The best criterion of fame is when a crazy person imagines he is you. In his full-court-press biography of Joe DiMaggio, Richard Ben Cramer does not say whether this ever happened to his subject, but it is difficult to think that it did not.¹ DiMaggio had, after all, first-name fame—fame of the kind that exempts headline writers from even mentioning your last name, like Frank (Sinatra), Johnny (Carson), Barbra (Streisand), Marilyn (Monroe), Michael (Jordan), Jerry (first Lewis, now Seinfeld). It is a small club, and Joe DiMaggio was a charter member.

Fame was DiMaggio’s portion, and it was served to him early, often, and throughout his long life. He received it in all its forms, high, mass, and squalid. No doubt he loved it, but it also made him, quite properly, paranoid. “Even paranoids have real enemies,” the poet Delmore Schwartz insisted, but it is their friends of whom the immensely famous must really beware. Fame can easily be coined, and, though DiMaggio himself proved excellent at this, turning his mere presence into cash, his signature into gold, he was always leery of others trying to make a buck off his name.

Joe DiMaggio was what is nowadays called an icon. (Once understood to mean a small religious painting, the word “icon” has been called into service in recent years to accommodate the national language inflation, which finds mere “superstar” insufficient.) One of the best reasons not to be an icon is that it brings out iconoclasts, often in the disguise of biographers. “The story of DiMaggio the icon [is] well known,” writes Richard Ben Cramer. “The story of DiMaggio the man has been buried.” His self-appointed task is the indelicate one of exhumation, and his DiMaggio leaves plaster shards and shattered glass everywhere.

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Cramer begins his story in 1930, when Joe was fifteen. He was one of nine children, the fourth of five sons, born to a Sicilian fisherman illiterate in both Italian and English who lived in the North Beach section of San Francisco. He was, in Cramer’s telling, an oddly detached boy, the sort who was not in need of the approval of his pals. People, somehow, came to him. He also had none of the standard marketable skills. He did not want to work on the fishing boat with his father and older brothers; he hated, in fact, the smell of fish. He had no interest in school, and dropped out at fifteen (his elder brothers had done so even sooner). Instead, he hung out, scuffled for a few bucks a week selling newspapers, playing poker, finding something that could be resold.

But there was one thing Joe could do: he could hit a baseball, really cream it. Whence this talent? Cramer does not, probably really cannot, say. What can be said is that it did not come from relentless early training or deep determination. DiMaggio entered baseball many decades before Little League came along with its early coaching, which is to say long before play for children, for better and worse, was organized. Kids just met on the playground, chose up sides, had established positions, and played the game. Joe played it supremely well and without great effort.

As a boy, he apparently had no special passion for baseball. He became more interested later when he discovered he could make a few dollars playing on semi-pro teams. At eighteen, he signed with the minor-league San Francisco Seals, where his brother Vince played. (A younger brother, Dominic, also played for the Seals and, later, for the Boston Red Sox.) That first season with the Seals, he had a 62-game hitting streak, batting .340 for the year.

He broke into baseball as a shortstop, a position at which he was not much good. The Seals also tried him at first base, at which he was not much better. After joining the New York Yankees in 1936, he would eventually become, along with Willie Mays in the National League, the greatest centerfielder to play the game, Mays having a flair for the dramatic, DiMaggio a flair for making every catch look as graceful and as easy as a thoroughbred trotting into the winner’s circle.

Joe DiMaggio’s competence at baseball touched on the profound. He could do six of the seven things required by the game: run, throw, field, hit, hit for power, and—here the sixth, magical quality entered in—do all of the above at times of maximum pressure, “in the clutch,” when the game was on the line. The only aspect he never mastered—chiefly because he was never called upon to do so—was pitching. (Babe Ruth began as a pitcher, and, during his years with the Boston Red Sox, was a good one.) DiMaggio also had great sports intelligence, intelligence of a kind that, in my experience, is connected to no other, and which entails the instinctual certainty that prevents one from ever making the kind of mistakes that other players make fairly regularly.

