Summer of '49: The Yankees and the Red Sox in Postwar America (39 page)

After retirement DiMaggio tried a postgame sports show, for which he was paid handsomely—$50,000 a year—but it proved painful; he was stiff and awkward and read his lines badly, coming to a halt after each line on the prompter, whether or not there was a period there. Hating to do anything he could not do well, he soon gave it up.

The rest of his life, as one friend said, has been devoted to being Joe DiMaggio. He puts himself on exhibit, carefully rationing the number of exposures. He guards his special status carefully, wary of doing anything that might tarnish his special reputation. He tends to avoid all those who might define him in a way other than as he defined himself on the field. He appears at sports banquets, celebrity golf matches, and old-timers’ games, and is usually well compensated for such appearances. Late in life he became a
television salesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and Mr. Coffee.

In the process Joe DiMaggio became something of an American icon. His fame transcended sports and endured in the 1980s. When later in his presidency Ronald Reagan hosted an elegant dinner for Mikhail Gorbachev, the guest list included, among others, Joe DiMaggio.

DiMaggio seemed somewhat amused by the giant salaries now paid ordinary ballplayers, let alone the handful of superstars. There was constant speculation in the press about how much he would be making if he played today. At an old-timers’ game at the Stadium in the early eighties a reporter asked him how much he thought he would make under contemporary salary schedules. He thought for a moment. “Oh, I’d probably be part owner,” he answered. He has a handful of people who are devoted to him and protect him from the outside world and run errands for him. One former teammate joked that Joe DiMaggio was the only successful man in America who never made a plane reservation, or a restaurant reservation in his life. Things like that were always done for him.

He has aged gracefully, his hair turning silver, as if on cue from some casting director. Wherever he goes fans rush up to him to pay homage, to ask who is going to win that season’s pennant, to tell him that they had seen one of his most memorable home runs, and, above all, to tell him that he looks great. His friend Toots Shor once joked that when DiMaggio dies the funeral will be one of the largest ever. It will be held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York with thousands of New Yorkers trooping up to the open casket to pay their final respects: “You look great, Joe.”

But he never managed to balance the scales between fame and privacy. He seems eternally wary. When a friend or a former teammate calls him at home or at a hotel, he picks up the phone and pretends that he is not Joe DiMaggio (“Who wants to talk to him?”). Since his voice is distinctive,
oddly sharp, almost strident, it is not a very successful ploy. A friend who was once at a banquet with him remembered years later the almost desperate quality with which DiMaggio held on to him: Could they go to the airport together? Could the friend sit with him at the coffee shop and help fend off strangers? Was the friend free to fly on to Los Angeles with him?

But he has mellowed somewhat, and when he goes back for old-timers’ games and sees his old teammates with their wives, he embraces the wives with real affection—something he never would have done thirty or forty years ago. He likes to go to these games, but he is too proud to play. There was a vote among players, and he was chosen not just to the all-star team but as the greatest living player as well. When he comes to such functions, two of his conditions are that he be introduced last and as the greatest living ballplayer. On one occasion Mickey Mantle was introduced after him and he was not pleased. As the years passed, many of his baseball records fell, but his deeds and his legend do not shrink.

He quite naturally cared about his connection with immortality; his career, after all, had been special, but much of what distinguished it had to be seen—the sheer beauty of his play, the systematic ability to play well under pressure and lift a team in big games. His individual statistics were not by themselves that exceptional: His career had been interrupted by the war and he had never as a player paid much attention to statistics. Now, however, as he grew older, he would be judged increasingly by those who never saw him play, and therefore statistics and records meant more. Not surprisingly he came to revere his fifty-six-game hitting streak more than in the past. At the time the streak had not seemed to mean that much to him. It was merely one of many exceptional things he had accomplished. When Pete Rose made his assault upon the record in 1978, DiMaggio was careful to praise Rose to reporters, and never, as many
of his contemporaries did, offered any churlish criticism of modern-day baseball players. But friends thought they noticed a certain anxiety in the way he talked about Rose in private. It was, they decided, the most human of emotions.

