Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  The brothers fought about their sisters. Dom advocated on Marie’s behalf, which irritated Joe, and when others sympathized with Dom, that irritated him further and made him take it out on Dom. When their sister Mamie got sick, Joe was not the least bit interested in helping out, but Dom frequently flew cross-country to look after her until he could get her into a nursing home. Of course, Dom resented Joe for putting him in that position, but Joe, too, was equally miffed. He felt that Dom’s heroics had made him look bad, and he could not forgive his brother for “shaming” him.

  In addition, there was a split between the brothers that resulted from a failure in the US Mail. Dom was invited to a charity event but didn’t get the invitation and therefore never showed up; Joe was furious and would not entertain any suggestion of clemency. For a long time after that, neither brother spoke to the other, but mostly it was Joe who would not speak with Dom. When push came to shove, Dom was always willing to forgive. It was Dom who delivered the eulogy at Joe’s funeral, and their mutual friend Joe Nacchio proclaimed, “Dominic was a good brother, and he was a good brother to the end.”

  Joe DiMaggio wouldn’t speak to Ted Williams, had no time for Mickey Mantle, ostracized several presidents, and found reasons to get out of having to interact with anyone he had the slightest criticism against—especially anyone who had, in his estimation, done him the slightest wrong. He even very nearly severed his relationship with Morris Engelberg, who was the most loyal of all his friends and followers, responsible for having won contracts that provided DiMaggio with a financially comfortable old age.

  Joe was once at a baseball card show in Atlantic City and insisted that Engelberg join him. The attorney had just had eye surgery and was unable to fly, but because he had been summoned, he took a train from Florida to Philadelphia and then had himself driven by car to Atlantic City. Joe was not impressed with the lengths to which his friend, whom he would only introduce to others as his lawyer, had gone to be there with him; at one point, he went so far as to slap Engelberg’s hand for not handing over memorabilia quickly enough for him to sign, prompting Engelberg to get up and leave. In this case, the Clipper came as close as he ever did to an apology. “Sometimes these shows piss me off,” he said, and Engelberg forgave him.

  • • •

  Of all Joe DiMaggio’s failures with people, the one that hurt him the most was the complete collapse of any association with Joe DiMaggio Jr., his only child, who once told a reporter proudly, “My lifestyle is diametrically opposed to my father’s.” For his part, Joe Sr. hardly wanted to discuss his son. Said baseball memorabilia collector Barry Halper, DiMaggio’s friend of twenty-seven years, “There were two subjects that were taboo with Joe: Marilyn Monroe and Joe Jr. In all the years I knew him, he never said a word about either one. You just knew not to ask.”

  Morris Engelberg said that Joe DiMaggio’s heart was broken only twice in his life: once by Marilyn Monroe and then by his son. A photograph taken by Robert Solotaire in 1952 shows father and son sharing a smiling, carefree moment at a beach in the water with a surfboard, but all Joe Jr. remembered when asked about his dad was that “we were from different planets.”

  Big Joe referred to Little Joe as “my boy,” never by name, never as his son, long after “my boy” reached manhood. When Little Joe was well into his fifties, Morris Engelberg offered to entice him to Florida, where he could be watched closely in an effort to keep him from drugs and alcohol. “You don’t know my boy,” DiMaggio responded. “You’re barking up the wrong tree. It would be a waste of your time.” Engelberg often spoke to Big Joe about reconciling with Little Joe, but the senior DiMaggio’s response was always the same: “My boy is a bum.” The “boy” was a grandfather by then, and even though DiMaggio had tried to help his son financially, he refused to give him the only thing that DiMaggio Junior really wanted, which was respect. Joe couldn’t give that, even though his declaration that his boy was a bum was often followed by a sheepish addendum, “But he’s a good boy.” If Joey had heard even that much approval, he might have been content.

  “I never knew my father,” Joe Jr. told Larry King in the late 1960s. 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 . . . 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 five jersey. I was driven to the photo session, we had our 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.”

  Joe Junior did remember being something like close to his father once in his life: in the car on the way to MM’s funeral. He said his father had always gone on loving Monroe, and since he loved her too, they had shared that bond, but it didn’t last.

