Somehow, I can’t imagine an infielder’s or outfielder’s sky for Rodriguez. The Yanks might have faltered as he missed the first part of 2009, but I never had the feeling that he was the team’s essential glue. Perhaps no one can be in an age of multimillionaire players who are like Samurai warriors as they flit from team to team. A-Rod is articulate and affable—and a world away from the Jolter. It’s hard to think of Joe DiMaggio ever confessing any kind of sin to ESPN. He would have been mortified. He had a mystery about him that none of the current Yankees will ever have. Yet there is a resemblance between A-Rod and the Jolter.
Like DiMaggio, he was born into an immigrant family of modest means. And like DiMaggio, he was a star at a very early age, winning the American League batting title when he was twenty-one. But he’s still a Samurai, who gathered up his millions and moved from the Seattle Mariners to the Texas Rangers in 2001, and then to the Bombers in 2004. Perhaps the Jolter might have had the same wanderlust had there been no reserve clause in the 1940s. We’ll never know.
A-Rod is my personal favorite among the latter-day Yanks, with his own brand of lightning and electricity at the plate. But he lacks the restlessness—the almost religious anticipation—that I remember from DiMaggio’s days in the Bronx. DiMaggio was the only one who could silence an entire stadium. Perhaps we don’t demand as much from A-Rod. Baseball was once our devotional, our secular church, and we expected everything from the Jolter. We felt his pain when he couldn’t deliver, and his pain was ours.
5.
Baseball wasn’t a huckster’s paradise when the Jolter was in the middle of his streak. At least it wasn’t for the players. One has to wonder what Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Happy Chandler, baseball’s first two commissioners, might have thought of players growing magical mountains of muscle. We don’t have to ponder about Bud Selig, baseball’s current commissioner, a folksy and congenial man who would croon in 1995: “If baseball has a problem, I must say candidly that we were not aware of it,” while the home run derbies of McGwire & Co. revived baseball’s sagging attendance and brought the game roaring into a new century. If Selig shut his eyes, it was because Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa (and later Alex Rodriguez) seemed good for business.15
And now, according to Murray Chass, baseball has its own “Hall of Infamy,” whose charter members are Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, and Pete Rose. But it sounds a bit sanctimonious to crystallize baseball’s affliction around a bunch of All-Stars. As Bruce Jenkins said in the San Francisco Chronicle: “Bonds was a steroid guy who came up to the plate against a steroid guy and grounded out to a steroid guy. Next time up, he got robbed on a great catch by a steroid guy. . . . Silence the moralists. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”16
A player’s career, former outfielder Doug Glanville reminds us, “is always a blink in a stare.” He arrives, becomes a wonder boy, then watches himself begin to wane as he runs from the nightmare of his own coming annihilation in the big leagues. “Enter steroids.”17
It’s an invidious ride, where players were “imbued with the belief that a failure to cheat and risk one’s health was made at the potential cost of a career,” writes Harvey Araton. One can only recall the Clipper, who couldn’t thrive without his endless half-cups of coffee during a game, who had a terrifying need not to falter once, and who wouldn’t let the Mick or any other Yankee outfielder intrude upon his domain; DiMaggio never would have danced with Morris Engelberg on a playing field. It’s not that he was holier than Roger Clemens or A-Rod or Mark McGwire. It’s that he would never have allowed himself to swell up in front of our eyes the way Bonds and McGwire did, and become a baseball Frankenstein.18
We remember him for the silver in his hair, for his demonized and masochistic devotion to Marilyn, for the childlike pride he had in his own game and the melancholy that seized him whenever he couldn’t help the Yankees win, but most of all, we remember him as an icon that is embedded in the American dream. He was almost fictional, a kind of Jay Gatsby transposed from the Jazz Age to the Depression and the shock of wealth after World War II; like Gatsby, the Jolter arrived out of nowhere and had to invent himself; both of them believed in Scott Fitzgerald’s orgiastic green light, in the notion of a magical, limitless future that seemed to rise right out of the “fresh, green breast of the new world,” right out of the American mist. And DiMaggio remains a distinctly American icon, one that could have been born in no other place, not only because baseball is our pastime but because the game itself was once linked with the nation’s innocence and ambition.19
Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, is startled when he meets Meyer Wolfsheim, the gambler who helped fix the World Series of 1919. “It never occurred to me,” says Nick, “that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”20
It’s no accident that the Yankee dynasty, and its dominance through most of the twentieth century, began just after the Black Sox scandal, with the arrival of Ruth, then Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Roger Maris, Reggie Jackson, A-Rod, and Derek Jeter, like some phantasmagoric replica of American corporate life played out in pinstripes. Underlying this pinstripe army are the ghosts of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other bumpkins who tossed away the World Series for peanuts and the promise of a gold mine. Jackson’s fall from grace, his anonymous journey across America with his glove and bats, is a far cry from Clemens and McGwire withdrawing into their gated communities with a real gold mine. Jackson is as sad as history and myth. And the Jolter seems to share the same sadness and silence. He wasn’t a country boy with paper clips in his pocket; he dressed like a movie star, but there’s a curious string that ties DiMaggio with Shoeless Joe, a gorgeousness about their play that could only have happened at a time when baseball itself was a spectacle that had not yet morphed into a piece of the entertainment machine, but was rather like a wild country where entire teams could rush out onto the field for a battle royal, while their fans joined them or sat back in ribald delight.
