Joe DiMaggio: No ordinary Joe

In the land of sports memorabilia, or what the experts who run such markets like to call "collectibles", the trophies do not come much bigger than daily diaries handwritten by a superstar.

So revered was Joe DiMaggio that he commanded two nicknames among baseball fans. But whether you know him as "Joltin' Joe" or "the Yankee Clipper," the diaries are now on sale - yours for something over $1.5m (£730,000).

The papers, each in a protective plastic sheet and covering the years 1981 to 1993, are contained in 29 loose-leaf binders. DiMaggio had them sent to his lawyer Morris Engleberg, who in turn sold them on to the memorabilia dealer Steiner Sports. Last week, Steiner put them up for public auction.

Joseph Paul DiMaggio was among America's greatest celebrities of the 20th century. I set eyes on him just once. It was a balmy September night in Baltimore in 1995, three-and-a-half years before he died, in a ceremony at the game in which Cal Ripken, star of the hometown Orioles, set a new record for consecutive games. The old one had been held by the great Lou Gehrig who - for a few years - had been DiMaggio's teammate on the New York Yankees in the late 1930s, before his career was ended by the disease that still bears his name.

The occasion was one of those that only baseball, besotted by its past as no other sport, could provide. He was almost 81, his back stooped and his gait slow. The sleek and wavy black hair that had made him a heartthrob in the 1930s and 1940s was thinner, and snowy white.

But as he walked to the centre of the field, Joe DiMaggio fused six decades of baseball history into one overpowering moment. Many of those present did not merely cheer. They wept. In part, his fame reflected his brilliance at what truly was the national pastime, when baseball was more popular than it ever would be again, before the modern era of strikes and drugs and anti-heroes such as Barry Bonds. Steroids were not even a gleam in an athlete's eye. They called him the "Yankee Clipper" for his elegant swing and graceful style in the outfield. Recurring injury in 1951 ended an already war-shortened career, at the relatively early age of 36. Even so, despite the lost years, DiMaggio was fifth on the all-time home run list when he retired.

Capping everything was the 1941 hitting streak. Hitting a baseball safely is one of the hardest things in any sport; even the best players manage it about only three times in 10 efforts. But between mid-May and mid-July that year, the quiet yet uncannily self-confident DiMaggio incredibly did so in 56 consecutive games. No one had come close before and no one has come close since. Of all baseball's venerated records, his and Cal Ripken's separate streaks are probably the most unassailable.

But like Babe Ruth, Joe Louis, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, Joe DiMaggio transcended mere sport. After that rose-tinted summer of 1941, the last before the US joined the war, he not only won a second most valuable player award. He also voted one of the country's 10 best-dressed men. Shy, yet with matinee idol Latin looks, he was an irresistibly attractive figure.

Almost single-handed, some claim, he restored the reputation of Italo-America after the depredations of Al Capone. He had a whiff of showbusiness glamour too. By then DiMaggio was married to Dorothy Arnold, a Hollywood starlet; later, of course, he would marry not a starlet but a superstar whose celebrity, tragically it would turn out, was even greater than his own.

But well before his brief, doomed liaison with Marilyn Monroe he was a national hero. When he signed up for the military, the powers-that-be apparently insisted he serve only on the home front. If Joe DiMaggio were killed in battle, they reasoned, the blow to national morale might be too much for the United States to bear.

His career inspired more than a dozen books. Ernest Hemingway alluded to him in The Old Man and the Sea. The hitting streak served as both a statistical freak studied by mathematicians, and as a metaphor for good evoked by Raymond Chandler's hardboiled yet soft-centred hero Philip Marlowe. And then came "Mrs Robinson," Paul Simon's haunting song that imbued a younger generation with the mystique of the Yankee Clipper, and made him famous in lands where baseball is unknown.

"Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

What's that you say, Mrs Robinson? Joltin' Joe has left and gone away."

Why Joe DiMaggio?, Simon was once asked, when everyone knew he was a huge fan of Mickey Mantle, a younger Yankees slugger whose reckless boozing and womanising appalled the gentlemanly DiMaggio. Simon brushed the question aside. "It's about syllables, and how many beats there are," he explained.

By the time DiMaggio died, however, in 1999, the singer had changed his song. In a piece for The New York Times the following day, Simon captured the ballplayer's place in America's collective psyche. He had been the embodiment of the values the country most prized in its chosen image of itself - excellence and fulfilment of duty (DiMaggio often played despite injury), grace and purity of spirit, and "an off-the-field dignity and a jealously guarded private life".

