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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  THE DAY AFTER the earthquake, Henry Bracco drove Joe to Ben Langella’s bank. Henry lived north of the city, in Marin—the trip to Millbrae, in the south, was a trek. But Bracco was one of those guys who’d do anything for DiMaggio. He was a pharmacist and got Joe his pills: vitamins, arthritis stuff, heart pills, plenty—expensive ones, too—though Joe never paid a dime. Bracco used to drive Joe anywhere he needed to go, then stay in the car, have a nap—content just to wait for the Clipper.

  DiMaggio wanted Langella to find a contractor—right now—get him over to the house. “It’s gotta be a guy we can trust,” Joe said. But Ben knew that: dealings with DiMaggio were, by nature, confidential.

  Ben got a builder named Wally Baldwin—convinced him to get on the case right away. Wally was a rising commercial builder. Houses weren’t really his business. (And his commercial clients were all calling in—they wanted their buildings checked out for quake damage, cracks, or cosmetics.) . . . “But we gotta take care of Joe first,” Ben said. Baldwin said he’d look at Joe’s house, that day.

  But lunch came first—for the Clipper, anyway. Anytime Joe came to Ben’s bank, Ben would take him next door to the deli—Leonardo’s. When Continental Savings built Ben’s branch in Millbrae, they created a strip mall around the bank. Lenny Baranti’s deli was a tenant. He’d make Joe a nice fresh sandwich—maybe turkey, with a touch of olive oil. Joe didn’t want anything fat, like salami—and no garlic: it made your breath smell. Joe didn’t want to smell like a Dago. (He was punctilious about that, as he was about his hair—no hair oil. He’d tell you, even if you didn’t ask: nothing but water on his hair. Of course, now he was also using a special shampoo that made his hair whiter. But that was a secret.) . . . Anyway, Joe’s taste in food had grown simpler with age. What hadn’t changed was his method of payment: Baranti’s walls were studded with signed pics of the Jolter—to enhance the glory of Leonardo’s Deli. Even so, after a few hundred lunches, Lenny had protested to Ben—they never paid a nickel! So that day, Ben had to pay for Joe and Henry Bracco.

  They got to the Marina in the early afternoon—Bracco drove, Ben had the back seat. Joe sat shotgun, as he always did—so he got to run the heater. Joe liked his cars warm. They were nice and toasty by the time Bracco parked, as near as he could, and prepared for a nap. Joe and Ben Langella walked in toward Beach Street. Marie was at the house. She had a yellow card from the Fire Department that permitted residents to visit their houses for an hour—in case there was medicine, or some other crucial thing to pick up. The unlucky residents got red cards: meant their houses weren’t safe even to visit. Green cards allowed full access—they were hard to get. Joe flashed his green card.

  Joe sat Ben in the front room, across from the giant oil of the 1950s DiMaggio in the double-breasted suit. There was a striking opulence to that portrait—it wasn’t just the size of the canvas. There was something about the half-smile on Joe’s face and the look in his eye—a look at nothing in particular, nothing to give rise to that smile . . . so the look of pleasure was for Joe, in himself. And there was the suit, so richly built up at the shoulder, so generous about Joe’s slender midriff. It was more than a 1950s fullness, it was regal, that ratio of raiment to man—like the fabulous garments borne by dead Sun Kings in the (similarly sized) portraits at Versailles. But there was nothing else palatial in the place—just the old stuff. And the old king couldn’t sit still to regard the painting. He was pacing, full of projects for the house.

  “This place hasn’t been fixed up in a long time. We gotta get everything fixed up. We’ll get these carpets cleaned . . .” There was wall-to-wall in the front room, the old sculpted wool, original to ’37—that carpet wore like iron. “And we get this all painted . . .”

  Joe walked past the little table with the phone for the house. There was the Pac-Tel bill—he checked that over. “Eighteen dollars! Marie! What are we spending money on?”

  “It’s all yours,” Marie said instantly. She knew all his moods—knew that bill would cause an eruption. “I only make local calls.”

  The Clipper scowled, and set the bill down. He had to check downstairs. He hadn’t had time, day before, to inspect all his stuff there. “Come on,” he said to Ben.

