Joe DiMaggio

Joseph Paul DiMaggio, born Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio, Jr. (November 25, 1914 – March 8, 1999), nicknamed Joltin' Joe and The Yankee Clipper, was a Major League Baseball center fielder who played his entire major-league-baseball career (1936–1951) for the New York Yankees. He was the brother of Vince DiMaggio and Dom DiMaggio, also baseball players.

A three-time MVP winner and 13-time All-Star Dimaggio was widely hailed for his accomplishments on both offense and defense, as well as for the grace with which he played the game. At the time of his retirement at age 36, he had the fifth most career home runs (361) and sixth highest slugging percentage (.579) in history. A "picture-perfect" player, many rate his 56-game hitting streak (May 15 – July 17, 1941) as the top baseball feat of all time. A 1969 poll conducted to coincide with the centennial of professional baseball voted him the sport's greatest living player.

DiMaggio's marriage to actress Marilyn Monroe raised his stature from baseball star to national celebrity. But the union ended in divorce and he lived an increasingly reclusive life out of the public eye. Following his death, a monument was established in his honor at Yankee Stadium. On it is inscribed, "A baseball legend and an American icon."

Early years

DiMaggio was the eighth of nine children born to Sicilian immigrants. His mother, Rosalia, named him "Giuseppe" for his father; "Paolo" was in honor of Saint Paul, lhis father's favorite saint. The family moved to San Francisco when Joe was one year old.

Giuseppe Sr. was a fisherman, as were generations of DiMaggios before him, and wanted his five sons to do the same. Joe would do anything to get out of cleaning his father's boat, as the smell of dead fish made him sick to his stomach. This earned him Giuseppe's ire, who called him "lazy" and "good for nothing." It was only after Joe became the sensation of the Pacific Coast League (PCL) that his father was finally won over.

Joe was in semi-pro ball when older brother Vince, playing for the San Francisco Seals, talked his manager into letting Joe fill in at shortstop. Joe—making his debut on October 1, 1932—could not play shortstop well, but he could hit. From May 28 – July 25, 1933, he got at least one hit in a PCL-record, 61 consecutive games.

In 1934, DiMaggio's career almost ended. Going to his sister's house for dinner, he tore the ligaments in his left knee while stepping out of a taxi. The Seals, hoping to sell Joe for $100,000—a staggering sum during the Great Depression—now couldn't give him away. Fortunately, New York Yankees|Yankees]]' scout Bill Essick pestered the team to give the 19-year-old another look. After Joe passed a test on his knee, he was bought for $25,000 plus the rights to five lesser players, with the Seals keeping him for the 1935 season. That year, he batted .398 with 154 RBIs and 34 home runs, led the Seals to the 1935 PCL title, and was named the league's Most Valuable Player.

"The Yankee Clipper"

Touted by sportswriters as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Shoeless Joe Jackson rolled into one, he made his major-league debut on May 3, 1936, batting ahead of Lou Gehrig. The Yankees had not been to the World Series since 1932, but, thanks in large part to their sensational rookie, they won the next four world championships. In total, he led the Yankees to nine titles in 13 years.

Bauer once described DiMaggio as a "red-ass," a man whose drive to win was all-consuming. This extended even to family: a 1948 TIME profile reported that his mother told him Dom's wedding was to take place on October 7 unless the Red Sox won the pennant, then it would be delayed ten days. "Mama," DiMaggio replied. "I will personally see to it that Dom is free to marry on the seventh." Although the Red Sox beat the Yankees in their final two games, the Cleveland Indians beat them in a one-game playoff to win the pennant.

By 1949, DiMaggio was still regarded as the game's best player, but injuries got to the point where he could not take a step without pain. A sub-par 1951 season and a brutal scouting report by the Brooklyn Dodgers that was leaked to the press led him to announce his retirement on December 11, 1951. He was to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955.

Dimaggio would likely have had better statistics had his home park not been Yankee Stadium. As The House That Ruth Built, it was designed to accommodate the Babe's left-handed power. For right-handed hitters, it was a nightmare: Mickey Mantle recalled that he and Whitey Ford would count the blasts DiMaggio hit that would have been home runs anywhere else, but, at the Stadium, were merely long "outs." Others calculated that DiMaggio lost more home runs due to his home park than any player in history. Left-center field went as far back as 457 feet, compared to ballparks today where left-center rarely reaches 380 feet.

Military service

Following the U.S. entrance in World War II, DiMaggio enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces on February 17, 1943, rising to the rank of Sergeant. While Ted Williams, Bob Feller, and Hank Greenberg served overseas at their request, DiMaggio was stationed at Santa Ana, California, Hawaii, and Atlantic City as a physical-education instructor during his thirty-one-month stint, and played baseball.

Giuseppe and Rosalia DiMaggio were among the thousands of German, Japanese, and Italian immigrants classified as "enemy aliens" after Pearl Harbor was attacked. They had to carry photo ID booklets at all times, were not allowed to travel more than five miles from their home without a permit, and Giuseppe's boat was seized. Rosalia became an American citizen in 1944, Giuseppe in 1945.

Personal life

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DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe on their wedding day, January 14, 1954

In January 1937, DiMaggio met actress Dorothy Arnold on the set of Manhattan Merry Go-Round. They married at San Francisco's Catholic SS Peter and Paul on November 19, 1939 as 20,000 well-wishers jammed the streets.

