DiMaggio: The Last American Knight – Joseph Durso, 1995 ★½

Heavy Sits the Crown

Heroes seemed to come thick and fast for America in the middle of the 20^th century. Few burned as bright, or left as deep a mark, as Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. Whether in baseball or his personal life, his story inspires wonder to the point of disbelief. How to tell it in a way that is relatable?

Other writers have gone to great lengths to emphasize the struggle and the tragedy, the darkness at the corners. Joseph Durso, a New York Times columnist and longtime friend of the celebrated Yankee slugger, aims at a more personal dimension. But to do that successfully, one needs more insight than Durso was apparently able to give.

DiMaggio lives on in public memory not so much for the success he bestowed upon his team, the New York Yankees (who won nine world championships in the 13 seasons he played for them), but for two other things. He hit in 56 straight games in 1941, a baseball record that looks as insurmountable now as it did then. And he loved and married Marilyn Monroe, an icon even bigger than himself.

Unfortunately, the DiMaggio-Monroe romance endured far longer in the public consciousness than it did for Joe and Marilyn, and left an already self-isolating DiMaggio more alone and unapproachable than ever. Durso explains how Marilyn both defined and hobbled DiMaggio’s public persona after her 1962 death:

But nothing in his life cloaked him in more nobility than his steadfast fixation on Marilyn Monroe. He not only idolized her, he idealized her. If her bounce and beauty tormented him when they were together, the memory of her comforted him when they were finally apart. She riled him in life; she calmed him in death. If her name came up in conversation, he cut it off. He possessed her now, and he tolerated no intrusion.

In Durso’s telling, this aspect of DiMaggio’s personality proved fatal to many relationships, as it did to Durso’s book. Or rather, his plans for co-authoring an autobiography with the man himself. In his preface, Durso notes he began this project in 1989 with an assurance from a key DiMaggio confidante that Joe wanted Durso’s help telling his own story. A figure of $2 million was floated, and accepted, with the assurance DiMaggio would be open to discussing all aspects of his life.

DiMaggio, according to Durso, understood what this meant.

“You mean about Marilyn?” he asked.

For many, the Joe DiMaggio story begins and ends here, with his beloved Marilyn by his side. The photo seems to capture an element of their relationship Durso notes in his book; she ebullient out in public, he proud but guarded. Image from https://www.biography.com/people/joe-dimaggio-9274899.

While seemingly agreeable to the condition at that moment, something inside DiMaggio apparently balked, and the autobiography was off before it began. Durso was left with his preparatory research, and wrote this, an odd compromise of a biography with a giant hole at its center, that being the non-cooperation of its star.

There are several big problems with DiMaggio: The Last American Knight. For one thing, it never quite gets around to explaining its title, beyond offering it up in the form of a quotation. There are a lot of quotations in this book, many derived from newspaper accounts or comments made in other books, including several authored by Durso. Perhaps it is appropriate that a book about a man known as “The Yankee Clipper” wound up being such a clip-job itself.

Most problematically, the book has a hard time explaining why DiMaggio is so important. It isn’t so much the statistics he accumulated, as they seem to diminish him in many ways. He once hit more than 40 home runs in a season, twice led the American League in batting average, and twice in slugging. He won three Most Valuable Player awards, but other great baseball players have done this, too, including a pair of DiMaggio teammates, Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle.

DiMaggio in a familiar pose, teeing off on a pitch with his signature all-or-nothing uppercut swing. Despite its explosiveness, DiMaggio the batter was a model of pure control. Image from https://blog.crownandcaliber.com/joe-dimaggios-watches/.

To get a perspective on what DiMaggio achieved, you need to know the person, what drove him to excel so despite a number of physical ailments that sidelined him throughout his career. Here Durso is stumped. He doesn’t lack for ideas, but his distance from DiMaggio the person really tells.

DiMaggio arrived in Yankee Stadium in 1936 with a King-Kong-sized monkey on his back in the form of Babe Ruth, the fabled outfielder he was already being unfairly compared to. Ruth had left the Yankees in 1934, and played corner outfield positions rather than center, where DiMaggio would thrive. Still the press judged him by his outsized predecessor:

He certainly didn’t arrive with Ruth’s sparkle or with Ruth’s gargantuan style. He was spare and silent, almost ascetic, maybe monastic, private and even remote.

Both were power hitters, though of different types, and in a way that justifies DiMaggio’s outsized stature. Compared to Ruth’s career home-run total of 714, DiMaggio’s 361 may strike one as undersized, but Durso points out the important caveat of strikeouts. Ruth, like nearly all great power hitters, struck out a ton, 1,330 times. A tough out, DiMaggio struck out just eight more times than he touched ‘em all.

