AS JOE DIMAGGIO AGED, HE became more embittered by the loss of Marilyn Monroe, and he pushed further and further away from the people who wanted to be close to him. As writer David Halberstam once observed, “He lived a very, very lonely life for a long time.” DiMaggio had a definitive mistrust of people, and no one was immune from his scorn, just as no one was assured of lifelong friendship or devotion. Over the years, Joe grew ever warier that his so-called friends were capitalizing on his name and profiting at his expense.
Through the 1990s, he began frequenting New York again in ways he had not been doing in many years, and he seemed, to some of the people who knew him, to be tiring at least somewhat of Morris Engelberg and was seeking relationships on the East Coast. Other pals speculated that he went to New York to get away from business, and he kept his visits under wraps, staying at the New York apartment of friends Dick and Kathy Burke and frequenting an Irish pub in Atlantic City as much as any restaurant in NYC. He often had lunch with cartoonist Bill Gallo, and Gallo frequently mentioned DiMaggio in his column, which didn’t bother the Clipper because DiMaggio said he could tell Gallo didn’t want anything from him.
He was bored with Florida and California, and he established a new version of the kind of roundtable he had had at Toots Shor’s years before, this one called the Bat Pack, a group started by his podiatrist Rock G. Positano, who had treated him for a heel spur on his right foot. Writer Elisabeth Bumiller reported that “Dr. Positano strapped up DiMaggio’s foot, fitted him with an arch support, and gradually built a retinue of four or five guys . . . who ate dinner with DiMaggio and reveled in his orbit when the legend visited New York.”
The rules that Joltin’ Joe imposed on his family and friends were demanding and strict, and any deviation from them would lead to suspension of all communication. Perhaps because he came late to Joe’s life, Positano remained close to Joe to the end, and the podiatrist was more than willing to adhere to DiMaggio’s rules of conduct. On one occasion, Positano arrived for dinner with Joe and his granddaughters, Kathie and Paula, at Coco Pazzo in the city, wearing a cashmere shirt and blazer, which constituted a violation of the Clipper’s commandments on proper attire in the presence of women. When the young women excused themselves to go to the bathroom, Joe instructed Positano to excuse himself as soon as they returned; Rock was to say that he had received an emergency call, and then he should go to his office, where he could don a proper shirt and tie before he returned. Aware that failure to do so would mean expulsion from the inner circle, Positano did just what he was told, and when he reappeared at the restaurant, Joe announced, “Okay. Now we can have dinner.”
Positano understood how hard a friend needed to work just to remain friends with Joe. “He was one of the warmest, sincerest people you’ll ever meet in your life,” Positano said, “but it wasn’t easy being part of Joe’s inner circle. There was always a tremendous responsibility and stress, because so few were allowed in. You couldn’t even bring a friend to dinner without clearing it with Joe first.” The worst offense anyone could commit was the mention of Marilyn Monroe. “Nobody mentioned Marilyn,” said his friend Gene Schoor, the journalist who wrote a definitive biography about Yogi Berra. “If they did, they were dead from then on. Period.”
After DiMaggio’s death in 1999, Rock Positano was the person that Morris Engelberg, as executor of DiMaggio’s will, entrusted with the task of organizing a memorial service in New York.
The entire DiMaggio clan had always seemed close, but there were seeds of discord even in their youth, and the parents’ deaths (Giuseppe’s in 1949, and Rosalie’s in 1951) marked the beginning of a shift in loyalties, after which there was less and less incentive to keep sibling relationships intact as time went on. The oldest DiMaggio brother, Tom, told a reporter before Marilyn’s death that while he might not be rich or well known, he felt sure that Joe was jealous of what he did have, which included a satisfying life with his wife and children.
