56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports (41 page)

The club declared July 14, 1933, Joe De Maggio night at Seals Stadium and in the game he extended the streak to 50 straight. Flashbulbs went off when he came to bat. San Francisco mayor Angelo Rossi presented Joe with a gold, engraved watch and gave flowers to Marie and Rosalie. The Seals players chipped in to give Joe a small check in gratitude and the boys from Joe’s old neighborhood team, the Jolly Knights of North Beach, came out and presented him with a leather traveling bag. At some games, when one of his old Knights teammates called out to Joe from the seats behind the Seals dugout, he did not even turn to look. Often a sense of distance surrounded him—a quiet, incurious pride. It was as if he were somehow set apart. Sometimes around the locker room and in the dugout things were said that DiMaggio did not quite understand.

He was young and skinny and callow, and in the hotel lobbies of Portland and Seattle and Los Angeles he wore yellowed T-shirts and torn leather shoes. Only later, when Joe began to believe that the money might stick, and began to hear whispers that a team in the major leagues, the Yankees even, might want to sign him did he agree to buy some real clothes. Then he visited with Joe Toboni, down at Toboni’s milliner’s shop on Market Street, and Toboni stood DiMaggio in front of a mirror and said he had something to teach him that he needed to learn.
You pull the wide end down through here, then you tighten the knot like this. There you go Joe, that’s how you tie a tie
.

During the streak DiMaggio faced pitchers who were bound for or had been in the big leagues—young Johnny Babich and Buck Newsom, veterans Tom Sheehan, Frank Shellenback and others. It didn’t matter who the pitchers were, Joe didn’t think about that. Not ever. He took his bat and went up and swung.

DiMaggio obeyed superstition that season because he thought that was what ballplayers were supposed to do.
Don’t mess with anything when you’re going good, kid
, the veterans said. So he kept his right thumb wrapped in tape for the whole length of the hitting streak, well after the bone bruise that had ached at the start of the run in May had healed and faded away.
That’s it, don’t change a thing
, the veterans said. He was summoned to City Hall and honored there for his streak by a local association of semipro ballplayers. At Cardinal Field in Sacramento, with the streak having climbed into the 50s, an Italian social club came out to honor him too.

It was there, in Sacramento for games 54 through 60 of the streak, that the blur became dizzying. He felt his exhaustion might never leave him. The nights were too hot to get a good unbroken sleep. In games 59 and 60, a doubleheader, DiMaggio reached on infield hits that might have been ruled errors but instead extended the streak. “I’ve seen batters given hits on much easier chances than those of De Maggio’s,” the Sacramento Solons pitcher Ed Bryan would say after the game in Joe’s defense. But the Solons fans hadn’t seen it like that. They became irate. A few zealots stormed angrily toward the official scorer in the press box and police were needed to turn them away. To Joe all of this was strange. Confusing. That people should worry so much about a hitting streak! During games he did not react with excitement or disappointment and for the first time someone called him Dead Pan Joe. On the day in San Francisco that Oakland pitcher Ed Walsh Jr., the son of the fine White Sox righthander, stopped the streak at 61 games, DiMaggio was the last man up and his sacrifice fly won the game. “It will take a good man to beat what he has done,” Seals manager Ike Cavaney said of the hitting streak.

From those eight weeks only soft and imprecise memories remained with DiMaggio. It seemed to him very long ago, and part of his younger, other self. In 1941, recalling that old Pacific Coast League streak gave the baseball writers another number to hold up to the light—DiMaggio chases De Maggio—and perhaps it gave evidence to any surviving cynics that this streak of ’41 was no fluke; DiMaggio was of a special breed. For most people who followed the game, however, and certainly for DiMaggio, that minor league milestone of 61 games seemed unimportant and irrelevant. It was not a number that he spent time thinking about.

In Chicago now the calendar turned to July 15 and DiMaggio’s big league hitting streak was a full two months old. Sometimes he felt keenly aware that at any moment it could come to an end. Other times it seemed to him that being on the streak was like traveling on a road that he himself was forging and that the road could go on forever.

AT THE HOTEL
Del Prado in Chicago, Lefty had to be careful when he opened the door of their room. He might find the hallway filled with children seeking autographs. Gomez would feign heart-stopping shock at the sight of them and then he would banter and suggest that maybe it was in fact
his
autograph that the kids were after, what with his won-lost record now up to 7–3. Anyway, wrong room. “DiMaggio’s not here,” Lefty would say although of course DiMaggio
was
there, lying on the top of the bed with his long legs stretched out and crossed, reading his
Superman
; or else standing silently beside the window, smoking. When DiMaggio went out in Chicago—maybe, weary of room service, he would try dinner at the Blackhawk or one of the other spots where there was enough buzz and music and distraction that he could, for a short time, be out in the hot night and shielded a little bit too—Lefty would do his best to make sure the hallway was free of lurkers. Then he would help Joe slip into the elevator, down to the hotel’s bottom floor and out the back way.

Sometimes Joe would phone Dorothy and tell her about these crowds and the constant attention that was upon him, and that at times he felt uncomfortable with it all and wished that he could be with her. Dorothy knew this was true; she remembered the difficulty Joe had on the occasions that they went out with Dorothy’s Hollywood friends—especially the ones that DiMaggio didn’t really know. It was hard for him to sustain himself, to follow the bouncy conversation, to come off as glib. You might have expected Joe to be the worldly one, with his name and his fame, but, really, when there were new and clever people around and all full of talk, it was Dorothy who was at ease, and guiding him. Dorothy wondered whether, as time went on and Joe became more comfortable around different people and with the spotlight that burned ever more brightly, he would still need to rely on her to help him through.