Even before their son Joseph III was born, the marriage was in trouble. DiMaggio was like many ballplayers: a high-school dropout whose life revolved around the game. While not the "party animal" Babe Ruth was, he had his fun, leaving Dorothy feeling neglected. However, she was an ambitious social climber who took advantage of her status as the wife of baseball's biggest star. DiMaggio biographer Michael Seidel reported that, except on the nights before Lefty Gomez was to pitch, Dorothy and Lefty's wife, Broadway's June O'Dea, would drag their husbands from one Manhattan nightspot to another. He resented how she complained about his off-the-field activities while she spent his money. But when Dorothy threatened divorce in 1942, the usually unflappable DiMaggio went into a slump, and developed ulcers. She went to Reno, Nevada in February 1943; he followed her and they reconciled. But shortly after he enlisted in the Army and was sent to Hawaii, she filed for divorce in Los Angeles.

The relationship continued off and on. Dorothy reportedly promised Joe she would wait for him to return from 1946 training camp, but married another man. It was only after he met another blonde actress on a blind date in 1952 did he finally get her out of his system for good. According to her autobiography, Marilyn Monroe did not want to meet DiMaggio, fearing he was a stereotypical jock. Both were at different points in their lives: the just-retired Joe wanted to settle down; Marilyn's career was taking off. Their elopement at San Francisco City Hall on January 14, 1954 was the culmination of a courtship that had captivated the nation.

The relationship was loving yet complex, marred by his jealousy and her ambition. DiMaggio biographer Richard Ben Cramer asserts it was also violent. One incident allegedly happened after the skirt-blowing scene in The Seven Year Itch was filmed on September 14, 1954 in front of New York's Trans-Lux Theater. Then-20th Century Fox's East Coast correspondent Bill Kobrin told the Palm Springs Desert Sun that it was Billy Wilder's idea to turn the shoot into a circus: "... every time her dress came up and the crowd started to get excited, DiMaggio just blew up." The couple then had a "yelling battle" in the theater lobby (see [1]). When she filed for divorce 274 days after the wedding, Oscar Levant quipped it proved that no man could be a success in two pastimes.

DiMaggio re-entered Marilyn's life as her marriage to Arthur Miller was ending. On February 10, 1961, he secured her release from Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic (she was reportedly placed in the ward for the most seriously disturbed). She joined him in Florida where he was a batting coach for the Yankees. Their "just friends" claim did not stop remarriage rumors from flying. Reporters staked out her apartment building. Bob Hope "dedicated" Best Song nominee "The Second Time Around" to them at the Academy Awards.

According to biographer Maury Allen, Joe was so alarmed at how Marilyn had returned to her self-destructive ways, falling in with people he felt detrimental to her (including Frank Sinatra and his "Rat Pack"), he quit his job with a military post-exchange supplier on August 1, 1962 to ask her to remarry him. But before he could, she was found dead on August 5, a probable suicide. Devastated, he claimed her body, and arranged her funeral, barring Hollywood's elite. He had a half-dozen red roses delivered three times a week to her crypt for the next twenty years. Unlike her other two husbands or other men who knew her intimately (or claimed to), he refused to talk about her publicly or "cash in" on the relationship. He never married again.

Death

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Following lung cancer surgery on October 14, 1998, DiMaggio fell into an eighteen-hour coma on December 11. The coma forced his lawyer, Morris Engelberg, to admit that the positive reports he had been feeding to the press were greatly exaggerated. He claimed Joe made him promise not to tell even his family about his condition.

Joe was finally taken home on January 19, 1999. Days later, NBC broadcasted a premature obituary; Engelberg claimed he and DiMaggio were watching TV and saw it. His last words, according to Engelberg, were "I'll finally get to see Marilyn." However, the day after DiMaggio's death, a hospice worker who cared for him gave a radically different account to The New York Post.

DiMaggio is interred at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, California. In his eulogy, Dom declared that his brother had everything "except the right woman to share his life with," a remark seeming to confirm the family's disapproval of Monroe. Cramer told the New York Times that Dom cooperated with him on his controversial biography, and got other family members to do likewise.

Legacy

DiMaggio was used by artists as a touchstone in popular culture not only during his career, but decades after he retired. In the South Pacific song, "Bloody Mary" has "skin tender as DiMaggio's glove." Joltin' Joe DiMaggio was recorded during his hitting streak by Les Brown.

In Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely, Philip Marlowe follows the streak, which Chandler uses as a metaphor for good. A generation later, Simon and Garfunkel used him in that same vein in "Mrs. Robinson." The literal-minded DiMaggio was reportedly not fond of the lyric "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" as he was very much alive, and had not gone anywhere. However, he changed his mind when he gained a whole new generation of fans from that song. When he died the London Times observed in its obituary that the lines from "Mrs Robinson" were what DiMaggio would be most remembered for.

Stephen Jay Gould often wrote of DiMaggio's 56-hit streak as the only sports record that was an unpredictable anomaly based on statistical analysis, and therefore the greatest feat in all of sports. His hitting streak has been used as a gold standard to compare similar feats in other sports. Johnny Unitas throwing at least one touchdown in forty-seven consecutive games is often cited as football's version. Martina Navratilova referred to her seventy-four straight match wins as "my DiMaggio streak." Wayne Gretzky's 51-game, point-scoring run also was compared with the streak. DiMaggio was less than impressed, quoted as saying that Gretzky (who scored an empty-net goal in the final moments of a game to keep the streak alive) "never had to worry about a mid-game washout in the middle of the second period."

On September 17, 1992, the Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital opened, for which he raised over $4,000,000. Elián González was taken there after he was rescued off the coast of Miami.

Yankee Stadium's fifth monument was dedicated to DiMaggio on April 25, 1999. It replaced a plaque that previously hung at Monument Park: "A baseball legend and an American icon." Also on that date the West Side Highway was officially renamed in his honor. The Yankees wore DiMaggio's number 5 on the left sleeves of their uniforms for the 1999 season. He is ranked #11 on The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, and was elected by fans to the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.

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