Everyone in the family, especially Joe, was truly devastated by the death of brother Michael, a tragedy that facilitated Joe’s decision to marry MM, but it did nothing to shore up the relationships Joe had with his siblings. Joe played alongside Vince and Dom on the San Francisco Seals baseball team, but he soon surpassed both the younger and the older brother and became a star. Vince was content to stay with San Francisco and was also convinced that he was far more fortunate than Joe would ever be because of his happy family. Dom, who played for the Boston Red Sox for many years, always found that his famous brother perpetually overshadowed him, but he learned to live with it. Joe, however, never entirely trusted that Dom wasn’t jealous or forever trying to get something from him.
When Joe DiMaggio lived in San Francisco after MM’s death, he lived with his sister Marie in a house he had bought for his parents while he was playing for the Yankees. Marie kept house and did basic bookkeeping for him, signing checks for his corporation and opening his mail. Morris Engelberg remembered her as “one of the sweetest, sweetest ladies I had ever met.” Most of the time, he said, “she would be sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.” At some point, Joe suspected that she was stealing from him items that he had been given as gifts. He stripped her of her bookkeeping duties and instructed Engelberg to cut her out of his will, even though she was already in her eighties. When she died in 1996, DiMaggio did not even attend her funeral. One day Engelberg visited Joe and asked casually, “How’s Marie doing?” “She died a couple months ago,” DiMaggio replied tonelessly. Engelberg searched his friend’s face for some sign of emotion but found none.
Vince moved away, and the situation between Joe and Dom became increasingly combative. They would go months without exchanging a word, stabbing each other with cold silences, and no one knew why. Dom would show up for games or at dinners where he knew Joe was sure to be, and Joe surmised that Dom was trying to steal the spotlight, and that would set him off. Dom was better with money than Joe was, amassing a fortune in what appeared to Joe to be a ridiculously easy manner. He sold the building where the family restaurant had once been, for example, and made a fortune, and his every investment seemed to pay off in the biggest possible way. Joe was clearly angered by his little brother’s success and resented it openly.
The brothers fought about their sisters. Dom advocated on Marie’s behalf, which irritated Joe, and when others sympathized with Dom, that irritated him further and made him take it out on Dom. When their sister Mamie got sick, Joe was not the least bit interested in helping out, but Dom frequently flew cross-country to look after her until he could get her into a nursing home. Of course, Dom resented Joe for putting him in that position, but Joe, too, was equally miffed. He felt that Dom’s heroics had made him look bad, and he could not forgive his brother for “shaming” him.
In addition, there was a split between the brothers that resulted from a failure in the US Mail. Dom was invited to a charity event but didn’t get the invitation and therefore never showed up; Joe was furious and would not entertain any suggestion of clemency. For a long time after that, neither brother spoke to the other, but mostly it was Joe who would not speak with Dom. When push came to shove, Dom was always willing to forgive. It was Dom who delivered the eulogy at Joe’s funeral, and their mutual friend Joe Nacchio proclaimed, “Dominic was a good brother, and he was a good brother to the end.”
Joe DiMaggio wouldn’t speak to Ted Williams, had no time for Mickey Mantle, ostracized several presidents, and found reasons to get out of having to interact with anyone he had the slightest criticism against—especially anyone who had, in his estimation, done him the slightest wrong. He even very nearly severed his relationship with Morris Engelberg, who was the most loyal of all his friends and followers, responsible for having won contracts that provided DiMaggio with a financially comfortable old age.
Joe was once at a baseball card show in Atlantic City and insisted that Engelberg join him. The attorney had just had eye surgery and was unable to fly, but because he had been summoned, he took a train from Florida to Philadelphia and then had himself driven by car to Atlantic City. Joe was not impressed with the lengths to which his friend, whom he would only introduce to others as his lawyer, had gone to be there with him; at one point, he went so far as to slap Engelberg’s hand for not handing over memorabilia quickly enough for him to sign, prompting Engelberg to get up and leave. In this case, the Clipper came as close as he ever did to an apology. “Sometimes these shows piss me off,” he said, and Engelberg forgave him.
