56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports Read online

  The Yankees won one World Series in the seven seasons before DiMaggio arrived. Then they won it in each of his first four years. DiMaggio played every element of the game with a controlled and beautiful ferocity, a fullness that Cleveland’s Feller called “inspirational.”

  If some fans were quick to detract, to say “Yeah, but… . ” and bring up Mize or Foxx or Greenberg or any of the rest, maybe it was because they still resented DiMaggio’s complaints about his contract. Maybe it was because people outside of New York were sick of the Yankees’ dominance. Maybe it was because DiMaggio didn’t yet have that single irrefutable achievement, something akin to Babe Ruth’s 60-home run season or Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 consecutive games played or Ty Cobb’s 4,191 career hits, to firmly exalt him. Maybe it was because DiMaggio could be shy and even aloof when the fans descended. Maybe there was also something else.

  Chapter 4

  The Italian

  ALL OF THE Italian players got called Dago, not just Joe. When he’d first come up there were three of them on the Yankees: Tony Lazzeri, Big Dago; Crosetti, Little Dago; and DiMaggio just Dago. Now Lazzeri was gone, Rizzuto had come in, and he was Little Dago too. Sometimes the guys on the team—Gomez, McCarthy, Bill Dickey, any of them—got it mixed up: which Dago was which? Half the time even the Italian ballplayers called each other Dago, or Daig, bantering the word among themselves, diluting any sense of negativity with their own nonchalance. Some other nicknames, though, they were less likely to use.

  In opposing stadiums and from out of opponents’ dugouts, all sorts of epithets came Joe’s way. Even as the Yankees went on to beat the Tigers 5–4 at the Stadium that afternoon—on Red Rolfe’s triple in the 10th inning (Del Baker’s strategy of pitching to DiMaggio and walking Keller had worked to help Detroit get out of the ninth)—and then beat them again the next day with DiMaggio singling in the seventh, Joe, as ever, heard it from the Tigers’ bench each time he came to bat: “You big Guinea, DiMaggio!” Or one chirper’s particular favorite: “Hey Spaghetti Bender!”

  This was common jockeying and everyone was a target, especially if you could play. Guys would scream anything that they thought might distract a hitter, rile him up, get him thinking about something other than the pitch coming in. McCarthy always ordered a couple of Yankees backups to lean out of the dugout and ride the Tigers’ Greenberg—“Heeb” or “Jewboy” they’d hurl toward him—to try to push him off his game. Ted Williams heard it for being so damn skinny and for the way he fidgeted around in the batter’s box. Williams let it show when the jockeying rankled him, yelled right back sometimes.

  DiMaggio, though, never looked over at the catcallers, not even the smallest glance. He just dug into his stance and stood waiting for the pitch, still as a photograph.

  He’d been hearing the coarse names and letting them roll off for years. That’s what you did. Yet the needling felt different now, the words somehow sharper and full of implication. It wasn’t easy to be an Italian in America in the spring of 1941. Not with Italy and its fascist dictator Benito Mussolini allied alongside Hitler’s Nazis, and not with the U.S. invested in beating down the Italians in the war. Just a week earlier, mid-May, more than 80 Italian men had been rounded up in New York City, taken out to Ellis Island and held there before being deported. They were waiters and busboys, dishwashers and cooks (and even a lawyer too) seized at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and the Pierre and the Caviar Restaurant right there on 49th Street two blocks from Toots Shor’s where DiMaggio liked to go for a steak. They were young guys trying to make the start of a life, not wanting to go back to Italy, guys who had come to work at the Italian Pavilion at the World’s Fair and never left, illegally overstaying their permits. These men were not U.S. citizens—any more than DiMaggio’s father and mother were—and in these times America did not want them.1

  More than one and a half million Italian-born immigrants lived in the United States, more than half a million in New York, packed closely in neighborhoods in each of the city’s five boroughs. Those numbers quadrupled when you added in the next generation, all those—like DiMaggio and his brothers—who had been born on U.S. soil to one of the millions who had left Italy in the first 15 years of the century.

