Dom Dimaggio

Dom Dimaggio is in an Italian restaurant on a warm Florida night in May. He's wearing gray trousers, a white Brooks Brothers dress shirt with French cuffs and heavy starch, silver cuff links, a striped tie and a blue blazer. The restaurant, Vittorio's, in Delray Beach, near Ocean Ridge, suits Dom, the way Toots Shor's suited Joe in New York in the 1940s. They know Mr. DiMaggio at Vittorio's. He sits down for a six o'clock reservation precisely on time, and two hours later he's still sitting, sipping his second drink, telling stories, his menu unopened. The staff does not disturb the man. He's in a reverie.

"Joe never expressed an opinion, not to me," Dom says, when the conversation turns to Joe and the Hall of Fame. "I would have loved him to, but we're not that kind of people. I know that when people used to ask him who was the best defensive centerfielder he ever saw, he would say, 'My brother Dom.' But he would never say, 'Dom belongs in the Hall,' because if he had said that and I had gotten in, he knew people would have said, 'Dom's only in because Joe pushed for him.' " It was a complicated business, being Joe DiMaggio. In many ways the complications trickled down to Dom.

"I want to thank you," Dom said many years ago to sports columnist Tom Laird of The San Francisco News. Laird, who covered the San Francisco Seals—the legendary minor league team that gave Joe and Dom, as well as older brother Vince, their professional baseball foundation—was hardly expecting a thank-you. In 1937, when Joe was a second-year star for the New York Yankees and Vince a rookie playing daily for the Boston Braves in the National League, Laird was merciless in writing about Dom, bespectacled and bony and in his first year with the Seals. Laird said Dom owed his job to his family name. Over three seasons Lefty O'Doul, the Seals' manager, taught Dom how to hit, really hit, and Dom's fielding, always a strength, became brilliant, and by 1940 three DiMaggio centerfielders were in the majors. "My desire was just to play professional baseball," Dom told Laird that day, "but what you wrote made me determined to get to the big leagues."

Vincent Paul DiMaggio, two years older than Joe and five older than Dom, played for 10 years, for five teams. He was twice an All-Star. Vince ran the bases well and played center like a DiMaggio, but his career average was .249. "Vince missed his calling," Dom says. "He could have been an opera star. If you asked him to sing, you couldn't get him to stop if you wanted to—which you didn't. What a voice."

The DiMaggios were musical people. Dom likes to listen to Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong. Joe loved Luciano Pavarotti. A recording of Pavarotti's singing Ave Maria was playing as Joe took his final breaths. This fact was reported in the book Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, Richard Ben Cramer's exhaustive and controversial biography published in 2000. Cramer spent five years researching the book, talking to hundreds of people, but not to Joe and, as a result, not to Dom. Since Joe wouldn't talk to Cramer, neither would Dom, out of loyalty to Joe before his death and in honor of his memory after it. It's a measure of Dom's decency that Cramer, in the book's acknowledgments, thanks Dom for being "kind enough to put up with me," even though he "didn't want to help."

Where Dom would have no problem with the book is on the subject of Morris Engelberg, Joe's lawyer and personal manager for the final 16 years of Joe's life. Cramer portrays Engelberg as relentlessly pushy, overwhelming his client while enriching him—his estate is estimated to be worth well over $50 million. Dom has no use for Engelberg. (Engelberg says he has "only warm feelings for Dom.") "He's the most despicable person I've ever had the displeasure of being forced into contact with," Dom says. As Joe neared his end, Dom says, Engelberg wanted him to remain in Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Fla.; Dom was insistent that his lone surviving sibling, whose house was nearby, be brought home to die, and home is where he died. (Engelberg maintains he also wanted Joe to return home.)

The funeral was in San Francisco. "Engelberg wanted the body flown out on American Airlines, with the freight," Dom says, "but all the funeral arrangements were to be at my discretion. I told Engelberg, 'I'm taking my brother out on a private plane.' I invited him to fly with us. He didn't, of course." (Engelberg says he wanted to fly the body out on American because "American was Joe's airline.")

Dom invited baseball commissioner Bud Selig and American League president Gene Budig to the funeral, despite Engelberg's objections. Dom felt those invitations were proper and what Joe would have wanted. Dom didn't invite Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, whom Engelberg thought should have been invited. When Dom was looking for a private plane to fly his brother's body to San Francisco, he called Steinbrenner, but Dom says he received no call back. (Steinbrenner doesn't recall any message from Dom and says had he received such a request, he would have done what he could to help. The commissioner's office paid for the charter, at a cost of $75,000.) When Dom didn't hear from Steinbrenner, he ended the DiMaggio relationship with him.

Dom's reaction was a manifestation of a central aspect of the DiMaggio code, a code rooted in old Sicilian notions of respect and how it is shown. It was a code so complex that even family members could violate it. Joe's first wife was Dorothy Arnold, an aspiring actress. They married in 1939, and two years later their only son, Joe DiMaggio Jr., was born. In 1945 Dorothy and Joe divorced. "When the kid came of age, he picked his mother over his father," Dom says, "and that was the end of it. Joe Jr. said repeatedly, 'If my father calls for me, I will come.' But I knew my brother. He would not do that. If Joe Jr. would have called his father, my brother would have accepted him with open arms." Joe Jr.'s life was a horrid saga of drug abuse, homelessness and isolation. But he put on a suit for his father's funeral and served as a pallbearer. Five months later he was dead, at 57, from an overdose of heroin and crack.

A key to maintaining a relationship with the elder Joe was being exceedingly discreet: knowing when to talk, knowing what not to talk about. In the years after she and Joe were divorced, discussion of Marilyn Monroe was forbidden. If you so much as mentioned her name to Joe, your relationship with him was over. Joe never cooperated with any of the writers or producers working on the dozens of books, articles and films about Monroe. He expected his family and friends to do the same, and they did, Dom especially, out of respect and out of fear that if they didn't, Joe would cast them out.