• • •
Of all Joe DiMaggio’s failures with people, the one that hurt him the most was the complete collapse of any association with Joe DiMaggio Jr., his only child, who once told a reporter proudly, “My lifestyle is diametrically opposed to my father’s.” For his part, Joe Sr. hardly wanted to discuss his son. Said baseball memorabilia collector Barry Halper, DiMaggio’s friend of twenty-seven years, “There were two subjects that were taboo with Joe: Marilyn Monroe and Joe Jr. In all the years I knew him, he never said a word about either one. You just knew not to ask.”
Morris Engelberg said that Joe DiMaggio’s heart was broken only twice in his life: once by Marilyn Monroe and then by his son. A photograph taken by Robert Solotaire in 1952 shows father and son sharing a smiling, carefree moment at a beach in the water with a surfboard, but all Joe Jr. remembered when asked about his dad was that “we were from different planets.”
Big Joe referred to Little Joe as “my boy,” never by name, never as his son, long after “my boy” reached manhood. When Little Joe was well into his fifties, Morris Engelberg offered to entice him to Florida, where he could be watched closely in an effort to keep him from drugs and alcohol. “You don’t know my boy,” DiMaggio responded. “You’re barking up the wrong tree. It would be a waste of your time.” Engelberg often spoke to Big Joe about reconciling with Little Joe, but the senior DiMaggio’s response was always the same: “My boy is a bum.” The “boy” was a grandfather by then, and even though DiMaggio had tried to help his son financially, he refused to give him the only thing that DiMaggio Junior really wanted, which was respect. Joe couldn’t give that, even though his declaration that his boy was a bum was often followed by a sheepish addendum, “But he’s a good boy.” If Joey had heard even that much approval, he might have been content.
“I never knew my father,” Joe Jr. told Larry King in the late 1960s. My parents were divorced when I was little, and I was sent away to private school, and my father was totally missing from my childhood . . . We were on the cover of the first issue of Sport magazine when it came out in 1949, my father and I, me wearing a little number five jersey. I was driven to the photo session, we had our picture taken, and I was driven back. My father and I didn’t say two words.
“I cursed the name Joe DiMaggio Jr. At Yale, I played football—I deliberately avoided baseball—but when I ran out on the field and they announced my name, you could hear the crowd murmur . . . When I decided to leave college and join the marines, I called my father to tell him. You call your father when you make that sort of decision. So I told him, and he said, ‘The marines are a good thing.’ And there was nothing more for us to say to each other.”
Joe Junior did remember being something like close to his father once in his life: in the car on the way to MM’s funeral. He said his father had always gone on loving Monroe, and since he loved her too, they had shared that bond, but it didn’t last.
The elder DiMaggio had formed a close relationship with Joe Jr.’s wife, Sue, and was, in his own eyes, at least, an ideal grandfather to her daughters, Paula and Kathie, whom Joe Jr. had adopted. He even moved the family to the Bay Area from Massachusetts so they could be closer to him. DiMaggio was very critical of his son’s failure to be a good father. “My kid never put his head to anything,” he said.
After the divorce, Joe Sr. kept close to the girls and their mother and remained devoted to them. In fact, sometimes he was too involved in their lives, especially his favorite, Paula’s, and he would try to control them, telling them where to go to school, whom to befriend, and eventually whom they could and could not date. He regularly sent money for clothes and school supplies and the like. He footed the bill for Kathie’s degree from the University of California, and he bought and maintained a condominium for Paula while he paid for her to attend beauty school. But although he went out of his way to remain connected to Sue’s daughters, DiMaggio grew further and further apart from his son.
After returning to California, Joe Jr. got into a social group that revolved around drugs. “Speed,” said his ex-wife Sue. “He loved speed.” He would leave Sue and the kids for days at a time to explore and experience the drug scene in San Francisco, and he could not understand why Sue would not follow him there. He began to beat her. “It was very embarrassing, and I didn’t want anyone to know,” Sue would say. “I thought it was my fault.” When she left him, Joe Jr. seemed unperturbed, finding no problem attracting plenty of female companions. The drugs caused him a nearly fatal automobile accident, jail time, and the loss of every job he ever took on, which angered and mortified his father.
