Joe DiMaggio was the kind of man a 21-year-old kid in 1968 might ask, Where have you gone?
Allow me a moment of reflection on music, baseball, and American history. Jeff wrote a little while ago about Simon & Garfunkel, also the subject of a recent episode of the Political Beats podcast. Jeff discussed on the episode how Paul Simon originally wanted to use Mickey Mantle in “Mrs. Robinson” but went with Joe DiMaggio instead because his name worked better with the melody. True enough, but there’s a deeper set of reasons why the line worked so, so much better with Joe. Recall the famous lyric:
Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at this, you lose.Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you
Woo, woo, woo
What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson?
Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.
(DiMaggio, then coaching for the A’s and doing TV ads for Mr. Coffee and the Bowery bank, was baffled at the time by the suggestion that he had gone anywhere.)
Hardly any song has been as associated with a particular generation at a particular moment as “Mrs. Robinson” has with the Baby Boomers circa 1968, when the song was released after unfinished pieces of it were used in the 1967 film The Graduate. In 1968, the biggest segment of that generation was between the ages of 15 and 22. (Set aside that Simon himself, born in 1941, is five years too old to be a Boomer.) The song evokes that film and Vietnam and Nixon–Humphrey and not wanting to go into plastics — not wanting, really, to grow up to follow in dad’s footsteps. Simon’s lyric evoked this whole emotion of a generation that is torn between, on the one hand, feeling the loss of the old certainties of their parents’ generation and, on the other hand, feeling as if nobody is listening to them about wanting things to be different. “Any way you look at it, you lose?” Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace were all for the war.
Now, think about Mickey and Joe D. The latter had his last great year in 1950, retired in 1951. So only the very oldest, born-in-1946 Boomers had even a vague memory of seeing Joe play. If you grew up as a Boomer and a Yankees fan, your hero was Mickey. And Mickey was a perfect Boomer idol. He was the All-American Boy who never really grew up (hence why Jane Leavy titled her penetrating Mantle bio The Last Boy). He avoided military service when he was the most impressive athletic specimen in the country and everybody else was serving — not unfairly, because Army doctors understood that his knees and back would never hold up on a three-mile march, but to the detriment of his public image. He drank and caroused and womanized and got in trouble, and even after one of the most storied careers in the game’s history — a Triple Crown, three MVPs, two 50-HR seasons, twelve pennants, seven rings — people still talked about him like he was your kid who never quite lived up to his potential. You couldn’t ask where he had gone in 1968 because he was still playing for the Yankees, a dangerous hitter to the end but hobbling like an old man, a shadow of his old self. And unbeknownst to the world in 1968, he was soon to be exposed in Ball Four for his adolescent lifestyle and humor in ways that respectable adults in the Sixties would consider childish.
But Joe? If you were a Boomer Yankees fan, Mickey was your hero, but Joe was your dad’s hero. Mickey was an Okie, but Joe was raised on his mamma’s spaghetti from the Old Country before the war, when it was really the Old Country. Joe never played on color TV. Joe went to war when your dad went, and he was distant and reserved and uncomplaining like a whole generation of men who bottled up their war and a lot of other things and went for an unadventurous job in a gray flannel suit and a house in the burbs because they had seen enough for one lifetime. Joe had a mystique. He had dignity. Joe never let them see him sweat. He played hurt to do amazing things in 1949, but he left the game not long from his peak, without hanging around getting old and declining. He married one of Hollywood’s most storied tragic starlets. Joe, not Mickey, was the guy a Hemingway hero would rhapsodize about. He was the man’s man, and that symbolized something to a generation who still felt like boys around the men. He was the kind of man a 21-year-old kid in 1968 might ask, Where have you gone?