Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (7 page)

To DiMaggio, how people perceived him was terribly important. In 1948 during a Boston-New York game, Tex Hughson, who liked to pitch him tight, drilled him with a fastball in the chest. It was obvious to everyone in both dugouts that the pitch really hurt. Even as he was hit, Joe McCarthy, by then the Boston manager, turned to his own players and said, “Watch him, he won’t show any pain.” Nor did he.

During the 1947 World Series, in a rare outburst of emotion, he kicked the ground near second base after a Brooklyn player named Al Gionfriddo made a spectacular catch, robbing him of a three-run home run. The next day while he was dressing, a photographer who had taken a picture of him kicking the ground asked him to sign a blowup of it. At first DiMaggio demurred and suggested that the photographer get Gionfriddo’s signature. “He’s the guy who made the play,” DiMaggio said. But the photographer persisted, and so reluctantly DiMaggio signed it. Then he turned to a small group of reporters sitting by him. “Don’t write this
in the paper,” he said, “but the truth is, if he had been playing me right, he would have made it look easy.”

Ted Williams, himself caught in endless comparisons with DiMaggio, once said that the difference between the two of them was that DiMaggio did everything so elegantly. “DiMaggio even looks good striking out,” Williams said.

Theirs was a rivalry that existed in the minds of their fans, in the minds of their teammates, and, though never admitted by either of them, in their own minds. Williams was, perhaps, the more generous of the two. Clif Keane, the Boston sportswriter, once went to New York in the late forties to cover a fight. He was staying at the Edison Hotel, which was DiMaggio’s residence. Traveling with him was a friend who was a great fan of DiMaggio. Keane called DiMaggio and asked if they could come up. DiMaggio said yes. “Joe,” asked Keane’s friend almost as soon as they were inside the room, “What do you think of Ted Williams?” “Greatest left-handed hitter I’ve ever seen,” DiMaggio answered. “I know that,” said the man, “but what do you think of him as a
ballplayer
?” “Greatest left-handed hitter I’ve ever seen,” repeated DiMaggio.

Unsure of his social skills and uncomfortable in any conversation that strayed far from baseball, DiMaggio was wary of moving into a situation in which he might feel or reveal his limitations. He did not push against certain New York doors that would have readily opened for him in those years. Some of his close friends thought the reason for his behavior was his sensitivity about being an Italian immigrant’s son in an age when ethnic prejudice was far more powerful than it is today. It 1939,
Life
magazine did a piece on him that its editors thought sympathetic but which said, among other things, “Italians, bad at war, are well suited for milder competition, and the number of top-notch Italian prize fighters, golfers and baseball players is out of all proportion to the population.”
Life
found the young DiMaggio to be better groomed than expected for someone who was not a Wasp:
“Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease, he keeps his hair slick with water. He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti ...” In fact, he was meticulous about his appearance, and unlike most of his teammates, who dressed casually in sports clothes, he almost always came to the ball park in a custom-tailored dark-blue suit, with a white shirt and tie. His overcoats were tailored as well, and he even took his army uniforms to be tailored during World War II.

He was spared the normal, crude byplay of the locker room. The other players were aware that he did not like it, and they did not dare risk displeasing him. (About the only person who could tease DiMaggio was Pete Sheehy, the clubhouse man, who seemed to be as much a part of the Yankee scene as the Stadium itself. Once when DiMaggio had been examining a red mark on his butt, he yelled over to Sheehy, “Hey, Pete, take a look at this. Is there a bruise there?” “Sure there is, Joe, it’s from all those people kissing your ass,” Sheehy answered.)

DiMaggio’s sensitivity to being embarrassed never diminished. He carried for no short length of time a grudge against Casey Stengel because Stengel, during the 1950 season, dropped him in the batting order from the cleanup position to the number-five slot, and told him to play first base, a position where he was not comfortable. His teammate Tommy Henrich noticed that when DiMaggio came into the dugout from first base near the end of the game, his uniform was soaked with sweat. Henrich knew immediately that it was not the physical exhaustion that had caused the sweat—it was caused by tension from the fear of embarrassing himself.

