Joe DiMaggio was born into an age of easy innocence and subsequently, in the big leagues, when his myth needed nourishing the simplest devices sufficed. He was the son of an immigrant fisherman. He married the most beautiful gal in the world. He played baseball like a god in the greatest city on earth. If Joe DiMaggio wasn't the American Dream then who was?
He had a big old horse face which passed for reliable if not handsome at a time when reliability was better valued and for balance he had a nickname, the Yankee Clipper, which suggested a life of permanent springtime. For legacy he was name-checked by both Ernest Hemingway and Paul Simon, little references which added to the feeling that the very name Joe DiMaggio represented a nostalgic, wholesome sort of glamour.
Even when he had long since ceased to get the point ("I ain't gone anywhere, I just did a Mr Coffee commercial," he told Paul Simon bitterly) he was loved and coddled. Born in 1914, he was as late as 1998 enjoying tribute days in his honour at Yankee stadium, still turning a few bob by sticking his signature onto baseballs destined for the mantelpieces of suckers.
Few sporting myths have the resilience to withstand prolonged scrutiny, however, and when Joe DiMaggio's life is boiled down for public consumption it makes for sad reading. The hero stripped bare is a pale, shivering figure. Socially and politically DiMaggio was ultimately of little influence, personally he was lonely, stricken by insecurities and never quite able to pull away from the warmth of his own publicity. Yet he was the gold standard of American celebrity for much of the last century.
Why? Well, Joe DiMaggio was a tough and difficult man who arrived on-stage in the mid-1930s at a strange time in US history. Baseball, the great pastoral obsession of pre-1950s, the US was in its heyday and the economy was just busting out of depression. People wanted sensations they could believe in and DiMaggio, one dimensional as he was, never failed them. He was a poor boy made good and famously came to work everyday and provided the bleacher bums with some excitement.
And in the summer of 1941, when American brows were beginning to furrow, he presented them with the greatest distraction they had known, a hitting streak of 56 matches. Imagine Robbie Keane scoring for 25 matches in succession at the height of a Premiership season and you have a small idea of the sensation DiMaggio caused.
By the time he was done with "The Streak", his place in the history of his times was copper fastened. For those close to him this was a wonder. He seldom socialised with team-mates, he consorted with chorus girls and drank stoically in the company of adoring press men. Yet he was loved because he could hit a baseball.
Richard Ben Cramer has done a wonderful job in scouring the life of a private and difficult man and in the interests of journalism he should be thanked for doing so. Yet one story would perhaps have sufficed and it is a well-known one. Marilyn Monroe was flown to Japan once during the Korean war as part of a goodwill trip to serving soldiers. DiMaggio, his celebrity already waning, accompanied her but, feeling sick in Tokyo, was unable to participate in the Korean part of the trip. When his wife got back to Tokyo she was exuberant, the trip had been a massive success. Every move she had made had been a triumph. She gushed to her husband: "Joe, you never heard such cheering."
"Yes I have," he said sourly. When the cheering went away, sourness was all that was left in Joe DiMaggio's life. His nine-month marriage to Monroe involved as much make-believe as the charming stories about his background but he went to the grave thinking otherwise.
Cramer, who wrote brilliantly in the past about the 1988 US presidential election, has been criticised for stripping DiMaggio of the slightest semblance of dignity yet he raises a valid point about heroism and the generous, almost careless way in which the attributes of heroism are conferred on sporting stars.
Despite his collection of craven press cuttings, DiMaggio was a hollow, lonely man who exploited his narrow talent for hitting a ball with a stick until the day he died. He was mean-spirited to the core, tough on women, fickle with friends, tight in company and shallow about the sort of patriotism which was popular back then. He never saw combat in the second World War and complained constantly about the War interrupting his career. Cramer has produced a thoughtful book, which serves as a template both for an examination of the immigrant experience and the way American popular culture manufactured its heroes. It is a story about a man and a country growing old, about their mutual bewilderment. The gaps in DiMaggio's personality once mistaken for mystery were always filled in by his fans. Gutted, with the myths taken out and strewn for examination on these pages, his is a sad story which makes uncomfortable reading.
Tom Humphries is an author and an Irish Times journalist