A Natural Gentleman - 21 March 1999

I was about to sail off into heavy waters. The shocking rumour had just been acknowledged as a fact by the Administration. Three years ago the National Security Advisor advised the president that China had stolen the technology of making very small warheads with which long range missiles can make many strikes.

The date 1996 has fuelled obvious and lively suspicions about all those Chinese agents and military who had such easy access to the White House when so many illegal millions were coming in from Asia for Mr Clinton's re-election campaign. This may re-open a sore that the Democrats had assumed was healed or at least well bandaged.

The revelation that the Chinese have been saved about 15 years of their own research by this intelligence disaster, which is possibly the worst in 30 years, will surely be looked into by a new and more alert Senate investigation. We, along with the White House, had better wait and tremble.

While I was casting round for a safer theme a great man died - or rather a great baseball player and a gentle man whether you spell that with two words or one. Anyway it's a very rare combination in a game whose pulsing competitiveness tends not to attract or breed gentle characters and whose preposterous big money today corrupts most loyalties of city, team, and - too often - marriage and family.

Joe DiMaggio is the name and he was surely no saint and physically the last ball player to be cast as Sir Galaghad or to be played by George C. Scott.

He was gawky, painfully shy and when you first saw him you would have guessed that he was a stumbler but mysteriously, somebody wrote: "He never had to dive for a ball. He was like a man skimming across ice to the place the ball was going to land. He held out his glove and there it was."

Well, all week the newspapers and the television screens have been making the fans' eyes goggle with lashings of old newsreels with statistically reminders of his prowess: 56 consecutive games with a hit in each - which is a record. In 10 World Series, won nine of them - another record. One fielding error in 141 games. And much more that will mean practically nothing to most listeners.

I know there are baseball fans in Britain and Australia, and legions of them in Central America and Japan. There are American civil war buffs in England but they don't outweigh the lovers of their native sports and the home heroes and it's probably as hopeless to try and convey the genius of Joe DiMaggio as a baseball player as it would be to instruct a cricket team in the niceties of Kabuki Theatre.

What I'm talking about as special in Joe DiMaggio - and to be honoured at his going - is character. Quite simply I'd say he was a natural gentleman. It being understood at once, at a time when many of the young - the good young - deride the word, that I'm thinking of a human quality or a fusion of qualities, totally divorced from the old class understanding of a gentleman.

Consider his origins, which alone tell you nothing about his character.

He was born in a coastal town in Northern California to which his father, an Italian fisherman, had emigrated. And on the docks of San Francisco today DiMaggio's is still there, selling the bass and the stripers and the petrali and the Dungeness crabs.

But you could have had this identical upbringing and turned out anything from an honest barber to a monster crook. Indeed such a combination passed into history as an improbable team of father and son.

The father was that humble, hardworking, sweet man - a barber, emigrated from Sicily to New York. His son came to own much more pretentious real estate than a barber's shop - nightclubs, restaurants, warehouses and - by way of protecting them for a weekly fee - he also owned police sergeants, district attorneys and judges.

His name was Al Capone - the evil genius of the bootlegging industry, who was responsible for the murder of heaven knows how many competitors, finally went to jail for tax evasion, and died mad.

I mention this at least intriguing genetic coincidence, in a television history of America that I did a quarter of a century ago. In a scene in which I strolled through the files of the Immigration Service in New York and snatched out a card here, a card there - starting alphabetically with Baline Israel - the entry visa of one who turned into America's music man, Irving Berlin.

When the programme was shown and I flipped the cards of Capone father and son, a howl of protest - as of a wolf pack - arose from a dozen or more Congressmen with Italian names. All their letters were hot with pride and anger, uncannily all in the precisely same words as if these spontaneous protests had been dictated by a single mind.

I sent to all of them a similar form letter, pointing out that in that immigrant programme in which I noted the wildly different characters of Capone father and son, I also held up for pride and celebration two other sons of Italian immigrants - the immortal, spunky reform Mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, and the equally immortal national hero, Joe DiMaggio.

I had only one reply from the Congress, from the chairman of a committee asking me to attend an all-American Italian dinner, which would celebrate my celebration of those two fine Italian Americans.

So I'm saying that of the positively identified sporting gentlemen in my lifetime I would now add Joe DiMaggio to the company of Bobby Jones, Lou Gehrig, Joe Montana, Don Bradman, Stanley Matthews, and no doubt some equally genuine gents who were so temperamentally modest that - like Houdini under water - they successfully escaped from the publicity that seemed bound to shackle them.

I was trying to think of one or two others of the sort, and wouldn't you know my mind worked in its usual mean way - backwards - and reminded me of several of the very opposites, of whom there are hundreds. Men, sportsmen - players rather - so brash, so dazzled by their mirror images, so full of themselves that whenever you met them and didn't pay lickspittle homage, the worst you'd receive in response would be a reminder of one of their great exploits and at best a sneer.

I think of one such - a marvellous, god-gifted golfer and - but never mind, let him be nameless.

Let us consider, rather, what in 17th Century literature was a favourite topic - the character of a gentleman.

I've heard scores of arguments in my time and when the definition is discussed in a social group, no single definition ever gets agreed on. They usually wind up with a line something like: "Well, I can't define one but I know one when I see one."

This century the word and the evasive qualities it contains have taken a beating since the decade of the famous 1920s, which thought of itself as emancipated from the manners and mores of the pre-war.

It was at the end of the 20s that William Empson, the brilliant young English critic - subsequently a learned professor - reviewed a John Galsworthy play and wrote: "The way such and such a character crossed the stage summed up the whole Galsworthian point of view - utter grossness of soul, tempered by a desire to behave nicely."

That's a long way from the earlier view of Galsworthy as a brave and subtle social reformer.

And the baby boomers and the later inheritors of the 1960s counter culture took the 1920s contempt for the gentleman figure still further, implying in the very word gentleman: "A highfalutin type with pretentious manners, taking on airs, seeming to separate himself from the common herd. Something of a stuffed shirt who demonstrated other fussy gestures."

Which, in fact, I'm saying offer glaring proof that the man was no gentleman at all. To me that view is just about as false as the age old contempt for religion, of people who think that a few corrupt priests in Italian films, or for that matter in life, discredit Christianity.

I believe ordinary, decent people of any class, from shepherds to tycoons - people neither soured by the 20s emancipation nor the 60s counter culture - understand well enough the word "gentleman" as it once was meant: a universal accolade for a certain kind of gentle character - modest, sporting - not entirely self-effacing, but having the unfailing habit of thinking first and always of the other person.

Having unstated standards not of how you must behave but of things you could never do. It's called having principles.

Of all the sportsmen I've known in 60 - 70 years, those sentences are most superbly apt for the greatest golfer of his time, the late Robert Tyre Jones - one of the two or three finest human characters I ever had the honour of knowing.

And much of this tribute applies to Joe DiMaggio. I think he must have reached the limit in asserting his ego when, during his short marriage to Marilyn Monroe, she returned from a triumphant tour of entertaining the troops in Korea and said: "Oh Joe, you've never heard such cheering." He said: "Oh yes, I think I have."

So let us stay with a final glimpse of that loping figure, that hangdog jaw, those heavy-lidded eyes, the "I'm having my picture taken" awkward smile of jolting Joe DiMaggio.

When the news came in on Monday morning, a cab driver, stopped by a reporter, was asked to sum up DiMaggio in one word.

"Sure," said the man. "Class."

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