56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports Page 5

  Spats did more than that for Joe. He lined him up a driver, a guy who could watch out for DiMaggio in the city or in Newark or wherever Joe needed him. In 1939 Spatola cooked up a testimonial dinner for DiMaggio, held at Newark’s upscale Essex House on the eve of the Yankees’ World Series opener against the Cincinnati Reds. More than 1,000 people turned out, all the local big shots, assorted New Jersey mayors and a dozen Yankees including Dickey, Gehrig, Henrich, Red Rolfe and even bat boy Timmy Sullivan. The Yankees sat flanking Joe at a long table set up at the head of the ballroom beneath a nearly life-size photo of Joe that hung luminously from a beam above. Dorothy sat with Rose and the Spatola girls at one of the big round tables nearby.

  At the end of the night the people of Newark, it was announced, had given Joe a brand new convertible to drive off in. He deserved it, they all felt. This was their Joe DiMaggio. Whenever news spread that he was in town people came out of their homes and gathered near the rounded brick facade at the front of Vittorio Castle, or, depending on the hour, swung by Vincent’s barbershop at Eighth and Boyden to see if they could catch a glimpse of DiMaggio getting a trim, perhaps they could even say hello. A Yankees farm team, the powerful Newark Bears, played in town and everybody was a Yankees fan.

  Joe helped out Spatola here and there, got him tickets to the games whenever he asked for them or went over to the Hospital and Home for Crippled Children on Clifton Avenue, one of Spatola’s causes, to sign balls and hospital gowns and brighten up the kids’ lives for an hour or two. Mainly DiMaggio’s presence leant a priceless cachet, his friendship a proof that Jerry Spats, gregarious and all about town, was truly someone special, someone to pay attention to. Richie the Boot and all the rest in Newark knew that it was mainly because of Spatola’s initiative that DiMaggio so often came around, baseball’s conquering Italian giving blessing to the neighborhood.

  There had been Italians in the major leagues for years, and not just Lazzeri and Crosetti. Ernie Lombardi began his career as a .300-hitting catcher for the Reds in 1932. The next season first baseman Dolph Camilli broke in, and he had since become a power-hitting star for the Dodgers. DiMaggio’s old pal from North Beach, Dario Lodigiani was doing okay as a third baseman for the White Sox. None of those players, though, mattered much in Newark. Or in Ocean City, N.J., or in South Jamaica, Queens, or anywhere in the Italian diaspora. Joe was the show.

  “DiMaggio has attracted a new type of fan to our game,” declared the Philadelphia Athletics’ manager and sage, Connie Mack. “He has made the Italian population baseball conscious.”

  They came to see him on the road, and they came to see him at Yankee Stadium, up from the densely packed streets of East Harlem or Mulberry Bend, from Brooklyn and from the Bronx. They brought with them Italian flags of various sizes, small hand-held ones to be shaken back and forth, and others so large that four people had to get together to hold it properly aloft. They sat in the bleacher seats or in the upper deck at the Stadium and waved flags and cheered for Joe DiMaggio. To hell with Westbrook Pegler, or anyone else who might try to tell them which country was really their own. These were Americans, at a baseball game drinking Coca-Cola and still proud of their homeland. They loved Italy and they loved DiMaggio.

  At this moment, early in 1941, DiMaggio still belonged to the Italians. He still belonged to the people of North Beach, who proudly watched him from afar—“That’s our Joe!”—and who each winter gathered by the thousands to greet him and welcome him back home to San Francisco. Not yet did DiMaggio belong to all of America, everywhere.

  The newspaper guys called him Giuseppe, or sometimes, in reference to his prowess at the plate, the Wallopin’ Wop.

  ________

  1 Ten months later, with the U.S. officially engaged in the war, non-citizen Italians were classified as enemy aliens and placed under a nightly curfew that rendered the streets of the San Francisco neighborhoods where DiMaggio grew up desolate after 9 p.m. His father, Giuseppe, was barred from coming near Fisherman’s Wharf, from where he had set out on his boat each workday for more than two decades.

