Until the day he died, the country knew just enough about Joe DiMaggio to treat him as a hero, but not enough to see him as a real man. Richard Ben Cramer’s biography helps us see him as both.
Joe DiMaggio was born of Italian immigrant
parents in 1914 in California. His father was a fisherman, a trade that DiMaggio was expected to carry on. The only problem was that young Joe hated fishing. He preferred
baseball, and
set out to prove to his parents that he could make a
career out of playing the game.
DiMaggio played for the New York Yankees from 1936 to 1951, during which
time he hit 361 home runs, had a career batting average of .325 and struck out only 369 times. In 1941 he set a record by hitting safely in 56 games in a row, a feat which may never be repeated. In 1943 DiMaggio stepped away briefly from baseball to enlist (reluctantly) in the Air Force. He served for 31 months but saw no action, mostly because his celebrity was such that officials worried that it would devastate morale if he were killed in battle.
The book follows DiMaggio through his two anxious and high-profile marriages. The first, in 1937, was to Dorothy Arnold, whom he cheated on repeatedly. The second, in 1954, was to Marilyn Monroe. DiMaggio had just retired and Monroe's career was just taking off when they met. They were "a mess of fame" together and the marriage lasted just 274 days. DiMaggio never remarried, and he and Monroe eventually reconnected later in life.
As he aged, DiMaggio became a compulsive penny-pincher; he would do anything to save a buck when he had millions in the bank. Cramer gives us all the dirty stories of DiMaggio’s miserliness, many of which are unsupported by concrete evidence. By the time of his death in 1999, we’re left with a portrait of DiMaggio as a bleak and petty old man.