January/February 2001

January/February 2001 | Contents

Covering Icons, Iconoclastically

BY STEVE WEINBERG

Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life
by Richard Ben Cramer
Simon & Schuster, 546 pages, $28

Richard Ben Cramer opens his biography of Joe DiMaggio with a scene from September 27, 1998, the year before the professional baseball player turned celebrity turned Marilyn Monroe's husband died. The New York Yankees are honoring DiMaggio at the stadium in the Bronx. What appeared to be a generous gesture by Major League Baseball, Cramer says, was actually the result of a concerted campaign by DiMaggio based on emotional and financial blackmail. Three years earlier, Cramer says, DiMaggio had been enraged that the Yankees honored former star Mickey Mantle in ways the team had never honored him. Especially angering DiMaggio, according to Cramer, was the commemorative baseball manufactured for Mickey Mantle Day. Collectors and dealers paid up to $300 per baseball, Cramer notes, twice as much as DiMaggio had been receiving for autographing balls at shows. So DiMaggio, Cramer says, began pushing for his own special day, with his own commemorative ball that, autographed, ought to fetch at least $400. He wanted 15,000 of those balls given to him at no charge, Cramer reveals.

(Some CJR readers are probably questioning the heavy, and awkward, attribution to Cramer in the paragraph above. More on this later.)

After relating the opening scene, Cramer becomes a media critic:

"Of course, no one was going to tell that story on Joe DiMaggio Day -- or write it in the papers. So they wrote about remembered autumns of glory, about the love affair of the hero and the Yankee fans. For sixty years writers had to make up what Joe cared about. As Joe himself once explained, 'They used to write stories about me like they were interviewing me, and never even talked to me.'"

For examples of such coverage, Cramer turns to two contemporary newspapermen, Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News ("Joe's favorite among the new generation") and Dave Anderson of The New York Times ("one of the last guys who knew Joe when"). Cramer describes Lupica's story about the September 27, 1998, ceremony as "wistful," and cites a passage from Anderson's story about DiMaggio marveling at the beauty of the World Series rings presented to him, rings meant to replace the originals that DiMaggio had reported as stolen. "The fact was," Cramer writes, "DiMaggio was never wistful . . . . And he never spent an instant in his life to marvel at the beauty of anything. Except maybe a broad. Which wasn't marveling -- that was wanting. Wanting he did."

On the baseball field, DiMaggio is portrayed by Cramer as so driven by perfection and ego -- in a sport where even the greatest fail more than 60 percent of the time -- that he became mostly unpleasant to be around. Off the field, DiMaggio is portrayed as driven by financial greed, sex with young blondes, and unquestioning loyalty from the few individuals whom he more or less trusted. Perhaps the book's major news peg -- besides the gossip about the possibility of a Marilyn Monroe-DiMaggio remarriage just before her death -- is DiMaggio's alleged favors from organized crime.

Cramer is a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter turned free-lance magazine writer turned book author. Within journalism, he is generally regarded as one of the finest stylists alive, but one who comes mighty close to the line between nonfiction and fiction in spinning a good story. Profiling baseball greats was not his thing (his Pulitzer is for international reporting) until he composed an acclaimed profile of Ted Williams.

So, when word got out during the mid-1990s that Cramer would be turning his attention to DiMaggio, a buzz began within the crafts of journalism and biography. DiMaggio, born in 1914, was alive at the time. Would he try to use the power flowing from his iconic status to squash Cramer's efforts? If he did, how would Cramer prevail? Or would he prevail at all?

While researching his 1992 book, What It Takes: The Way to the White House, Cramer spent lots of time with each of the six main candidates and their entourages. He could not operate that way with the intensely private DiMaggio, whose public appearances almost always had to do with increasing his bank account. As Cramer explains his hurdle in the Author's Note: "The coverage of DiMaggio for sixty-five years was mostly flat because Joe would show nothing but a shiny surface of his own devising. Any attempt to penetrate that surface met with silence (at best). Persistence only spurred him to more icy and obdurate exclusion. And if that didn't work, there was anger and threat. Moreover, he enforced a similar silence within his wide acquaintance. All the men and women who truly knew Joe were well aware they would face his exclusion or rage if he found out they had talked about him."

Lots of people talked to Cramer anyway, he says. When DiMaggio died in 1999, Cramer got a break, as information "came sluicing in -- new recollections spurred by the event, new sources who felt free to talk, and old sources who wanted to talk -- to remember the man who had touched their lives."