Players and fans were barnstormers in their own fashion, with each year a constant, glorious summer, so that DiMaggio could sit in San Francisco or forage through the streets of Manhattan in a snowstorm and still feel he was five minutes away from center field. There was always “an outfielder’s sky” for the Jolter, no matter where he was. That sky was the mark of his own myth; he and Shoeless Joe had very little lore outside of baseball itself. Their culture was the culture of the game. The Jolter didn’t have a magic bat, like Black Betsy, or a glove held together with paper clips. But he had his sweet spot in center field. And he couldn’t woo Marilyn with anything other than the grace he’d had on the field, or offer her much besides the devotion of an ex-outfielder whose insights were limited to an outfielder’s sky.
He was her Slugger and would remain so, even when she was married to her Owl. It was a twentieth-century romance, foolish and full of heartbreak, and we remember the way he mourned her while he unraveled. He was a proletarian prince, wounded in one heel; it wasn’t any of his records—his MVPs, his batting championships, his destruction of the Red Sox during the 1949 pennant race, even his hitting streak in ’41—that sticks to us as much as the memory of that heel. He was our Philoctetes, wrenched from Greek myth, who could redeem us through his suffering. In his last four years as a major leaguer, he seldom played without a good deal of pain. We could see him grimace under the pinched bill of his baseball cap, watch him limp after a devilish tear into second base. We worried that he might not rise up again in that special shoe of his, his cleatless cleat. And when he did retire in ’51, weren’t we a little relieved that at least now he wouldn’t be crippled for life? But we haven’t stopping dreaming of him and the outfielder’s sky that only he could reveal . . .
The only other athlete who ever haunted me as much as DiMaggio was Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics. Russell was like a tall octopus with two arms rather than eight; but he might as well have had eight arms out on the court. He could b
lock any ball with those tentacles of his. But there was never an extra motion or an extra move. He would glide past an opponent like an elegant ghost and close off every avenue to the basket. Russell’s cool fire reached beyond basketball. He had a kind of poetry that no one else on the court understood or possessed. That didn’t remove him from his teammates. He was the ultimate team player. But none of the other Celtics could approach his strange syncopation.
DiMaggio also had a language of his own. It wasn’t simply that he was all by himself in center field, a wayfarer a world from home plate. The whole team moved according to his rhythm, depended on it, but could never really grasp the undercurrents of that rhythm. No one could. The Yankee Clipper was a singularity, a freak of nature who emerged out of nowhere with a sense of form. He was moody, inarticulate without his bat and glove. But until that heel hobbled him, his play was like a string of perfect sentences. And I realized that DiMaggio, who could barely pronounce his name in public, was a novelist’s dream. The phantom that Grantland Rice wrote about in “An Ode to the Jolter” was as much of an artist as an athlete. His outfielder’s sky wasn’t inhabited by any other player; it was that kingdom where he thrived. And those of us who ever watched him could feel a melody that was akin to baseball but wasn’t really a part of it.
In Lives Like Loaded Guns, Lyndall Gordon writes that Emily Dickinson’s celebrated dashes, which allowed her to catapult the reader from image to image without a chance to breathe, “push the language apart to open up the space where we live without language.” But that space without language is also a language. And it’s into this territory that DiMaggio takes us, an incredible chasm where no one else has ever dared to go.21
Notes
Prologue
1. Simons, “Joe DiMaggio and the American Ideal,” 21.
2. Grantland Rice, “An Ode to the Jolter,” Sporting News, 1947; 66; Cramer, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” 66.
3. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, xi.
4. Cramer, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” 126.
5. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 479.
6. DiMaggio, Lucky to Be A Yankee, 52; Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 177.
7. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 151.
8. Updike, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” 305.
9. Quoted in Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 64, 58; Halberstam, Summer of ’49, 62.
10. Halberstam, Summer of ’49, 60; Talese, “The Silent Season of a Hero,” 4; Vecsey, “DiMaggio Left a Mark.”
11. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 99, 87.
12. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 113.
13. Mailer, Marilyn, 97.
14. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 327.
15. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, 325.
16. Mailer, Marilyn, 100.
17. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 160; Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 331.