At the plate, DiMaggio was a classic of quiet elegance. “The guy was a statue,” Lefty Gomez, his Yankee teammate, once said. Tall (6′2″), smoothly muscled, he stood, stock still, all concentration, fearless during an age when the vocabulary of pitchers included such happily menacing phrases as “a little chin music” and “smoke him inside.” He had the sweetest stroke in the game, and was often photographed—as he is on the back cover of DiMaggio—at the end of that great follow-through that left him, stride complete, weight on the left foot, bat on the left shoulder, ball (one assumes) either rolling away out of reach in one of the power alleys or in the delighted hands of a fan in the stands.

A DiMaggio strikeout was a rarity—the New York saloonkeeper Toots Shor, one of his pals and hangers-on, said Joe looked better striking out than other men making a hit. In more than 6,000 times at bat over his career, as we learn from Cramer, he was two-and-a-half times more likely to hit for extra bases than to strike out. On the subject of his superior hitting DiMaggio was not much of a theorist; he believed it came from the same place that Aristotle thought the power of making metaphors derived: God.

In his era—roughly from 1936 to 1951, with two years out for stateside service in World War II—DiMaggio’s only rivals as pure hitters were Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Hank Greenberg, and, later, his teammate Mickey Mantle (to whom DiMaggio rarely spoke, telling another teammate, “He’s a rockhead”). He was especially rivalrous toward Williams, who may have been the better pure hitter and who was the last player in the major leagues to bat .400 in a season. (DiMaggio probably would have matched it in 1939 if he had not been forced to play the last three weeks with an eye infection, which caused his average to drop 30 points to .381.) “He throws like a broad,” DiMaggio said of Williams, “and runs like a ruptured duck.” Besides, he would add later, Williams never won anything.

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DiMaggio won everything. In his thirteen seasons in the majors, the Yankees were in ten World Series, and victorious in nine of them. He was among that small number of athletes who, through the main force of ability combined with attitude, can make a team produce winners. Others have been able to do this in basketball—Michael Jordan most recently—but basketball involves only five men on the court at one time. In football, a quarterback—Joe Montana comes to mind—can sometimes do it, but since there are two separate teams in football, offense and defense, the feat is highly unlikely. It is rarest of all in baseball, where nine men are on the field and no one but the pitcher dominates, and pitchers work only one game in five.

DiMaggio seems to have accomplished it not only through amazing play but also through an Olympian contempt for anyone who contributed to his team’s defeat or failed to meet his personal standard. His teammates were in awe of him, in awe of his skill, and no less in awe of his determination to play even when in deep pain. In 1949, he led the American League with 39 home runs, had 155 runs batted in, hit .320, and was in the lineup in 153 of 154 games—playing, as Cramer reports, “hurt in almost every one of them.”

A lonely man with no gift for gregariousness, DiMaggio always kept apart from his teammates. Occasionally he would take a young player in hand—the relief pitcher Joe Page is an example Cramer mentions—and build up his confidence. But he dressed for the field in a corner off by himself and spent the half-innings in which he would not be batting near the tunnel to the locker room, alone with a Chesterfield and half a cup of coffee. (A reserve outfielder named Hank Workman had the job of lighting DiMaggio’s cigarette just before he arrived in the dugout from centerfield.) He usually made the trip back to his hotel with a friend who was not a team member. A measured aloofness was everywhere part of his style.

Great timing marked not only DiMaggio’s playing at the plate and in the field but his larger career. He started with the New York Yankees a year after the great Babe Ruth retired, which seemed to put him in a direct line of succession as the greatest player in the game. When he arrived, the Yanks had gone four years without a pennant; in his rookie year he helped take them to the World Series, which they won.

John Gregory Dunne was no doubt correct to observe recently in the New Yorker that DiMaggio would not have achieved the same fame had he played for St. Louis, Cleveland, or Detroit. New York had its own cachet. With its heavy concentration of high-powered sportswriters working the then more than twelve city dailies, DiMaggio’s every move was chronicled in highly colored prose. Besides, television was not yet on the job when DiMaggio entered the majors, exposing players day in and out, subjecting them to inevitably disappointing interviews, everywhere erasing whatever aura their on-the-field performance might bring. The burden of description was left to sportswriters and radio announcers, who could make a duel between, say, DiMaggio and the Cleveland fastball pitcher Bob Feller seem like a battle between Achilles and Hector.