Paul Simon had been seven years old in 1949, and he had become a Yankee fan while sitting in his father’s lap listening to Mel Allen’s broadcasts. DiMaggio was his father’s hero, and the senior Simon spoke often of him and his great deeds in the years before the war. When he was only five years old, Paul Simon himself had almost witnessed a DiMaggio home run, but everyone in the Stadium had jumped up and blocked his view at the moment the Yankee star hit the ball. So, in truth, Simon was so young that DiMaggio was a fairly fuzzy figure to him at the time.

In 1966 Simon, writing the lyrics for the score of the movie
The Graduate,
had sought for one song an image of purity in a simpler America. His mind flashed to the great Yankee player. He wrote down, completely by instinct, the words, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you ...” He knew immediately that it was right—a lament for another time—and he wondered whether he had the right to use it. After all, in the traditional sense the words had nothing to do with the rest of the song. But because he loved the feel of it (the words were to become among the most memorable he ever wrote), he kept it. The irony was that the real hero of his youth was Mickey Mantle. Once in the late sixties he found himself on a talk show with Mantle. “Hey, why didn’t you write that song about me?” Mantle asked during a break in the show. Simon thought for a minute and decided that the real explanation was too complicated. “It was syllables, Mickey,” he answered, “the syllables were all wrong.”

Toots Shor transferred his allegiance from DiMaggio to Mantle in the 1950s, a move made somewhat easier because
DiMaggio began to cut him dead after Shor made an unflattering remark about Marilyn Monroe. But in other ways Shor could not adapt to changes taking place in the world. The flight from the boroughs to the suburbs accelerated. The subway at night became a riskier option. Two of New York’s baseball teams left the city. Perhaps most important of all—in terms of Shor’s decline—night baseball replaced daytime baseball, which had allowed both player and writer to go to the game and then show up at Shor’s in the early evening for a night of relaxing. Now the sportswriters did not finish their stories until well after midnight—too late to go and play at Shor’s. As newspapers died and writers were replaced by television producers, there would have been little interest in mingling with the players at the nightclub anyway.

In the 1960s, Shor’s decline was accelerated by the fact that the proprietor turned out to have been a horrendous businessman who had not been very careful about paying his taxes. Besides, a new kind of athlete celebrity was appearing on the scene: Someone asked Joe Namath, a
football
player, if he liked going to Shor’s. No, he said, as a matter of fact, he did not. Why not? “Because the owner spills drinks on you,” Namath answered.

In 1964 there was an old-timers’ game at the Stadium and many of the 1949 players attended; afterward there was a party, with food and drink, in the Stadium clubhouse. Johnny Pesky had played briefly in the old-timers’ game and had felt the old familiar tension—for this was the Yankees and the Red Sox. He had even felt a surge of anger, for Pesky more than the other Boston players had been at war with the Yankees. He had always played his hardest, for they were the enemy, and perhaps also because when he was a young player in Oregon their scouts had shunned him because he was too small. He had never forgiven them; after all, he was an inch taller than Rizzuto.

But it had been a pleasant day; old memories had been stirred and they were for the most part happy ones. Afterward Pesky went up to get some food and as he turned to find a seat he saw a table with old friends. He headed back toward it, a friendly island in a seat of potential adversaries. As he moved toward them he passed a Yankee table with three formidable men: Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi, and Charlie Keller. That is a lot of muscle, he thought. He had a quick memory of Allie Reynolds once, hitting him by mistake in a game—a light nick on the shoulder. Pesky had looked out at the mound and had been stunned to see the rage in Reynolds’s face. That man, he had thought, is not upset that he hit me, he is upset that he did not hit me right in the neck.

“Sit down, you little shit-ass,” Reynolds said, his face as hard and impassive as it had been when he was on the mound. Pesky, suddenly very nervous, did as he was told. Reynolds gave him another look, and Pesky suddenly realized he was smiling.

“We only ask guys we like to sit with us,” Reynolds said. “Pesky, you know, you were a pain in the ass back when we played, but you could play. You know that. You were okay, Pesky.”

