"His private life," I wrote, "was an unholy mess, a riot of contradictions awaiting a tough-mind biographer to sort them out ... All that needs to be done to stir outrage is to recount the unpleasant facts of DiMaggio's life that are already known but which the press unofficially agreed to forget. We can practically see ahead to how his first real biographer will become to sports what Albert Goldman is to rock and roll."

Not all the letters of outrage I received in response to that story were from people whose names ended in vowels. Now Joe has gotten his tough-minded biographer, and I can only imagine the amount of abuse that's headed Richard Ben Cramer's way. "Joe DiMaggio:The Hero's Life" was written without DiMaggio's cooperation -- he apparently dismissed Cramer as "Benny" and refused to talk to him -- but it's so thorough it's doubtful that any other book on DiMaggio will ever be needed.

Cramer seems to have talked to everyone who ever came in contact with DiMaggio, however briefly. (Full disclosure: I am mentioned in the acknowledgments.) The biography doesn't really include any facts about DiMaggio's career and his sometimes sordid private life that haven't been published somewhere before, but not everyone has heard all of them and Cramer has done us the courtesy of gathering them in one place.

For example: Joe was a lousy father -- cold, distant and unnurturing. The famous and oft-reprinted shot of him on the cover of Sport magazine with his arm around Joe Jr. was set up in a rush, with the boy delivered to the shoot by limo and then driven back to his mother. (Joe and his wife, Dorothy Arnold, were separated and Joe seldom saw his son. Joe Jr. died of a drug overdose six months after his father's death.) Joe didn't get along with his brother, Dominic; his attitude toward him was "a changeable mixture of fondness, family loyalty and resentment." (Poor Dom, himself a fine outfielder for the Boston Red Sox. Being Joe DiMaggio's brother couldn't have been easy.) DiMaggio also had some mob ties.

But ask any American and you're likely to hear a complaint about a remote father. (Of course, we ourselves are not bad parents.) Whose relationship with a brother isn't a "changeable mixture"? What Italian-American celebrity born before World War II didn't have "mob ties"? That's not what you're here for, right?

You want the dirt, don't you? OK, he whored around. Polly Adler, who ran "the best whorehouse in New York," sent out for plain cotton sheets because Joe's knees kept slipping on the shiny satin ones. He beat ex-wife Marilyn Monroe at least twice (though she forgave him, and they may have thought about getting remarried before her death). In his middle age, there were some sensational drunken escapades. A former Miss America, Yolande Betbeze, describes an incident at a Paris hotel where Joe was "so drunk ... that his pants were open, with his member lying exposed upon his leg." ("The biggest thing," recalls Miss America, "that you ever saw.")

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"