Joltin’ Joe Has Gone : Yankee Always a Picture of Class

At a luncheon when the Reagan presidency was in flower, an editor who was holding forth on American heroes asked if I’d take on a tough one.

“The Yankee Clipper,” the editor said. “Jolting Joe. Did you know Marilyn used to call him ‘Joe the Slugger’ in that breathy, bedroom voice of hers. There’s sarcasm there, don’t you think, and doesn’t that say a lot?”

Some of the biography the editor wanted would describe high deeds at Yankee Stadium, as Baseball Joe captured New York. Some would describe his life and hard times with Marilyn Monroe.

Eventually, Sports Illustrated decided to excerpt this book I had not yet agreed to write and offered me access to all the Joe and Marilyn files at all the Time Inc. publications--the research behind several hundred magazine articles. There it was, an offer I could not refuse.

A year later, starting the writing, I began with a summation of DiMaggio as he appeared in the fullness of years:

“Still formidable in his eighth decade, he is patient with a public that does not want him to grow old. His manner is practiced, courteous, even smooth. Certainly he will sign an autograph. He is flattered that you asked. Yes, the pennant race this season looks exciting and no, he certainly would not count out the New York Yankees. How is his golf? Well, it’s not as good as he’d like it to be, but he has some fun.

“The geniality--it is the solemn geniality of a solemn figure--appears innate, but it is something Joe DiMaggio has cultivated, nurtured and developed for half a century. It surrounds him, pleasing his idolaters and concealing by its large expanse the complex, sometimes brooding man within.

“DiMaggio is comfortable with these circumstances. He wants his admiring public. He enjoys being fussed over, and who can blame him for that? But he wants a distance from the public, a deep greenbelt of privacy, and who can blame him for that either? His has been a thrilling life, but it also has been lonely and jolted by tragedy.

“When someone approaches to ask about Marilyn Monroe, the geniality dissolves. He rises and says in measured icy tones, ‘Stop right there.’ The words fall like a black curtain in front of him.

“They were ardent lovers, wonderful friends and perfectly wretched as husband and wife. And, of course, their affection, play, their shouted bickerings and private lusts were foreclosed beyond redemption when she took her life one August night in 1962.

“After that he wept and said, ‘I love you,’ and kissed her corpse as it lay in an open coffin.

“What really can he, can anyone, say about that?

“He tried to love her well.

“Somehow he failed.”

He Was Always a Cut Above

The Joe DiMaggio I remember was charming and conflicted, vital and suspicious, vigorous and besieged by arthritis and peppered lightly with paranoia.

He wanted to be famous and he wanted to be left alone. He married the bounciest and most restless blond movie star of an era and then expected her to settle down in a quiet corner of San Francisco, at 2150 Beach St., for a life of ironing shirts and scrambling eggs. It amazed some of Marilyn’s friends that her marriage to DiMaggio lasted as long as it did--nine months.

Although there was plenty of substance in his 84 years, and remarkable energy in the man, his life finally emerges, at least to me, as most of all a triumph of style. Joe DiMaggio knew how to play the public and the press, as few prominent figures before or since. (The young Charles Lindbergh and John Kennedy of the Camelot Kennedys were cut from some of this same cloth of gold.)

Mark Reese, the son of the Dodger captain and shortstop, Pee Wee Reese, remembers charming visits to the Hall of Fame with his father. A plane ride from Kentucky to Binghamton, N.Y. The drive up to Cooperstown. The room overlooking Lake Glimmerglass.

“Dad always took the bed by the window,” Mark said. “He’d earned it.”

Unlike the other Hall of Famers, DiMaggio did not arrive by rented car. He chose to come by chartered helicopter.

“Why is that?” Mark Reese asked his father one summer.

“Son,” Pee Wee Reese said, “you have to understand. There are Hall of Famers. And then there is Joe DiMaggio.”

DiMaggio’s major league career, though distinguished, was relatively brief. He played for only 13 seasons. By contrast, Willie Mays played for 22, Hank Aaron for 23, Ty Cobb for 24.

DiMaggio was a strong right-handed power hitter, but he could not hit a baseball as far as two of his approximate contemporaries, Hank Greenberg and Jimmy Foxx. Nor could he match their numbers. Greenberg and Foxx each had a 58-home run season. DiMaggio never hit more than 46. DiMaggio’s lifetime home run total, 361, is respectable, but bettered by Duke Snider, Frank Howard, Norm Cash and more than a score of other mortals who did not ride in choppers.

Batting skill? DiMaggio had a fine eye and seldom struck out. He finished with a lifetime .325 average. Over 23 years, Rogers Hornsby batted .358. Ted Williams retired at .344. In the least approachable of records, Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average was .367. Simple arithmetic tells us that Cobb outhit DiMaggio by the significant margin of 42 points.