“Well it was no goddamn day at the beach against you,” Pesky said. It was a very pleasant moment, Pesky thought. It seemed to cement the best of those old rivalries in his mind; they had played hard and they had made each other better because of their rivalry. They had always respected each other. The old struggles were finally over.

Tommy Henrich ran into Bobby Doerr about the same time at another old-timers game.

“Tom,” asked Doerr, “didn’t we have a good ball club?”

“You had a great ball club,” answered Henrich. “We were always afraid of you.”

“Then why didn’t we win?” asked Doerr, who had played
fourteen seasons and had been in only one World Series (Henrich had played eleven years and had been in four).

“Because you didn’t have to and we had to,” said Henrich, an answer that would have made George Weiss smile. “We needed the extra money from the World Series check. That was our extra salary. You guys were all making more money than us because of Yawkey.”

Birdie Tebbetts took a different view. When people asked him, as they often did, which team had been better, he said the Red Sox.

Then why didn’t you win? the people would ask.

“I’ll give you the answer in two words,” he said. “Joe Page.”

Bart Giamatti did not grow up to play second base for the Boston Red Sox. He became a professor at Yale, and then president of Yale, and then, in time, exhausted by a bitter strike at Yale and anxious to try greener fields, president of the National League. He never lost his love for the Boston Red Sox. It was as a Red Sox fan, he later realized, that he had first learned that man is fallen, and that life is filled with disappointment. The path to comprehending Calvinism in modern America, he decided, begins at Fenway Park.

He also retained his love of Bobby Doerr. In 1986, his first year as a baseball executive, he went to Cooperstown for the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. By chance, Bobby Doerr and his wife were there, and Giamatti was introduced. He was very nervous. “Mr. Doerr, you’re my hero,” he began. The Doerrs were stunned by this display. That the ex-president of Yale knew who he was and wanted to meet him seemed quite beyond them. “Mr. Giamatti,” said Mrs. Doerr, “you’re the former president of Yale—you’re a hero to people like us.”

As they left the grounds together, Bart Giamatti was doubly
thrilled, first that he had met his hero, and second that his hero was the person he had wanted him to be.

Joe Lelyveld did not grow up to play right field for the New York Yankees. Instead he went to Harvard and from there he went to work for
The New York Times,
becoming one of that newspaper’s most distinguished foreign correspondents, and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his book on South Africa. In 1987 he ran into the author of this book at a party. He asked me what I was doing and I told him I was writing a book about the Yankees and the Red Sox in 1949. “Did you know,” he said, “that in that season, before DiMaggio came back from his bad foot, Tommy Henrich hit something like fifteen home runs and almost everyone of them won a ball game.” “I knew that,” I answered, “but how the hell did
you
know that.” A small smile passed over Lelyveld’s face and for a moment he became the little boy he had been sitting by himself in his room, listening to Mel Allen. “I helped him do it,” he answered.

Ted Williams played for eleven more seasons. His career was interrupted again—the draft board recalled him for service in Korea, for his second tour of duty, though many young Americans of that period had yet to serve one tour. His love/hate affair with the Boston fans continued. In his last time up in 1960, he quite fittingly hit a home run, the 521st of his career. The moment was captured eloquently by the American novelist John Updike in a piece for
The New Yorker
magazine, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” Of that last home run, Updike wrote, “Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his hat. Though we thumped, wept and chanted ‘We Want
Ted’ for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he refused. Gods do not answer letters.”

Retired, Williams continued to live on his own terms. As he aged, he became even more handsome, his face now leathery. He was crusty, outspoken, and unbending, a frontier man in the modern age, the real John Wayne. “He is not a man for this age,” his old friend and teammate Birdie Tebbetts said of him. “The only place I would put him, the only place he’d be at home, is the Alamo.” In an age where, because of television, fame was regularly confused with accomplishment, and where many of the society’s new instant celebrities seemed cut from plastic, Ted Williams stood in sharp contrast, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, warts and all; whatever else, he was never anything less than real.