  The elder DiMaggio had formed a close relationship with Joe Jr.’s wife, Sue, and was, in his own eyes, at least, an ideal grandfather to her daughters, Paula and Kathie, whom Joe Jr. had adopted. He even moved the family to the Bay Area from Massachusetts so they could be closer to him. DiMaggio was very critical of his son’s failure to be a good father. “My kid never put his head to anything,” he said.

  After the divorce, Joe Sr. kept close to the girls and their mother and remained devoted to them. In fact, sometimes he was too involved in their lives, especially his favorite, Paula’s, and he would try to control them, telling them where to go to school, whom to befriend, and eventually whom they could and could not date. He regularly sent money for clothes and school supplies and the like. He footed the bill for Kathie’s degree from the University of California, and he bought and maintained a condominium for Paula while he paid for her to attend beauty school. But although he went out of his way to remain connected to Sue’s daughters, DiMaggio grew further and further apart from his son.

  After returning to California, Joe Jr. got into a social group that revolved around drugs. “Speed,” said his ex-wife Sue. “He loved speed.” He would leave Sue and the kids for days at a time to explore and experience the drug scene in San Francisco, and he could not understand why Sue would not follow him there. He began to beat her. “It was very embarrassing, and I didn’t want anyone to know,” Sue would say. “I thought it was my fault.” When she left him, Joe Jr. seemed unperturbed, finding no problem attracting plenty of female companions. The drugs caused him a nearly fatal automobile accident, jail time, and the loss of every job he ever took on, which angered and mortified his father.

  Joe Sr. tried to help, but since he couldn’t be available emotionally, his help was mostly financial. He put up the funds for Joey to establish a polyurethane factory, and then, when that failed, he bought his son a very expensive truck so that the younger man could go into the trucking business. Joe Jr. proceeded to wreck the truck, and then he set off on what his father called his hobo adventures. He didn’t even bother trying to make telephone contact, as no connection to his father seemed to matter to the son, who spent his time drinking wine or beer with other itinerant drinkers and bikers, while he collected welfare checks in addition to the money his father regularly sent. Joe Sr, who had had the highest expectations of Joe Jr.’s opportunity to attend Yale, never understood his son’s flagrant disregard for real work and could not forgive the way “my boy” squandered everything his father gave him or did for him. For his part, Joe Jr. felt that his father had long since rejected him.

  A particularly poignant episode happened in the Napa Valley long after Joe Jr. had begun to go gray. Joe Sr. and his friend Sam Spear would often take rides into wine country, and Joe would insist on going through Martine
z, a town where Joe had grown up and Joey was said to be living. After many failed attempts, the father spotted the son walking in town, dressed shabbily and looking wan and starving. “Pull over, pull over. There’s Joey,” DiMaggio ordered Spear. Then he called to his son, “Joey! Joey! Joey!” Without so much as slowing his walk, the younger DiMaggio shouted back, “You don’t know me. You don’t know who I am. Leave me alone.” The father was embarrassed and forlorn, but he didn’t want to talk about the incident. He didn’t have the words for the way he felt or the way Joey had disappointed him yet again. And Joey took it in, adding yet another failure to the many he had already accrued.

  By then, Joe Jr. had been homeless or quasi homeless for some years. “He was a troublemaker,” his cousin Joe’s (Vince’s son) wife, Marina, said of him. “But I miss him.” Toothless, scruffy, and vagrant, Joey drifted around the Martinez area, refusing to accept rides, refusing to hold down a job, wandering rather pointlessly but insisting, “I’m fine. Thank you very much.” Joe Nacchio, who was one of Joe Sr.’s best-educated, most perceptive, and sensitive friends, described Joe Jr.: “His choice of words was above the ordinary person’s. He was sensible and logical, and he talked with a great deal of reason.” Knowing that his son was a well-educated do-nothing with bad teeth and poor health infuriated the father even more. Joe Sr. bought his son new teeth and begged him to get cleaned up, but the son didn’t like wearing the false teeth and was more likely to use them as a weapon to throw at someone with whom he was angry than as they were intended.

