Say It Ain’t So

When Joseph Paul DiMaggio died at 84 in 1999, there were few people left alive who had ever seen him play. His time as a ballplayer (1936-1951) preceded the triumph of television and was witnessed by paying customers in an era when there were no major league teams west of the Mississippi. To be sure, his accomplishments as a New York Yankee glittered on the sports pages of the time, and his form as a batter, glimpsed in movie house newsreels, was powerful and elegant. But in some strange, indefinable way, DiMaggio’s athletic skills were not what mattered to all those people who mourned his death. Their laments were about something else: the loss of a special kind of American grace.

The meaning of “grace” is difficult to define, as elusive in its American usage as that other word often applied to DiMaggio: “class.” But those who admired DiMaggio insisted that he possessed both qualities. Often, they cited the things that DiMaggio would not do. In an era of endless celebrity slobbering, DiMaggio never sat with Barbara Walters to weep about Marilyn Monroe. He never published a tell-all autobiography, retailing his sexual exploits or demanding pity. During the long years after his retirement as a player, he seemed to wear his fame lightly, insisting on his privacy without becoming a bitter recluse. He was never vulgar. He was never a boor.

In “Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life,” Richard Ben Cramer grapples valiantly with the mystery of DiMaggio’s enduring image, his transformation into a legend and a hero.

“Joe didn’t want to help with biography,” he writes. “He didn’t want to help anybody know his life. It was a smart move by a smart man--canny, anyway. In latter years he cultivated the distance that set him apart from every other person of fame. He was revered for his mystery. We cheered him for never giving himself entirely to us.”

Cramer wants us to believe that he has solved the mysteries of his subject, unraveled the riddles within the public enigma. And his thesis is a familiar one in modern biography: The public man was largely a fiction; the bronze god had feet of clay. In Cramer’s view, the image of DiMaggio was a fiction, carefully tailored, nurtured and edited by DiMaggio himself.

Cramer’s DiMaggio was a cheap, egocentric miser, who used friends as gophers and flunkies and dropped them abruptly when it suited his purposes. He lived as if he expected someone else to pick up the tab: for food, lodging, clothes and personal responsibilities. In 1939, he married his first wife, an aspiring actress named Dorothy Arnold, but continued playing around with many other women. “You wouldn’t have thought God made so many eager American women,” Cramer writes about DiMaggio in 1941, the year of his great 56-game hitting streak. “But it seemed like every one He made had a friend on the hotel switchboard, or went to school with the bellboy’s sister, or got the room number somehow. Sometimes, they’d call from the lobby. ‘Yeah, come on up,’ Joe would say into the phone. And any other fellows who were visiting would know, Daig was going to be tied up for a while. When she got there, Joe would take her right into the bedroom and, as he said, ‘give her a good pump.’ ”

While reserving the right to cheat, DiMaggio was often jealous of Dorothy. He was frequently irritated by her loudness and the way she spent his money. At the same time he was grappling with the scrutiny that came with immense fame. “He was the most famous man in America,” Cramer writes (about a year when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president), “a man at every moment watched. But there was so much about his life that he didn’t want anybody to see.”

He certainly would not have wanted the public to see or hear what went on with Dorothy after Pearl Harbor, according to Cramer. While other public figures ignored their deferments (Joe was 3-A) and enlisted, DiMaggio, we’re told, did everything possible to avoid joining up. By the middle of the 1942 season, DiMaggio was in a slump and being booed. Writes Cramer: “Dorothy was telling him every day (or every day they were talking) that he ought to be signed up, that the boos were never going to stop till he enlisted. Joe said she didn’t know a thing about it. If he got a few hits, there’d be nothing but cheers.”