Remember, too, that in March 1999, one Monica Lewinsky was also fresh in the national mind. "In these days of presidential transgressions and apologies and prime-time interviews about private sexual matters," Simon continued, "we grieve for Joe DiMaggio and mourn the loss of ... his fierce sense of privacy, his fidelity to the memory of his wife and the power of his silence."

And so to Marilyn Monroe. The Clipper never wrote about her, though a man who notoriously counted every penny could have netted millions from a tell-all memoir. Their marriage of January 1954, a sensation to match the O J Simpson trial or the Lindbergh case, lasted just 274 days. Joe was only too aware of the pitfalls of fame. He hated Hollywood - its moral emptiness, its self-importance, its ever-running publicity machine. He also could not cope with having a wife who was a bigger star even than he. But, even after their divorce, he loved her. Indeed, according to Richard Ben Cramer's terrific biography Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, the couple had decided to remarry, and set 8 August 1962 as the big day.

Instead it would be the date of her funeral, three days after Monroe was found dead in her Los Angeles home, apparently as a result of an overdose of sleeping pills. DiMaggio was in charge of the arrangements, and kept Frank Sinatra, the Kennedys and the rest away from the ceremony. When their minions complained, as Cramer tells it, DiMaggio growled in reply, "Tell them that if it wasn't for them, she'd still be here." For 20 years, he had red roses delivered to her crypt, three times a week. And he never remarried.

No wonder he became a legend. But where did the legend go? Mrs Robinson doesn't say in the song, and the "diaries", compiled by a man in his late sixties and seventies, forever a prisoner of his past, provide but a tiny part of the answer. These are not diaries in, say, the Alastair Campbell or Josef Goebbels sense, offering an inside version of great events, fascinating even though sanitised, throwing unexpected shafts of light on familiar figures.

The reason of course is that "Joltin' Joe" didn't have to sanitise the bits that our prurient generation would find most interesting - because he never mentioned them in the first place.

His so-called diaries are a random collection of 2,000 pages, offering a clipped daily chronicle of events, written in that neat sloping hand drummed into all Americans of a certain age, on odd bits of hotel and airline stationery and pages from yellow legal pads.

There are also bills, stubs of airline boarding cards bearing his name, and sundry other bits and pieces. For a true collector, these have the same appeal as signed baseballs and bats. But they tell you no more about the great man than the fading name he scrawled on a piece of leather or ash.

DiMaggio's personal jottings are not much better: next to nothing about Marilyn Monroe, and precious little even about the Yankees. Instead you find bland entries about dinners with friends, and endless complaints about the burdens of fame. "Swamped with the signing of baseballs - pictures - radio and TV," he writes of one July 1989 day in Anaheim, California. "Stress too much."

A couple of years later it was worse still. "I was asked for another autograph," he complained of a wait at Kennedy airport on 30 April 1991. "Just one interruption after another. People must think I have skin like an armoured plate. Will get a check-up to find out how I'm holding up."

Even his greatest feat becomes a source of misery, as preparations build for the 50th anniversary celebrations of the 1941 hitting streak. "If I thought this would be taking place due to the streak, I would have stopped hitting at 40 games," he notes tartly.

Back in December 1987, DiMaggio did seem to enjoy a White House dinner offered by Ronald Reagan for the visiting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, but not without grumbling of how he had to waste a couple of hours shopping for a dress shirt with a smaller neck size. He had lost so much weight that his old one didn't fit any more.

These are the public thoughts of a very private and ultimately unhappy man, who loved the financial rewards of fame but loathed its obligations that he also could not escape. DiMaggio was loyal and discreet. But for all his wealth he was famously a tightwad, who liked to be paid for every ball or bat he autographed.

In fact, his diaries grew from a request from his accountant to keep a daily record of his expenses that could be reclaimed from the tax man.

At the bottom of every entry there is a figure. "Food, Tips, Taxis etc. $70," he noted for instance after his big evening at the White House, back in his room at Washington's Jefferson Hotel at 11.30 p.m. To judge from these pages, Paul Simon had it wrong. It's wasn't the nation that was lonely. It was Joe DiMaggio.

So how much will the diaries fetch? The auction runs till 25 July. At the time of writing, according to the Steiner Sports website, there had been no bid beyond the opening minimum of $1.5m, equal to $600 per page or item. The company reckons they should fetch some $3m or $4m in all.

But thus far nothing. Not a nibble at all. It's all rather sad. In fact, rather like the private life of an ageing Joe DiMaggio, beyond the public glories of the baseball diamond.