  In the mid-1990s, Joe Jr. contented himself with doing odd jobs until he went to work for Mike Fernandez, a DiMaggio cousin, who owned a junkyard in Bay Point. Joey loved working at the junkyard and soon moved into a trailer that had been discarded there. Later, Fernandez fixed up a bungalow on the property, and Joe Jr. moved in—until he felt crowded by reporters asking too many questions about his father, who was dying by then. He moved to another junkyard in another town not far away.

  Marina DiMaggio said of Joe Jr., “He was a con artist. He could con you out of anything.” When his father lay dying, the television tabloid news show Inside Edition offered the son $15,000 to be interviewed about his relationship to Joe Sr. Junior took the money and conned the producers, carefully avoiding the issues they were most interested in discussing, which included anything remotely related to Joe Sr.’s personal life and the reason that the famous ballplayer’s son was in such dire straits. “What is Joe DiMaggio’s son supposed to do?” he chided the interviewer. “I’m free . . . just a free spirit. No commitments. The first of the month rolls around, and I have no payments to make.”

  Joey was invited to collaborate on a damning tell-all book with an author who saw an opportunity to cash in on DiMaggio’s dark side, but Joey refused to participate. That was at least one thing Joe Sr. could be proud about. “My boy is loyal,” he said. “He wouldn’t talk, even for a million dollars.” Money was never something that interested Joe DiMaggio Jr. The only reason, he once admitted to Mike Fernandez, that he took the money from Inside Edition at all was so he could, on his own, buy dentures that actually fit him.

  DiMaggio Jr. was a lost soul, but, according to Morris Engelberg, he was a “warm, gentle person, and, as everyone said, articulate and bright.” Unlike his father, Joey was demonstrative and openly affectionate toward those he liked, and he knew more about sports trivia—especially basketball statistics and factoids—than most people. He never got his teeth right, however. One of Engelberg’s last memories of the Clipper’s son was a visit they both made to Mama Mia’s, a popular Italian restaurant in Hollywood, Florida, after Joe Sr.’s death. Owner Joe Franco observed that when Junior entered, “He had no teeth and was wearing thongs and a ponytail. “He ordered a huge meal but spent most of his time at his table drinking several beers. He barely touched his knife and fork and had the food wrapped to go.” Engelberg learned later that Joey was embarrassed to eat in public because he believed that his false teeth failed to “work well.”

  In the Inside Edition interview, Junior explained why he hadn’t run to his father’s bedside when he was taken ill. “You know, I never got the words ‘Come now.’ Or I’d have been there in a flash. I love him, and just all of the things that are felt between people but never said. When he wants me there, I’ll be there.”

  • • •

  By March 1998, Joe DiMaggio had begun to notice that he seemed to be without energy for things he always liked to do, but it wasn’t till the end of the year before he finally got the attention his ailment needed. He was unable to eat the food he loved, was easily tired and weak, and he coughed incessantly. The loss of appetite seemed fairly predictable, given his advanced age of eighty-four, but he had also begun to cough up blood and foul-looking phlegm, and that was shocking. He’d had a pacemaker implanted the preceding March, and he figured the coughing had something to do with the three packs of cigarettes he smoked each day. There had been a similar instance in 1992 that had amounted to no cause for alarm, and, besides, he had a year full of appointments and promises to keep.

  In September, as the ’98 baseball season was coming to a close, DiMaggio had two major commitments that no physical ailments could keep him from honoring. The National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame unveiled a statue of the slugger in Chicago’s newly minted Piazza DiMaggio and feted him with a dinner in his honor. The next morning, he rang the opening bell at the Chicago Board of Trade. He was running a fever, feeling every bit of his eighty-four years, but he was where he was scheduled to be.

  After the three-day agenda of ceremonies, Joe had to fly back to New York, where he was to be honored at Yankee Stadium upon arrival. George Steinbrenner sent a car to pick Joe up at LaGuardia Airport, and though Joe was feeling poorly, his color gray and his posture sagging, after a cup of coffee with the Yankees owner in the private box, Joe embarked on Joe DiMaggio Day, which turned out to be a difficult if fond farewell to Yankee Stadium and New York City.

