Joe DiMaggio

by Jerome Charyn

  It mattered little to Hollywood that Gary Cooper had never played baseball, or that he was right-handed while Gehrig had been a lefty. Mogul Samuel Goldwyn simply used his own magic mirror. He let the Coop “bat right-handed and run to third base. They would have him wear a reversed Number 4 on his back. Then they would flip the film so it would look as though the actor were swinging from the left side and running to first.”4

  The Coop had just won an Academy Award playing a World War I hero in Sergeant York (1941), about a farm boy who becomes a terrific sharpshooter, luring Germans into the line of fire with his own turkey call. For the filmgoers of 1942, it seemed as if Samuel Goldwyn had plucked Sergeant York out of the trenches and given him Yankee pinstripes. Gehrig himself would forever wear the face of Gary Cooper. And that hulking monotonous man, Lou Gehrig, who didn’t have enough verve to play Tarzan on the screen, though he auditioned for the part, suddenly had Cooper’s silent power. And we watch Cooper mouth Gehrig’s lines in his own Montana drawl at that mythic farewell address to a full Yankee Stadium. “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

  But DiMaggio wasn’t much of a lucky man. The nation was now at war, and it longed for different heroes. Baseball would soon become a game of grandpas and stumblebums, as both stars and utility players entered the armed forces. After much brooding, the Jolter enlisted in the Army Air Corps on February 17, 1943. But he couldn’t seem to function as a celebrity soldier. He was addicted to center field. Perhaps he should have become a Marine Corps pilot, like the Kid.

  Ted Williams flourished during the war, broke out of his baseball mania and his protected shell, that privileged cocoon of a star. The Kid had tried to dodge his way out of the draft, claiming he was his mother’s sole support. DiMaggio had swiped ’41 away from him with his hitting streak, even though the Kid had batted .406. He promised himself that he would demolish DiMaggio in ’42. But there was a furor everywhere he went; polls were taken door-to-door about whether he should join up or play. “In Boston, Ted was bigger news than war in the Pacific.” Finally he did enlist, though he finished out the season with the highest batting and slugging averages, the most runs scored, the most runs batted in, and the most home runs in the major leagues, while DiMaggio faltered most of the season.5

  It wasn’t only the complications of the world around him that troubled DiMaggio. He’d been a nomad, one of Toots Shor’s crumb bums, and he had a hard time being a husband and a father. Suddenly there was another DiMaggio, Little Joe. He wasn’t sure how to relate to his son. He would pose with him for some magazine and then disappear for days. And when he boasted to his pals at Toots Shor’s that he could teach anyone how to hold a baby, Mrs. Joe DiMaggio muttered, “Whose baby are you going to use for teaching?”6

  But Ted Williams didn’t have a wife, and he didn’t suffer at all in the service. “He loved . . . its certainty and ease.” He had to deal with instructors and other apprentice pilots. His first training was at Amherst College, where he studied mathematics and navigation problems, like some freshman away at school for the first time. He became a flight instructor at Pensacola, Florida, and would have flown on combat missions had the war lasted a little longer. He didn’t seem to miss baseball, or at least he never complained.7

  DiMaggio complained from the moment he entered the army to the moment he left. His three years away from the big leagues further narrowed an already narrow man. He dined with generals, played pinochle, took part in exhibition games against army or navy teams filled with other All-Stars, other baseball refugees. It bored him to death. He would sit and brood. His ulcers got worse and he was in and out of the hospital. He was morose without his sycophants and Toots Shor. And he didn’t even have Dorothy. Six months after he joined up, she filed for divorce in Los Angeles. Wrapped in a mink coat, tears in her eyes, she told a packed court that the Yankee Clipper had been cruel to her, that the arrival of Joe Jr. didn’t change him at all; he still wouldn’t talk to her for days at a time.