Durso calls him “the rarest of rare birds” in that way:

He had either the instincts or the reactions or the measured swings. He didn’t flail at the ball. He didn’t turn his head from the ball. He didn’t guess what was coming and then shoot the works. He watched, and waited.

The downside to this was in making something incredible look almost boring. Pre-Marilyn, this may have been DiMaggio’s biggest curse. People came to accept his greatness on the diamond as almost routine.

Durso’s book is best at capturing the one stat of DiMaggio time hasn’t diminished one jot: The Streak. In the book’s one stand-out chapter, Durso details DiMaggio’s 1941 hitting streak, almost game-by-game. To do it, DiMaggio had to hit against an array of pitchers, including great ones like Bob Feller; adjust to hitting in an inaugural night game; shake off a career-worst defensive nightmare of making four errors in one game; and hit safely in a game played under the shadow of the death of Lou Gehrig, his former teammate.

Sure, there were a couple of games where a friendly scorer, Dan Daniel, ruled a hit over an error, but in the first case the hit was a tough chance, and in the second DiMaggio managed a purer hit later in the game.

Throughout his narrative, Durso reminds you that this was no mere personal achievement of DiMaggio’s, but a means with which he rallied the rest of the team. “When it started, the Yankees were fourth in the American League, five and a half games back,” he writes. “When it ended, they were first by six.”

Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams (at left) shares a friendly moment with his longtime Yankee rival. During the two months of DiMaggio's big hitting streak in 1949, Durso notes Williams actually enjoyed a higher batting average (.412 to DiMaggio's .408.) Williams hit over .400 for the entire season. Still, Williams later said DiMaggio's feat "may be the greatest batting achievement of all." Image from http://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2017/07/07/dimaggio-williams-trade-yankee-red-sox.

The focus of Durso’s book is on baseball. There he relies on contemporary accounts, though to a fault. There are many long excerpts of sports articles written at the time, with brief interjections from Durso (“Dan Daniel certainly thrust the rookie under his microscope, didn’t he? And there was more.”) It’s not exactly lazy, but with no listing of sources or even a bibliography at the end, it feels excessive.

Durso may have been hobbled also by his own personal connection to DiMaggio, a need to avoid nettling the famously-sensitive legend. Still, he is remarkably candid, if a tad elliptical, in noting DiMaggio’s terse manner around teammates and a propensity for a regularly-shifting cast of protective, often loud friends who cemented his solitude:

With almost all of the people who worked or lived around him, DiMaggio was either proper or removed, even remote. But with the chosen few, the rather crude few like Toots Shor, George Solotaire, and Billy Martin, he was tight, confiding, even isolated from the world outside. They had one trait in common, besides any other traits he regarded as virtues: They didn’t challenge him, they fawned over him.

Perhaps that was why both Marilyn and DiMaggio’s first wife, the far-less-famous actress Dorothy Arnold, reputedly described DiMaggio as boring company. Yet both women would maintain friendly contact with DiMaggio after their divorces.

DiMaggio: The Last American Knight goes off in several odd tangents: Chapter 1, for example, is almost exclusively concerned with his work as television pitchman for the Bowery Savings Bank, and includes long quotations from the bank’s marketing director. It represented, along with another long stint with Mr. Coffee, DiMaggio’s highest public profile after his Yankee days were over, but hardly merits the attention, let alone pride of place for kicking the book off. We learn that DiMaggio was amiable, silent, and liked to take home his TV wardrobe, but the tone of unapproachability that it sets is too much borne out by the rest of the book.

Durso also spends a chapter detailing Babe Ruth in the 1920s, and Babe’s rivalry with New York Giants skipper John McGraw. I guess it establishes the stage upon which DiMaggio would work his later magic, but it’s a long time to be away from the man of the book.

Even the little light Durso is able to shed on DiMaggio’s personality emphasizes the distance. DiMaggio relates a story about attending an important dinner at the White House late in the 1980s, and getting Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to sign a baseball for him. It goes on and on and doesn’t really offer much in the way of personal perspective except that DiMaggio knew how to use his celebrity.

But if there is a lesson in DiMaggio: The Last American Knight, it is that celebrity more often used Joltin’ Joe, giving him security but stripping away his personality, or at least any willingness to share it. It’s a depressing lesson of lost opportunity that adds to the weight of this rather thin but pungently sad bio.