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

by Cramer, Richard Ben

  “Hey, wait a minute. They gotta know I’m here!”

  Same way at the autograph shows: Joe would complain and haggle for months before a show—he wanted his own room, with special ushers to keep the customers in line, so fans couldn’t crowd around, get behind his table and put their hands all over him while the wife or kid snapped their picture—Joe wasn’t going to be on display! But he would also schedule his three hours of signing well after the doors opened in the morning—say eleven A.M., or right after lunch—when the place was full. And even then, he’d be just a few minutes late—so people would be in line quite a while, and expectation would build . . . until that moment when the organizer would grab the PA microphone, and everything in the hall would stop, as the news blared from overhead: “Ladies and Gentlemen—now entering the building!—Baseball’s Greatest Living Player . . .” That was why the promoters paid Joe’s quarter-million. When the Clipper walked in, their show was an event.

  For example, there was a 1995 show called “Yankee Legends” at the Trump Taj Mahal, in Atlantic City. The promoters had a good lineup: Don Larsen, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, all at a table in the big hall . . . and in the special side room, Reggie Jackson and Mickey Mantle. Mantle sat next to a pretty blond woman, talking with the fans, signing anything they had for him, listening with his head cocked while they told him about the games they’d seen. Reggie Jackson came alone, in a tight golf shirt, spent his day talking at length about his games, posing for pictures, signing a few things with whatever words the fans requested. But when DiMaggio arrived in his dark blue suit and tie, flanked by Morris Engelberg and his associate, Jerry Cantor—both of them in matching dark blue suits—then the serious business had begun. Joe’s table looked like one side of the boardroom at a takeover meeting.

  Large notices proclaimed:

  Joe DiMaggio

  RULES AND REGULATIONS FOR AUTOGRAPHS

  Joe will not sign the following: Bats, jerseys, Perez-Steele cards, baseball cards, plates, multi-signature balls, original art, statues, lithos, gloves, albums, caps, cloth or wood items, flats over 16 × 20, books, items not related to baseball, photo or NL balls, equipment or personalizations. Joe has the right to refuse to sign any item that in his opinion fits into these categories.

  PLEASE DO NOT BRING UP ANY ITEMS THAT JOE WILL NOT SIGN.

  At the head of a long line, fans would present their articles to Cantor, who would accept or reject them. Rejected articles were handed back to the fan by an usher. Accepted articles were passed on to Morris, who would turn the piece into signing position and slide it under Joe’s hands. If it was a proper American League ball, that would disappear into Joe’s big left hand, with the ’36 World Series ring gleaming toward the customer, as Joe’s Sharpie pen rolled a perfect signature onto the sweet spot (with one dot above, and one below the last “i”—which was Joe’s mark to guard against forgeries). Then the ball would be rolled down the baize toward another usher who was returning signed articles to their owners, and moving fans away. Few words were spoken. Joe wore dark glasses. He looked up only in annoyance. At the end of his three hours, he stood amid the last fans who were trying to engage him. “Morris!” he barked. “You comin’? Let’s go!” They walked down an electric purple corridor of the Trump Taj Mahal, in the lurid glow of a neon sign directing gamblers to the “World Cash Center.”

  “Joe! . . . JOE! Wait a minute! . . .” This was from a man in a nylon jacket and a Yankees cap, steaming down the hall with a couple of large flats under his arm. His voice held echoes of New York, and desperation. “JOE! I PAID! WAITAMINUTE WILLYA?”

  DiMaggio turned and froze the man ten feet away. Joe’s face was a gray mask, his opaque shades a slash of purple reflection. He didn’t say a word, just stared the guy into a puddle of pleading. “Joe! I was in line. Two pictures! . . . Joe! I’m a collector!”

  DiMaggio walked away. The fan stood rooted in the hall like the Clipper had glued him there. “Joe . . . !” People were staring at the fan as they passed. DiMaggio was already turning into the elevator bank. “Thanks, Joe! Thanks a lot, you asshole!” DiMaggio and Morris were laughing as the elevator doors closed.

  EIGHTY YEARS OLD, and people were still desperate for him. And not just at shows. Joe would take along some guy to New York—say, an associate from Engelberg’s office—and the man would talk about it for the rest of his life. They walked into the Carnegie Deli—everybody stopped eating and stood up to applaud! The fame made it fun to hang out with Joe. You were in a special world—on the inside—and there was nothing like it.

