Joe DiMaggio, a hero to millions, the greatest ballplayer of his time, died a lonely man.
As Eddie Lopat, his former teammate, often said: “Joe was the loneliest man I’ve ever known. He led the league in room service.”
Dead at 84, the great DiMaggio didn’t have many friends at the finish. His only child, Joseph Paul DiMaggio Jr., now 57 and living in California, didn’t visit him as he lay dying in a Ft. Lauderdale hospital before being sent home. The only family at his hospital bedside had been his brother Dominic a onetime star center-fielder with the Boston Red Sox; two granddaughters, the children of his son’s former wife; and four great-grandchildren.
DiMaggio’s loneliness was not uncommon. Many older people die alone.
“He just wasn’t a very happy man,” said Maury Allen, a New York sportswriter who was among DiMaggio’s biographers. “Over the years he cut off a lot of his friends. When you consider who he was and the place he held, he became very suspicious. He felt a lot of his friends betrayed him by talking to reporters.
“And he dismissed them–especially when they mentioned Marilyn Monroe.”
DiMaggio and Monroe were married less than a year before their divorce. She committed suicide 36 years ago.
“He refused to talk about her,” Allen said. “I could understand that. He didn’t want anyone intruding on his private life. And he was always a very private man.”
Still, DiMaggio made hundreds of appearances, most of them without a fee.
According to George Randazzo, founder and chairman of the National Italian-American Sports Hall of Fame, DiMaggio helped raise more than $10 million for charity. What may have been his last public appearance was at a hotel here last September when he attended the annual induction ceremony for the Italian Hall.
He was greeted with a standing ovation as he was escorted to his table by Tom Lasorda, the longtime manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Jerry Colangelo, the owner of the Phoenix Suns and Arizona Diamondbacks.
I was at an adjacent table and didn’t want to intrude. When Lasorda spotted me, he motioned to me to come over.
When he introduced me, Lasorda said to him, “You know Jerome.”
And DiMaggio said, “Of course.”
We talked for about 30 seconds, a courtesy conversation.
I was with him about a dozen times, sometimes alone. Once he offered me a ride in his limousine, which was stationed outside the Yankee Stadium press gate after a World Series game. I was grateful; we beat the crowd.
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More memorable was the unveiling of his heroic statue at the front steps of the Italian-American Hall of Fame when it was in Arlington Heights.
When word got out that he would be there, all the major television networks showed up.
I was among the few people he knew, so we talked between his television interviews. I was aware of his impatience. He was anxious to get it over with.
He appreciated the many honors that came to him in later life. He couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized. In 1947, when he was nearing the end of his baseball career, he attended a Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight in Yankee Stadium accompanied by Ernest Hemingway and Toots Shor.
As they were walking down the aisle, people began shouting, “Joe! Joe! Joe!”
A youngster put his finger on Hemingway’s shoulder and said, “Are you anybody?”
Deferring to royalty, Hemingway said, “I’m his doctor.”
DiMaggio’s greatest honor came when he was voted the greatest living baseball player. This was in 1969, at a lavish baseball centennial banquet in Washington on the eve of the All-Star Game.
Private and secluded as he was, he had an ego. Thereafter, DiMaggio’s public-appearance contract included the stipulation he was to be introduced last, always with acknowledgment of his selection as the greatest living player, said Yankees public relations chief Arthur Richman.
Richman also told of the time he was chauffeuring DiMaggio in Los Angeles. DiMaggio instructed him to turn right, turn left, right again, and so on until they reached the main gate of the Westwood Memorial Park cemetery.
“Why are we stopping here?” Richman asked.
“This is where I have Marilyn,” DiMaggio replied.
DiMaggio was truly a baseball virtuoso. He is best known for his record 56-game hitting streak, a major-league record that hasn’t been challenged seriously. What isn’t as well known is that he batted safely in 61 straight games in 1932 when he was 18 and breaking in with the San Francisco Seals in the old Pacific Coast League.
When DiMaggio was in his twilight years, the late Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams asked him why he continued to play so hard. “There might be a kid in the stands who never saw me play before,” DiMaggio told him. “I owe it to him to give it my best.”
Appearing with Ted Williams several years ago, DiMaggio said, “Ted, you were the better hitter.”
Williams answered: “But you were the best player.”
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