Joe Sr. tried to help, but since he couldn’t be available emotionally, his help was mostly financial. He put up the funds for Joey to establish a polyurethane factory, and then, when that failed, he bought his son a very expensive truck so that the younger man could go into the trucking business. Joe Jr. proceeded to wreck the truck, and then he set off on what his father called his hobo adventures. He didn’t even bother trying to make telephone contact, as no connection to his father seemed to matter to the son, who spent his time drinking wine or beer with other itinerant drinkers and bikers, while he collected welfare checks in addition to the money his father regularly sent. Joe Sr, who had had the highest expectations of Joe Jr.’s opportunity to attend Yale, never understood his son’s flagrant disregard for real work and could not forgive the way “my boy” squandered everything his father gave him or did for him. For his part, Joe Jr. felt that his father had long since rejected him.
A particularly poignant episode happened in the Napa Valley long after Joe Jr. had begun to go gray. Joe Sr. and his friend Sam Spear would often take rides into wine country, and Joe would insist on going through Martinez, a town where Joe had grown up and Joey was said to be living. After many failed attempts, the father spotted the son walking in town, dressed shabbily and looking wan and starving. “Pull over, pull over. There’s Joey,” DiMaggio ordered Spear. Then he called to his son, “Joey! Joey! Joey!” Without so much as slowing his walk, the younger DiMaggio shouted back, “You don’t know me. You don’t know who I am. Leave me alone.” The father was embarrassed and forlorn, but he didn’t want to talk about the incident. He didn’t have the words for the way he felt or the way Joey had disappointed him yet again. And Joey took it in, adding yet another failure to the many he had already accrued.
By then, Joe Jr. had been homeless or quasi homeless for some years. “He was a troublemaker,” his cousin Joe’s (Vince’s son) wife, Marina, said of him. “But I miss him.” Toothless, scruffy, and vagrant, Joey drifted around the Martinez area, refusing to accept rides, refusing to hold down a job, wandering rather pointlessly but insisting, “I’m fine. Thank you very much.” Joe Nacchio, who was one of Joe Sr.’s best-educated, most perceptive, and sensitive friends, described Joe Jr.: “His choice of words was above the ordinary person’s. He was sensible and logical, and he talked with a great deal of reason.” Knowing that his son was a well-educated do-nothing with bad teeth and poor health infuriated the father even more. Joe Sr. bought his son new teeth and begged him to get cleaned up, but the son didn’t like wearing the false teeth and was more likely to use them as a weapon to throw at someone with whom he was angry than as they were intended.
In the mid-1990s, Joe Jr. contented himself with doing odd jobs until he went to work for Mike Fernandez, a DiMaggio cousin, who owned a junkyard in Bay Point. Joey loved working at the junkyard and soon moved into a trailer that had been discarded there. Later, Fernandez fixed up a bungalow on the property, and Joe Jr. moved in—until he felt crowded by reporters asking too many questions about his father, who was dying by then. He moved to another junkyard in another town not far away.
Marina DiMaggio said of Joe Jr., “He was a con artist. He could con you out of anything.” When his father lay dying, the television tabloid news show Inside Edition offered the son $15,000 to be interviewed about his relationship to Joe Sr. Junior took the money and conned the producers, carefully avoiding the issues they were most interested in discussing, which included anything remotely related to Joe Sr.’s personal life and the reason that the famous ballplayer’s son was in such dire straits. “What is Joe DiMaggio’s son supposed to do?” he chided the interviewer. “I’m free . . . just a free spirit. No commitments. The first of the month rolls around, and I have no payments to make.”
Joey was invited to collaborate on a damning tell-all book with an author who saw an opportunity to cash in on DiMaggio’s dark side, but Joey refused to participate. That was at least one thing Joe Sr. could be proud about. “My boy is loyal,” he said. “He wouldn’t talk, even for a million dollars.” Money was never something that interested Joe DiMaggio Jr. The only reason, he once admitted to Mike Fernandez, that he took the money from Inside Edition at all was so he could, on his own, buy dentures that actually fit him.