Along with all this, DiMaggio had somehow, as Cramer notes, “grown into his face.” He became—with his gap-toothed smile and wide nostrils—if not handsome, then, in a masculine version of the jolie-laide, a “beautiful-ugly” man. In the realm of sobriquets, he also had two of the best: Joltin’ Joe (for his hitting) and The Yankee Clipper, which felicitously suggested his stately presence in the ocean that was centerfield in Yankee Stadium. A great sobriquet requires a definite article—Red Grange had The Galloping Ghost; Ted Williams, The Splendid Splinter; George Herman Ruth, The Babe—and The Yankee Clipper seemed a perfect fit.

Raw to the point of being a rube when he came up, DiMaggio did not take long to learn how to fulfill the role of a quiet hero, the epitome of grace under pressure. Although he played as hard as anyone going, he never caused consternation afield by arguing with umpires, badgering opponents, or getting into fights. When an otherwise obscure Brooklyn Dodger outfielder named Al Gionfriddo made an amazing catch on a ball DiMaggio expected to be a World Series home run, DiMaggio, already rounding the bases, kicked the bag at second, an incident so out of character that it is remembered even now. In press interviews he gave little away, and if he had any secrets, the press was not yet devoted to uncovering and exposing them. His taciturnity translated itself as reticent dignity. He came off as a gent: a Hemingway hero in Yankee pinstripes.

Such, at any rate, did The Clipper appear from the outside.

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Richard Ben Cramer proposes to show us the less than elegant inside. Not to put too fine a point on it, DiMaggio makes Joe out to be a drip, a jerk, a bore, and a creep, with nothing good to be said about him off the baseball field. At one point, early in the book, Toots Shor, whose most honored customers included Jack Dempsey, Ernest Hemingway, and Joe DiMaggio, is quoted offering a definition of class—“a thing,” says Toots, “where a guy does everything decent.” In Richard Ben Cramer’s pages, Joe DiMaggio does almost nothing decent. He is a bad father, a worse husband, a poor friend, a cheapskate, selfish, humorless, a prude operating on a sexual double standard, a solipsist of the highest order.

In his bachelor days, Cramer tells us, DiMaggio was happy to dance between the sheets with any woman who was ready and willing; and, fame being a great aphrodisiac, more than a few were. He was a guest (nonpaying, surely) at the cat-house of Polly Adler, madame extraordinaire and author of A House Is Not A Home, where he complained that the shiny sheets did not allow him to get enough traction. As did most bachelors of the day, he referred to women as “broads,” though in their company he tended to be quite formal. In later years, he was known (here comes the double standard) to send male friends home for a change of clothes if they showed up in mixed company at restaurants neglecting to wear a jacket and tie.

That Joe was not much of a husband also appears on the bill of complaint. What he was, was a husband on the Sicilian model. He married his first wife, an actress named Dorothy Arnold, in 1939, in a wedding in San Francisco that required police crowd control. They had a son, Joe, Jr. Conflict did not take long to get under way. The new Mrs. DiMaggio wanted both her marriage and a career in the movies. Joe did not see much point in the latter. Something had to give, and soon enough the marriage did.

In the middle of this marriage, DiMaggio had his 56-game hitting streak, still unsurpassed in the majors, which ran from May 15 to July 17, 1941, when it was stopped in Cleveland by a negligible pitcher named Al Smith. (The next day he began a streak that lasted for an additional fifteen.) Once under way, the streak put him in the headlines every day, taking people’s mind off the war in Europe. His teammate Lefty Gomez said, “He seemed like a figure, a hero, that the whole country could root for.” And they did, except at home; in 1944 his wife sued for divorce, charging mental cruelty. Translation: indifference.

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DiMaggio’s second marriage, to Marilyn Monroe, has been more exhaustively chronicled than the relationship between Romeo and Juliet. When they first met, she, sweet ditz, was perhaps the only person in the country who had never heard of him. He had been out of the majors for a few years, and their courtship put him back in the headlines. “They are folk heroes, Marilyn and Joe,” wrote the sports columnist Jimmy Cannon, “a whole country’s pets.” They were the best athlete and the sexiest girl, the king and queen of the prom, with the whole nation as high school. They married in 1954, when she was twenty-seven, he thirty-nine. They had only their fame in common.