Cramer is a determined, skilled researcher -- some of the book's best parts are its context sections: the context of San Francisco in the 1920s as Joe, the son of Italian immigrant parents, was growing up there, one of nine children, including two others who became major league outfielders; the context of major league baseball just before and just after World War II; the context of the war itself; the celebrity culture of New York City; the "rotten magnificence" of Marilyn Monroe's (and, briefly, Joe's) Hollywood.

But Cramer's sourcing is usually too vague -- even in the contextual sections -- to be persuasive. In the back he lists hundreds of people who he says sent him information, granted him interviews. The amazing revelations that fill page after page, however, are almost never tied to a document or an interview. There are no footnotes, no endnotes. I took the extraordinary step of comparing every person thanked by Cramer to the people named in the text. That task took about six hours. I found lots of matches, suggesting that perhaps the people thanked provided information for portions of the text. Sad to say, pursuing that line of reasoning led mostly to dead ends.

Here's a homely example, from page 198. The scene is the New York eatery owned by Toots Shor, one of DiMaggio's toadies. DiMaggio, married to the small-time actress Dorothy Arnold, is father to a new son, Joe Junior. DiMaggio is drinking with the jockey Eddie Arcaro, himself a new father. Cramer quotes the usually guarded DiMaggio as saying, "Come over to the house some night, Eddie, and I'll show you how to hold a baby." Then Cramer cuts to Dorothy, with DiMaggio at the eatery that night, the Dorothy who felt ignored in the marriage, the Dorothy who believed Joe was a terrible father to the baby, the Dorothy who would later file for divorce. Cramer writes, "Very few were close enough to hear Mrs. Joe, whose blue eyes held a cold glint of scorn, as she said under her breath: 'Whose baby are you going to use for teaching?'"

Now, there is no need for Cramer to tell us precisely on page 198 how he knows what he knows about that scene. After all, as the opening paragraph of this review was intended to demonstrate, such attribution would cramp his writing style, and that would be a shame. But why not tell us in an endnote? Did Cramer hear the story from somebody in attendance that night? We know the information did not come from DiMaggio. As for Dorothy, she died before Cramer started his research. Cramer never suggests that he talked to Arcaro or Shor about this matter. Who else was there? Cramer doesn't say. If he relied on such a source, that somebody must have been sitting mighty close to Dorothy, to hear her muttered words, to see her eyes, to even interpret what that look in her eyes meant. Why not tell us who that somebody is?

Or did Cramer hear it from somebody who wasn't there, somebody who heard it from somebody else who heard it ten years after the event from the actual somebody who was there that night? Hey, maybe Cramer adapted the scene from a previous book or article? But there's no bibliography either.

Probably the most disturbing example of non-sourcing is on page 246. Cramer reveals that DiMaggio's "Mob friends" established a trust account for his benefit at the Bowery Bank in New York. They contributed over and over, year after year, until DiMaggio had accumulated a nest egg hidden from the commissioner of baseball, from government tax agents, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But not from Cramer.

Here I bow to Pete Hamill, who knows more about the New York Mob than I do. Hamill writes in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "What was the name and number of the secret trust account? Where was the branch of the Bowery Bank? When could DiMaggio begin to draw upon it? . . . If we assume that this tale is based on Mob gossip (whose source can't be named), our skepticism must be almost absolute. Mob guys, particularly aging low-level hoodlums, are notorious bullshit artists . . . . If one of those Mob lowlifes crawls out of the sewer, claiming to know something lousy about someone famous, it's best to think of the tale as entertainment, not journalism, history, or biography. As a great editor once warned me, when I was a young newspaperman: 'If you want it to be true, it usually isn't.'"

Chances are good that Cramer's life of DiMaggio is more true than the dozens of books, the thousands of articles and documentaries that have appeared before. Cramer certainly thinks so:

"The problem wasn't simply volume(s) but a well-trodden sameness that had matted down the grass along a few practiced paths -- the stories that were always mentioned -- which were (not by coincidence) the stories of which Joe approved. The net effect of the vast and mostly shallow coverage was the creation of a character who was at once gigantic and at the same time curiously flat -- there was so little about him that felt human and alive." So buy Cramer's book. Study him as a compelling writer. Decide for yourself if his revelations should be accepted on trust alone.

Steve Weinberg lives in Columbia, Missouri. He is currently writing a life of the journalist Ida M. Tarbell.