Say It Ain't So, Joe

By Daniel Okrent

A question to ponder over the post-World Series winter: How was it that Joe DiMaggio--a high school dropout whose favorite reading material was Superman comics, a man who was a lousy father, an unfaithful husband and a wife beater, a guy who was reluctant to enlist in World War II, someone who never did a meaningful day's work in the last 47 years of his life, who was monumentally vain and cheap and mistrustful--became a national hero?

Simple. He could hit and throw and run with a gliding grace, and when he could no longer do those things he...well, he looked great in a suit. But as Richard Ben Cramer establishes in his absolutely persuasive DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (Simon & Schuster; 546 pages; $28), Joe D. had a secret. He knew the power of silence. The less he gave, standing remote and noble and regally aloof, the more the world took it as evidence of dignity.

Normally, you might worry about a writer's ability to draw meaningful biographical blood from the soundless stone that was Joe DiMaggio. It doesn't help that the existing historical record is a fabulous piece of packaging, abetted by three generations of sports writers who knew that "the Daig"--short, one is sorry to say, for "Dago"--was their meal ticket. But Cramer is an all-star reporter, and if his fertile prose at times sprouts too many colloquial tendrils and exclamatory blossoms, it soon gives way to the sheer muscle of his facts. Oddly, the book's weakest part is the section on DiMaggio's deathless entanglement with Marilyn Monroe. Here Cramer skitters close to melodramatics, as if he couldn't trust the epic unfathomability of the relationship to speak for itself.

The rest of DiMaggio is rendered so vividly you almost want to look away. During his nonpareil career, DiMaggio learned to squeeze every drop of privilege out of his fame. Every nightclub operator in New York City understood that if DiMaggio came into his joint, it was good for business--which was why no one minded depositing the required couple of hundred into DiMaggio's account at the Bowery Savings Bank in exchange for the visit.

It got even more squirrely during his long retirement. In the 1990s, taking his last laps as a handshaker, autograph signer and first-ball thrower, he demanded to be introduced as "baseball's greatest living ballplayer." He insisted on first-class transcontinental airfare even if he was only taking a cab from across town.

But still, he did play baseball like a dream, didn't he? And gosh, the handsome suits, the silver hair, the sculpted features! Of course, why we ever thought that those attributes had anything to do with character says more about us than it does about him.

--By Daniel Okrent