread—that’s how noticeable you were.”
Near eleven P.M., she rose and said she had an early call. DiMaggio stood, as well. By her account, she startled herself by offering him a ride home. But they didn’t go to his hotel . . .
“ ‘I don’t feel like turning in,’ he said. ‘Would you mind driving around a little while?’
“My heart jumped, and I felt full of happiness. But all I did was nod and mysteriously answer, ‘It’s a lovely night for a drive.’
“We rode around for three hours. After the first hour I began to find out things about Joe DiMaggio. He was a baseball player and had belonged to the Yankee Ball Club of the American League in New York. And he always worried when he went out with a girl. He didn’t mind going out once with her. It was the second time he didn’t like. As for the third time, that very seldom happened. He had a loyal friend named Georgie Solotaire who ran interference for him and pried the girl loose.
“ ‘Is Mr. Solotaire with you?’ I asked.
“He said he was.
“ ‘I’ll try not to make him too much trouble when he starts prying me loose,’ I said.
“ ‘I don’t think I’ll have use for Mr. Solotaire’s services on this trip,’ he replied.
“After that we didn’t talk for another half hour, but I didn’t mind. I had an instinct that compliments from Mr. DiMaggio were going to be few and far between, so I was content to just sit in silence and enjoy the one he had just paid me.”
Joe told her that he’d seen her photos in the paper. That’s why he’d wanted to meet her. She said she couldn’t understand why. He must have met so many more famous people. Joe thought for a moment, and said—well, he’d met Ethyl Barrymore, and Douglas MacArthur. Then, he added shyly: “But you’re prettier than them.”
That’s what fetched her into the boat. Joe never did get home that night.
And it never occurred to him to ask why she’d wanted to meet him—why did she agree to that dinner date? . . . He had, at that moment, no way to know how she was making up her life on the fly, and why, suddenly, he fit into her fictions. Joe didn’t know how she’d talked it over with her friend and advisor, the gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky—who would reveal to the world Joe and Marilyn’s liaison in the column he’d write the following day. It was Skolsky who’d told her how DiMaggio was so hugely admired, how his name—a really Big Name!—bespoke for the public dignity and class. It was Skolsky who told her Joe was a hero . . . just what she needed for her problem, now.
The problem was, the news was out that Marilyn Monroe was the naked girl on those scandalous calendars. In 1952, nice girls didn’t pose nude. When a UPI reporter, Aline Mosby, alerted the brass at Twentieth Century Fox, the boss, Darryl Zanuck, hit the roof. Zanuck was a buck-toothed and bumptious tyrant who demanded obedience, and enforced it with rage. He want
ed Marilyn to deny that was her—deny everything! It was Skolsky who advised her to tell the truth, and tell it exclusively to Mosby (who had written, some months before, a syrupy account of Marilyn’s childhood—the “little orphan girl” who’d made it big).
So despite Zanuck’s threats (Her career would be ruined! He would exercise the morals clause in her contract—and cut her loose!) . . . Marilyn went to lunch with Mosby, and took her to the ladies’ room of the restaurant, to offer her tearful tale: she’d been broke, scared, and hungry—otherwise she never would have done it. But that fifty dollars was the only way to pay the rent! . . .)
Mosby’s scoop would hit the papers that March 13—the day that Marilyn signed on for dinner with Joe. The way Skolsky (and Miss Monroe) had it figured, if the most admired hero in the country thought her a nice, decent girl, worthy of his company (in public—and in hyper-public print) . . . well, what more did anybody need to know?
As it turned out, Marilyn’s dangerous “scandal” would become an enormous public relations triumph—one of the building blocks of her legend. And, at the cost of his own lifelong heartache, so would Joe.
STILL, THAT COULDN’T explain why she went out with him the next night, and the next, and the next . . . in fact they were together every night he was in town—which was just about every night, till he had to go east, that April, to take up his job in the Yankee Stadium broadcast booth.
He was so different from all the chattery men who buzzed around her in Hollywood. He was a fascination. It wasn’t that he didn’t have anything to say—just that he didn’t have to say it. Like he already knew everything that they were always talking about. Even about her.
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Touchstone Book) Page 40