  For years, through the 1920s and ’30s, many Italian-Americans, especially among the older generation, had approved of Mussolini and of fascism. From afar, Il Duce gave to some of them feelings of pride and dignity. Italy, long seen as inept and bumbling, suddenly had a strong and seemingly competent government that was regarded seriously, if warily, by other nations. Italy wasn’t going to be a pushover anymore.

  And if that affection for the new Italy had dissipated in recent years as many thousands of Italians began to flee their home country expressly to get away from Mussolini’s brutal intolerance and heavy fist, and if for many Italian-Americans Il Duce’s embracing of Nazism and anti-Semitism was now not a source of pride but rather of shame and anger—a betrayal that led them to enlist in the U.S. Army and prove their Americanism by joining the fight against their homeland—well, even still some of the old sentiments, along with that strange begrudging sense of respect that a bully like Il Duce can inspire, lingered on. Now, a flood of antifascist Italians might rally in New York City one day, but a gathering of profascist Italians might parade on the streets in New Jersey the next. The scores of Italian-language newspapers across the U.S. split themselves by necessity for their readers: A paper was either in support of fascism or against it. Black and white.

  Being an Italian in America meant having to “overcome more handicaps than a pure Anglo-Saxon. Therefore he has to run twice as fast, or else he will be treated forever as a Wop … an alien,” wrote an Italian immigrant in The Atlantic Monthly in 1940. And yes, that prejudice was there, evident in the things people said, and read and did. An editorial in Collier’s decried the discrimination and mocked it: “You would think that from some of the talk in circulation that our Italians were getting ready to carve up our government and hand it to Mussolini on a spaghetti-with-meatballs platter.” In this climate many Italians changed their names to hide, as the writer Giuseppe Fappiano had done upon taking a job in sports at The New York Times some years before. He went by Joseph Nichols now.

  In the World-Telegram, the same newspaper in which Dan Daniel tirelessly, passionately and sometimes eloquently covered DiMaggio and the Yankees, the popular news columnist Westbrook Pegler went on a kind of crusade, chastising not only those Italian immigrants who would congregate loudly in the city and cheer for the fascist cause, but also those who simply felt a fondness for their heritage, who dared to look homeward. Their country was a scourge, Pegler declared, and he wrote indignantly, “The Americans of Italian birth or blood have no reason to love Italy.”

  Yet no break could ever be that clean. There was an affinity for the homeland and a kinship among Italian-Americans that crossed political lines; their bonds were sustained in part by the way Italians were so often lumped together in the jaundiced public eye, lampooned in songs and cartoons as good-for-nothing wine swillers and macaroni eaters. And now the Italian military, even under the tough-talking Mussolini, was being roasted anew for its ineptitude in battle, which had been made plain by Italy’s botched attempt to take Greece in late 1940 and early ’41. The invading Italian troops were summarily beaten back and tied down, helpless until the Nazi war machine arrived to save them. Earlier Italy had taken over powerless Ethiopia in ’35—causing riots in Harlem, to the south of Yankee Stadium, where African-Americans and Italians lived cheek by jowl—and had declared war against a badly weakened France in the summer of ’40.

  For many Italians in America, whatever their thoughts on Mussolini, however virulently they might oppose Il Duce and the fascist ideal, there was still this: Someone back home was fighting on the Italian side. A brother or a cousin or a friend, or the brother of a friend, or someone else whose life could not be subsumed in a statistic—530,000 Italian troops trudging through Albania—but was valued and precious. Back home
in Italy the men had to fight for Il Duce whether they believed in him or not. Soldiers died. For an Italian in America, the knowledge that on any day a letter might arrive, bearing news of a loved one’s peril or injury or death, complicated the allegiance to the United States even at the very moment the Italian immigrant planted an American flag in his front yard. When you prayed, what exactly did you pray for?

  Little Gay Talese, nine years old and the son of an Italian-born and antifascist tailor in Ocean City, N.J., had uncles and cousins in Mussolini’s army. Whenever Talese, conspicuously olive-skinned in a schoolyard of fair classmates, saw pictures of the southern land where his father was from, or heard of some fine accomplishment by a famous Italian, he felt his own vicarious pride. Too many times, though, the news that filtered down through the papers and adult conversations to his young awareness was of Italian gangsters in America like Al Capone or the New York crime boss Frank Costello, men whom his parents reviled. The more palatable stories came from the boxing rings and the ballparks where Italians were staking a claim, and where now, above all else, lorded DiMaggio.