He was finally shamed into enlisting in 1943 (“Dorothy wanted him in the Army--she’d made that clear enough; otherwise it would be divorce.”) He served his country playing exhibition baseball in California and Hawaii, and Dorothy divorced him anyway. The judge ordered the settlement: $14,000 in a lump sum, $150 a month to care for their son, Little Joe. According to Cramer, this rankled the hero:

“The way DiMaggio saw it, he had to write out a check for fourteen thousand--as much as he’d paid for his family’s house--just for the privilege of paying more every month. And that money would come from his own pocket--he’d have no way to earn it back.”

Alas, we are asked to take all of the above on faith. It’s infuriating that there are no footnotes in this book, no page notes, no apparatus of sourcing. Cramer is a very good reporter (his piece about Ted Williams is one of the best profiles I’ve ever read). But the general tone of this book is right out of the Bob Woodward School of Trust-Me-I’m-A-Great-Reporter. Cramer, the omniscient author, doesn’t tell us how he knows that DiMaggio got it on with all those women. He doesn’t say how he knows that Joe used the expression “give her a good pump.” Or how he learned about DiMaggio’s personal reaction to the divorce settlement. Or how he knew that there was so much in his life, even in 1941, that he did not want the world to know.

This blurry biographical strategy is particularly galling in the parts of the book that will surely get the most attention. One is Cramer’s charge that DiMaggio was, in effect, mobbed-up. According to Cramer, DiMaggio’s relationship with the Mob started in the 1930s, when his appearances at various clubs run by racket guys were rewarded by cash deposits in a secret DiMaggio trust fund (by 1951, the hidden money would total about a million untaxed dollars). The Mob guys didn’t ask him to throw ballgames; they just liked him to add “class” to their joints. And Joe’s insatiable Depression-era hunger for money did the rest. On page 246, Cramer writes about the way DiMaggio justified this arrangement by describing Joe’s annoyance with the requests made of him by strangers and self-serving pals:

“The thing they couldn’t seem to keep in mind: an appearance by DiMaggio was valuable--money in the bank. By ‘48, it was literally money in the Bowery Bank, where Joe’s mob friends had established a trust fund account for his benefit. Here’s how the system worked: say Joe did end up, with some photogenic broad on his arm, at El Morocco for the late show--or at the Copacabana, the Stork Club, or the Cotton Club. That was promotion, it gave the place class. Of course, he was never going to see a tab. That went without saying. But shouldn’t Joe get something for lending the glamour of his presence? Sure, he should. . . . So all the managers of all the clubs knew, if the Clipper made an appearance, they should put a little something--say, a couple hundred bucks--into the trust account, next day.”

Cramer assures us that the secret account was at the Bowery Bank, favored by Tammany Hall politicians and racket guys and thus immune to inspection in the years when Democrats held the White House. Joe had to be careful, of course, because the existence of the trust fund could get him thrown out of baseball in disgrace. Frank Costello, who was the power behind some of the New York joints, was a discreet man. But DiMaggio had to ask a friend to tell hoodlums such as Longie Zwillman and Meyer Lansky to stop showing their affection for him in public. This didn’t hurt the friendships. Cramer says that Longie once asked Joe to keep three boxes for him, supposedly filled with cash, and DiMaggio still had them years after Zwillman’s death. When the earthquake rocked San Francisco in October 1989, Joe moved through police lines to the family house in the Marina, entered his private quarters and left with a garbage bag. Cramer says, without elaboration, that it contained $600,000 in cash. Longie’s money? Money paid for autographed baseballs? Cramer doesn’t say.

He also offers no documentation for the Mob stories. What was the name and number of the secret trust account? Where was the branch of the Bowery Bank? When could DiMaggio begin to draw upon it? Are there records of withdrawals after his retirement in 1951? Did the IRS know about its existence? Do any government documents support the story? Cramer never tells us. But he does go on to let us know how DiMaggio thought about this secret aspect of his life and the dangers it could present.

“Joe understood the bargain perfectly, too. Or to put it another way: he understood the bargain with perfection. He could have honor, our adulation, the glory of the Big Name . . . he could have men to sit with him, take him around, buy for him, do for him . . . he could have any woman he fancied--fresh or famous--and no questions asked . . . he could have all the money he needed, and a tidy pile left over, growing in a dark place. He understood: we would give him anything--if he would always be the hero we required.”