DiMaggio Jr. was a lost soul, but, according to Morris Engelberg, he was a “warm, gentle person, and, as everyone said, articulate and bright.” Unlike his father, Joey was demonstrative and openly affectionate toward those he liked, and he knew more about sports trivia—especially basketball statistics and factoids—than most people. He never got his teeth right, however. One of Engelberg’s last memories of the Clipper’s son was a visit they both made to Mama Mia’s, a popular Italian restaurant in Hollywood, Florida, after Joe Sr.’s death. Owner Joe Franco observed that when Junior entered, “He had no teeth and was wearing thongs and a ponytail. “He ordered a huge meal but spent most of his time at his table drinking several beers. He barely touched his knife and fork and had the food wrapped to go.” Engelberg learned later that Joey was embarrassed to eat in public because he believed that his false teeth failed to “work well.”
In the Inside Edition interview, Junior explained why he hadn’t run to his father’s bedside when he was taken ill. “You know, I never got the words ‘Come now.’ Or I’d have been there in a flash. I love him, and just all of the things that are felt between people but never said. When he wants me there, I’ll be there.”
• • •
By March 1998, Joe DiMaggio had begun to notice that he seemed to be without energy for things he always liked to do, but it wasn’t till the end of the year before he finally got the attention his ailment needed. He was unable to eat the food he loved, was easily tired and weak, and he coughed incessantly. The loss of appetite seemed fairly predictable, given his advanced age of eighty-four, but he had also begun to cough up blood and foul-looking phlegm, and that was shocking. He’d had a pacemaker implanted the preceding March, and he figured the coughing had something to do with the three packs of cigarettes he smoked each day. There had been a similar instance in 1992 that had amounted to no cause for alarm, and, besides, he had a year full of appointments and promises to keep.
In September, as the ’98 baseball season was coming to a close, DiMaggio had two major commitments that no physical ailments could keep him from honoring. The National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame unveiled a statue of the slugger in Chicago’s newly minted Piazza DiMaggio and feted him with a dinner in his honor. The next morning, he rang the opening bell at the Chicago Board of Trade. He was running a fever, feeling every bit of his eighty-four years, but he was where he was scheduled to be.
After the three-day agenda of ceremonies, Joe had to fly back to New York, where he was to be honored at Yankee Stadium upon arrival. George Steinbrenner sent a car to pick Joe up at LaGuardia Airport, and though Joe was feeling poorly, his color gray and his posture sagging, after a cup of coffee with the Yankees owner in the private box, Joe embarked on Joe DiMaggio Day, which turned out to be a difficult if fond farewell to Yankee Stadium and New York City.
A security snafu kept DiMaggio waiting in the sun-drenched bullpen for far too long, and by the time the tribute got under way, the Clipper was in a lather. “I don’t need this crap, “he declared. “I want to get out of here.” Engelberg reminded the champ that before the announcement that the day would be known as Joe DiMaggio Day, only eighteen thousand tickets had been sold; by the time Joe was on the verge of collapse in the dugout, the stadium had sold out all of its fifty-six thousand seats. The attorney went on to disclose a secret Steinbrenner had been holding on to in order to surprise Joe at midfield: he’d had replicas made of the eight World Series rings that had been stolen from the slugger’s hotel room years before and was about to present them in front of fifty-six thousand delighted fans. In the end, as he always did, Joe DiMaggio rose to the occasion, overcame the extreme discomfort caused by his illness, age, and the blazing sun, and he thrilled the assembly with his warm smile and his grateful wave. His speech was true to form: simple and short. He thanked the fans for their kind ovation and the Yankees for the gifts and the day, and then he quoted Lou Gehrig, who, he said, was “one of the greatest baseball players of all time,” saying, “I am the luckiest man on the face of the earth to be here today and to have had the opportunity to play for the greatest franchise in sports history, the New York Yankees. New York,” he went on, “thank you for the best thirteen years of my life. God bless you all.”
