Volume 47, Number 18 · November 16, 2000
Where Has Joe Gone?
By Russell Baker
Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life
by Richard Ben Cramer
Simon and Schuster, 546 pp., $28.00
Joe DiMaggio played baseball for the New York Yankees for thirteen years, then spent the rest of his life playing Joe DiMaggio. It is doubtful that he enjoyed either career very much, or that he enjoyed anything at all very deeply, although Richard Ben Cramer suggests that he took a miser's delight in accumulating money. Even this pleasure was often spoiled by suspicions that friends and relatives were raking in money that should have been his. Joylessness seems to have been his natural habitat, distrust his natural instinct, and loneliness his inevitable destiny. He had no enduring friendships, but he had a hundred 'pals,' each of whom, like a typical specimen described by Cramer, 'had blisters on his lips from kissing the ground Joe walked on.' He was married twice, both times to blond actresses, both of whom divorced him. By the first he had a son to whom he was an indifferent, mostly absent father. The son outlived him by only six months, then died of an overdose of heroin and crack cocaine.
Review, 4564 words
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