Since DiMaggio never talked to Cramer--in spite of repeated requests for interviews--how can we know the old ballplayer thought this way? If we assume that this tale is based on Mob gossip (whose source can’t be named), our skepticism must be almost absolute. Mob guys, particularly aging low-level hoodlums, are notorious bullshit artists. When they are not standing around in bars or social clubs, scratching their crotches and dreaming of drug deals, they like talking about their immense knowledge of the weaknesses of the famous. Listen and you hear the same names you read in Mob histories: Frank and Momo, Longie and Meyer and Jimmy Blue-eyes and on and on. If one of these Mob lowlifes crawls out of the sewer, claiming to know something lousy about someone famous, it’s best to think of the tale as entertainment, not journalism, history or biography. As a great editor once warned me, when I was a young newspaperman: “If you want it to be true, it usually isn’t.”

Some of the same aggravating blur works its way through the sad tale of Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. Early on, as he begins to learn about Marilyn, Joe discovers she isn’t “a little orphan girl.” Her mother is alive, recently released from a mental hospital. “Joe knew all about making up your life story. He didn’t judge her for that. And he knew why she did it. He seemed to understand (without a word said) how she wanted to be a star--had to be the biggest star, a perfect star.” Hmm. “Withal, he bound her to him with the only cords that could ever keep her--those of her own ambition. She wanted to learn to be like him.”

How does Cramer know all this? He doesn’t tell us. Nor does he provide a source for the following paragraph about their courtship:

“But he loved it more when it was just for him--or even better, when they’d get to her place, and she’d drop that dress on the floor (there was never anything on underneath), and scrub all that shit off her face, and drop the towel coming out of the bathroom, lit perhaps by the one bulb behind her, or the blue of the TV he’d flicked on . . . and there she was, his girl, so pale, past vanilla, it was white in her young skin--dairy milk--and perfect, tiny-boned, delicate, like a twelve-year-old virgin, childlike as her giggle when he grabbed her, then, covered her with him, filled her, crushed her sometimes (Christ forgive him) he was trying to kill her . . . God, he never wanted to jolt anybody like this girl.”

Christ forgive my skepticism, too, but I’d really like to know the source for this encounter with the Terminal Shiksa. How did Cramer know about Joe that “he felt like his real life--his aliveness--was with Marilyn.” (Imagine Joe turning to Toots Shor and saying: “My real life, Toots, my aliveness--is with Marilyn. . . .”) Early in the relationship, when a photographer shot Marilyn from a high angle at some Hollywood affair, thus memorializing her cleavage, Cramer writes of DiMaggio’s reaction:

“He was furious. He was screaming at her. Like she’d done the whole thing to embarrass him. She tried to explain, it was publicity, it was part of her job, she had to show herself.

“ ‘SHOW ‘EM NOTHING!’ Joe just shouted her down.

“But that was the dress she got from the studio!

“ ‘WEAR YOUR OWN GODDAMN CLOTHES. . . .’ ”

Where did this dialogue come from? Is it part of the endless Marilyn literature? Marilyn Monroe killed herself in 1962, and DiMaggio didn’t speak to Cramer, so the source is important to the biography’s credibility. Many other passages, lush with details, demand some kind of concrete answer to the question: How does he know? This one, from Marilyn’s point of view during the courtship, is typical:

“She liked to watch him. He was beautiful, the way he moved, and so strong. And then they’d stand, staring out at the sea and sky and the soaring birds, and the only sound came from the gulls above and the water at their feet, and the dull, distant grumble of engines in the city behind them. They’d stay for a long time, and then finish up at some bar near the water, that always turned out to be owned by a cousin, or a cousin of a friend, or a friend of a cousin. And they’d bring drinks, and little cups of crabmeat with crackers and sauce that tasted like heaven, and there was never any bill.”