The marriage was unrelieved hell. She thought he did not care enough about her career; he was jealous and discouraged by her willingness to play the national bimbo. On their honeymoon in Japan, she went off to entertain the troops in Korea. Lots of other men were always sniffing around. She was rumored to wear no underwear, and then, in the famous photograph of her skirt blowing up while she stood on an air grate for the movie The Seven-Year Itch, she showed the entire world that this was not so. Joe was on the set the day the scene was shot. Cramer quotes the director Billy Wilder, who recalls “the look of death” on his face. Murder may have been more like it. He roughed her up that night, and three weeks later she filed for divorce. The marriage lasted nine months. “I suppose no one,” Oscar Levant quipped at the time, “can be expected to excel at two national pastimes.”

The children of the famous do not, for the most part, have uncomplicatedly joyous lives, and Cramer, by more than implication, accuses DiMaggio of making things even worse for his son by being an indifferent father. To be the child, especially the son and namesake, of Joe DiMaggio, and not oneself a good athlete, was to draw a very difficult card in life. Joe, Jr.’s second bad card was being the child of divorce. Prep school, Yale, the Marines, businesses his father set him up in, connections he made for him—nothing seemed to work. He lapsed into drink and drugs, and ended up a middle-aged man with a gray ponytail and false teeth. Left an annual stipend of $20,000 in his father’s will, Joe, Jr. died of an overdose of heroin and crack cocaine six months after his father’s death in 1999.

That $20,000 stipend leads inexorably to the subject of DiMaggio’s cheapness, about which Cramer rattles on endlessly. We are told about the hanger-on who gave him a free Cadillac, to which his response was, “Did you fill it with gas?”; about his habit of carrying his wash to a local laundromat because the machines were fifteen cents cheaper than in the building where he had a free condominium; about how, apart from a single check for $100, he never gave anything to the Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, where he lived out his last years; and, especially, about how he was disinclined to pick up any restaurant check—he was after all known as The Yankee Clipper, not The Yankee Tipper—or in fact pay for anything, even though he had millions tucked away, including a safe-deposit box jammed with $100 bills.

The final major item Cramer puts on DiMaggio’s rap sheet is his connection with the mob. The Boys, as we used to call them in Chicago, cultivated the great Italian hero. Every time he went into one of the Boys’ restaurants or nightclubs, which in those days included most places in New York, they put a couple of hundred dollars in a special account for him in the old Bowery Bank. One of Joe’s greatest patrons among the Boys was not an Italian but a Jew named Abner “Longy” Zwillman, who, Cramer claims, gave DiMaggio three boxes of cash to stash for him before he was murdered—money that DiMaggio later rescued from his house in San Francisco during the earthquake of 1989.

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When material of this kind comes up in DiMaggio, one especially feels the want of footnotes. Where did Cramer get all this dish? Pete Hamill, the veteran New York journalist, has suggested in a review that Cramer probably got it from third-level mafiosi, adding that “mob guys, particularly low-level hoodlums, are notorious bullshit artists.” But even if it were all true, it is unclear how else DiMaggio was supposed to behave. Tell Longy Zwillman and the others that he was too high-principled to accept their kindness? Nothing, after all, was ever asked of him, nor does Cramer claim that DiMaggio was ordered to appear in mob-owned places, let alone do anything that was against the law. Was he supposed to have been saintly enough—or perhaps brave enough—to turn down the money, which was not even handed over directly?

The fact seems to be that the Boys were no less caught up in the mystique of Joe DiMaggio than everyone else. Whenever he flew, American Airlines upgraded him into first-class, assigning him a seat, D5, corresponding to his initial and his old Yankee uniform number. Throughout his life, DiMaggio had guys to run his errands, do his bidding, smooth the way for him. He never asked favors; he didn’t have to. Toots Shor, Jimmy Cannon, a man-about-town ticket agent named George Solotaire, a foot surgeon named Rocky Positano, and others rushed to do them for him. They did so not because he commanded or conned them, but because they wanted to—because their friendship with The Clipper came to seem the most significant thing in their lives.

