In Search of the Elusive Yankee Clipper

The editors of USA Today Baseball Weekly weren’t waiting for more bad news about Joe DiMaggio before being lavish with coverage of the New York Yankee great’s career. Last week’s issue of the paper, published more than a month into DiMaggio’s stay in a Florida hospital, was fronted by a nostalgic portrait of the center fielder from his pinstriped heyday.

“The DiMaggio legend: Celebrating the greatness of the Yankee Clipper” was the cover line, followed by five pages of memories inside.

It’s safe to assume that other print editors and broadcast producers have reexamined or updated their own pieces about DiMaggio as he struggles, at age 84, to bounce back from lung cancer surgery. Meanwhile, the big DiMaggio book is being completed, at a time when most of the serious titles about him released in the last 10 years or more are out of print.

Simon & Schuster revealed this week that it plans to publish Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of DiMaggio next September. It’s eagerly awaited because DiMaggio has been famously secretive and distant from writers--with the exception of a little baseball chatter he shared in September with New York Times columnist Dave Anderson--and Cramer is famously tenacious.

Cramer’s last big book, “What It Takes,” which went deep inside the heads of six contenders in the 1988 presidential race, ran more than 1,000 pages in hardcover when it was published four years later. It’s considered one of the gems of political reporting and observation.

“I wish I were more in the home stretch,” Cramer, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said of his DiMaggio book this week from his home in Maryland. “I have a due date of April 1, and I’m behind.”

The big question: Did Joe D speak to him?

“I talked to him several times, but it resulted in no help,” Cramer said. “He did not want to help. He didn’t like the whole idea.”

Cramer’s answer at first recalls Gay Talese’s famous profile of DiMaggio, which ran in Esquire 22 years ago. When Talese arrived at DiMaggio’s San Francisco restaurant and announced himself, the slugger immediately left the room, then went to great verbal lengths to dismiss the writer: “You are invading my rights, I did not ask you to come, I assume you have a lawyer . . . get your lawyer!”

In Cramer’s case, though, DiMaggio was “quite courtly about it,” the biographer explained. “He wasn’t mean in person or yelling or anything. He just had no interest in helping me in finding the story of his life.

“He’s got a right to that,” Cramer went on. “But I tried to explain to him that this wasn’t a celebrity biography that wouldn’t get published without his cooperation. It’s a piece of American history, whether he likes it or not.”

After brushing off Cramer, DiMaggio appeared to make a preemptive bid to reach bookstores first. He sought out interest from publishers in a book of his own--one that would focus solely on his baseball career, which ended in 1951. Nothing, for example, about his brief marriage to Marilyn Monroe. So that book idea went begging.

Still, it’s hard to imagine how serious DiMaggio really was. In “DiMaggio: The Last American Knight” (1995), author Joseph Durso, who knew his subject from years of covering baseball for the New York Times, wrote that the book had started out as an autobiography.

“But Joe DiMaggio decided that he would rather have privacy than 2 million dollars,” Durso added.

I recalled for Cramer the scene when DiMaggio entered Radio City Music Hall last spring for Time magazine’s 75th anniversary gala. Though he wore a smile with his tux as he walked across the spacious lobby, no one in the crowd approached him, as if he were unapproachable, until the not-so-shy F. Lee Bailey stepped up to shake his hand and schmooze.

DiMaggio “likes the fame,” Cramer responded. “He wants his position. He wants it assiduously. But he doesn’t want to be known. . . . He wants fame on his own terms.

“But that isn’t easy.”

Of course it isn’t, especially when such a person was married to Monroe, who continues to entrance the public.

Naturally, Cramer did not reveal specifics but said that his book will contain “some explosive stuff.” As Cramer put it, if DiMaggio doesn’t deny some of the particulars, “he’s going to have to run away from them. . . . I think I’ve really got something.”

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Paul Colford’s e-mail address is paul.colford@newsday.com.