JOE DIMAGGIO

Joe DiMaggio… The name alone is loud with echoes of his cheering crowds. To a whole generation that saw him play baseball, he was the consummate hero. And indeed his accomplishments on the diamond reached heights never attained by others at the time, and never surpassed since. But behind those feats there lurked a deeply flawed man. What he did off the field was deplorable. Yet all of that obnoxious behaviour was something the public either forgave or ignored or, if possible, preferred not to know about. And that tells us much about the relationship between public and hero, about the role of myth in the public mind: elevate someone to the status of a god, and he can then do nothing wrong.

His career as an athlete speaks for itself. For thirteen years he was supreme with the bat, an outstanding centre-fielder, and a superb base-runner. Largely thanks to him, the New York Yankees won ten pennants and nine world championships. He was the heart and soul of the club. And if he sometimes chided his team-mates with a harsh tongue, that was only because they fell below the standards of perfection which he set for himself: baseball, to him, was not about friendship or team spirit; it was about doing everything just right. That included not only dedicated effort, at whatever cost to the body, but also the kind of proper demeanour that would keep burnished the ideal image of the game: he was always gracious to opponents, and never indulged in tantrums with the umpires. In short, what baseball ought to be, and seldom is, was all summed up in what he did and how he comported himself. For that, the game itself, and its fans, were for ever grateful.

The hero-worship that was accorded him, throughout his career and afterwards, fitted very neatly into the American dream of poor boy makes good, winning fame and fortune. That factor, added to his actual eminence, transformed him from a man into a legend. And the sad fact is that he became a legend in his own mind: reputation and its glittering rewards were, in the end, all that mattered to him. Raised in poverty and patho­logically shy, he built himself a life that was entirely self-enclosed, avid of wealth, and rooted in a sense of owning a unique talent. The world owed him, that was his article of faith. He made millions, but never paid for anything if, as a celebrity, he could get it for free. He never gave autographs, except now and then to a child, but made a big business of selling his autograph at outrageous prices — this at a time when he was far too rich to need the money. Not content with his earnings and his freebies, he accepted secret bank deposits from organized crime, from gangsters who were happy to hitch themselves to his bandwagon; and that was just fine with him, for money, wherever it came from, was after all his due. And he guarded every penny he acquired with obsessive miserliness: he did buy his parents their house and he made sure his elder sister was taken care of — that duty was built in, part of his Sicilian heritage. But no one else had a claim on him: he had no room in his life for the other siblings, or even for his only son; and he alienated everyone else who might have been his friend; everybody, in his view, just wanted a piece of him, and that was exactly what they were not going to get.

The famous exception, of course, was Marilyn Monroe. She was the one true love of his life. And he stood by her loyally, despite her promiscuity, her drinking and drug use, her compulsive narcissism, and her unwavering fidelity to the ambitions of stardom rather than to him — she wanted his love, and repeatedly depended on it; but she was not prepared to pay the price for it, if it meant in any way compromising her career.

Fidelity, though, was for him merely a one-way street. By the double standard of his ancestral culture, it was alright for him to sleep with any woman who caught his fancy, but his wife, or his fiancee, or his ex-wife, must never sleep with, or flirt with, another man: she was his possession; and if she stepped out of line, it was his right to slap her around. Theirs was a tormented relationship. Yet, despite all its emotional turmoil, it came at long last to resolution, reconciliation. He had always perceived in her the fragile girl behind the glamorous mask; he wanted only to protect her, from herself and from the sharks who fed on her; and he did learn, over the years, to give of himself to her, not just to try and own her. She, for her part, with her career in ruins through self-destructive behaviour on and off the set, chose finally to turn her back on Hollywood and return to Joe: they would remarry, and she would settle into this other role as traditional wife, probably in San Francisco: it was the one place where they had ever been truly happy together, and the only place that he had ever thought of as home.