Dorothy thought always of the baby. In her condition how could she not? The thoughts made her feel hopeful and optimistic about her relationship with Joe. They would make a family together! What Dorothy did not know then, as Joe was missing her in Chicago, was that when Joe Jr. was born—on Oct. 23, 1941, 17 days after the Yankees beat the Dodgers to win the World Series—Joe would spend the better part of the night not with Dorothy at Doctors Hospital but at Toots Shor’s celebrating and smoking cigars. She did not imagine that during that following off-season in New York, DiMaggio would, more than ever, go out at night without her, leaving her alone, with diapers to change and formula to mix. She had always expected that the real work of child-raising would fall to her (and that Joe would be best for doting on the boy and dandling him on his knee), but when the time came Dorothy did not embrace this responsibility as happily as she thought she might. It was hard and selfless work. Already she had put her own needs and wants into the background for Joe. Now she was doing it for Joe Jr., too. It seemed to her, during the first year of Joe Jr.’s life, that DiMaggio’s silences grew longer, his ill temper more acute; she felt sure that there were other women, and she did not like it that Joe too often criticized her in front of their friends.

Nor could Dorothy know then—as she bundled up the daily batch of fan mail to send up to Yankee Stadium—how angry and resentful she would come to feel. She would leave Joe for a stretch during the 1942 season to go home to Duluth and sit with her mother and father and say the thing that weighed so awfully on her mind. “My marriage is just not going well,” she told them. “Sometimes I just want to put it all behind me.” Her parents urged her to hang on, to see if, with patience and understanding, she could make things work. It would not be until the fall of 1943 that Dorothy would officially file for divorce, charging Joe with “cruel indifference.” DiMaggio was temporarily out of baseball then, a staff sergeant in the Army’s special services, and a divorce was not what he wanted. He appealed to Dorothy for another chance, telling her that he would try to make things right between them. For years after the divorce finally went through, in the spring of ’44, he would say to people that he and Dorothy might soon reconcile, though they never did.

On those hot July days in New York with DiMaggio’s hitting streak now into the 50s, Dorothy did not know that the baby kicking inside her womb would not in the end serve to be a force that held her and Joe together but rather another wedge that drove them apart. She rubbed her big, smooth belly and looked out off of their grand terrace onto the treetops thick with leaves. She followed the streak, as everyone did, through the radio reports. The excitement of what Joe was doing was all around her, in the phone calls, in the mail and on the doorman’s lips—“How about that streak, Mrs. Joe!” When Dorothy heard Joe’s voice over the telephone line she envisioned him returning home and collecting her in his arms, and she felt that she needed him and that he needed her.

DIMAGGIO STRETCHED THE
streak to 54 against the White Sox’ Johnny Rigney who, thanks to that broken eardrum, had avoided military induction and who was three months away from marrying a Comiskey. Life was good for Johnny. No wonder he had his fastball. In the second inning, Rigney’s 3–2 pitch handcuffed DiMaggio and he lifted a soft flair to short centerfield that the second baseman Billy Knickerbocker flubbed. Error. Some of the Yankee players came out of the dugout and complained that it should have been ruled a hit. On the swing DiMaggio split his bat, the one that had been stolen and then regained with Peanuts’s help, the one that he had hit with in games 1 through 41 in the streak and then used again from 46 through 53. Rigney was booed for walking DiMaggio in the fourth, and booed again when he went to 2–0 against him in the sixth. Then on the third pitch of the at bat, DiMaggio, swinging with a new Louisville Slugger, chopped the ball into the ground in front of the plate. It bounced, then dribbled down the third base line. By the time third baseman Bob Kennedy got to it, DiMaggio was all but across the first base bag. Infield hit for 54. The following game, the last of the four against Chicago, DiMaggio made it 55 in a row when he singled (and later doubled) off of the chubby lefthander Edgar Smith.

DiMaggio had been on the road for nine days now, giving Peanuts time for other pursuits in Newark. He helped to organize and then to lead a group of about 1,000 local Italians on a trip to Rockaway Beach in Queens. “For a day in the sand,” he said. Peanuts wore a suit and tie to the beach. He sometimes went by Vincent’s barbershop, where one day a guy came in for a shave and brought with him a square clump of turf and sod that he swore he had cut out of the Yankee Stadium outfield after a game the week before. “Got it from right where Joe was standing,” the man said. The turf had spike marks in it—Joe’s spike marks supposedly—and the man carried it in a cardboard box. His idea was for DiMaggio to sign the box.

At Vincent’s and at barbershops like it all the way down through Maryland and right up into New England, the first iterations of Les Brown’s
Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio
, live from the Log Cabin, could be heard on the swing stations. Before long, with the melody polished and the lyrics updated to reflect the events of DiMaggio’s streak, the song would ring out across the country, played many times a day wherever in the United States radios were, and a can’t-miss pick on the diner jukeboxes. When Brown and his band went into the Okeh Records studio to lay down tracks for a recording, DiMaggio himself came by the session wearing a light summer suit and sat on a stool in the thick of the big band, cocking an ear to Brown blowing on the saxophone and listening to the song live for the first time: “From coast to coast that’s all you’ll hear of Joe the one man show/He glorified the horsehide sphere, Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio.”