  The judge was “a rabid baseball fan,” and it hurt him to hear these tales of Dorothy’s woes, but the Clipper still had to fork over $14,000 in cash and $150 a month in child support. He was batting zero as a husband, the papers said.8

  He’d woo Dorothy, win her back, and lose her again, as if he were on a crazy roller coaster. He would have lost Dorothy no matter what he did, but it might have been different had he avoided that endless season of an army baseball player. Perhaps combat duty would have meant nothing to him, but without it, he amputated himself, froze his psyche. It was his last chance to leave that hermetic world of baseball, its adoration, its tight statistics, its heraldry of pennant races, and to serve with guys grounded in war. His one real tie to Babe Ruth was that neither of them had really left home. The Babe had graduated from St. Mary’s to the ballpark and remained a perpetual delinquent, as if he were returning every night to his own private school for bad boys. And Joe had gone from a cloistered home in San Francisco with eight brothers and sisters to a baseball team in the Bronx that was like a cornucopia of squabbling brothers, with thousands of squabbling fans that could also have been his sisters and brothers. He spent his days wearing pinstriped pajamas like some adored, grown-up child who had this perverse gift of batting a stitched leather ball into the stands, so that every other man or boy in the country dreamt of doing the same thing. For once, he might have gotten out of that realm of baseball and lived a little with other men who had to learn how to hold a gun and battle an enemy that wanted nothing less than to annihilate you. But it never happened.

  And so he suffered like an unruly child with temper tantrums. The Jolter was beside himself. He mumbled about the money he lost while away from the Yanks. But that money talk was nothing more than a mask. In a terrifying way, this hiatus from baseball was a dire prediction of what it would be like when he no longer had his haven in center field. For the first time the Jolter was utterly lost. His sense of certainty was gone, that freedom he had on the field, that controlled wildness of the Yankee Clipper. There was an aura of unreality about him; he was someone estranged from himself. Perhaps now we understood what Toots Shor’s really meant to him—it was where the Jolter could unwind from the intensity of the game and also be safe within his own celebrity, adored but left alone. If people in Shor’s saloon gaped at him, so what? Toots was there to protect him and that image of himself as the nonpareil. He could brood among his own peers, sit with Sinatra. Toots Shor’s had become a necessary oasis.

  His three years without the Yankees were also a harbinger of things to come—the squabbles with Dorothy, the jealous rages, the battle royals, and his endless need to woo her again and again served as a warm-up for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. It was as if his armor had been torn away and he was left with nothing to fill the void of a world without baseball. He grew petulant, was full of bile, without ever being aware of what was bedeviling him. The Jolter had bedeviled himself.

  FOUR

  “C’mon, Joe, Talk to Me”

  1.

  He returned to baseball in 1946 as if he had never been away. He hit the ball like a wizard during spring training. He was much more affable, willing to smile and tell stories. But it was a masquerade; perhaps he was frightened for the first time, unsure of his skills, of his place in a postwar world. It was as if his soul had begun to rot and he’d never get out of the burden of being Joe DiMaggio. The army years had ruined him in a way, kept him even more of a child. Williams could remain a “pure” hitter, wed himself to a world of statistics, but DiMaggio was far more fragile.

  Then the season started, and it was ’42 all over again. He fell into a slump. He tried to woo Dorothy again, and failed. She moved into the Waldorf with a stockbroker and married him in the summer of ’46, while DiMaggio sat in his room at the Edison Hotel, sat alone. Toots couldn’t even coax him back to Table One. He hurt his ankle and lived with a pain in his heel. He’d never had so poor a season, batted under .300 for the first time. The Yankees sat
in third place. Their management started to panic. They had a veteran of thirty-one on their hands. They tried to palm him off on the Washington Senators, to trade him for first baseman Mickey Vernon, who had won the batting title that year. But the Senators said no. They didn’t want DiMaggio. For the Yankees and the Senators he was now an old man.

  He hobbled around in 1947, but still managed to win his third MVP. Yet ’47 didn’t belong to DiMaggio or Williams or any other star. It was the most significant season baseball has ever had, almost negating every other season from the very beginning of baseball, sometime prior to the Civil War and the formation of the National League in 1876. In 1947 the Brooklyn Dodgers took a chance on Jackie Robinson, a twenty-eight-year-old rookie with a trick knee, brought him up from the Montreal Royals, where he had been groomed, broke the “color barrier,” and let him become what we all liked to think was the first black American to play in the big leagues. Thus Robinson was added to baseball’s own little grab bag of myths.

