Achilles in Pinstripes. - Review - book review

Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, by Richard Ben Cramer (Simon & Schuster, 560 pp., $28)

Nineteen thirty-four was a tough year for the New York Yankees. It was painfully clear that the mighty Bambino was in the twilight of his majestic career, and as good as Lou Gehrig was, he couldn't carry the team by himself. Besides, he didn't have Babe Ruth's charisma.

The Yankees' owner, brewery heir Jacob Ruppert, was the George Steinbrenner of his era: blustery, overbearing, larger than life. Finishing second to the Detroit Tigers, as the Yankees did in '34, was simply unacceptable. So in a convoluted deal Ruppert gambled on a much-heralded kid with a bum knee from the Pacific Coast League, "a dago named DiMaggio."

From the moment DiMaggio arrived in training camp he was at the top of the marquee. This 21-year-old kid from San Francisco who rarely spoke and had no education, the son of a Sicilian fisherman, was a natural at the plate and seemed to know intuitively everything there was to know about making it big in the Big Leagues and in America itself.

As Richard Ben Cramer writes in his extraordinary biography, DiMaggio became a national myth, a man who was apotheosized as the American Achilles. From the moment of his arrival the effusions began. And at least for a time, DiMaggio proved himself worthy. Led by Joltin' Joe, the Yankee Clipper, the Yankees won the World Series in '36, '37, '38, '39, '41, '47, '49, '50, and '51. In 1941, Joe hit in 56 consecutive games, a record that remains unbroken. Even with war clouds on the horizon-with German planes raining bombs on London, and France under the sway of goose-stepping Nazis-the number one question on Americans' minds was: Could Joe keep it going?

What became known as The Streak came to seem a portent of the nation's victory in World War II. DiMaggio himself was the poster boy for valor and grace. He embodied the great melting pot that turned immigrants from Italian-speaking fishermen into unbeatable mythic figures for an exceptional nation. Italian-Americans especially were hungry for a hero. Mussolini had become a villain and a running joke. Al Capone made headlines but not the kind that made Italians proud. Primo Carnera was a circus strongman who became heavyweight champ, but the Jewish Max Baer turned the "man of steel" into a sheet of tinfoil in their 1934 championship bout.

DiMaggio was everything those people were not. He was young, quiet-mute would be more like it-seemingly dignified, homegrown, and a winner. He played the national game and he played it with style. Here was the face Italian Americans-and Americans generally-wanted to show the world.

Yet, as Cramer points out, despite the air of immortality that wafted around DiMaggio, despite his glorious deeds, there was another side to Joe that obsequious reporters didn't reveal. Joe could be surly and nasty to those who got too close. His first marriage to Dorothy Arnold failed in part because he wanted to control her every action, and when she resisted, his tantrums were violent. Joe's courtly image could not be tarnished: He needed every hair in place and never a crease in his well-tailored suits. He had dozens of friends to do his bidding. They took his clothes to the cleaners, brought food to his room, and when requested, delivered women to satisfy his sexual appetite.

Meanwhile, standing on his pedestal, DiMaggio had begun to believe and act on his own press releases. In the Golden Age of baseball there was a conspiracy of silence about money and embarrassing behavior. Sportswriters didn't reveal anything about the Bambino's gargantuan sexual appetite or DiMaggio's violent temper, even when the evidence was paraded before them.

But the hero who could hit for power and average, who could chase a fly ball like a gazelle and had a cannon for an arm, started to lose his magical powers at an early age. For the first seven years of his career DiMaggio was arguably as productive an anyone in baseball history, but nagging injuries, specifically bone spurs in his heels, diminished his effectiveness. As with Achilles, DiMaggio's heel was vulnerable even when it appeared he hadn't any weakness.

DiMaggio's real weakness, however, was not his heel but his heart. In 1952, Joe saw a photo of a beautiful young actress who showed up at the Philadelphia A's training camp and took a photo with the darkly handsome slugger Gus Zernial. Joe was livid: "How come that f***in' busher gets to meet a beautiful girl like that?" A "blind date" with Marilyn Monroe was set up, and Joe's life was never the same. He was caught in the web of infatuation and stardom-his and hers.

Marilyn was a Hollywood goddess as Joe was a baseball god. Yet Joe had a conventional idea of marriage that he tried to impose on the erratic Marilyn. In Cramer's words, "they might have been brother and sister. Joe's insistence made them husband and wife." The marriage lasted less than a year. Joe's volcanic eruptions and beatings brought Marilyn to divorce court. Yet their lives were interminably linked. Joe never stopped loving her and she never stopped leaning on him. Time and again Joe would ask her forgiveness and beg for a reunion, but to no avail.