Book Review -- Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil, by Jerome Charyn

I'll begin this book review by doing something that Joe DiMaggio himself rarely did: I openly admit that I made a mistake.  You see, when I agreed to review Jerome Charyn's Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil, I assumed I would be reviewing a baseball book written by a sportswriter.  It appears that I forgot what happens when people assume things.  Needless to say, I was wrong in judging this book by its cover. 

To be sure, the book is about Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, the sweet-swinging Yankee Clipper who was one of the best to ever play the game, and certainly one of America's greatest sports heroes.  But Charyn is not a sportswriter (he considers himself a "novelist and cultural critic" and has won several prestigious fellowships and awards for his fiction) and baseball is, at most, a supporting actor in this story about DiMaggio's darkest demons.  Rather than retell the ubiquitous story of The Streak, or spend a half dozen chapters drooling over the "Jolter's" awe-inspiring talent, Charyn assumes the much more difficult task of exposing DiMaggio's struggles to the public eye.  He succeeds, and the resulting pages are simultaneously compelling, frustrating, and perhaps most poignantly, depressing.

For many Yankees fans in my generation -- those who grew up in the eighties and nineties -- Joe DiMaggio was first and foremost a Hall of Famer.  An all-time Yankee great with a 56-game hitting streak, a prized single-digit uniform number, and a giant plaque in Monument Park.  He was a famous song lyric within a famous Simon & Garfunkel song and, unavoidably, we knew him as Mr. Coffee and Mr. Marilyn Monroe.  Perhaps we're a little too young to remember how DiMaggio looked when he played the game, but that's where Charyn steps forward in chapter two, "The Walloping Wop."  He hits all the usual stuff: the Dago's graceful strides in center field, his strong, quick wrists, his fierce (a favorite word of Charyn) and unbreakable concentration.  But he also discusses some aspects of DiMaggio's time in pinstripes that we don't hear about often.  How Babe Ruth left a leadership void in the Bronx that Lou Gehrig, "just a good old plowhorse," could not fill and DiMaggio could.  How DiMaggio effortlessly hit his way into the majors in 1936.  How long it took the Yankees to integrate after Jackie Robinson, and how blind DiMaggio was to the introduction and significance of black ballplayers, even after he went head-to-head with Jackie Robinson in the hotly-contested 1951 World Series.  How intense DiMaggio would approach the game; intense enough that teammates were afraid to fail and therefore "risk DiMaggio's displeasure."

But the crux of the book, and the subject that was most riveting for me, is Charyn's description of DiMaggio's personality on and off the field.  I had formerly regarded Joe as one-half of America's darling couple in the 1950's (think Brady and Gisele, times ten) but Charyn decisively dashes that notion.  It turns out that the DiMaggio-Monroe marriage was a PR move designed to rescue Marilyn's career from a 1949 scandal in which she posed nude for a calendar.  Charyn introduces this premise early in the book, setting the stage for the eventual (and, in retrospect, inevitable) fallout.  I never realized how jealous DiMaggio acted around his one true love.  I never knew that he beat Monroe and left her with visible bruises, or that he and Frank Sinatra once followed the advice of his private detective and broke into a building in which Monroe was purportedly hiding with her new fling (a voice coach), only to find that they'd broken into the wrong building altogether, allowing his wife and her coach to escape.

Joe & Marilyn in 1954. (Credit: NY Times)

"[Joe] couldn't defend himself against this blond witch -- she'd arouse him and bedevil him until he had no guard against her, and suddenly he wasn't the Jolter any more, wasn't the great DiMaggio but some suitor inside a country he'd never gone into before, his very own being, the widest and most mysterious of all center fields."

 "And he, who'd never been humbled, even with a .263 batting average during his last year in baseball, even with Stengel against him and Mantle hovering behind him, had held onto his own myth until Marilyn came along and robbed DiMag of all he had ever had when she dumped him, turned him into a national joke..."

DiMaggio never got over his love for Monroe.  In a way, I came away from the book feeling impressed.  The Jolter developed more love for Marilyn Monroe in their nine months of marriage than many husbands do in a lifetime.  It ate him up.  After Monroe converted to Judaism (who knew?) so that she could marry the playwright Arthur Miller, DiMaggio actually chased around several Monroe impersonators, looking for any piece of his ex-wife that he could get, no matter how phony the source.  He also followed her around relentlessly.  In an age long before the paparazzi, he would wait alone for her in alleyways outside movie premieres, or pound on the door of her apartment, just to see her face or hear her voice.