  He wasn’t the first black player, of course. There were black Americans in professional baseball in the nineteenth century, though they were often advertised as Spaniards or Arabs; one such, Frank Grant, aka “The Spaniard,” played in the high minor leagues some sixty years before Jackie Robinson ever put on a Dodger uniform. Grant, a second baseman, had to wear wooden shin guards to protect himself from runners who came at him with high-flying spikes. And two brothers from Ohio, Fleetwood and Welday Walker, played a season in the American Association, then a major league. But finally Grant and the Walker brothers couldn’t play at all when bigots like future Hall of Famer Cap Anson declared that they wouldn’t take the field against any team that employed a “nigger.” Soon all the Spaniards and Arabs disappeared from the majors and the minors. “They are the players who just vanished from baseball’s narrative, like a secret no one talks about,” according to baseball historian Jim Overmyer.1

  Black Americans had to organize their own teams, which were often phantom counterparts to the majors themselves, with the Colored Giants or the Black Yankees, and black National and American leagues. When the majors instituted an All-Star Game in 1933, blacks followed suit with an All-Star Game of their own, with big-city black newspapers in charge of the voting. Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had been put in place after the Black Sox scandal of 1919 to go after gamblers and clean up the game, sang to the press that the only reason black Americans were not in baseball was that they were not good enough to play against whites. And every major league owner went along with this line, even as their best and biggest stars often barnstormed with blacks during the winter, and such black players often ate them up alive.

  Landis’ big lie tarnished the game, left it with a terrible stink and the growing suspicion that there was a shadow world of players who might be just as powerful and fleet as the Babe or Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. The Babe never said one word about the blacks he played against in winter ball. But at least Williams recognized this injustice and deep insult to black Americans and raged against it. When he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966, “Williams said that he looked forward to the day when such great Negro leagues players as Satchel Paige [who did get to the majors, after he was forty years old] and Josh Gibson would be elected to the Hall of Fame because ‘they weren’t given the chance.’ ”2 Gibson, a hard-hitting catcher often called “the black Babe Ruth,” not only never played in the majors but died in 1947, a sick, shrunken man of thirty-five. Yet Josh Gibson is linked with Joe DiMaggio in a sad and disturbing way.

  2.

  Gibson was born in Buena Vista, Georgia, in 1911, three years before Joltin’ Joe. He moved to Pittsburgh as a child with his family, and became a catcher on the Crawford Colored Giants and then the Homestead Grays, who often played at Forbes Field when the Pirates were out of town; but the Pirates didn’t allow the Grays to use their locker room, and Josh and his teammates had to dress and shower at the local YMCA, far from Forbes Field. Like Ted Williams, Gibson was monomaniacal about the game. He limited himself to “nothing but baseball” and led “a single-minded stilted life,” according to William Brashler. He drank a lot of whiskey and gobbled tubs of vanilla ice cream.3

  All sorts of myths have grown up around Josh; certain baseball aficionados swear he was the greatest right-handed slugger who ever lived. But how will we ever know? He never hit home runs off Bob Feller or Carl Hubbell, never played in a World Series against Joltin’ Joe. We have tales about his stupendous power, how he hit line drives that “tore the gloves off infielders,” that he once smashed a home run at Yankee Stadium against the Black Bombers that landed in the bullpen in left field, more than 500 feet from home plate, that he also hit “impossible” homers into the upper decks of Chicago’s Comis-key Park and Washington’s Griffith Stadium. He never waded into a pitch or danced on his pigeon toes at the plate like Ruth, nor did he whip his wrists like DiMaggio. “He stood flat-footed, his heavy bat gripped down to the end and held high above his right shoulder, his feet spread fairly wide apart, and with the pitch he strode only slightly—some say four inches, some say not at all, but simply raised his foot and put it down in the same spot when the pitch came,” walloping the ball with the power of his upper body alone.4