  There wasn’t any car in Joe’s garage. There wasn’t room. He parked on the street. For a while, he’d kept the Cadillac in there—the free Cadillac. That was classic Joe, too. He knew this guy named Cappy Harada—Japanese guy, kind of an operator—used to be an executive with the Yomiuri Giants in Japan. Later, Cappy was hustling in the U.S.A., on his own, promoting this and that. So, one time, Cappy got a contract for some ratty town in California—Santa Maria, or Margaret—Santa Something . . . they were going to have their sesquicentennial, and Cappy wanted Joe to show up. Big deal. Joe didn’t even know where the town was. But Cappy was on him like a cheap hooker, and finally, Joe said okay. So he did go, he did hang around, and even talked for a minute after the big dinner. That was that. But two days later, into the bank, here came Cappy.

  “Where’s Joe? . . .” Joe was in his armchair, half-asleep. “Joe!” said Cappy. “Hold out your hand!” Cappy dropped a set of keys into Joe’s palm.

  “What is it?” Joe said.

  “It’s your brand-new Cadillac! I got it parked for you, right outside.”

  Joe looked from the keys to Cappy without sitting up, without a smile, without moving his head an extra inch. Joe said: “Did you fill it up with gas?”

  So, Joe kept the Cadillac for a while, but then it was his tank to fill, so he gave it to his granddaughter—actually, her husband. As Joe liked to say in those days, everything was for the grandkids. Anyway, the car was taking up his garage. Joe needed the room.

  Now, the garage was lined with golf bags—neat, against the walls—must have been fifty golf bags. They were all new, each with a new set of clubs inside. A lot of famous tournaments, like the Dinah Shore, always gave the celebs a new set of clubs (and a bag, shirt, and shoes) automatically—with the tournament name—as a memento. Joe liked those. One time, Dinah herself called up to invite him—and Joe said, sure, he’d come. But he was going to bring a friend—so he’d need two sets of stuff, and all . . . and the friend was exactly the same size as him. When it wasn’t automatic, Joe didn’t like that. He didn’t like to ask. He played for something like fifteen years straight in the American Airlines tourney, and every time, he’d have to tell the girl in the office that his bag was in Florida, or his sister screwed up, and it never got shipped—so he’d need some clubs, and shoes . . . but that was over, now. They stopped inviting him. Crandall, the airline president, got pissed off because if Joe didn’t win and wasn’t going to get a check he wouldn’t even stay for the big Sunday dinner.

  So Joe had his bags all lined up, with the shoes on shelves above, and on the floor, in front of the golf bags, he had the shirts—hundreds of shirts!—still in plastic bags. They had things like “Buick Open” or “Pebble Beach” embroidered on the chest where the pocket would have been. But you couldn’t see what was what anymore. They were dusty before the quake—but now, Jesus! It was a quarter-inch of grime over everything.

  And Joe was in a state—who was going to clean all this shit up? (He was going to pay someone to clean up dust?) . . . And then he saw the window. It wasn’t in the garage, but behind, in a small room that led to the backyard patch of grass. There was a door back there—the old wooden kind, with six panes of glass. And the firemen had broken a pane, so they could reach in and open the lock, to check the house. There was glass on the floor.

  “Cocksucker firemen! Lookit what they did here!”

  Joe was stomping around the back room, looking at the glass like it was shards of Ming vase. And cursing the firemen up and down, back and forth . . .

  “SONOFABITCH ASSHOLES . . .”

  Langella was picking up shirts, blowing dust off. He came to look. He couldn’t get upset. “It’s okay, Joe.”

  “OKAY MY ASS . . .” Joe was inspecting a cliff-wall of
baseballs, brand-new baseballs, American Leaguers, in boxes of a dozen. People sent Joe balls—sometimes he forgot to sign. Plus, any time he went to a locker room, they’d load up his car. Joe had at least a hundred dozen new balls in his stack.

  “LOOKIT! I knew it! Those cocksuckers stole a half a dozen balls!”

  “You can’t tell, Joe. How can you tell?”

  “I CAN TELL, GODDAMMIT! THEY STOLE HALF A DOZEN FUCKING BALLS!”

  Silent, Ben went back to the shirts. He knew Joe would subside. Ben blew dust for a couple of minutes, then held up a Buick Open shirt. “Hey, Joe! This one’s my size. Can I have it?”

  Joe didn’t yell. He was tired, hunched over. He tilted his head on his bent neck, but he couldn’t really see the shirt . . .

  “Put it back,” he said. “I’ll get you another one.”

