Dinner with DiMaggio: Memories of An American Hero - Hardcover

Positano, Dr. Rock; Positano, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1501156845 ISBN 13: 9781501156847

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2017

Synopsis

The real Joe DiMaggio, remembered by one of the few who really knew the man behind the legend—candid and little-known stories about baseball icons from Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, and his Yankees teammates on the field to Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and others off the field. As told by Dr. Rock Positano, DiMaggio’s closest confidante in New York during the final years of his life, Dinner with DiMaggio is an intimate portrait of one of America’s most enduring heroes.

This memoir of a decade-long friendship reveals the very private DiMaggio as he really was—sometimes demanding, sometimes big-hearted, always impeccable, loyal, and a true stand-up guy—while serving up illuminating stories and rare insights about the people in his life, including his teammates, Muhammad Ali, Sandy Koufax, Woody Allen, and more.

In 1990, Dr. Rock Positano, the thirty-two-year-old foot and ankle specialist, was introduced to DiMaggio, the pair brought together by a career-ending heel spur injury. Though Dr. Positano was forty years younger, an unlikely friendship developed after the doctor successfully treated the baseball champ’s heel. At the start, Joe mentored Rock but came to rely on his young friend to show him a good time in New York, the town that made him a legend. In time, the famously reserved DiMaggio opened up to Dr. Positano and talked about his joys, his disappointments, and his sorrows as he reflected on his extraordinary life. The stories and experiences shared with Dr. Positano comprise an intimate portrait of one of the great stars of baseball and icon of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Rock G. Positano is the Director of the Non-Surgical Foot and Ankle Service at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, where he has been on staff since 1991. He graduated from Yale University School of Medicine, where his thesis on foot health was approved, with Honors and Distinction. He is a clinical assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is internationally known for his non-surgical approach for the treatment of foot disorders. Visit him at HSS.edu/Physicians_Positano-Rock.asp. Dinner with DiMaggio is his first book.

John A. Positano, Esq., is associate producer of The Joe Piscopo Show, which airs daily on AM970, and the weekly Live From Downtown New York City. He graduated from New York Law School. In addition to arguing federal cases, he has written articles on the military, law, and surfing for the LI Pulse, Huffington Post, and Daily News (New York). He lives near Stony Brook, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I decidedtowritethismemoir on what would have been Joe DiMaggio’s hundredth birthday, November 25, 2014. We had become close friends during the last ten years of his life, despite more than forty years’ difference in our ages. I had tried to write my memo- ries of Joe with the help of others. The chemistry was never right, and it didn’t work. On his centennial, I realized that only I could write this book, with my brother John, because it is so personal. Nobody knows the landscape better than the two of us. I intended to write a memoir ofmy friendship with Joe DiMaggio, not another baseball book.
I had invited his family for dinner at Campagnola on the Upper East Side to celebrate the memory of “Big Joe,” as his great-grandkids called him. His granddaughter Paula and her husband Jim Hamra along with their daughters Vanassa, her new husband, and Valerie joined me for the celebration. I felt privileged to sit at the dinner table with the people whom Joe Di loved and cared for the most in the world. I know Big Joe would have been thrilled that we were having a family dinner to celebrate his birthday. Since the dinner table was sacred to Joe, Dinner with DiMaggio seemed the perfect title for this memoir.
As we enjoyed our meal, our conversation was full of the Yankee Clipper, one of the great heroes of the twentieth century. As I re- counted stories he had told me, it became evident that they had never heard many of them. It was a revelation to me that Joe Di didn’t share many of his stories with his family. When it came to his family, it was all about them. He always put them first. When he was with them, they were the focus, not his legend. For Joe DiMaggio, kids always took precedence, no matter who else was in the room.
I had learned that he compartmentalized his life as a means of self-preservation. Joe’s life was a jigsaw puzzle, and only he had all the pieces. He believed that if no one could put it all together, he would
have more freedom. Joe was always in control. His insistence on pri- vacy is critical to understanding Joe as an icon and a man.
“Doc, there’s a difference—a big difference—between secrecy and privacy,” Joe explained to me one day as we drove through the rat maze of Manhattan traffic. “Secrecy is when you hide something, but privacy is when you have information that’s privileged, that belongs to nobody except family. That’s the reason you never tell anyone about your kids, your family life, or your personal life. They will use it against you if they could. You always need to protect your family.”
I have followed his advice to this day.
Joe had a life in Florida, a life in California, and a life in New York. He made sure that no one life ever totally intersected with the others. People in Florida knew certain things that people in New York and California did not, and the same was true of the other places where he spent time. That’s probably one of the reasons there have been so many books and such a variety of opinions about Joe, because no one knew him completely. In the end, only he held all the pieces of the puzzle, and he always kept us guessing.
Joe reminded me of a theory I learned in quantum physics at New York University, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Simply stated, this theory holds that the position and velocity of an object cannot be measured exactly at the same time. For Joe it was the DiMaggio uncer- tainty principle regarding who he was.
Joe was inscrutable to journalists and hearsay biographers, because he was closed mouth about personal information. He knew that the less he said, the more control he had over his image. His personal life was a forbidden zone. To his credit, there was never a double standard, because he would not intrude into the privacy of others. People who did not know him well sometimes judged him to be aloof, remote, even shy, which was far from the truth. He often commented that people who had never even sat down with him for a cup of coffee could not write a book about him.
 