  His father was no baseball fan, but Gay was falling in love with the game, and with a ballplayer, that spring. Though the Taleses lived just a short afternoon’s drive from the heart of Philadelphia where both Connie Mack’s Athletics and the woebegone Phillies played at Shibe Park, and though it was the Dodgers, alone among the New York teams, whose live-game broadcasts would sometimes float out over the radio waves and into the center of Ocean City, there was only one baseball team, the Yankees who played some 150 miles away, that Gay cared for and followed.

  He waited on the news and sometimes, as a way to gain slightly better reception, Gay would steal downstairs and dim the spotlights in the dress department of his parents’ shop, then clamber back up to his room and the radio beside his bed, to listen through the crackling static for the voice of Mel Allen or some other New York announcer giving a report of that day’s game: which team won and, most importantly to Talese, what DiMaggio had done.

  DiMaggio had that hold on legions of boys like Talese, and like Mario Cuomo, the son of two Italian-born parents who was himself about to turn nine. Mario lived in an apartment in South Jamaica, Queens, among multiethnic neighborhoods so tough that you gave people your whereabouts by police precinct—“I’m over in the 113th, how ’bout you?”—rather than by street name or school district. Looking out from Queens, standing outside his father’s grocery shop with his baseball glove seemingly permanently affixed to his left hand, young Mario might have followed any of the three New York teams. He had his justifications for rejecting both the neighboring Dodgers (essentially Mario held to a provincial disgust for Brooklyn, where people seemed haughty, more privileged. “They think who they are” is how South Jamaicans slangily put it) and the Giants (forget it; they played in a stadium with a name—the Polo Grounds—that sounded like it was made for the wealthy). But the real reason that Mario chose to rise and fall with the Yankees was because they in effect picked him, on the day that he learned about Joe DiMaggio, the greatest Italian ballplayer of them all.

  When DiMaggio himself was nine years old he had never even thought of himself as Italian, or more accurately, he had never fully realized that there was anything different or unusual about that. Everybody in his San Francisco neighborhood of North Beach was Italian. Everyone’s mother cooked the sauce on Sunday, and made some version of cioppino, that dreadful fish stew. The men and women might get a piece of focaccia at the Liguria Bakery over on Washington Square and then sit beneath the willows and talk to one another in the old language. Joe and all the boys on the block had to go over and sit with the swarthy Italian Catholic priests at Saints Peter and Paul now and then. Everybody’s last name ended in a vowel.

  It was only later, during his brief time as a student in the gray lockered hallways of Galileo High, where kids of many backgrounds mixed outside the classrooms, that DiMaggio had first really understood that being Italian was not a given, but that it was a badge—of one kind or another—that made you part of a group not everyone was part of.

  When DiMaggio first reached the Yankees, the photographers wasted little time lining him up next to Lazzeri and Crosetti, each player posed on one knee with a bat in hand. “McCarthy’s Italian Battalion” read the photo caption a few days later. Even now, five years into his career, the newspapers often referred to Joe as Giuseppe—why he didn’t know. That was his father’s name, not his. Joe didn’t even speak Italian! But such details didn’t matter. Every Italian Joe was a Giuseppe.

  For all of his gradually broadening appeal, DiMaggio was, in the eyes of many, still first an Italian star. In the spring of 1939 Life magazine published a long story about DiMaggio, delving into his life back in San Francisco; his new restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, Joe DiMaggio’s Grotto; the way he was raised and how during his rookie season his mother Rosalie had traveled across the country to see him, bearing an “armful of Italian sausages.” In the story, Joe’s heritage was not underplayed. The author, Noel Busch, described him as emblematic of Italians who, “bad at war, are well suited to milder competition.” DiMaggio, Busch wrote, wasn’t what you’d expect from a black-haired, dark-eyed 24-year old Italian kid: “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.” Busch was wrong about the chow mein. Joe loved spaghetti—he whirled the long strands up off his plate in the same careful manner now that he had adopted as a kid, his fork tines pressed for stability into the spoon he held lightly in his left hand.

