NPR News

Excerpt: 'Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil'

NPR | By Jerome Charyn

Published March 25, 2011 at 3:07 PM EDT

Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil by Jerome Charyn

Prologue: Pinocchio in Pinstripes

He was the nonpareil, missed from the moment he retired in 1951. "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" asked Paul Simon in 1967. "A nation turns its lonely eyes to you." Thus there was a lament for DiMaggio long before he died, in 1999. And when he lay ill in a hospital during the last days of his life, the flurry of reports about his condition could have been about a pontiff or a president, not a baseball player who toiled in the outfield at Yankee Stadium for thirteen years. DiMaggio seemed to override baseball and sports itself. He was the lonely practitioner of some lost American art—America's one and only prince, who happened to have been a baseball player.

Babe Ruth was loved; Ty Cobb was reviled. Joe DiMaggio was revered, looked upon with an almost religious awe. He was the first saint of baseball when baseball itself was a religion, an icon of American life, "the binding national myth," according to David Halberstam in Summer of '49; and even as reverberations began to grow about his tie to gangsters and gamblers, his disregard for his only son, his mauling of Marilyn Monroe (he bruised her face and might have broken her thumb), DiMaggio still managed to survive as our troubadour.

As Marilyn's own aura multiplies year after year, and we see her now as a great comic artist, much more complex than most of the men who hovered around her—Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, Yves Montand, Frank Sinatra, and both Kennedy boys—Marilyn and Joe have become America's mythic couple, with a troubled friendship and romance that was more constant than any marriage, even their own. Whatever his faults, he was the only man worthy of her, who did not use Marilyn or feed off her fame, as Miller and Montand did. When she was trapped inside a madhouse in 1961, it was DiMaggio who got her out, threatening to tear down the place, "piece of wood by piece of wood," if it did not produce her in five minutes. When she lay about like some besotted prisoner in Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs compound, it was DiMaggio who stood outside the gate, keeping his own vigil, just as he kept vigil in the caverns of Yankee Stadium.

Marilyn and Joe have become America's mythic couple, with a troubled friendship and romance that was more constant than any marriage, even their own. Whatever his faults, he was the only man worthy of her, who did not use Marilyn or feed off her fame.

He was always keeping vigil, and that's why we remember him. His greatness has less to do with statistics than with his devotion to baseball, or to anything he cared about. He had a purity and a natural grace that few others had. He was, as Grantland Rice reminds us in "An Ode to the Jolter," a "drifting phantom" with "movement none could match." Ted Williams, his one great rival, was utterly bored in the outfield. "There were tales of his conduct in the outfield, where he'd sit down between batters or practice swinging an imaginary bat, watching his leg-stride, watching his wrist-break, watching everything except balls hit to him," wrote Richard Ben Cramer.

It was Cramer's biography of the Yankee Clipper, published in 2000, that seemed to deflate DiMaggio, to tarnish him for the twenty-first century. Subtitled The Hero's Life, it attacks the "hero machine" that helped create DiMaggio and reveals a man who didn't want to go to war, who was utterly friendless except for a coterie of sycophants, who stalked Marilyn after their divorce, who sold his World Series rings to pay for his lodging, and who never spent an instant marveling "at the beauty of anything. Except maybe a broad."

Cramer's book is itself a marvel that digs deep into the DiMaggio myth as it unmans him piece by piece. But its picture of the Jolter is far too reductive and bleak. DiMaggio was much more than the blind apparatus of a machine that spat out heroes and ruined them in the process. He wasn't as calculating as Cramer loves to think. He was like an idiot savant whose magic was born on a baseball field and abandoned him once he left it.

No one, not even Cramer, doubted him in center field. "It was a special place—not just the vastness in the Bronx, but every center field: the largest suzerainty in the game's realm, it had to be patrolled by a prince."

DiMaggio was that prince, alone in his suzerainty, unrivaled, a hunter waiting for his prey. DiMaggio land was not simply center field but right-center and left-center, so that the other two out fielders were appendages who didn't dare enter his territory unless the prince gave them permission to do so. "He was a world by himself," recalls Henry Kissinger, who first saw DiMaggio patrol the outfield from a seat in the bleachers in 1938, when Kissinger was a German Jewish refugee living with his parents in Washington Heights. "There was nobody who could take over a ballpark like he could."

DiMaggio was much more than the blind apparatus of a machine that spat out heroes and ruined them in the process. ... He was like an idiot savant whose magic was born on a baseball field and abandoned him once he left it.

And Kissinger wasn't an exceptional witness: so much of DiMaggio's almost magical fame comes from his own fans, from those he marked for life, whether it be Ernest Hemingway, who wrote about "the great DiMaggio" in The Old Man and the Sea, a sports writer such as Jimmy Cannon, a social critic such as David Halberstam, a literary critic such as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the biologist and baseball aficionado Stephen Jay Gould, or the rest of us, who were astonished by what we saw, and were able to find a language to tell others about it, to describe DiMaggio's own language, his economy of motion, his lyricism as he roamed center field. There was a kind of heartbreak, as we worried that he might disappear in that enormous expanse of space, that no one man could withstand all the wind, not even the Yankee Clipper, that the leaping gazelle we saw was some aberration, a phantom put there by our own wish to create some creature more perfect than ourselves. No fellow human being could possibly look that good, but DiMaggio did.