As for his cheapness, even Cramer does allow that DiMaggio picked up checks when out with his teammates. So if any principle was in operation here, it would seem to be that he let people pay who were themselves making a profit by being with him, of whom there were more than a few. If Joe DiMaggio ate in your restaurant, lived in your condominium complex, wore the clothes you manufactured, such would be the rush of other people wanting to do likewise that it all meant money, fairly serious money, in the bank. Because of the magic of his name, and the even greater magic of his presence, he was visited by a plague of leeches all his life. The last seventy or so pages of DiMaggio showcase the work in this line of a Florida attorney named Morris Engelberg, who eventually sold, through Sotheby’s, DiMaggio’s canceled checks, license plate (DiMag5), MasterCard, driver’s license, hundreds of signed baseballs, shirts, and other paraphernalia, and just about everything but the tumor in his lung that killed him.

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“I’m not great,” DiMaggio told the writer Gay Talese in 1966, attempting to put off a request for an interview, pleading to be left alone. “I’m just a man trying to get along.” Years later, when first acquainted with the lines from Paul Simon’s song “Mrs. Robinson”—“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?/A nation turns its lonely eyes to you”—he is supposed to have responded, “I haven’t gone anywhere. I’m employed.” Yet if he was not the deep creep presented by Cramer, neither will it do to make him out to be just a dumb jock. He was more complicated than that.

Although a lousy husband, for example, DiMaggio proved an excellent ex-husband to Marilyn Monroe. He looked after her as best he could, coming to her aid whenever needed. This was fairly often, for she needed a lot of looking after, not least when she landed in Payne Whitney for mental problems and he bailed her out. He always despised Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford for pimping her, and the Kennedy brothers, John and Bobby, for treating her like a whore. Cramer reports that Joe and Marilyn planned to remarry, and when she was found dead in her apartment in 1962 an unfinished letter to him lay beside her body. He went to his own grave believing they—“the fucking Kennedys,” as a friend reported him calling them—had killed her.

Nowhere did DiMaggio seem so gallant, or so tragic, as in the aftermath of Marilyn Monroe’s death, when he stepped in to take care of all the details of the funeral, seeing that it was conducted in dignified privacy and arranging that fresh roses be sent to her crypt every two weeks “forever.” At the time, I remarked on the impressiveness of this to a friend of mine who happened to know Arthur Miller, who was Monroe’s husband after her divorce from DiMaggio. According to my friend, Miller had said DiMaggio used to beat her up fairly regularly. “You know,” my friend added, “brutality is often the other side of sentimentality.”

Only two beatings of Marilyn Monroe by DiMaggio are recorded in Cramer’s biography, however. I say “only” and “however” because, such is the relentlessness of his attack, if he had known about more he would surely have reported them. Nor, for all his digging in secret sexual places, is Cramer able to report any instances of DiMaggio fooling with another man’s wife. Monroe herself, when asked later if Joe hit her, said, “Yes, but not without cause.” And she is not the only one who has ever wanted to come to DiMaggio’s defense, or to find extenuating circumstances for his behavior. Any reader of DiMaggio will feel much the same way.

Henry Kissinger, whose admiration for DiMaggio began at age ten, when he watched him play in Yankee stadium, and who later became a friend, has said: “If you had told me in 1938 that I would be Secretary of State, and I would be friends with DiMaggio, I would have thought that the second was less likely than the first.” At Time magazine’s 75th anniversary dinner, when they wanted DiMaggio to sit at the head table with President Clinton, he refused. He despised the Kennedys as sexual predators, and he despised Clinton on the same grounds. He sat instead with Kissinger and his wife.

In most contests between a biographer and his subject—and contests they often come to seem—it is difficult not to find yourself rooting for the subject. The reason is that the contest is an inherently unfair one, for the biographer has not only hindsight but can bring virtue—if he pretends to it—to bear on his side.

Richard Ben Cramer, cool and with-it though he strains to be, plays the virtue card throughout. If DiMaggio uses the word “broad,” or cannot make a go of marriages to two very difficult women, he is a misogynist (a touch of political correctness thrown in at no extra charge). If he fails to tell members of the mob to stick it in their ears, he is practically a member of the mafia himself. If his son does not turn out to be an astrophysicist, he is a rotten father.

In scoring off DiMaggio in all these various ways, in smoking him inside, Cramer’s own position is implicitly one of moral superiority. But if the biographer is the morally superior man, why does he seem so much less interesting than his subject and finally so unconvincing? The short answer is that his moral superiority exists only on paper.

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¹ DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life. Simon & Schuster, 546 pp., $28.00.

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