Joltin’ Joe: The Great DiMaggio [an astrological profile]
Joe DiMaggio [pictured left, with sometime spouse] loved smoking. He favored Chesterfields, though he also enjoyed Camels and promoted them in advertisements. (“They have the mildness that counts with me”). When he came into the dugout after playing the field, a younger player would greet the Yankee Clipper with a cup of coffee and a lit cigarette. This was because Joe was royalty in the Yankee clubhouse. In 1936, at the age of twenty-one, he had the greatest rookie year of all time. The Yankees won the World Series that year, and the year after, and two years after that, and Joe was the star, a player of rare elegance who was at his best when the club needed him most. In 1941 he hit safely in fifty-six straight games, and even as other seemingly forever records (Ruth’s home runs, Gehrig’s consecutive games streak) have been broken, the mark still stands.
1941 was the last year before America’s entrance into World War II. The nation needed a hero, and Robert Mitchum playing detective Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely (1975) sums up the year in one gesture: he relies on the daily newspaper to see if DiMaggio can keep it up. The whole nation watched. A song was written about “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” with a chorus culminating in “We want you on our side.” Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of DiMaggio, one of the best sports biographies I have ever read, is subtitled The Hero’s Life, and the author proves his point with elan and ease without overlooking the subject’s dark side.
Here is Ben Cramer’s comparison of the aging DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, his rookie successor in center field at Yankee Stadium in 1951: (p. 297). “A fly ball would be dropping, when young Mantle, knees pumping up and down in a blur, would steak across the grass (at a pace [no one] had even seen on a ballfield) . . . to spear the ball before it hit the ground.” This was totally unlike “the loping spare stride of DiMaggio as he arrived to tarry elegantly at the place where the ball would come down.”
Sports writers used to fill up columns by wondering whether a trade of Joe DiMaggio for Ted Wiliams would have benefitted their respective teams, the Yankees and the rival Boston Red Sox. Sports writers used to fill up columns by wondering whether a trade of Joe DiMaggio for Ted Wiliams would have benefitted their respective teams, the Yankees and the rival Boston Red Sox. Yankee Stadium had a short right-field porch, and Williams, betting from the left wise, would surely hit more home runs. By contrast, Boston’s Fenway Park, with its famous Green Monster in left field, favored the right-hand hitting DiMaggio.
The Yankees were the dominant team of the 1940s; in the thirteen seasons DiMaggio played for the Yanks, the team won ten pennants, and nine World Series rings. DiMaggio was the better fielder, with the better throwing arm. He ran the bases brilliantly going from first to third, or scoring from second, on a single. Ben Cramer offers a beautiful summary of the perennial DiMaggio versus Williams debate (p.248): “Ted wanted to be the greatest hitter who ever lived (and at time he was cruelly mocked for saying so). But Joe’s ambition was more astonishing: he wanted to be perfect, not at something but everything — to abide, in other words, as a god.”
DiMaggio was the best player on the field in every game he played. He was a superior defender in center field; he was graceful; his swing was exemplary; and when necessary, he could win the big game with a hook slide eluding the catch’s tag. He played when he was hurt, and he was often hurt, and he put on a stoic face. Off the field, he wore custom-made suits; he was on the ten-best-dressed men list every year. And he wasn’t loud; wasn’t even assertive. What struck Marilyn Monroe about DiMaggio, when the couple met on a blind date, was that unlike other important or self-important men, Joe let others do the talking. And he was the one the others revered. A majority of players, when the question was put to them, said he was the player they admired most.
Hemingway’s comeback novel, The Old Man and the Sea, which won him the awards his early books deserved, featured an indefatigable fisherman whose ideal is “the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly.” It was a compliment DiMaggio valued. He enjoyed listening to a tape of Spencer Tracy reading The Old Man and the Sea: “I would like to fish with the Great DiMaggio. They say his father was a fisherman.”
David Halberstam, in his brilliant Summer of ’49, picked his simile carefully when he described the attitude of sports writers toward Joe. “They treated him as the White House press corps might treat a wildly popular president. They entered the locker room as men but changed back into boys when they approached DiMaggio’s locker.”[1]
But I began with the smoke, a fixture, because that cigarette stands for the unexpected side of DiMaggio – an aloof man, lonely, angry, sensitive, with an inviolable honor code. He demanded perfection of himself on and off the field – and complete loyalty from anyone who would be his friend. (There were many ex-friends over the years.) Coffee and cigarettes kept him going. No matter how much an injury hurt him, he wouldn’t complain. Only rarely did he show emotion on the field. In the 1947 World Serie, Al Gionfriddo of the Dodgers made a celebrated catch that robbed DiMaggio of a double. Disappointed, Joe kicked the dirt around second base. This is still talked about because no one could remember a second occasion in which DiMaggio made noise other than the crack of his bat.
Joe, the model of grace, had a fierce temper he kept hidden, and was quick to feel dissed. He was terse. If he said hello, it was a conversation. It was understood that Joe would have first dibs on any fly ball hit to right-center or left-center, but Hank Bauer, as a rookie right fielder in 1948, didn’t know that. Bauer caught a ball in deep right-center and DiMaggio gave him a dirty look. “Did I do something wrong?” “No,” Joe said, “but you’re the first son of a bitch who ever invaded my territory.”
In a rare slump Joe mumbled to himself but would talk to no one. If he felt slighted, he would go weeks without speaking to you, and “you” included the Yankee team manager. At a time when his established teammates (Berra, Rizzuto) were living with their families in New Jersey, he, a single man, lived in the Hotel Edison, the art deco hotel on West 47th Street in the heart of New York’s theater district. He hung out at Toots Shor’s on Fifty-Second Street and other New York hot spots. He had a very active sex life with showgirls. He dated a lot of splendid women, including Marlene Dietrich, and married the greatest of all starlets. But he was prone to insomnia and spent a lot of nights alone listening to Sinatra sing the Gershwins’ “Someone to Watch Over Me.” No intellectual, he; he favored Superman comic books.
DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra were probably the two most famous Italian-American men in the 1940s. The former epitomized baseball as the latter epitomized classic American popular song. Like Sinatra — who was born December 12, 1915, not much longer than a year after Joe D.’s birth on November 25, 1914, the centerfielder was a Sagittarius with his moon in Pisces. But whereas the skinny singer from Hoboken had Libra rising, Joe was a double Sagittarius; it was not only his sun sign but also his rising sign. Talk about fire; you can’t get a flame more intense than is latent in a double Sagittarius!
No wonder Joe made such ecstatic music with Marilyn Monroe, a Gemini with Leo rising and an Aquarius moon. They were made for each other. Their song was the Gershwins’ “Embraceable You.” Their lives were exclamatorily sexual. If sex were all, they’d have stayed a couple forever. The only problem was that that each year he got older and she remained young. He was the recently retired champ, while her meteoric rise was happening right now. He had old-fashioned values and wanted a wife and a family. He was incredibly jealous, possessive, and was totally outraged when photographers snapped Marilyn with her skirt swelling high to advertise The Seven-Year Itch. Sometimes he beat her. It couldn’t last, and didn’t. After the end of their nine-month marriage, Marilyn took up acting lessons with Lee Strasberg, dated and married Arthur Miller, starred in Bus Stop and Some Like it Hot, got addicted to drugs and died of an overdose in August 1962. Joe took care of the funeral and made sure to ban the Kennedys, Sinatra, and all the other “bastards” who ruined her life.
Sinatra and Joe were friends for a time, hanging out together at Toots Shor’s. Sinatra was deathly afraid of being alone; he needed an entourage, a pack; and not until he ran out of gas, did he hit the hay. DiMaggio preferred to be alone, awake, in the wee small hours of the morning. As I spent more and more time with DiMaggio I realized how much Joe resented Frank after they fell out. It was an incident involving Marilyn Monroe that ended their friendship, an incident that has come to be known as the Wrong-Door Raid.
In Los Angeles, DiMaggio was suffering because Marilyn had left him. He was spilling the beans, having a drink with Sinatra, and when you drank with Frank you drank with the whole entourage. As a favor to Joe, Frank hired a detective to keep tabs on Marilyn. The detective directed them to a three-unit Tudor house where the actress was allegedly having an assignation with her voice coach. Ever the prankster, ever impulsive, Sinatra suggested that they – not just Joe and Frank but a group including tough guys Broderick Crawford and Lee Marvin – drive over to the corner of Waring Avenue and Kilkea Drive, where the fellows knocked on the wrong door. The woman whose apartment they had broken into was a thirty-seven-year-old legal secretary who was fast asleep and furious.
One of the two heroes thought it was very funny, a prank upended by destiny. The other couldn’t laugh and wouldn’t forgive the sinner, I mean singer. What Sinatra took as a prank, a lark with an unexpected ending, DiMaggio felt was a grave and private matter. He wouldn’t laugh with Sinatra and he couldn’t bear being laughed at.
Perhaps it was DiMaggio’s experience with Marilyn that led Hemingway to remark casually to an interviewer that he “would never marry an actress, on account they have their careers and they work bad hours.”
Among the people DiMaggio detested were the Kennedys – especially after Marilyn sang “happy birthday, Mr. President” in May 1962. And in winter 1998, when Time magazine convened an extravagant dinner to honor all the living persons whose faces had appeared on the magazine’s covers, DiMaggio spurned the Clintons, who had asked for him. He didn’t like Clinton. The Monica Lewinsky affair outraged him. Diplomacy was used and he got seated with Mr. and Mrs. Henry Kissinger instead. Also at the table were Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, husband and wife, and Henry Grunwald, Time’s top editor, and his wife. DiMaggio wondered what the actress and comedian were doing there, and it was explained to him that Bancroft had played Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, which featured Simon and Garfunkel singing “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” When the song was new, DiMaggio didn’t like it; he thought it was making fun of him until he was made to realize that the lyrics were a tribute, mourning his absence.
Joe liked Kissinger, a baseball fan from way back, and when the two shared a box seat at a game, Joe taught the secretary of state a thing or two about how the relief pitcher’s arm angle and release point differed from those of the man he replaced. Kissinger was impressed.
DiMaggio brought out the poet in the sports columnist. Red Smith, perhaps the best in the trade, delighted in describing Joe’s outfield play. In the fourth inning of a 1947 World Series game, “Joe DiMaggio caught Gene Hermanski’s monstrous drive like a well-fed banquet guest picking his teeth.” In a crucial September game against the rival Red Sox in 1950, Boston’s “Bobby Doerr tied into a pitch and lashed it on a line over second base. Clean, stand-up double, one would say as it started. Joe raced in on a long angle to his left, thrust out his glove, palm up like a landlord taking a payoff under the table. The ball snuggled into the pocket.”
Smith opened his column of October 12, 1951, by recording that “one of the very few very great pros of professional sports” had announced his retirement. More than thirty years later, Smith concluded the last column he would ever write with a couple of the questions people invariably asked. Who was the best athlete? Whom did he like best? Sometimes he got gloomy. But, Smith wrote, “I told myself not to worry. Someday, there would be another Joe DiMaggio.”
[1] David Halberstam, Summer of ’49 (HarperCollins, 1989. pp.50-51.
See this post explaining the methods and the madness of David Lehman's astrological profiles: https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2025/06/david-lehman-reveals-all-about-his-astrological-profiles.html