The next day Joe DiMaggio left New York City, never to return.
• • •
Upon his arrival in Florida, Joe visited his pulmonary specialist Dr. Aaron Neuhaus, and he soon learned that an X-ray had detected an odious white spot on his lung, a spot that was eventually identified as tuberculosis and then complicated by the additional diagnosis of pneumonia. Joe was admitted to the hospital. When none of the treatments gave DiMaggio any relief, and his condition continued to deteriorate, Neuhaus ran more tests and found advanced-stage lung cancer. A protracted fight with the various complications of the illness ensued, and the Clipper was not released from his confinement for ninety-nine days.
At first, when Joe entered the hospital for the surgery to remove and assess the cancer, he instructed Morris Engelberg, who kept an unceasing vigil through the several stages of DiMaggio’s illness, to censor all reports about his condition. He was adamant that his granddaughters be protected from concern, that his friends and family have no reason for pity, that his baseball colleagues lose no respect, that the Yankees be undeterred from their race for the pennant and the World Championship. He had checked into the hospital under a pseudonym so that the press would be kept away from the hospital as well as from him and his close circle. When it became impossible to keep the truth from Paula and Kathie, the young women flew to his side and did not leave. When Dom, his only remaining sibling, learned through the grapevine that DiMaggio was ill, he came, and since Joltin’ Joe was far too ill to object, the rift between the brothers was tentatively called off.
DiMaggio defied all the odds. When the surgeon Dr. Luis Ansanza emerged from the operation, Engelberg reported, it was clear that the Clipper was done for. He explained that a tumor had been removed, but that the cancer had spread to locations in the lungs that were inoperable. Joe DiMaggio’s death seemed imminent.
But Joltin’ Joe was not ready to leave. He survived several crises—his lungs collapsed, he contracted serious infections and hospital-borne illnesses, his heart failed, and he became disoriented—but he fought on. Word leaked to the press, and a barrage of nosy reporters soon pressed in on the staff and other patients as well as on Joe and his small entourage. A security guard had to be hired, and a psychiatrist was engaged along with round-the-clock protection by hospital staff and others. But he rallied.
George Steinbrenner came to visit Joe in the hospital. Nervous about seeing Joe fragile and weakened by illness, Steinbrenner fretted about what he would say, how he would react to the Clipper, but he needn’t have worried. When Steinbrenner arrived, DiMaggio was sitting up in bed, his trachea tube removed for the occasion, holding a baseball. They discussed the Yankees owner’s plans to trade players. Steinbrenner wanted to acquire veteran pitching star Roger Clemens, saying, “He’s the Michael Jordan of baseball!” The Clipper lobbied for keeping left-hander David Wells. “David Wells is a big Yankees fan,” DiMaggio argued. “He knows about Babe Ruth. He even has a gut like Babe.” Engelberg, who was with the two in the hospital room, reported that the meeting was “a tonic for DiMaggio’s morale. He talked about it for days.”
In January, in defiance of all the predictions to the contrary, DiMaggio left the hospital and went home to his house on Waterside Lane, in Harbor Islands, Florida. Though DiMaggio’s doctors expected him to expire quickly once he left the hospital, Engelberg had equipped the house to make it as much like an intensive care unit as possible without extinguishing the comforts of home. Joe loved the view from his windows of the Intercoastal Waterway, and he had pushed Engelberg to get the doctors to release him so that he might return there. Whether he knew he was dying was a matter of concern to all who knew him, but no one knew for sure. Engelberg was afraid that the knowledge that he had reached the end would plunge his friend into a depression that would speed the inevitable, and he was determined to keep Joe around as long as he could. He also knew that DiMaggio’s fragile mental state must be protected by keeping the old man stimulated with activities, responsibilities, and commitments.