18. Jacobson, Toots; Bainbridge, “Toots World: I, How Far Can We Go?” 50.
19. Bainbridge, “Toots World: I, How Far Can We Go?” 72.
20. Ibid.
21. Bai nbridge, “Toots World: I, How Far Can We Go?” 50; Bainbridge, “Toots World: II, Friendship,” 56.
22. Bainbridge, “Toots World: II, Friendship,” 56.
23. Brainbridge, “Toots World: III, Guys Like Us,” 73.
ONE
“Our National Exaggeration”
1. Creamer, Babe, 154.
2. Ibid., 221, 14, 191.
3. Ibid., 330.
4. Burns and Sanders, New York, 360.
5. Smith, “The Babe Was Always a Boy,” 161; Creamer, Babe, 321.
6. Creamer, Babe, 318, 81.
7. Ibid., 403.
8. Ibid., 403; Schumach, “Babe Ruth, Baseball Idol.”
9. Creamer, Babe, 428.
10. Burns and Sanders, New York, 315, 317; Leach, “Brokers and the New Corporate, Industrial Order,” 235.
11. Burns and Sanders, New York, 360.
12. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 64; Creamer, Babe, 322; Berra, Introduction to Sultans of Swat, 59.
TWO
The Walloping Wop
1. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 17.
2. Cramer, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” 74.
3. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?, 51.
4. Cramer, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” 74.
5. Simon, “The Silent Superstar,” 2.
6. Simons, “Joe DiMaggio and the American Ideal,” 37.
7. Cramer, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” 164, 63.
8. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 55.
9. Engelberg and Schneider, DiMaggio, 30.
10. Halberstam, Summer of ’49, 56; Engelberg and Schneider. DiMaggio, 287.
11. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 74.
12. Gould, “The Streaks of Streaks,” 174, 175.
13. Ibid.,” 185.
14. DiMaggio, Lucky to Be a Yankee, 207.
15. Gould, “The Streaks of Streaks,” 187.
16. Seidel, Streak, xi.
17. Ibid., xii, 1.
18. Ibid., 1.
19. Ibid., 5, 16.
20. Ibid., xiii.
21. Ibid., 225.
22. Ibid., 223.
23. Ibid., 2, 3.
THREE
Joltin’ Joe and the Ghost of Lou Gehrig
1. Seidel, Streak, 11; 93.
2. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 192; Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 85.
3. Eig, Luckiest Man, 207, 205.
4. Ibid., 360.
5. Cramer, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” 74.
6. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 198.
7. Cramer, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” 74.
8. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 210.
FOUR
“C’mon, Joe, Talk to Me”
1. Pennington, “The Forgotten Pioneers.”
2. Berkow, “17 from Black Baseball.”
3. Brashler, Josh Gibson, 24–25.
4. Ibid., 42, 40.
5. Ibid., 142, 129, 130.
6. Ibid., 137, 136.
7. Buck O’Neil, quoted in Berkow, “17 from Black Baseball.”
8. Creamer, Babe, 41, 185, 270.
9. Brashler, Josh Gibson, 142.
10. Eig, Luckiest Man, 2.
11. Eig, Opening Day, 12.
12. Eig, Luckiest Man, 23, 4, 44.
13. Engelberg and Schneider, DiMaggio, 99.
14. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 226.
15. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 41.
16. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 236.
17. Ibid., 315; Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 93.
18. Halberstam, Summer of ’49, 206.
19. Ibid., 207.
FIVE
The Wounded Warrior
1. DiMaggio, Lucky to Be a Yankee, 137.
2. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 256.
3. Ibid., 251.
4. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 91.
5. Creamer, Babe, 403.
6. Helfers and Davis, “The DiMaggio Era,” 78.
7. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 21–23.
8. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 261.
9. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 101.
10. Ibid., 106, 105.
11. Durso, “Joe DiMaggio”; Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 69.
12. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 100, 127.
13. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 306, 303.
14. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 122; Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 297, 300.
15. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 121.
16. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 313.
17. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 128.
18. Halberstam, Summer of ’49, 46.
SIX
The Princess of Yankee Stadium
1. Halberstam, Summer of ’49, 5, 137.
2. Cramer
, Joe DiMaggio, 315.
3. Mailer, Marilyn, 118.
4. Ibid., 78.
5. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 324.
6. Mailer, Marilyn, 157.
7. Ibid., 97.
8. Leaming, Marilyn Monroe, 34; Kazan, A Life, 408, 540, 415.
9. Kazan, A Life, 455.
10. Mailer, Marilyn, 96.
11. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 333.
12. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 139.
13. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 329; 331; Leaming, Marilyn Monroe, 86.
14. Mailer, Marilyn, 119.
SEVEN
Mr. Marilyn Monroe
1. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 143.
2. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, 325.
3. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 357.
4. Ibid., 360.
5. Mailer, Marilyn, 118; Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, 329.
6. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, 339.
7. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 362.
8. Churchwell, Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, 233.
9. Ibid., 363.
10. Ibid., 366.
11. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 144.
12. Leaming, Marilyn Monroe, 127.
13. Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, 349.
14. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 367; Spoto, Marilyn Monroe, 350.
15. Cramer, Joe DiMaggio, 368.
16. Ibid., 370.
EIGHT
“Bigger Than the Statue of Liberty”
1. Allen, Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 148.
2. Ibid., 149.
3. Leaming, Marilyn Monroe, 135.
4. Capote, Music for Chameleons, 230.
5. Leaming, Marilyn Monroe, 168.
6. Miller, Timebends, 359.
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