  During the war, when DiMaggio and Williams and Greenberg and Feller were all away and the big leagues were filled with stumblebums, there had been some talk about the Washington Senators signing Josh Gibson. The Senators had seen him play. They knew he might even bring them a pennant. He’d become the most famous invisible man in baseball history. But they worried that there would be a furor among the players, who like Cap Anson might stage a sit-down strike and refuse to play. And what if white fans boycotted Griffith Stadium? But even if the Senators had gathered up the courage to sign him, it would have been too late. In 1942 Josh “began a desperate slide.” Gradually he grew depressed, with an endless craving for vanilla ice cream. He got dizzy when he had to chase foul fly balls, suffered from “persistent, painful headaches,” often lost the power of speech, began to have blackouts and irrational outbursts of violence. He fell into a coma on New Year’s Day, 1943, recovering after several hours. The doctors told him he had a brain tumor and they wanted to operate, but Josh ran from them, fearing that the operation would leave him “like a vegetable” and that he’d never play again.5

  After more outbursts he was locked away in a ward at St. Elizabeths in Washington, D.C., the same madhouse where Ezra Pound would be held for having made rabid anti-Semitic broadcasts for Mussolini during the war. And part of Josh’s own macabre history is that he would wander out of St. Elizabeths to play weekend games for the Grays.

  Not even the army wanted him now, and he was given “permanent 4-F status.” Finally he was let out of the hospital and lived at a boardinghouse with other Grays while the team was in D.C. He would often sit alone in a chair by the window and talk to an imaginary player: it was Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. He would repeat over and over again, “C’mon, Joe, talk to me, why don’t you talk to me? Hey, Joe DiMaggio, it’s me, you know me. Why don’t you answer me? Huh, Joe?”6

  Josh’s sad refrain is perhaps the severest indictment of white baseball we will ever have. He could only try and seek solace from its most visible player, Joltin’ Joe. But white baseball wouldn’t talk to Josh Gibson. And its denial of him and every other black player helped contribute to his craziness. It’s through Josh’s own case that we can possibly comprehend how other African Americans must have suffered in their baseball ghetto. Not that black baseball wasn’t its own kind of success. “It was the third largest black business in the country, behind insurance and cosmetology.”7 Never mind the relative poverty of the barnstormers. White players weren’t that rich either, except for the Babe and a few others. Never mind the daily indignity of separate locker rooms and water fountains. It was the gnawing away at one’s pride, the heartbreak that one could never compete, have the deep pleasure of hitting a line drive over the Clipper’s head or throw
ing Ted Williams out at third.

  A classic note of irony about black-white baseball is derived from Babe Ruth. Because of his “swarthy skin and pushed-in nose,” he was often called “Niggerlips” by opposing clubs. Aware of this constant catcall, some players in the Negro leagues took great pride in Ruth and “considered him a secret brother.” But Ruth was as much of a racist as those who razzed him. When called “Niggerlips” once too often, he would charge into an opponent’s dugout and scream: “I don’t mind being called a prick or a cocksucker or things like that. I expect that. But lay off the personal stuff.”8

  3.

  Incoherent or not, riven with devils and usually half-drunk, Josh Gibson, the black Babe Ruth, became a singles hitter in ’45 and ’46. He continued to barnstorm and was found in the middle of one winter tour “wandering nude in San Juan.” Still, he played to the very end of his life, and died on January 20, 1947, after suffering a stroke. It was only months before the start of Jackie Robinson’s strange, meteoric career.9

  Blame it on Branch Rickey, the Dodgers’ president, general manager, and part owner, “a potato-shaped man in a wrinkled suit.” Known as “the Mahatma” because of his supposed idealism and religious streak, Rickey was one of the few visionaries baseball has ever had. Born in Ohio in 1881, he was a journeyman catcher (for the New York Highlanders and the St. Louis Browns) who could neither hit nor catch, but as general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals from 1925 to 1942, he was the first baseball mogul to believe in a farm system; it was much shrewder and far less expensive for a club like the Cardinals to develop its own talent rather than raid another club and steal away players at exorbitant prices. Under Rickey’s tutelage, the Cardinals grew into perennial pennant winners, finding and developing players such as Dizzy Dean, Stan Musial, and Marty Marion. When he moved to the Dodgers in 1943, Rickey followed the same fashion of farm teams and helped build the “Bums” into a National League dynasty.10