  LOOKING BACK, LANGELLA never did get the shirt. But it didn’t matter—Ben was soon gone from Joe’s life. They were all gone, sooner or later, the way Joe figured. Everybody he was close to, gone—and he was still here.

  One day, a couple of years before the earthquake, DiMaggio got picked up at the airport by Bob Wuerth. Bob was the PR guy at Bay Meadows back then—and part of the Clipper’s network. Whenever Joe was in San Francisco, Wuerth would drive into town in the morning to pick Joe up and bring him to the track. He’d drive Joe on off days, too—to appointments, lunch, to the club for a steam. After a day at the track, Wuerth would bring the Clipper home with him, to watch TV and share a bag of pretzels. Anyway, they were driving in from the airport, and Wuerth asked Joe what he planned to do in San Francisco. “I don’t know,” Joe said. “All my friends are dead.” Joe didn’t see Wuerth’s face—looked like he could’ve cried. He thought he was Joe’s friend. But that didn’t matter anymore, either. Now Wuerth was dead, too.

  Joe didn’t go to his funeral—didn’t like that sort of thing. What was all the talk about? Guy was dead. (Now his friends would pester Joe all day.) Same way with Reno Barsocchini, and Lefty O’Doul. Of course, Joe wasn’t real pals with them when they died. He’d figured out, years before: they were only inviting him to their bars so people would talk about their joints. That wasn’t his job, to make them big names. Wasn’t his job to sit in funerals, either. Same with Lefty Gomez—when El Goofo kicked the bucket up in Rodeo. Joe was afraid the family would ask him to be a pallbearer—that was no good for Joe’s back. So he got somebody to drive him up the day before the funeral. He signed the book and got the hell out. Joe said he had to go to New York, next day. But he didn’t.

  A lot of fellows who were still around were out of Joe’s life just as wholly, and finally, as if they’d been planted six feet under. Somewhere along the line Joe had decided, they weren’t true pals, or they’d done something wrong . . . and he walked away. And when Joe walked away, that was it, you were gone. You could try to call, you wanted to explain—he’d hang up. Or you could wait: he’d think it over, he was bound to call, right? What about all those years of friendship? . . . But it didn’t pay to hold your breath. Joe wouldn’t call.

  See, the way Joe looked at it, you were in it for your own reasons. Even if you just loved the guy, the man was your hero . . . well, then, that was your reason. You might’ve gotten along for years that way—did everything for Joe, put your life on call for Joe—and then one day, maybe you decided you had to get back some money you’d laid out—not a profit, just expenses. Whack! You were gone . . . . Or say you got a call from another friend—all he wanted in the world was to meet Joe DiMaggio. And you said, “Sure, come on over. He’s coming here today.” And DiMaggio walked in and saw someone extra there. So, he was gone, for good . . . . Or maybe you did something really stupid, and talked to a writer—you said you knew Joe. You should have said you used to know, because he’d never know you again. Writers were the worst—but it was the same logic. Joe looked at a writer, interviewer, biographer (they were all the same), and thought: Why should this guy make a buck off my life?

  As a matter of fact, it was the same for everyone—family was not excepted. Now, Joe and Dom were the only two brothers left. But they didn’t talk. Why? Who knew why, with that family. They were DiMaggios. Neither one would say. But the silence went on for years. Dom didn’t even like to show up at baseball dinners, or All-Star Games—places where Joe was going to be. Joe would figure that Dom was trying to steal his spotlight—and that would set the Big Guy off, for sure. Money might have caused the trouble, at the start. Dom ended up with the building where DiMaggio’s Grotto used to be—he made a fortune with that. (Dom made a fortune with everything, which always pissed Joe off.) Or sometimes, the brothers would fight about the sisters. There weren’t so many of them left, either. When one of the older ones, Mamie, got too sick to care for herself, Joe was sitting in San Francisco, and he didn’t lift a finger. So Dominic had to fly across the country, to put her into a nursing home. Dom wasn’t happy about that episode. And neither was Joe. Because Dom flying all that way to take care of Mamie—that shamed Joe. And shame was what he hated worst.