  Chapter 5

  Big Brother

  DOM DIMAGGIO LIKED coming to New York. He liked the bustle of the city, the swift pulse that beat through Grand Central Terminal and the Hotel Commodore, where the Red Sox always stayed when they came to town. And you knew there was a ballgame on when you played at Yankee Stadium, just like you knew it at Fenway. The noisy crowds, intense and savvy—they’d let you hear it on every pitch.

  Dominic always felt a little something extra facing the Yankees, and not only because it meant playing against his older brother Joe. A couple of years earlier, before Dom got to the majors, the Yankees and Red Sox had brawled spectacularly at the Stadium, a fracas that started when Sox player-manager Joe Cronin and the Yankees’ Jake Powell grappled on the field (Powell took exception to the Boston pitcher, Archie McKain, throwing too close), then continued their disagreement as they both left through the exit in the Yankees’ dugout. The argument carried on in the tunnel beneath the stands and, to the thrill of a large and roaring crowd, players left the benches to join in while the umpires followed in hopes of keeping peace. When Cronin finally emerged, his face, along with those of several other players, was reddened and badly scratched.

  Since that day, the stakes in the Yanks-Sox games had gone up, it seemed, and it often felt like the crowd was hoping something like that melee might happen again. The teams were closely bound; Boston had finished one slot behind the Yankees in the standings for three years running. And who knew, the way New York was struggling, maybe this was the year the Red Sox, close on their heels, would come out ahead.

  True, Dominic didn’t enjoy it much when some Yankee fans would yell from the bleachers, “Hey little Dommy, go on home will ya! You’re just in the big leagues because of Joe.” But he was used to hearing that. It had been that way when he started playing pro ball with the San Francisco Seals, Joe’s old team. He was so much smaller than Joe, by five inches and 25 pounds, and he wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses.

  “You don’t look like a ballplayer,” a fan or an opposing player would dig at him when the Seals went across San Francisco Bay to play the rival Oakland Oaks. “You look like somebody did your big brother a favor.” Then Dominic hit .360, ran the bases like someone was chasing him, and that shut everybody up.

  Whatever the barbs in Yankee Stadium, real baseball fans knew by now that Dom wasn’t simply riding Joe’s reputation. Some coaches in the league thought he was an even better fielder than Joe—or just as good, anyway—and as a Red Sox rookie in 1940 Dominic had batted .301. Cronin told the press that except for Joe’s power, he didn’t see much difference between these two DiMaggios at all.1

  The Red Sox and Yankees played a strange game that Friday afternoon, a 3 p.m. start that unfurled into a long, unsatisfying battle, threatened continuously by rain, and finally suspended by the umpires after more than three hours and nine innings of play with the score tied at 9–9 and the cloud-covered sky having darkened so deeply that the hitters could no longer see the ball. Joe knocked a single that helped the Yankees go briefly ahead in the bottom of the eighth. Dominic had two hits in the game. If the DiMaggio brothers didn’t compare themselves to one another—and they did, of course they did—the newspapers would do it for them.

  Joe and Dom didn’t talk about how they had played, or much of anything, on the ride to Joe’s apartment after the game. Just being together like this was a rarity; the brothers almost never saw each other off the field during the season. But Joe wanted to show Dom his penthouse, 20 floors up on the West Side of Manhattan and newly leased. Dorothy was making dinner for both of them that night.

  The radio played softly in the car on the way downtown, and Joe’s driver chatted about the weather and the news of the war. Joe would make a noise here and there to acknowledge that he’d been listening. The driver was one of Spatola’s friends from Newark, Jimmy Ceres, an amiable, meaty guy—the size of his hands!—who always ha
d something to say. Ceres did more than just drive. He worked things out for Joe, made sure that the people whom Joe wanted to see he saw, and that the people whom Joe didn’t want to see were kept away. He’d done some boxing as a young guy coming up in Newark, which to look at him wouldn’t surprise you.

  Ceres must have been about 34 years old and even before he started this part-time work for Joe, even when no one knew just what his job was, he somehow always had money in his pocket. Jimmy Ceres came from a large Italian family and he knew a lot of people in Newark. He put on a clean, full suit each morning. Everyone called him Peanuts.