  And stories—New York was the best for that—something had happened everywhere Joe went. If you asked him, of course, he wouldn’t talk. But if you just went along, sooner or later Joe would bring up some name, or some tale: “You know, this place has a kitchen door . . .”

  (Joe knew the back way in and out of everyplace.)

  “The night before a World Series game—it was my second or third year in New York—I was getting out through the kitchen door at three in the morning. And who do I run into? Walter Winchell. He said, ‘Joe! Don’t you have a game today?’ And I said, ‘I sure do, Walter. And I’m going to be just as keen as ever. If I’m not, you can write that you saw me here.’ ” . . . That day, DiMaggio got three hits—and Winchell never wrote a word.

  But it wasn’t just old stories: the amazing thing about DiMaggio was, it was all still happening. In 1996, when a new generation of Yankees brought the world championship back to New York, Steinbrenner asked Joe if he would ride in the lead car in the ticker tape parade up Broadway to City Hall. So there was the Clipper—eighty-one years old, bent in the back, shrunken now to maybe five foot ten—but handsome still, in his perfect suit that didn’t even roll at the collar when he lifted both his hands in his Pope wave to acknowledge the cheers of a million fans . . . in a storm of cascading paper . . . and riding next to New York’s governor, George Pataki, who was hanging on the Jolter’s every word, and laughing. Of course, those pictures were beamed around the world, too.

  “Hey, Joe,” one of his pals remarked, “it looked like you were having a good time riding around with Pataki.”

  “Good time!” said the Clipper. “Did you see all the crap they were throwing down? Big rolls of toilet paper. I told Pataki—‘Hey, they’re aiming at you, but they’re hittin’ me.’ ”

  It was like that speech from the film Field of Dreams (one of Joe’s favorites)—where James Earl Jones, in his godly voice, tells the hero, Ray Kinsella: “The one constant through all the years, Ray, is baseball . . . .

  “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again—but baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and could be again.”

  Except, in point of fact, baseball had been kind of up and down lately. The one constant through the last sixty years, Ray . . . was DiMaggio.

  That was something special about being with DiMag, too. The old DiMag, especially. Because nothing stopped him—not even time. In the army of steamrollers, he was in the lead car. And always would be. And while you were with him, it was possible to think all the rules could be cheated—age, frailty, and the flight of fame . . . to hell with death and taxes—he even faced them without a flinch.

  People used to cringe when Joe and Morris sat around in Florida talking about “the estate.” Morris would tell Joe, he had to keep a diary every day—even if he only wrote down what he ate—and sign every page . . . because every one of those pages would be worth hundreds when Joe was dead. And the checks—thousands of checks that Morris was keeping. They would fetch millions when Joe was dead. And the contracts—they would sell for even more. (Of course, Morris likely didn’t tell Joe about the extra three contract copies that he made Joe sign—Morris put those in his own house—because then Joe would know how Morris planned to cash in. And the Clipper might walk, if he figured that out.) . . . But v
isitors always got a creepy feeling when they listened in. How could Morris talk that way? Wasn’t it a bit—well, insensitive?

  Joe liked it. Because it proved to him that DiMaggio would go on, even after his lousy ticker gave out—or his lungs, after all those goddamn cigarettes. (Joe hadn’t smoked since ’69—but still, he was kicking himself.) . . . It was Joe who’d bring Morris back to the subject—what to do with the money, after—especially if Joe was in a bad mood about Paula. If they’d had a fight, or he couldn’t get her on the phone, or he’d got the idea, somehow, that she didn’t care enough about him—then, he’d tell Morris how Paula was only after the money, and they mustn’t let her get her hands on it.

  (For his part, when Morris would run his mouth to visitors, he liked to call the heiress “that cunt, Paula.” And he’d tell everybody how he could have her in bed in a minute if he chose—she was hot for Morris, as Morris imagined—and anyway, he never failed to add, without any evidence, her husband was a fag. But Morris couldn’t let Joe hear him say any of that.)