Once home, Joe insisted on being well groomed and hidden from view. Engelberg planted ficus trees to create a wall around the house, shielding its occupant from peering eyes of neighbors and strangers alike. Engelberg hired DeJan Pesut to be DiMaggio’s security guard, cook, shopper, maintenance supervisor, and companion, and Pesut was able to move him gently about while his nurses kept him dressed, manicured, trimmed, and clean shaven. Though DiMaggio was not inclined to eat very much, Pesut insisted on using his Croatian skills to cook authentic Mediterranean food Italian style. The staff kept a library of Western movies and boxing bouts so that whenever there was nothing he wanted to watch on television, he could choose from any of dozens of alternate options.
News of DiMaggio’s confinement reached his multitudinous admirers, and cards and letters began to flow daily into his home in amazing numbers, from statesmen, politicians, celebrity actors, athletes, and especially from his fans. The letters kept the Clipper busy and comforted, as did the constant presence of Engelberg, the granddaughters, and the handful of others he was willing to see. But his strength continued to fail, and even the task of signing baseballs, which was once effortless for him, became overwhelmingly exhausting. At one point, Joe said to his friend, “Morris, soon Marilyn and I will be together again. Up there.”
• • •
On March 2, 1999, George Steinbrenner visited the Clipper and spent the afternoon reminiscing and arguing again about some of Steinbrenner’s managerial choices and discussing the upcoming Yankees season. Steinbrenner told DiMaggio he expected Joltin’ Joe to throw out the first ball when the season opened the following month, but Joe didn’t commit himself. When Steinbrenner left, it was clear that the visit had been a great elixir for the retired Yankee, and Engelberg encouraged Joe to allow him to invite other friends to visit. Some of those summoned were able to get to DiMaggio in time. Other of Joe’s friends were emotionally unable to face his death, and still others were disinterested; some, like Barry Halper, were refused entry by DiMaggio himself. Morris Engelberg and granddaughters Paula and Kathie did not stray from Joe’s side for more than a few minutes at a time, and while Dom and his brother were not speaking to each other again, Dom and his wife, Emily, were steadfast and resolute in their determination to be near Joe. In the middle of the first week of March, Engelberg consulted with Joe’s family, and they decided it was time to call hospice in.
Javier Ribe, a registered nurse with the nearest hospice, was assigned the job of easing Joe DiMaggio into death. Ribe visited every day to assess the Clipper’s condition, and he instructed the family that no matter what time of the day or night death seemed imminent, they were to call him. He wanted to be the one to be there to call the funeral director and make the final arrangements. On the third day, Dom and his grandnieces called in a priest so that Joe might receive last rites. No call was made to Joe DiMaggio Jr.
On Saturday, March 6, the family and Engelberg realized that the end was surely near, when DiMaggio could not be roused even to watch the fight televised on HBO. By Sunday morning, DiMaggio was in a deep coma, barely hovering between life and death. That day was Engelberg’s birthday, and the friend hoped desperately that the old man would live until the day had passed. Dom, never one to be ultrasensitive to his brother, sat by Joe’s bed and spoke openly about funeral arrangements, which enraged Engelberg, who asked Dom to leave. The younger brother didn’t argue with Engelberg but gathered his belongings and left for a prearranged meeting with a business associate.
By this time, Joe’s oldest friend, Joe Nacchio, had returned from a trip to Panama and had joined the vigil at DiMaggio’s bedside. Engelberg, knowing how important the World Series rings had been to DiMaggio, forced the ’36 Series ring, which Joe had asked him to protect, onto the Clipper’s swollen finger. Engelberg, Javier Ribe, Kathie, Paula and her husband, Jim Hamra, held Joe’s hands and feet, weeping openly, knowing they could not hold him back from death but hoping to ease his journey to the other side.
Moments after midnight on March 8, Joe rallied. His trachea tube had been removed, and he cleared his throat feebly. In a voice that none of the assembled family and friends recognized, Joe said, “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn again.” Seconds later, he was gone, but everyone there had heard his last words with absolute clarity.
Joseph Paul DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper died in the first hour of Monday, March 8, 1999.