  “See you tomorrow, Joe,” Peanuts said as they pulled up in front of the building. “Regular time?”

  “Game starts at 2:30,” DiMaggio said. “Come early.”

  “Right,” said Peanuts. “Dominic, we gotta get you out to Newark sometime and really feed you.”

  Dom laughed and waved goodbye, and the doorman at 400 West End Avenue nodded in greeting as he held open the thick front door and let the two DiMaggios inside. The elevator operator took them straight up to the penthouse, where Dorothy met them as they stepped out.

  Dom liked her. Smart, worldly and beautiful. She could be a little brassy too, crack a joke, especially when Joe was in the next room. Dorothy had seemed at ease on her visits to San Francisco. At Christmas and at other family occasions she would fuss around happily with the four DiMaggio sisters, even as she remained deferential, tacitly conceding her place on the outskirts of the big DiMaggio clan, never helping to cook until Ma asked her to, and then doing things just as Ma showed her, crushing cloves of garlic or cutting tomatoes into hearty wedges. Pa thought Dorothy was great.

  It was still a kick that Joe was married to her at all. An actress! Dorothy was good in the serials, especially that strange, suspenseful one with Bela Lugosi, The Phantom Creeps. Shapely and slender, her bob of curly hair cut just so, Dorothy often delivered her lines with the hint of a smile, and her characters possessed that same coyness and allure that she had in real life. She moved nimbly on the screen. There was a richness in her voice, like thick honey.

  The irony in Joe being with a woman like this—or really, the boys at home might crack, being with any woman at all—was that as a teenager he wouldn’t even talk to girls. He’d disappear when one of his sisters brought home a friend for dinner, then come back and eat later on his own. When Joe showed up to the parish dances at Garibaldi Hall, he would stand off by himself, looking at everything and no one, never once asking one of the girls to dance. And now he was married to a showgirl.

  Dorothy, Dominic felt, was good for Joe. She was four months pregnant, her belly ever so slightly swollen beneath her dress.

  The apartment tour began, and Dom spent a lot of time shaking his head and grinning as Joe showed him the living room with its weighty, dark wood paneling and the recessed shelves; a fireplace with a few birch logs lying in a low iron rack set up just for show; a heavy polished lintel above the archway that led into the hall. The guest bedroom, furnished with two pristinely dressed beds, had room enough for four; the linen closet was itself big enough for a grown man to sleep in. The view from Joe and Dorothy’s master suite looked south, and on clear days, they told Dominic, you could see for miles, out past the foot of Manhattan and to the Statue of Liberty. The windows in their bathroom, indeed in all three of the apartment bathrooms, were fitted with stained glass so that someone out on the terrace could not see in. At the far end of the apartment, behind the kitchen and through a few small hallways, Joe had his study. This, said Dorothy, chuckling when they finally got there, was Joe’s sanctuary; there were a few newspapers arranged on the writing desk, which had before it a sturdy, high-backed chair.

  They all agreed that this was not a night for eating outside, too wet and too windy, but Joe and Dorothy took Dom out onto the brick terrace that wrapped around three sides of the place, and they walked the full length of it. From the north end, the widest area of the terrace where the tables and chairs were arranged, you could see in three directions: across the Hudson River to New Jersey, over the treetops in Central Park and, most impressively at night, straight ahead to the bright lights festooned upon the George Washington Bridge, now twinkling and blurred in the moist sky. They were a long, long way from Taylor Street, from the crowded flat where Joe and Dominic were raised.

  Seeing Joe away from the ballpark like this reminded Dom of home, and of the early years, of stepping out of that first-floor apartment to a world of games and youth. He and Joe, the two youngest of the nine children, would listen in the predawn darkness as their father, Giuseppe, pulled on his old boots and crept outside to walk the half mile downhill to the wharf where he would clamber into his boat, the Rosalie D (named for Ma) for another day on the water in San Francisco Bay, bait-fishing with Tom or more likely Mike or sometimes both of his older boys along to help him out.