But there was, of course, a tragic ending.  Monroe died young, and her funeral was held on the same day that she had planned to re-marry DiMaggio, after much wooing on his part.  Ouch.  It doesn't get much sadder than that.  Joe blamed everyone for his loss, including John and Robert Kennedy, against whom he held a lifetime grudge for the role he felt they played in her death.  Charyn asks, "Did the Jolter really survive Marilyn Monroe?"  The answer, most clearly, is no.  He lost touch with his son, Joe Jr., and when he finally tracked him down, JD said: "You don't know me.  You don't know who I am.  Leave me alone."  That had to hurt, and it shows the effect that his failed marriage with Monroe had on his life.

If you take away one thing from the book, make it this: DiMaggio is not the hero that America thought he was.  During a time of war and instability, of panic and uncertainty, the image of Joe DiMaggio represented all that was glorious and perfect about sports.  His hitting streak of 56 games inspired people all over the country.  He wasn't beloved like Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle, and he wasn't embraced like Ken Griffey Jr. or Mark McGwire (circa 1998).  He was respected for his awe-inspiring talent and wondrous abilities.  He was admired for playing the game better than anyone else.  But the problem was that the same fierce (there's that word again) concentration and obsessive-compulsive focus on the game that allowed the Yankee Clipper to excel at baseball, also crippled his personal life.  Charyn actually wonders if Joe was "almost autistic."  Unlike Ted Williams or Yogi Berra, DiMaggio reluctantly entered the service during World War II and complained the entire time he was there.  He was jealous of everyone around Marilyn Monroe, and he never accepted -- or even spoke to -- Mickey Mantle when the young Oklahoman was a rookie during Joe's last year in baseball.  (In fact, Charyn notes, when Mantle was once announced at the Stadium after DiMaggio and received a louder ovation, DiMaggio brooded for an entire year about the perceived slight.)

At best, Joe D was a reluctant superstar.  At worst, he was a shy, jealous, obsessive, brooding recluse who never fostered the image of himself that America saw, wanted, and expected.  Years after he retired, Charyn goes into great detail about DiMaggio's business -- how he signed thousands of bats and balls, became the spokesman for Bowery Savings Bank and Mr. Coffee, and focused seemingly exclusively on making money at memorabilia shows.  Perhaps Charyn's most telling question is this:

"Why did the greatest center fielder of our time molt into Mr. Coffee?"

DiMaggio's powerful, iconic swing.

After reading this book, I believe the answer is that he simply didn't know how to be anything else.  He was a baseball player, a legendary baseball player, whose identity belonged to center field at Yankee Stadium.  When his career ended, and after Marilyn had long left his life (first by divorce, then after her death), transforming into Mr. Coffee was the only way DiMaggio could cling to his heroic identity.  It is a sad story, far more depressing than I ever realized.  In many ways, I prefer the old naive (and heavily sugar-coated) image I had of him.

But what about the book, you ask?  It is very good.  It is extensively researched and thoroughly footnoted.  It is also a quick read at only 146 pages, but I will say that it's not the easiest read.  My first, admittedly small, criticism is that the brilliant talent that netted Charyn three fellowships and faculty positions at Princeton and Stanford doesn't translate particularly well to a book about a baseball player.  At times, Charyn's flowery language seems excessive, perhaps more fitting for a poem.  There are only so many adjectives and figures of speech that an author can use to describe the same man over dozens and dozens of pages.  My second and much smaller criticism is that Charyn digs at a fellow DiMaggio biographer, Richard Ben Cramer, no less than 15 times (according to the book's index).  I realize that Cramer penned what many have heretofore considered the "best DiMaggio book," and Charyn may therefore regard Cramer as his biggest rival, but the I'm-right-he's-wrong routine eventually becomes tiring.  Enough already; such personal sniping only detracts from an otherwise captivating novel.

I realize this book review has become somewhat unwieldy at nearly 1600 words, so I will wrap things up by saying that I truly enjoyed Jerome Charyn's book on how Joe DiMaggio struggled throughout his life.  It was not the novel I expected, but I was pleasantly surprised by Charyn's insider look at a legend who was as aloof as he was heroic, forever uncomfortable in his own skin.

Some helpful links:

Twitter -- @JoeDiMaggio2011 and @jeromecharyn

Facebook -- Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil and Jerome Charyn

Website -- Jerome Charyn

Blog Tour -- Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigil

Buy the book -- at Amazon.com