  For Joe, Morris himself was evidence that DiMaggio would go on. He liked it when Morris would tell about his greatest thrill in life—Morris often told that story—about when they stopped the Yankee Clipper van because Joe had to pee, so Morris got out, too, and both stood by the side of the road, and Morris knew he had arrived—there he was, pissing with the Yankee Clipper! . . . Joe liked the fact that Morris dressed like him. Morris always wore a dark blue blazer, or a dark suit stretched without a wrinkle over his tall frame and stooped shoulders. Or maybe Morris stooped because Joe was stooped now—it was hard to tell . . . . Joe liked Engelberg’s absolute conviction that DiMaggio—the fame of DiMaggio—would never die. Joe would be like Elvis—bigger and bigger over the years. (And Morris would be Priscilla.) . . . Truly, Engelberg was convinced. He’d staked his fortune on that.

  BUT IN THE latter years, through the 1990s, Joe came more and more to New York, and left Morris at home. The way Joe’s New York pals talked about it, New York was where Joe came to get away from business—to get away from Florida. (He complained that life was boring there—he didn’t know many people.) . . . The fact was, sometimes, Joe got tired of talking about the money.

  He had always tried to wall away one part of his life from another—say, his love life from his public life, or the public life from his business interests. Now, he was building a new life in New York that only a few people knew about. And there was no business in it. New York was where Joe came to have a good time.

  He didn’t have to fool with hotels anymore. Now, he had a pal, Dick Burke, who took care of the Clipper’s lodging. Dick and Kathy Burke had a business in Atlantic City—a bar, restaurant, and hotel called the Irish Pub. But they also kept an apartment in New York, on Fifth Avenue, and Joe could use the place as his own.

  He could call from Florida, to his friends Mario Faustini and Nat Recine—and ask what they were doing for dinner the following night. Of course, what they were doing was running their own restaurant—they had a big operation called Alex and Henry’s, in Eastchester, just north of the Bronx. But when the Clipper called, Alex and Henry’s would have to run itself. Mario or Nat, or often both, would drive to the airport, and bring DiMag into town, take him out to dinner, and to the Burkes’ apartment to spend the night.

  The next day, Joe might call Bill Gallo, the famous cartoonist for the Daily News sports page, to ask what Bill was doing for lunch. Those two went back almost as long as Gallo had been drawing heroes for the New York fans—that was forty years. So, what Gallo would be doing for lunch, that day, was sitting in a neighborhood Italian joint (the Foro Italico on West 34th), while the mamma in the kitchen spent herself to create her specialties, one after the other, as DiMag and Gallo, a tavola, talked about old times. (Bill had heard Joe’s stories five or six times—but he always laughed like they were brand-new.) . . . After two or three hours, Joe would be so relaxed, he might walk Bill back to his office at the Daily News—where the city room would stop dead when they walked in. Next time he wrote a column, Gallo would mention the visit—but Joe didn’t mind. He knew Gallo didn’t want anything from him.

  Or Joe might show up for lunch with his friend Gianni Garavelli—at Bravo Gianni, a luxurious hideaway on East 63rd. There, Gianni would present Joe’s specialties. They weren’t on the menu, but DiMaggio had his own menu. First came the minestrone, thick with vegetables (no pasta), and with a bit of pesto in the broth, for tang. Then, came the bow ties (farfalle, Joe’s favorite)—with a hint of garlic in the oil, fresh tomato, basil, and sweet Italian sausage. Joe got to be so at home with Gianni, he’d walk around from table to table, to be introduced and shake the patrons’ hands. One time, he was wandering past the phone as it rang. He picked it up and answered: “Bravo Joey!” The woman who was calling for reservations was confused. “Oh, I was calling Gianni,” she said. “Yeah, but I’m Joe DiMaggio,” said the Clipper. “S’not enough for you?” . . . (That night, when she told her husband—a supermarket magnate—of course, he didn’t believe her. But when he came for his dinner, and there was DiMaggio to greet him at his table, he was so thrilled that the following day, he sent a pair of ruby earrings for Garavelli’s wife. As Gianni would remember ever after: “If I had given twenty thousand dollars to this man, he would not have been so happy.”)

  But the pal Joe called every day was Rock Positano, Foot Doctor to the Stars. You probably wouldn’t have known that People magazine’s list of the “Fifty Most Fascinating” hid a hundred aching feet. But Dr. Rock knew. He knew them all—from the ground up, you could say. And he enjoyed them all. If he hadn’t taken a wrong turn into med school, he would have made an all-star social director on the world’s best cruise ship. He had the gifts of relentless energy and unflagging interest in the lives of his patients. You could talk to Dr. Rock about your heels, it was like going to a party. Maybe he could fix your feet, maybe not, but he was always a balm to the soul. That was how he met DiMaggio, who came in at the turn of the 1990s with a complaint about his ancient, aching heels. (They’d butchered Joe back in the forties, as Dr. Rock discerned.) . . . But after he’d come in about his heels two or three times, Joe showed up, one day, to ask: “You wanta have a cuppa coffee?”