 
 
 
My friendship with Joe DiMaggio began with the heel spur in his right foot that had sidelined him for sixty-five games in 1949, one of the physical ailments that forced him to retire in 1951. It led to our meeting thirty-nine years later in 1990.
At thirty-two, I had a fledgling foot-and-ankle practice in Manhat- tan at the Hospital for Special Surgery. I specialized in nonsurgical treatment of foot and ankle disorders. I credit Joe’s famously botched heel-spur surgery and Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings of the foot and ankle as my inspirations for developing nonsurgical programs while I was at Yale Medical School and the New York College of Po- diatric Medicine in Harlem. The nonsurgical ethos was considered a unique approach to caring for foot-and-ankle problems.
Bill Gallo, the dean of American sportswriters and a brilliant car- toonist at the NewYorkDailyNews, introduced me to the Yankee Clipper. As Bill told me, while he was having lunch one day with Joe at a restaurant on West Thirty-fourth Street, the Clipper complained about his still painful right heel, which continued to give him trou- ble and affect his quality of life. Bill thought I could help Joe, so he mentioned that he had a good friend who had done a lot of work on heel pain and foot disorders at Yale. That was a plus for me, because Joe’s son had attended Yale, and Joe had great respect for Ivy League education. Bill offered to see if I could help him with his problem. Gallo also mentioned that I was a guy Joe might like to hang out with. According to Bill, Joe looked skeptical and did not appear terribly enthusiastic.
Joe prized the streetwise virtue of complete discretion. His friend- ship with a journalist was a departure from the norm for him. Gallo was the exception to the no-journalist rule, because he kept his mouth shut. Dave Anderson of the NewYorkTimes was another member of this very exclusive club. Charlie Rose, the late Tim Russert, Bob Costas, Al Michaels, and Bryant Gumbel also made the exclusive and coveted DiMaggio safe-zone list. He would have no problem talking in
an elevator in front of these journalists. In his eyes, they were all honor- able and maintained the highest professional standards and discretion. “Doc,” Joe explained to me later, “When you tell Gallo something is
off the record, it is just that. You’ll never see it appear somewhere else. That’s a trick you see with these newspaper fellows. They’ll tell you something is off the record, then trade the information with another one of their buddies. Then it shows up somewhere else. Not Gallo. His word is his word: no tricks, smoke, or mirrors.”
Gallo called me and asked me to do him a favor. He wanted me to see a friend of his, who was coincidentally staying in the same building as my office at Sixty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue.
Whenever he was in town, Joe stayed at the seventh-floor apartment of Atlantic City restaurateur Dick Burke, located on Fifth Avenue. Dick Burke was a Horatio Alger figure, a rags-to-riches former street waif who, as a boy, had sold newspapers to Joe when Joe strolled on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Dick had gone on to be a big success, and eventually opened the Irish Pub on St. James Place in Atlantic City, where Joe was always a welcome guest. Dick Burke and his wife, Cathy, were family to Joe. Since the Burkes spent little time at their Fifth Avenue place, they gave Joe a key, and 860 Fifth Avenue became Joe’s home base in New York. The Burkes were remarkably gracious and generous to Joe, and he returned the favor.
When Bill told me his friend was Joe DiMaggio, all I could say was, “You’re kidding me.”
After assuring me that he wasn’t pulling my leg, Gallo advised me to drop Joe a note.
I was eager to make the connection. I gave the doorman a note, which read, “Hi, I’m Dr. Rock Positano, Bill Gallo’s friend, and he asked me to drop you this note.”
I didn’t expect anything to come of it. At about six forty-five that evening, my assistant, Christine Albano, answered the doorbell, to find two men at the door. One of them was unmistakably Joe DiMaggio,
impeccably dressed in an overcoat, blazer, shirt, and tie. She buzzed me and announced, “You’re not going to believe who’s out here and wants to say hello.”
“Who is it?” I asked, near the end of a long day. “Joe DiMaggio, with his friend, Mr. Burke.”
Her answer nearly knocked me off my feet. I couldn’t believe he actually had come down to say hello to me the same day I sent him the note.
I raced to the reception area with my hand extended and said, “Mr.
DiMaggio, it’s an honor to meet you.”
Joe, always a consummate gentleman, turned to Dick Burke and said, “Dr. Positano, I would like you to meet my dear friend, Mr. Burke.”
“Mr. Burke, it is a pleasure to meet you.” I matched his formality. Then Joe cut in. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Doc, from our friend
Bill Gallo.”
“That’s great, Mr. DiMaggio,” I responded, not knowing how im- portant being a mutual friend was to Joltin’ Joe. An introduction from Bill Gallo was golden and never in question. I was very careful about how I addressed him, as he was a gentleman from the old school. I came to know that nothing irritated the Clipper more than someone he didn’t know calling him Joe. Impeccable manners were extremely important to DiMaggio. He gave you permission to call him Joe.
“Mr. Gallo suggested that I drop you a line,” I explained. I still couldn’t believe it, the most famous heel and sports medicine injury in history—even more renowned than that of Achilles—needed my attention.