Fly balls? In his long-striding, graceful way, DiMaggio hauled in some long ones, but not as many as Mays or Tris Speaker. On a per-game basis, he caught fewer flies than Richie Ashburn of the Philadelphia Whiz Kids, or his own gifted brother, the bespectacled Dominic DiMaggio of the Boston Red Sox.

Baseball is more than the sum of its numbers. I would not argue with the contention that DiMaggio was both a center fielder of surpassing grace and the best .325 hitter who ever lived. But he could not homer with Ruth, hit with Cobb or play outfield with Willie Mays.

Why then at Cooperstown had he become the icons’ icon? Certainly the blond was a factor, but only one of several. To understand the nature of his triumph, we have to go back in time to the 1930s, when Hitler was rising, when America was staggering out of the Depression and when Joe DiMaggio was inventing Joe DiMaggio.

It Wasn’t Easy From the Start

He was born in Martinez, a small town north of San Francisco, into the family of an immigrant fisherman called Giuseppe, who fathered eight children, three of whom, Joe, Dom and Vince, became major league center fielders. This seems reasonable evidence that a gene carries center-fielding skill, like eye color.

All the boys bore the same middle name, Paul. The household language was Italian; Joe DiMaggio had to go out of his home to learn English. Tom, the oldest brother, played ball until he blew out a shoulder. Another brother, Michael, drowned when he fell off the family fishing boat, Rosalie, in rough seas in 1953. (“I hated fishing even before that,” Joe DiMaggio once told me. “I hated the smell of fish and the crabs. I used to get seasick.”)

Vince, the eldest of the three major league DiMaggios, broke in with the Boston Braves in 1937 and lasted, with a variety of teams, for 10 National League seasons. He was a fine fielder, but a wild swinger. He led the National League in strikeouts six times. When I found him in North Hollywood in 1984, Vince was surviving on Social Security, a tiny baseball pension and such money as he could make selling Fuller brushes.

“Joe and I don’t see each other much,” he said. “And that’s a shame. Families ought to stay close. Joe has a lot of money and some things I’d like, but I’ve got some things he’d like.”

“Such as?” I asked this bent and tired man.

“Such as a long, happy marriage,” Vince DiMaggio said.

Dom, three years younger than Joe, played center field for the Red Sox for 11 seasons. He was an outstanding outfielder and a good batter but at 5 feet 9, he had little power. Still, Red Sox fans composed an impassioned anthem that they sang to the tune of “O Tannenbaum”:

“Oh, Dominic DiMaggio,

“He’s better than his brother, Joe.”

Dom married a woman of means. After he quit baseball in 1953 he became president of a company that manufactured fiber cushions and, it was said, a millionaire. His name appeared in Tanglewood programs as a significant contributor to the Boston Symphony, a poor fisherman’s son, paying homage to Beethoven, beside Lowells and Cabots and Lodges.

Joe was different from Vince and Dom. He was bigger, more assertive, stronger and, well, different.

At 18, playing for the San Francisco Seals, Joe set a Pacific Coast League record by hitting safely in 61 consecutive games. He developed knee trouble, which led some major league teams to shy away, but two years later, in 1935, he batted .398 for the Seals. He was 20 years old. The Natural in real life, starring Joseph Paul DiMaggio.

The Yankees bought his contract for $25,000. The Bronx ballclub had discarded Babe Ruth in 1934, then finished second to Detroit, the team’s third consecutive second-place finish.

The big, rich, aggressive Yankee franchise, with its Bronx stadium then seating 67,000, needed pennants as redwood trees need water. Well before Joe DiMaggio had ever seen Broadway, public relations drumrolls rumbled through New York. This gifted youngster had, all by himself, saved the Seals and indeed the Pacific Coast League from bankruptcy. People loved to watch him play. The next great Yankee superstar--and drawing card--was on the way east.

Ed Barrow, who ran the Yankees for the team’s beer baron owner, Jacob Ruppert, told two older players from the Bay Area to take DiMaggio to spring training. Tony Lazzeri, the veteran second baseman, invited DiMaggio to join him and shortstop Frank Crosetti on the long drive to St. Petersburg, Fla., where the Yankees trained. Each man put up $15.

“We had to add another $5 to make it,” Crosetti said, “but anyway, we got by on 50 bucks, three guys eating, sleeping, gas everything for 50 bucks the whole damn way.”

Lazzeri and Crosetti shared the driving and then--it may have been in Texas, it may have been in Alabama--Lazzeri turned to DiMaggio in the back seat and said, “OK, champ. It’s your turn to drive.”

“I don’t know how to drive,” DiMaggio said.

Lazzeri turned to Crosetti. “Let’s throw the bum out and let him walk the rest of the way.”

DiMaggio was a superstar rookie, but a rookie still.