  If DiMaggio had not been Italian, and famously so, he would never have met Jerry Spatola and all the guys from Newark. Spatola had read newspaper stories about DiMaggio during Joe’s early time in New York, read that he was shy and on his own without any nearby family. That was all it took. Spatola got over to Yankee Stadium, waited outside the players’ gate after a game and introduced himself to DiMaggio. Spatola could be that way, forthright and confident and then a breeze to talk to. He brought Joe to Newark and into his home.

  Spatola’s wife Rose cooked alltime Italian dinners, heaping plates of manicotti or lasagna that the Spatola daughters, Geta and Bina, would bring out and set before Joe. The girls adored DiMaggio and Bina began to keep a scrapbook of Joe’s newspaper clippings, a book that she could later pore over and show off to friends or to Joe himself the next time he came by. The Spatola cousins would come over for those dinners, along with any number of friends, and around the busy dining table plates were passed and red wine was poured. Amid the happy commotion, all those voices going and laughing at once, Joe would sit silently and eat, keeping to himself. He was relaxed. The dinners at the Spatolas reminded him of the best days as a kid back home with the family in San Francisco.

  So, in some ways, did life in Newark’s First Ward remind Joe of North Beach. Every coffee shop and fruit stand in the First Ward, every candy store and bakery, had stenciled on its window an Italian family’s name. The peddlers walking down Garside Street or Seventh Avenue pushed carts filled with special meats or carried covered trays of warm pizza, and they would advertise their wares in loud voices using the Italian names. Spatola knew everyone in town it seemed. He ran the local funeral parlor below the family’s home on Mount Prospect Avenue, and he would organize Italian Catholic burials with all the right touches. It was the funeral parlor that led Spatola to get in with Richie the Boot. Richie all but owned that part of Newark, controlled its crime patterns, decreed who owed money to whom, and decided, often, what the local politicians would say. Richie was the guy that all the liquor and the numbers ran through. He wore a diamond as big as a baseball on his belt buckle.

  The story was that Richie the Boot—Boiardo was his surname—wanted the store owners in the First Ward to “unionize,” that is to pay a little something on the side just to keep things nice and orderly, make sure that nobody somehow accidentally and unfortunately got hurt. But Spatola wouldn’t do it
. The funeral parlor was his business, passed down from his father, and he wasn’t about to give chunks of it away for the privilege of being allowed to keep running it the way that he always ran it. Sometimes a couple of guys would stop by Spatola’s office and suggest to him again why getting in the union might make a lot of sense for a guy like him, with a young family and all. Spatola still said no.

  One night Spatola was outside the place when he was confronted by an especially neckless man he’d seen around plenty of times and who was carrying something that seemed sure to make Spatola change his mind. “No,” Jerry said. “I’m not giving you money. I won’t pay.”

  The bullet, it turned out, went down through the side of Spatola’s cheek and out the underside of his jaw; when he came upstairs and into the house that night, he was bloody and in a bad way. He had to go to the hospital, of course, and when the police heard about the injury and caught up to Jerry, to find out just what had happened in a neighborhood they were hoping somehow to get clean, he did not have much to offer. Spatola said it was just plain dumb luck that he had run into a mugger or whoever that was. He said that he had no idea who had shot him nor why. Unfortunately, Spatola said, he had just never gotten a real good look at the guy. The police gave up the case.

  With that, Spatola won Richie the Boot’s respect. All the boys now knew to let Jerry Spats alone, and, more than that, to take care of him when he needed anything. That’s how Spatola became a regular at Richie’s restaurant, the splendid Vittorio Castle on Eighth Avenue, with its high ceilings and its heavy curtains in the doorways, street scenes of Italy painted on the walls. Spatola would bring DiMaggio here—or sometimes across the street to Vesuvius, another old-world Italian place—and Richie and his son Tony Boy and whoever else was hanging around that night made sure that Joe got treated right. In his immaculate suits and with his way of sitting quietly while others buzzed around him, DiMaggio fit right in. Even before they were married, he began taking Dorothy to the Castle sometimes too, for a meal with Jerry and Rose, and once for the party celebrating their engagement. Dorothy’s diamond engagement ring, four carats and emerald cut, had come to DiMaggio as a gift from Richie the Boot.