Both men went into an examination room and took off their coats. When I looked at Joe’s foot, I saw that the surgery on his heel, per- formed in the ’40s, had been bungled. The famous heel, the Holy Grail of sports injuries known all around the world and repeatedly men- tioned in the Ernest Hemingway classic, TheOldManand the Sea,
mesmerized me. It was a foot doctor’s fantasy and dream. In addition, he had a large arthritic left big toe, which was a consequence of fouling numerous balls off his foot in the batter’s box.
“When they did the heel spur incision, they did a Griffith’s, which is a fish-mouth incision,” I explained. “They not only removed the spur but also the fat pad, so you have been walking on bone with no cush- ion.” I learned later that sharing ill-fitting, hand-me-down shoes from his brothers also contributed to his heel and foot problems. Wearing shoes of the wrong size is a prescription for foot disaster.
I recommended a special orthopedic foot strapping and a prescrip- tion orthotic that would calm down the soft tissue inflammation in the area and reduce the force and tension in the tendons and ligaments of the bottom part of his heel. In two weeks, he showed considerable improvement, but just treating Joe was not enough for him or me. I was determined to heal him and allow him to enjoy walking and playing golf.
When I wanted to take X-rays of his foot, which was standard med- ical procedure, Joe refused to be X-rayed.
He said, “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Doc, but I don’t want this X-ray showing up at one of these memorabilia shows. It could fetch a lot of money.”
Clearly, Joe didn’t trust me, even though I was a professional trying to help him. I was a little insulted, but decided not to get defensive or to take him on. I had to rely on reports he had his Florida doctors send, which wasn’t an ideal way to treat him or to observe the progress he was making. His concern seemed over the top to me, but I didn’t know much about him then. Now, it makes perfect sense.
Joe was accustomed to people wanting to exploit his name and legend to make money, and that made him guarded and suspicious. In his book of life, everyone started in the negative column and had to prove himself trustworthy.
About three months after our first meeting, Joe dropped by my
office unannounced and alone. “Hey, Doc, you want to grab a cup of coffee?” he asked.
As if I’d refuse.
We went around the corner to the Gardenia Café, an upscale Greek diner on Madison Avenue and East 67th Street. That is how our friend- ship outside my office began.
I can’t recall how many people have asked me, “What do you talk about with Joe DiMaggio?”
My answer was, “Everything.”
I became like New York family to him. He was as protective of me as he was of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Over time, he let me into his private zone, but, as I learned, not even family or very close associates and friends knew the whole picture. That was by design.
I experienced his tendency to compartmentalize his life. He was brilliant, even strategic, about it. Napoleon would have been proud of the Clipper. Soon after Joe’s death, I had a call from a guy named Joe Nachio, who identified himself as one of Joe’s oldest friends from Panama. I assumed he was one more fan claiming to be Joe’s supposed best friend. I had never heard of him. Nachio told me that he had known Joe since the 1930s. We got to talking. I was surprised by how much he knew about me. Apparently, Joe Di had told him a lot about his young doctor friend in New York, but had never mentioned Nachio to me. I later learned they were so close that Joe had stayed at his friend’s house in Panama to escape the furor following the breakup of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. As I said, no one knew the whole picture when it came to Joe. I was getting a firsthand lesson from the professor himself. I was initially suspicious of Joe Nachio, because I’ve run into so many people who claimed to have enjoyed a close relationship with Joe and had dined with him often. There were two litmus tests to the truth of these claims: coffee and garlic. Joe’s eating habits were peculiar, es- pecially as to how he liked his coffee. When pretenders would talk
about Joe’s ordering a cappuccino or gulping down a double espresso with Sambuca, I knew they had never had coffee with Joe. Joe always ordered “a half cup of decaffeinated coffee and, on the side, a small pot of hot water.” Joe would mix the little pot of hot water into his decaf like a precision chemist, not one drop over the mark. He never took coffee any other way.
As for the garlic test, though Joe was a true son of Sicily, he avoided garlic. When someone told me he ate at an Italian restaurant with Joe, I’d ask him what Joe had ordered. When the answer was, “He ate riga- toni with garlic, loaded with garlic. He loves garlic,” I knew he had never broken bread with Joe. And rigatoni was not Joe’s favorite pasta. Joe might have liked garlic, but I believe he steered clear of it, be- cause he was concerned about smelling like a “dago.” Ethnic stereo- types were stronger in Joe’s heyday than they are now. Italians and Italian-Americans were judged far more harshly than in these politi-
cally correct times.
During his last decade, I became his New York surrogate son and later a buffer and an expediter, a young friend who could read his mind and take care of things to keep him in his comfort zo...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501156845
• ISBN 13: 9781501156847
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368