  A security snafu kept DiMaggio waiting in the sun-drenched bullpen for far too long, and by the time the tribute got under way, the Clipper was in a lather. “I don’t need this crap, “he declared. “I want to get out of here.” Engelberg reminded the champ that before the announcement that the day would be known as Joe DiMaggio Day, only eighteen thousand tickets had been sold; by the time Joe was on the verge of collapse in the dugout, the stadium had sold out all of its fifty-six thousand seats. The attorney went on to disclose a secret Steinbrenner had been holding on to in order to surprise Joe at midfield: he’d had replicas made of the eight World Series rings that had been stolen from the slugger’s hotel room years before and was about to present them in front of fifty-six thousand delighted fans. In the end, as he always did, Joe DiMaggio rose to the occasion, overcame the extreme discomfort caused by his illness, age, and the blazing sun, and he thrilled the assembly with his warm smile and his grateful wave. His speech was true to form: simple and short. He thanked the fans for their kind ovation and the Yankees for the gifts and the day, and then he quoted Lou Gehrig, who, he said, was “one of the greatest baseball players of all time,” saying, “I am the luckiest man on the face of the earth to be here today and to have had the opportunity to play for the greatest franchise in sports history, the New York Yankees. New York,” he went on, “thank you for the best thirteen years of my life. God bless you all.”

  The next day Joe DiMaggio left New York City, never to return.

  • • •

  Upon his arrival in Florida, Joe visited his pulmonary specialist Dr. Aaron Neuhaus, and he soon learned that an X-ray had detected an odious white spot on his lung, a spot that was eventually identified as tuberculosis and then complicated by the additional diagnosis of pneumonia. Joe was admitted to the hospital. When none of the treatments gave DiMaggio any relief, and his condition continued to deteriorate, Neuhaus ran more tests and found advanced-stage lung cancer. A protracted fight with the various complications of the illness ensued, and the Clip
per was not released from his confinement for ninety-nine days.

  At first, when Joe entered the hospital for the surgery to remove and assess the cancer, he instructed Morris Engelberg, who kept an unceasing vigil through the several stages of DiMaggio’s illness, to censor all reports about his condition. He was adamant that his granddaughters be protected from concern, that his friends and family have no reason for pity, that his baseball colleagues lose no respect, that the Yankees be undeterred from their race for the pennant and the World Championship. He had checked into the hospital under a pseudonym so that the press would be kept away from the hospital as well as from him and his close circle. When it became impossible to keep the truth from Paula and Kathie, the young women flew to his side and did not leave. When Dom, his only remaining sibling, learned through the grapevine that DiMaggio was ill, he came, and since Joltin’ Joe was far too ill to object, the rift between the brothers was tentatively called off.

  DiMaggio defied all the odds. When the surgeon Dr. Luis Ansanza emerged from the operation, Engelberg reported, it was clear that the Clipper was done for. He explained that a tumor had been removed, but that the cancer had spread to locations in the lungs that were inoperable. Joe DiMaggio’s death seemed imminent.

  But Joltin’ Joe was not ready to leave. He survived several crises—his lungs collapsed, he contracted serious infections and hospital-borne illnesses, his heart failed, and he became disoriented—but he fought on. Word leaked to the press, and a barrage of nosy reporters soon pressed in on the staff and other patients as well as on Joe and his small entourage. A security guard had to be hired, and a psychiatrist was engaged along with round-the-clock protection by hospital staff and others. But he rallied.

  George Steinbrenner came to visit Joe in the hospital. Nervous about seeing Joe fragile and weakened by illness, Steinbrenner fretted about what he would say, how he would react to the Clipper, but he needn’t have worried. When Steinbrenner arrived, DiMaggio was sitting up in bed, his trachea tube removed for the occasion, holding a baseball. They discussed the Yankees owner’s plans to trade players. Steinbrenner wanted to acquire veteran pitching star Roger Clemens, saying, “He’s the Michael Jordan of baseball!” The Clipper lobbied for keeping left-hander David Wells. “David Wells is a big Yankees fan,” DiMaggio argued. “He knows about Babe Ruth. He even has a gut like Babe.” Engelberg, who was with the two in the hospital room, reported that the meeting was “a tonic for DiMaggio’s morale. He talked about it for days.”