After a game he would always linger in the locker room for two or three hours, in order to avoid the crowd of fans who waited outside the players’ entrance. He simply needed to sit in front of his locker, catch his breath, drink a beer, and relax. Once he was sure there were no outsiders around,
he would conduct an informal seminar on the game just played. In those moments he was absolutely relaxed and unthreatened. He might turn to Shea. “Spec,” he would say to the young pitcher, “you have to stay with the game plan when you go after the hitters. If you say you’re going outside, stay outside, don’t cross us up. Otherwise we’re going to end up with a big gap out there. The other thing you were doing today is you were goosing the ball. Not really throwing it. Pushing it. Just throw it next time.” “Phil,” he might tell Rizzuto, “you didn’t get over quite quickly enough on that grounder in the third inning. I know you made the play, but that isn’t what worries me. What worries me is you getting hurt. If you get hurt, this team is in trouble. We can’t afford it.”

When he was sure that most of the crowd at the players’ entrance was gone, he would get ready to leave. The call would come down to the gate people: “Joe’s ready to go.” A taxi would be called and a group of attendants would form a flying wedge so that he could get out with as little harassment as possible.

Although DiMaggio was largely suspicious of newspapermen and reserved with most of them, his relationships with them were actually rather good. The last line of the last column of the greatest sportswriter of two eras, Red Smith, concluded: “I told myself not to worry: Someday there would be another DiMaggio.” The writers were, of course, wired to DiMaggio. They treated him as the White House press corps might treat a wildly popular president: They understood the phenomenon, what caused it and what made it work, and they were delighted to be a part of it, mostly because their readers wanted to know all about DiMaggio. Besides, the writers respected DiMaggio; for many of them he was the best all-around player they had ever seen. He frequently carried the team and he always did it modestly.

If DiMaggio wanted them at a distance, they readily accepted that. For one thing, even if he might not have been
the perfect interviewee (when he first came up, he was so unsophisticated, he liked to recall, that when the sportswriters asked him for a quote, he thought they were talking about a soft drink), he was a gent. As he took his own dignity seriously, he generally accorded the writers theirs. On questions about
baseball,
he was generally candid. He was also aware of the uses of good publicity, and he was, if anything, closer to some of the writers, particularly the columnists, than he was to his teammates. He understood that if he gave too little of himself, the press would rebel. He never upbraided a reporter who transgressed, as Williams did, but he was, in his own way, just as tough. If a reporter displeased him, even slightly, DiMaggio would ruthlessly cut him off.

W. C. Heinz, one of the best writers of that era, thought that his colleagues were different with DiMaggio from the way they were with other athletes. As they entered the Yankee locker room, they were cocky, brash, and filled with self-importance. Then, as they approached DiMaggio’s locker, they began to change from men to boys. They became reverential, almost apologetic for even asking questions. You could, Heinz thought, hear the rustle of the paper in their notebooks as they steeled their courage to ask him how he felt.

DiMaggio had good reason for being suspicious of the press. In his first two seasons as a Yankee, he had been nothing less than brilliant, leading New York back to the pennant after a hiatus of three years. In his second season he hit .346 and 46 home runs, and knocked in 167 runs. He had been paid only $8,000 for his first year, and for his second, $15,000 plus, of course, his World Series checks, which Yankee management viewed as part of his salary. For his third year he decided to ask for $40,000. The Yankees offered him $25,000. Ed Barrow, the general manager, told him that $40,000 was more than the great Lou Gehrig made. “Then Mr. Gehrig is a badly underpaid player,”
DiMaggio answered. The Yankee management turned its full firepower on him. This was the Depression, and, typically, the ownership did not view the question in relation to how much money the Yankees had made, or to how many millions Colonel Ruppert was worth, but rather to DiMaggio’s salary as measured against the wages of the average American.

The assault was surprisingly harsh. He was privileged and spoiled. “DiMaggio is an ungrateful young man and is very unfair to his teammates to say the least,” Colonel Ruppert said. “As far as I’m concerned that’s all he’s worth to the ball club, and if he doesn’t sign we’ll win the pennant without him.” Then Ruppert added: “Is it fair for him to remain home while the other boys are training down South? No! Absolutely no!” DiMaggio himself remained adamant, which made Ruppert angrier. As the holdout progressed he added, “I have nothing new on DiMaggio. I’ve forgotten all about him. Presidents go into eclipse, kings have their thrones moved from under them, business leaders go into retirement, great ballplayers pass on, but still everything moves in its accustomed stride.” Why, said the Colonel, if you included World Series checks, DiMaggio had averaged $20,000 a year since he came up.