  Giuseppe imagined that one day they’d have a fleet of DiMaggio boats, more fish, more money and the old family tradition living proudly on for another generation. But later, when the youngest boys Joe and Dominic were old enough to help fish or clean the boat, they rarely did. Joe especially. He would mend the nets that had torn along the reef. He was good at that, his long fingers working swiftly and nimbly, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. But he did the mending on the dock. As for fishing, Joe said he couldn’t take the smell, and that riding in Pa’s little boat made him seasick.

  As boys they ate what they could find in the house for breakfast, on lucky days the butt end—the culo as Tom called it, laughing—of a loaf of Italian bread, brushed with a little olive oil. When the bread was stale, as it often was because it came cheaper that way, Ma put it in the oven and made it good as new.

  After the day at the Hancock School, which took up the corner at Taylor and Filbert, practically right next door to home, Dom and Joe and maybe their neighbor Dante or one of the other kids from the block would devise a game using a ball and a branch, or perhaps the DiMaggios’ well-worn family bat, to play on Valparaiso Street, a flat, narrow alley off of Taylor’s precipitous drop. That was safer; miss a ball on Taylor and it might roll down five blocks or more. Joe was in the fourth grade. Dom was in the second. When enough boys were around they’d sometimes head down to the dusty horse lot by the wharf, play baseball with a beat-up ball. There were never enough gloves to go around and piles of manure dotted their makeshift field.

  The real games, especially in the years when Joe had begun at Francisco Junior High, took place a dogleg away from home, a block-and-a-half scamper on the coarsely paved streets to North Beach playground. Here’s where people began to take more serious notice of the way Joe played ball. Vince, two years older, was good too, very good, but no one hit the ball farther than Joe, and no one played more intently. Joe never spoke much, and if his team lost, he wouldn’t speak at all.

  Even the kids who weren’t playing, guys like Paul Maniscalco, the Crab King’s son, who went to the school at the church, liked to gather to watch the games. They’d sit in clusters in the shade of the evergreens or stand near the concrete wall, flipping baseball cards they’d gotten out of Cracker Jack boxes.

  Sometimes there would be betting on the ball games, a dime here or there, a nickel, and nothing got Joe’s attention more than when there was a little money to be won. Then he’d really bear in, hit with a ferocity that flat-out frightened the infielders, even after they’d taken their three steps back when he came to the plate. Joe could intimidate on defense too. If a guy tried to score on him he’d throw the ball in from the outfield so hard it might knock the catcher right off his feet.

  In the spring and summer, when the light lasted, they would come home late, miss dinner, and their father, old Giuseppe who never had the time—or the desire—to come down to the playground and watch the games himself, would complain that the boys were wasting their young lives, that all baseball was good for was wearing out the clothes that the DiMaggios could barely afford. Giuseppe and Rosalie spo
ke only Italian at home.

  Joe and Dom got jobs for a while, selling afternoon newspapers—Joe the Call-Bulletin, Dominic the News—on the busy streets over in the financial district. But Joe didn’t last long at that; he was too shy, too reserved to bellow out the headlines to entice buyers. Perky Dom would sell all of his batch then come help Joe sell his too, so they could go back and play ball for nickels again, or mooch a cigarette, or head to La Rocca’s Corner Tavern on Columbus and try to wangle free plays out of the pinball machine—Joe had a trick—until the bartender ran them out. Later they would sometimes come back to La Rocca’s and listen to Vince sing opera songs. People passed the hat and said that Vince, 15 or 16 then, had the voice to be a star if he only got the chance.

  There wasn’t much money in those days—Joe and Dom wore shirts that had first been passed down from Tom to Mike to Vince, and most of the money they made from selling the newspapers went straight to the family—but that didn’t matter so much to Dom.

  There was always the smell of something Italian cooking in the neighborhood. As a goof some of the boys liked to hop onto the back of the grape truck that rode up and down the North Beach streets, maybe the only car that they’d see on the block all day, bringing the fruit to all the families for wine-making in their cellars. Giuseppe and Rosalie made wine too. Even in the prohibition years the law allowed wine for medicinal or religious reasons. In North Beach the grown-ups used to joke, “We have a lot of sick people, and we have a lot of devout people.”