After the funeral home van had carried off Joltin’ Joe’s body to be prepared for burial, his trusted friend and attorney sat at his desk and penned a press release to be disseminated among the news media. Then, after months of rarely leaving his best friend’s side, the fifty-nine-year-old lawyer broke down emotionally, contemplating the weeks that had just passed. “I was consoled that Joe died peacefully,” Engelberg reflected. “He went the way he lived his life and played baseball: with dignity and with class, la bella figura to the last. He had a clean shave, his hair was combed, and his nails were manicured. The French doors facing the Intercoastal were open, and a cool breeze was blowing in.”
• • •
Major League Baseball chartered a plane to carry Joe DiMaggio’s body, accompanied by Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, Dom and Emily DiMaggio, and American League President Gene Budig, back to San Francisco. The funeral was held in the same church where Joe and Dorothy had been married, and where many DiMaggio family events had been consecrated. Yet even before the plane touched down, the controversy surrounding the funeral service had begun.
Kathie and Paula were adamant that DiMaggio’s wishes be honored and that, with the exception of Joe Nacchio and Morris Engelberg, only family be allowed to attend. As Evelyn Nieves wrote in the New York Times, “Even though he was one of the most famous men of this century, DiMaggio’s funeral this morning at SS. Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church . . . was astonishingly small, devoid of the celebrities of his vanishing era.”
Though George Steinbrenner and baseball luminaries such as Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, and Reggie Jackson wanted to be there, none was invited. “They said they wanted it to be family,” reported Rev. Armand Oliveri, who presided over the service; “and that was about it.”
As the preparations were nearing completion, Joe Nacchio insisted that Joey Jr. be contacted, saying it would serve as a “fitting tribute and a mark of respect for his father.” Junior had called at least a couple times during Joe’s illness to find out how the old man was, but he had made no attempt to get to the dying Clipper. “Just give my regards to my father and tell him that I love him,” he told Engelberg. But as the funeral approached, no one was sure what Joe Jr. might or might not know, as no one knew where he was or what his situation might be. Dom DiMaggio wanted to hire professional pallbearers, but Nacchio and Engelberg disagreed, and Engelberg, who was Joe’s legal representative, decreed that pallbearers would include Joe’s brother Vince’s grandsons, Joe Nacchio, Morris Engelberg, and, if they could locate him, Joe DiMaggio Jr. Dom DiMaggio disagreed about finding Joe Jr. “You’re wasting your time,” he said. “He’s nothing more than a bum, and he won’t come.”
But Joseph DiMaggio Jr. did come to his father’s funeral, and he was a pallbearer. After driving for hours about Northern California, Engelberg and Nacchio located Joe Jr. under a car, doing maintenance work, somewhere outside of Pittsburg, California, looking every bit as he had once described himself: “diametrically opposed” to his father. Nacchio told him Joe would have wanted his son to be at his funeral. “He loved you, you know,” Nacchio told Joey. “I loved my father too,” he replied. “I’ll be there.”
Nacchio gave Junior $400 to “get cleaned up and buy appropriate clothing” for the funeral, and the family warned that Nacchio had probably been conned. “He’s a manipulator,” vowed Cousin Joe. But Nacchio had absolute faith that the son would be there to accompany the father’s casket into the church and to his final resting place, and Joseph DiMaggio Jr. did not disappoint.
Joey arrived at the funeral in a white limo and emerged wearing a new, well-pressed, and tailored three-button suit and shiny shoes. His hair, though still in a ponytail, was clean and carefully controlled, and his hands were scrubbed to pristine softness with manicured and polished nails. He entered the arena of his long-neglected family with warmth and exuberance, and he greeted them all as though he had never been apart, as though they had always been close-knit and loving. Jim Hamra, Paula’s husband, was very taken with the way Joe Jr. handled himself that day. “He stood there, off to the side of the room, shoulders back, head up, studying the people as if he was figuring out who he knew and who he didn’t know. He then worked the room, hugging some people, shaking hands with some, and he seemed completely at ease.”
All was forgiven. Joseph DiMaggio Jr. had come home to his papa.