Soon Joe McCarthy joined in: The Yankees, he said, could win without DiMaggio. No one came to DiMaggio’s defense, not even the writers. The beat reporters, who had coveted his goodwill in the past, proved to be toadies to management. They helped turn the fans against him—he was often booed that year—and he learned the limits of his bargaining power the hard way. Finally, on April 20, with no leverage of his own, DiMaggio surrendered. He would come back at the salary he had been offered. The Yankees even tightened the screw: DiMaggio would have to get back into condition at his own expense and the Yankees would deduct $167 a day, his per diem salary, from his pay until
he did. “I hope the young man has learned his lesson,” Colonel Ruppert said.

Gradually the scar from the press’s treatment of him during that holdout healed. Something of a pecking order developed in the way he treated writers: The beat reporters respected him, but except for Lou Effrat were not his pals; the grander figures of the time—such columnists and magazine writers as Jimmy Cannon, Tom Meany, and Milton Gross—might pal around with him. There was no danger that DiMaggio would cut off Jimmy Cannon. Cannon was at the height of his fame. He was forty years old and a columnist for the
New York Post.
In the late 1940s he was probably the most influential sports columnist in New York. He and DiMaggio were pals. Unlike the genteel Red Smith, who wrote for the
Herald Tribune,
an upper-middle-class paper favored by Wall Street executives, Cannon was passionate. It was easy reading him, to know who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. The
Post
was blue-collar liberal, and its readers were baseball-obsessed. Cannon was the New York street kid as columnist—salty, blunt, with a style not unaffected by Hemingway. He loved being a sportswriter, he once told Jerome Holtzman of the
Chicago Tribune,
because “[he] spent most of [his] life at glad events as a sportswriter, amid friendly multitudes gathered for the purpose of pleasure.” Sportswriting, he also told Holtzman, could be either the best writing or the worst writing in the paper. How do you know when it’s bad? Holtzman asked him. “You feel the clink,” he answered.

The son of a minor Tammany politician, Cannon grew up in a cold-water flat alongside the docks on the west side of Greenwich Village. He went to high school for one year, never attended college at all, but was a voracious reader, so much so that his family warned him he would damage his eyes. A wonderful sense of the city, the sharpness and edginess of its life, ran through his writing. He loved Damon Runyon, always dapper, with his wonderful collection of
suits, and his three carnations—one red, one white, one blue—which were delivered every day. He emulated him, eventually becoming Runyon’s hand-picked successor as a chronicler of the raffish side of the city. Indeed, he loved to quote Runyon about a mutual friend: “He’s out hustling, doing the best he can. It’s a very overcrowded profession now.” Runyon had once been a heavy drinker, and he had taught Cannon, the latter said, to drink a bottle of brandy a day. Eventually Runyon stopped drinking and warned his protégé that if he did not stop “you’re going to end up a rumpot.” For a long time Cannon did not heed that advice. As far as he was concerned he did not have a drinking problem because he did not drink in the morning. That was the dividing line.

By the late forties, though, Cannon did stop, and in his own words, “When I quit I took the title with me.” Home, for much of his life, was two rooms in the Edison Hotel. Restless at night, his work done, he often made the rounds with Leonard Lyons, the
Post’s
gossip columnist. Lyons had a proscribed route: Shor’s to “21” to Palm Court, and Cannon knew where he would be at all times. It was better than going to bed. Cannon and DiMaggio shared a special palship because they had a lot in common. Both of them were lonely, without family. They were both insomniacs, and they both liked to make the New York scene, Cannon with his regular date, the actress Joan Blondell, DiMaggio with some show girl. Cannon loved the moment they entered a nightclub, when everyone there gawked to get a look at this baseball god.

He wrote often and well about DiMaggio, and in the process he helped create not just the legend of DiMaggio as the great athlete but, even more significant, DiMaggio as the Hemingway hero, as elegant off the field as on it. Cannon was in awe of his friend, and he lovingly passed that on to his readers. The view he provided of DiMaggio was an uncommon blend of genuine intimacy and pseudo intimacy.
Only the better qualities were worthy of mention, of course—those allowed near the star knew what to write and what not to write. Lou Effrat once was invited to spend a week with DiMaggio in Florida during the winter. It was a pleasant interlude, but near the end of his stay Effrat asked DiMaggio a question about his contract for the next year. “What are you doing, turning writer on me?” DiMaggio asked him. That ended the subject of contracts.