During a lively spring training, he bruised his left foot and the trainer started treating him with shortwave diathermy, then forgot about his patient. By the time the trainer came back, the foot was burned. DiMaggio could not play until the third week of the season.

When he did, he became the Yankees’ sharp spur. He batted .323 with 29 homers; Lou Gehrig batted .354 and hit 49. But where teammates affectionately spoke of Gehrig as a “good old, hard-working plow horse,” DiMaggio struck fire.

His throwing arm was so strong that he led the league in outfield assists. The Yankees won the 1936 pennant by 19 games. They won the pennant every year until 1940 and then won again in 1941 and ’42.

A Man Ahead of His Time

During that period DiMaggio achieved a personal peak, variously leading the league in homers, runs batted in and batting. Across the summer of 1941, when he batted .357, he put together the famous streak in which he batted safely in 56 consecutive games. He had become the dominant player on the dominant team in the dominant city in America.

But there is more to his accomplishments than that. The sporting press--no media in those days--regularly gathered at a New York restaurant called Toots Shor’s. Rules there forbade table hopping. Anyone bothering a celebrity for an autograph was bounced. At Table 1 in Shor’s you were likely to find Shor, DiMaggio and power newspaper columnists, people such as Bob Considine, Jimmy Cannon and later Red Smith, talking in good spirits and sipping same.

Everyone relaxed and gabbled and almost everybody drank. Personal habits--how much one did drink, which woman one was seeing--were not things these columnists would write. DiMaggio liked showgirls. Blond showgirls. Everybody at Table 1 knew that. But nobody stuck that in the paper. “Don’t write garbage,” went the line. “Write baseball. Write the game.”

DiMaggio relished talking baseball with the columnists, reliving his sunlit moments, and he found that in exchange for his friendship, the columnists would rally round him in print. His personal life, like the private life of Franklin Roosevelt, remained sacrosanct.

DiMaggio had to fight hard to drive up his Yankee salary. He started at $8,500, moved to $25,000 in his third season and, after the batting streak, battered his way to $42,000 for 1942. A number of reporters who were in the Yankees’ pocket--housemen, we called them--attacked DiMaggio as greedy. Others made fun of his origins. Someone actually wrote in Life magazine that despite his roots, DiMaggio’s breath did not smell of garlic and he did not comb his hair with olive oil.

“All I was trying to do was make as much money as I could,” he told me early in the 1980s. “What the hell was wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” Hank Greenberg said. “I did the same myself.”

“If I was playing today,” DiMaggio said, “and I had to negotiate a contract, I think I’d say to Steinbrenner, ‘First, George, I’d like half the franchise.’ ”

“In our day,” Greenberg said, “we were lucky the ballclubs paid for our uniforms.”

To terrorize DiMaggio, the Yankees complained to Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the baseball commissioner, that he was using an agent, fight manager Joe Gould, to advise him on his contracts and was paying him a percentage of his pay. If that were proven, Landis said, DiMaggio could be thrown out of baseball. Here is what happened next:

DiMaggio retreated to Table 1 at Shor’s and said to Bob Considine, the Hearst columnist: “This isn’t just about me. Landis is sending a message to all the players. ‘You can’t have an agent. You gotta stay dumb.’ ”

“Do you talk to Gould about your Yankee contracts?” Considine asked.

“You won’t quote me?”

“Of course not.”

“Sure I do. I talk to Gould, and my brother Tom and I even talk to Ty Cobb, one hell of a businessman. I talk to anybody I think can help me get paid what I deserve. This isn’t Germany. It’s America, a free country. I pay Gould for the endorsements he gets me. I keep my baseball salary for myself.”

Considine wrote a column without once quoting DiMaggio.

“The big league bosses are afraid that ballplayers like Joltin’ Joe will smarten up enough to hire fast-talking, tough agents to bargain,” Considine said. “If that day ever comes to pass, the ballclubs will have to pay all the blokes what they are actually worth.”

Landis retreated--and, obviously, in baseball, that day has come to pass.

He Was Bigger Than Life

On Nov. 19, 1939, DiMaggio married Dorothy Arnold, an attractive, blond contract actress at Universal Pictures, in a lavish wedding at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul in San Francisco. The marriage produced a son, Joe Jr.--from whom DiMaggio became estranged--and ended with a divorce in 1944. Dorothy’s complaint: “Joe preferred going out with the boys to staying home with me and the baby.”

DiMaggio spent 1943, ’44 and ’45 in the Army, playing service ball. When he rejoined the Yankees in 1946, he was not the player he had been--nor, except in certain thrilling bursts--would he ever be. But his presence continued to lift the team, and the Yankees won four more pennants before DiMaggio retired after the 1951 season.

As his skills ebbed, his later seasons became unhappy. Milton Gross wrote in the New York Post: “Instead of mellowing in the twilight, Joe has withdrawn into a shell. He sits by himself, or walks silent and unseeing, and talks to virtually no one with the ballclub. His active dislike for Manager Casey Stengel is apparent.”

