Left and Gone Away: JOE DIMAGGIO (1914-1999)

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DiMaggio retired at the end of the 1951 season, after having been hobbled for several years by painful bone spurs in his right heel. (A few sportswriters did not blush at comparing him to Achilles.) Those who never saw him play and who consult the common statistical benchmarks may wonder at DiMaggio's renown. His lifetime batting average (.325) was good, but not so high as those of his rough contemporaries Stan Musial (.331) and Ted Williams (.344). DiMaggio's career home runs (361) also trailed Musial's (475) and Williams' (521). But Joltin' Joe drove in more runs per game than either man and had far fewer strikeouts than any comparable slugger. (For an analysis of his performance, please see the article that follows this one.)

Once out of baseball, DiMaggio did the only thing that would attract more attention than his 1941 streak. Long divorced from his first wife, he courted and in 1954 married Marilyn Monroe. This union was passionate but star-crossed. Freed at last from the demands and expectations created by his on-field heroics, he craved privacy and a quiet life; she attracted, wherever she went, a maelstrom of publicity. He believed in punctuality; she was always late. He expected an Old World housewife; she was a New World sex goddess. He wanted her to abandon the movies and settle with him in San Francisco; she was reveling in a fame that outstripped even her teenage fantasies.

Gay Talese was one of the few journalists to gain a measure of DiMaggio's trust in later years, and an article in his 1970 collection Fame and Obscurity called "The Silent Season of a Hero" recounts a telling vignette from the nine-month Monroe-DiMaggio marriage. During their delayed honeymoon in Japan, she was asked by a U.S. Army general to visit the troops in Korea. When she got back, she said, "It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering." He replied, "Yes I have."

Being the man who had won and lost Marilyn Monroe added a new dimension to the DiMaggio legend. So did his quiet grief after her death in 1962, when he arranged her funeral--barring the Hollywood types whom he felt had betrayed her--and ordered fresh flowers placed weekly on her grave. The great poker-faced star had a heart after all, and the world could see that it had been broken.

He spent his 48 years after baseball essentially being Joe DiMaggio. The less he said about himself during his dignified public appearances, the more others talked about him. Ernest Hemingway put him into The Old Man and the Sea ("I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman."). Paul Simon's song Mrs. Robinson, written for the movie The Graduate (1967), asked, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you," evoking a '60s sense of vanished heroes.