There are some sources for the more serious stuff. Marilyn’s drama coach, Natasha Lytess, says in an unpublished interview quoted by Marilyn biographer Donald Spoto that the actress would call at 2 or 3 in the morning “when DiMaggio was being so filthy to her, when he beat her.” There was a “famous” fight at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, and Cramer quotes a hairdresser named Gladys Whitten: “The husband got very, very mad with her, and he beat her up a little. It was on her shoulders, but we covered it up, you know.” Photographer Milton Greene’s wife Amy also saw the bruises on Marilyn’s back. Cramer doesn’t say whether he interviewed these witnesses or if they are even alive. If he relied on previously published sources, it would help to know if the stories ran in The New York Times or the National Enquirer. By page 380, the cumulative blur of the mushy technique had made this reader lose trust in the book.

When I read here that Joe was grateful to Marilyn for sending him to a psychiatrist, I just don’t know whether this ever happened. Cramer says bluntly that after their divorce, DiMaggio still loved Monroe, and when she broke up with Arthur Miller, he went after her again. Joe was so much in love that he first hired an L.A. private detective named Fred Otash (a big talker, “but Joe’s wiseguy pals said Otash could back up his talk”), lent Marilyn $10,000 toward the down payment on a new house and suffered with jealousy over rumors about Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers. By page 410, DiMaggio and Marilyn are once more having a terrible fight and “Marilyn would appear at her plastic surgeon’s office the following day--she feared she had a broken nose.” Then on page 412, there’s a long sequence describing a renewed courtship during the summer of 1962.

“And that July, Joe did what he’d never done with her, what he never could do before in his life. He told her it didn’t matter what she wanted to do--about the pictures, or where they lived, or the shrink, or the pills, or the bills, or the . . . anything.

“He was her guy--and he would stay with her.”

Joe proposes that they remarry. Marilyn accepts. A date is picked: Aug. 8. On Aug. 5, she kills herself. We get more of the familiar Kennedy-linked conspiracy theories but nothing conclusive. In DiMaggio’s anguish, we are told, he rails against the Kennedys and against Frank Sinatra and spends all of one night beside the corpse, “gazing at her face, talking to her, praying for her, crying.” Cramer relies for some details here on a man named Harry Hall, a low-level wise guy and police informer, who claimed to be a DiMaggio pal. Some pal. Poor Marilyn is buried on Aug. 8, “the day Joe and Marilyn would have been remarried.”

Again, all of this might be true (although I have my doubts), but the sources are like a bowl of gruel. The book’s strengths are in its reconstruction of Joe’s childhood in San Francisco and the accounts of his glittering baseball career. But although Cramer’s DiMaggio is a great player, he is also an indifferent jealous brother, a dreadful father, a wretched husband. In the squalid final sections, when Joe is presented as a greedy schemer, cashing in on the “collectibles” market, it’s hard to keep reading. There are long runs of source-free (or summarized) dialogue between Joe and his final lawyer-agent, Morris Engelberg; verbatim accounts of private telephone conversations between Engelberg and another memorabilia merchant; and a scene during Joe’s final hours in his home in Florida (rigged up like a hospital room), when an impatient Engelberg chooses to pull the plug and let Joe die. He then proceeds to pry Joe’s 1936 World Series ring off his dead finger and is seen wearing it the next day.

All these stories might be true. Cramer certainly worked hard, and his book contains nearly 10 pages of acknowledgments, offering thanks to hundreds of people interviewed over a five-year span and citing books that helped him in his own work. But the decision to avoid direct sources--particularly for the intimate stories and the allegations about the Mob--has grievously wounded his book. That major flaw is compounded by the adoption of a semi-fictional intimacy that allows the writer to penetrate his subject’s mind, that very private place where the mysteries of Joe DiMaggio abided for two-thirds of the 20th century. The mysteries, alas, remain.