  In Joe’s eyes, Rock was only a boy—thirty-one years old, when he met the Clipper. But as Joe also saw, Dr. Rock already had come a long way. He’d grown up poor on Brooklyn streets and had hauled himself through Yale Medical School, to the top of his profession—and to a glad welcome at a thousand doors. Maybe Joe saw something of himself in the kid. But Joe also knew a good time when he saw one—and in Dr. Rock, Joe had met fame’s reward. In the doctor’s fond gaze—and maybe for the first time in his life—Joe relaxed, without agenda, save to enjoy who he was.

  So one day, Woody Allen was walking, with his wife-to-be, Soon-Yi, up Madison Avenue near 75th—just about where the old Sotheby’s used to be—when he heard a voice call: “Woody!” And as he turned, he saw a limo at the curb, with a window rolling down and a hand extended, waggling invitation. “Woody! Over here!” . . . As Allen recalled, it was a good neighborhood, and a good car, so he went over and peered in, to find Dr. Rock and Joe DiMaggio—who, it turned out, was a Woody Allen fan. It also turned out that Woody was a fan of the Jolter . . . so when they said, “Let’s have dinner!”—well, they actually did. They were both connoisseurs of New York—especially the old New York, where everybody was out all the time—Joe had been there, and could bring it to life in his stories. And for his part, Woody wanted to tell Joe how, at the age of ten, he’d read Lucky to Be a Yankee—and now, nearing sixty, he could still quote parts of it. (Which parts? . . . Well, for one, there was the advice about throwing the ball from center field on one hop—which made the throw easier to handle for an infielder or the catcher. Woody never forgot that—who could?)

  And then, too, with some trepidation (this could have gone either way), Dr. Rock (and his limo) took the Clipper to the Carlyle Hotel to hear Woody Allen’s
jazz band. It turned out, Joe enjoyed that, too. And he was especially pleased to meet the producer of some of Woody’s best-known films. That was Jean Doumanian, a smart and very comely woman, who was at the same show. (Dr. Rock happened to be her friend, as well.) Jean was startled by how handsome DiMaggio was, with that sparkle in his eye. As she said, “He could just win you with a smile.” They went out to dinner at an Italian joint in Brooklyn. Joe was interested in everything Jean was doing. (He knew the entertainment business—and quite a few people in it.) In those days, she was producing an off-Broadway play, Dinah Was—a tribute to the late great singer Dinah Washington. So on opening night, Joe arrived to see the play. There were lots of notables in the audience—but Joe was the star. And Jean, who was, perhaps, half Joe’s age, adored him. “So courtly,” she said. “I mean, he paid so much attention to you as a woman. Now I understand how a woman can fall in love with a man so much older.”

  But old habits die hard—and Joe still played the field. He was also very much taken with Elizabeth Vargas, who was another passenger on Dr. Rock’s cruise ship, and a good-looking newswoman for NBC. “Lizzie,” as Joe liked to call her, hadn’t yet attained half Joe’s age—which spurred the Jolter to effusions of charm, and stories. “Now, Lizzie,” Joe said, “I’ve got a real cute one for you. Have you ever heard of Alcatraz? . . .” And Joe explained how the prison there had a ballfield—he’d played against the cons—and at Alcatraz, when you hit a ball over the wall, that was not a home run. It was an out! Because they wanted to put the idea into the prisoners’ minds, see, that if you went over that wall, you were going to be a loser . . . . After hours of cute ones, Lizzie had to powder her nose—whereupon Joe said to Dr. Rock: “Doc, she’s a real class act. Do you think she’d come out to dinner with me again?” . . . Joe took her to Lattanzi’s on West 46th. (Kosher Italian—Joe loved it. And they had a back room for him.) Joe told more stories. And then, Joe saw, in the front room . . . there was Paul Simon! So, to impress Lizzie, Joe told the Doc to tell the maître d’: “Eddie—Mr. DiMaggio wants Paul Simon to come over.”