  In the end, it was shame that finished Joe and his son. Shame and money—a deadly combination with DiMag. Joe Jr. never did stop drifting, or drinking. One night—late 1960s (he was out of the Marines)—Joey was hanging around Miami Beach, and wandered onto a houseboat from which a nighttime radio show was being broadcast. It was a popular show—made a big name for the host, a guy named Larry King—who, of course, put Joe Jr. on the air, straightaway. As King told the story in his memoir, years later, he was shocked when Junior started to speak about growing up a DiMaggio:

  “ ‘I never knew my father,’ he said. ‘My parents were divorced when I was little, and I was sent away to private school, and my father was totally missing from my childhood. When they needed a picture of father and son, I’d get picked up in a limo and have my picture taken. We were on the cover of the first issue of Sport magazine when it came out in 1949, my father and I, me wearing a little number 5 jersey. I was driven to the photo session, we had the picture taken, and I was driven back. My father and I didn’t say two words.

  “ ‘I cursed the name Joe DiMaggio, Jr. At Yale, I played football—I deliberately avoided baseball—but when I ran out on the field and they announced my name, you could hear the crowd murmur . . . . When I decided to leave college and join the Marines, I called my father to tell him. You call your father when you make that sort of decision. So I told him, and he said, “The Marines are a good thing.” And there was nothing more for us to say to each other.’

  “DiMaggio, Jr. said that the closest he’d ever been to his father was in the car on the way to Marilyn Monroe’s funeral. He said his father had always gone on loving Monroe, and that he loved her too . . . .”

  Of course, Big Joe was furious after Junior told the world all that crap. What right did the kid have to talk about him that way?

  As Joe saw it, whatever he gave, Junior pissed away. In 1970, Joe put the kid in a business making polyurethane foam. But the other guys who’d put money in yanked the rug—and forced both DiMaggios out. Joe always said Junior lost that business. Joe bought the kid a long-haul truck—a beauty, Peterbilt, seventy-five grand. Junior wrecked it (and screwed up his trucker’s license, too). Big Joe told Ben Langella to give the boy a job. So Ben brought Joey into his bank, and asked him, what did he want to do? “Nothin’,” Junior said. “I want to be a bum.” By that time—the 1980s—Joey was doing drugs, on top of the drink. And he didn’t want a damn thing from his dad. Back east, in New Jersey, Big Joe had a meeting with a man named Bob Boffa—friend of a friend, you could say—Boffa was very big with the Teamsters. And Big Joe asked Boffa to get the kid a job, in a quiet way—which Boffa did, as a favor to the hero. He got Joey signed on to drive a cement truck in Las Vegas. But it didn’t last. Anyway, Junior had no place to stay in Vegas. So, while his dad was signing autographs for fifty G’s a day, Junior was sleeping in an empty cement-mixer drum . . . and telling his friends—if his father called, they were to say t
hey didn’t know where Joey was.

  Looking back, there was one chance, one time the kid might have turned it all around. Joe Jr. was in his late twenties when he met a woman named Sue—a single mom with two toddler daughters, Paula and Kathie—and Sue fell in love with Joey. They got married. And Junior adopted the two girls. He moved them all to California, to a town across the Bay from San Francisco. Junior was a head of household. He was working (making foam). He was pleased with himself. He took Sue with him to meet Big Joe at the American Airlines Golf Tournament—it was in Scottsdale, Arizona, that year, and a lavish affair, as always. Joey made one mistake right away: he came downstairs the first morning in a pair of jeans. Big Joe sent him right back to his room to get dressed properly. That night, Joe Jr. and Sue joined Big Joe, along with Frank Scott and his wife, Betty, for dinner in the resort dining room. Joey wore his best suit and tie. And Sue looked lovely. But she was tapping the table in time to the music. “Step outside,” Big Joe said to Junior. “I want to talk to you.” Joey came back and told his wife: “Come on. We’ve got to get out of here.” She looked up. “Where?” Junior said: “Come on. We’re going back to San Francisco.” Betty Scott ran after them, and stopped Joe Jr. in the hallway. “Why you goin’, honey?”

  “My father said he doesn’t want anything to do with her.”

  And after that, Joe wouldn’t have anything to do with her. In fact, he did all he could to make sure the marriage didn’t work. Not that Joey needed help—he didn’t do well as a husband. By the mid-1970s his marriage was history. But it did provide Big Joe a chance to send the boy one last message. Because long after the marriage was gone, Big Joe decided that Sue’s daughters, Paula and Kathie, were his granddaughters . . . and they would be his heirs. So the Clipper’s fortune would never go to his son—who, after all, had not lived up to the standard.