Three nights before their wedding, which was to be a rigorously private affair, Marilyn Monroe was found dead on her bed in her Hollywood apartment with empty bottles of pills beside her. The official view was that this was either death by misadventure, through an accidental overdose, or else suicide. These easy assumptions, however, were undermined by the fact that the autopsy detected no trace of narcotics in her system. So her death remained, and still remains, something of a mystery. Conspiracy theories sprang up at once, suggesting that foul play was involved. It was hinted, in some quarters, that her death was just a little too convenient for the Kennedy brothers, the President and the Attorney General: she had slept with them both, and it would be politically damaging to them if their adulteries became public knowledge; she was a bit of a loose cannon, and there was no knowing what she might let drop. Such theories, of course were pure speculation, and there was no physical evidence to show that a homicide had occurred. But conspiracy buffs were quick to note that there had been a curious three-hour gap between the discovery of the body and the arrival of the police — ample time, it was implied, for physical evidence to be removed, if political pressure had been exerted either to remove it or to suppress it. Such notions are, to many minds, rather fanciful. A more likely explanation is that there was no overdose, but that her body had simply succumbed to the years of abuse by alcohol and drugs. Either way, the truth will probably never be known.

As for Joe, it destroyed him, her death. All his adult life, he had felt that the world was somehow against him. He had had to fight for his rights as a baseball player, against a managerial tradition that exploited players like serfs: to the owners he was just someone to be used, for profit, and it wasn’t just the owners; other people, too, were always out to use him, for whatever their own reasons might be. So it became his habitual response to retire within himself, at arm’s length from everyone: not to give to the world, but to take care of business and wrest from the world what might otherwise be withheld.

Given that outlook, it was inevitable that he should see Marilyn Monroe as the victim of Hollywood exploitation. Contractually, the studios treated her like a chattel. Commercially, they served her up as so much meat for the fantasies of male lust. And they manipulated her as a pawn in the artificial world of Glamour, giving her no respect at all either as a real woman or as a would-be serious actress. Joe loathed the whole Hollywood setup, for what it did to her. He was perfectly well aware that her own weaknesses made her a willing victim, that the role of sex-goddess held a wretched attraction for her. But he also knew, as almost no one else did, that she had experienced a true contentment, and a truer sense of herself, when she stayed with his sister in San Francisco and went shopping in the market, incognito in a head-scarf and an unrevealing black dress, and helped cook the meals, and had for the first time in her life the pleasure of fitting in with a family.

Joe had known this about her, and had loved it in her. It had brought out the best in her, and in him. She had found for herself an escape and a future, abandoning the perverse milieu that had done her such damage, and looking to a normal life away from it all — she began an interrupted note to him on the day she died, in which she wrote, “If I can only succeed in making you happy, I will have succeeded in the biggest and most difficult thing there is — that is, to make one person completely happy. Your happiness means my happiness.” The prospect of this did not only offer her a cure to what ailed her, it offered him a powerful healing of a lifelong adversity they would live simply and privately as Mr and Mrs DiMaggio, and he would be at peace with the world.

So when she died, he lost it all. He lost the one person with whom he had arrived at a healthy kind of love, no longer possessive or jealous, but at once protective and generous. The remembrance of that love, and of its meaning, would never leave him. But the loss of it would turn him back once more, and irrevocably, into a man embittered, hard, and implacable. He was convinced that her world, one way or another, had killed her; and the world, again, was his enemy. He spent the next thirty-eight years at odds with it, closed off from others, and locked into old patterns of avarice and rancour.

In a sense, he too was a victim: in part of his own weaknesses, and in part of circumstances. If the result was to bring out the worst in him, it is not for us to stand in judgment. Rather, and fitly, what we can take away into our own lives is the legacy of Joe DiMaggio at his best: an image of strength and poise and skill; a memory of grace.

History has never been short of flawed heroes and heroines, men and women who, like Joe DiMaggio, rose from humble beginnings to various eminences of wealth and power; who summed up in their own persons something of what their country was about, who excelled at what they primarily did, but who also, in their private lives, exhibited a moral blindness that blots their overall record. One of the most striking personalities of that sort was David, the king of ancient Israel. Coming out of nowhere, an obscure shepherd-boy, he saved the kingdom from conquest by foreign troops, defeating their champion in single combat. Surviving the murderous plottings of his jealous king, to whom he remained steadfastly loyal even at the risk of his own life, he inherited the throne after the king’s death and during his reign, he ruled justly and saved Israel, repeatedly, when invaders launched attacks. Yet at the height of his power, he had an adulterous affair with another man’s wife, and arranged for the husband to be killed in battle. Sinner and saviour, he was a web of contradictions. But his legacy outweighs his failings: he bequeathed to his people a firm sense of their nationhood; and he bequeathed to the world at large, in his psalms, a gift of magnificent poems.

In the end, when the score is added up, much can be forgiven.