Life obtained a copy of the Dodgers’ scouting report on the 1951 Yankees, publishing a withering critique of DiMaggio at 36:

“He can’t stop quick and throw hard. . . . He can’t run and won’t bunt. . . . He can’t pull a good fastball at all.”

Actually, in the last three games of the 1951 World Series, which the Yankees took from the Giants, DiMaggio cracked out six hits.

Even Life conceded, “DiMaggio was a better player than the scouting report made him out to be.”

But there was truth in the report. Its publication humiliated DiMaggio. Two weeks after his 37th birthday, he announced his retirement. He turned down the Yankees’ $100,000 offer to play in 1952 and addressed the press in the Yankee offices on Fifth Avenue: “I can no longer produce for my club, my teammates, my fans, the baseball their loyalty deserves.”

Joltin’ Joe was history. He knew it. He began to cry.

Stengel, privately happy to be rid of an aging star who had turned sullen, said dry-eyed: “I just give away the big guy’s glove. It’s going straight to the Hall of Fame.”

It was time for Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle.

DiMaggio had some job offers, but after that baseball career--how Mel Allen loved calling him “the Yankee Clipper”--what could he do for an encore?

Implausibly, and opening himself to terrible pain, he set about courting the national blond sex symbol, Norma Jean Baker, who called herself Marilyn Monroe.

“She’s a plain kid,” he told Jimmy Cannon. “She’d give up show business if I asked her. She’d quit the movies in a minute. Jimmy, this is one marriage that can’t miss.”

They married in a civil ceremony at San Francisco City Hall on Jan. 14, 1954. She did try a turn at housekeeping in San Francisco. They quickly learned more about one another.

He was neat, stacking up his coins on a dresser every night. She was sloppy, a mix of stockings on the floor.

He was repressed. She was hyperactive.

She wanted to play Grushenka in “The Brothers Karamazov.” He had never heard of Dostoevsky.

I think the hardest thing for him was her exhibitionism. But, after all, Marilyn’s business, her trade, was flirting with the world. As a small part of the world, I glimpsed that one evening in September 1954, at a party where I was asked to join Joe and Marilyn and a few others. The gathering was set in a suite near Central Park South in a room where every wall was a mirror.

Marilyn arrived in a tight black skirt and a translucent blouse, and the Broadway columnist Earl Wilson, bearing a camera, said, “Lean over, Marilyn, so I can get a picture of your cleavage.”

She did and then said, “Oh, Earl. You can see too much.”

She pulled up the blouse. But since it was translucent, Marilyn’s breasts now showed even more clearly.

DiMaggio never joined the party. He never showed up. By that time he had seen this sort of Marilyn performance more often than he could endure. Fine for Marilyn, but not for Mrs. Joe DiMaggio.

A few days later, Marilyn wriggled through the famous episode in “The Seven Year Itch” where, as she stood on a subway grating, her white skirt blew high. The shots one now sees have been doctored. Her actual lingerie left little to the imagination.

Harsh moments ensued. Marilyn flew back to Hollywood. DiMaggio retreated to Shor’s. They divorced on Oct. 27. But DiMaggio could not get over his trophy bride.

Years later, after Marilyn’s marriage to playwright Arthur Miller soured, she checked herself into Payne Whitney, a mental hospital in Manhattan, and discovered that she could not easily check out. She called DiMaggio. Somehow he forced the hospital to release her. Then he took her to spring training, where he had agreed to coach young Yankee hitters in the morning. Afternoons he took her to the beach. When tourists approached Marilyn for an autograph, Joe said, in his commanding way, “Leave the lady alone.”

By the time of her death, on the night of Aug. 4, 1962, she had been drinking too much, swallowing too many pills and bed-hopping without caution. Her closest relative, a half-sister living in Florida, one Bernice Miracle, asked DiMaggio to organize the funeral in L.A. at Westwood Village Mortuary. He kept it small and excluded Hollywood power types, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and her link to the Kennedy family, Peter Lawford.

“How could you bar those important people, Joe?” somebody asked.

“Because,” DiMaggio said, speaking of a love that would not die, “they killed her.”

Not the greatest ballplayer ever. A man who could not spell women’s liberation. In later years he seemed--no, actually became--arrogant and penurious. Very deep, as he aged, lay the broken dream: If only Marilyn had lived she would have taken him back.

The world will go on, as it always did when Joe DiMaggio played baseball. Now that he is gone, someone, probably Tom Lasorda, will blubber that Joe and Marilyn are reunited at last in the big ballpark-sound stage in the sky.

I don’t know about that. What I do know is that the Jolter reached out and seized life on earth with two strong hands.

They’re going to miss the chartered helicopter in Cooperstown.