Joe DiMaggio represented the last curling wisp of blue smoke, the last fading big band note of a more elegant era. His celebrity was enduring enough to have survived into the buffeting, chaotic time of the paparazzi and the tabloids, but mostly he will be remembered and revered as the last of the matinee idols to have graced the sporting imagination.

From Hemingway to Paul Simon he was duly name-checked as an American cultural icon. The son of Italian immigrants, he and his brothers, Dom and Vince, made it in the Klondyke of major league baseball, and Joe married a goddess of the silver screen to underline the great American dreaminess of his life. He has been part of the American consciousness since before the second World War. His bumpy hitch to Marilyn Monroe in 1954 bought him another spin on the merry-go-round after baseball had stopped for him, but it was the sport he graced and its place in the America's vision of itself which made DiMaggio such an enigmatic and enduring cultural phenomenon. The tickertape of statistics gives some measure of his sporting stature but little idea of his sociological importance. He replaced Babe Ruth on the New York Yankees and also stepped fully into his shoes in terms of mythmaking. He was on nine World Series winning teams, but his fame and significance outlasted them all.

"I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," said Hemingway's old man. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand."

Born in 1914, in Martinez, California, DiMaggio might indeed have understood something about poverty. He left high school after just one year to work in a local fish cannery, and not long afterwards began playing baseball with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, despite the objections of his father who thought he was becoming "a bum".

He joined major league baseball and the New York Yankees in 1936 and his first game in Yankees stadium attracted 25,000 Italian-American New Yorkers waving DiMaggio flags. He would go on to play 1,736 games for the Yankees.

He was an instant sensation, but his greatest year came in 1941 when he created a record which still stands. With Americans just forgetting the Depression and beginning to fret earnestly about the war, DiMaggio hit safely in 56 consecutive major league games. From May 15th through to July 16th he hit in every game. Picture Robbie Keane scoring every day for a season and you have some grasp of it. His record should survive for many more years, but it was the sociological impact of the feat which was so interesting.

Rival ballclubs began advertising his pending appearance in newspaper advertisements. Bandleader Les Brown caught the circus atmosphere of it all with his summer hit, "Who started baseball's famous streak/ That's got us all a glow/ He's just a man and not a freak/ Jolting Joe DiMaggio".

The streak ended in Cleveland when third baseman Ken Keltner threw DiMaggio out as he headed for first base. DiMaggio's friend, Lefty Gomez, blamed the death of the streak on a taxi driver who had jinxed DiMaggio on the way to the stadium.

For DiMaggio, shy and weary, the end of the run brought nothing but relief. After 1941 the real world intruded and DiMaggio was drafted at the end of the following season. He returned to the Yankees in 1946 and retired in 1951. For the final three years of his career, though, he earned $100,000 a season, a statistic which grabbed the popular imagination even more firmly than his 1941 record. As fame overtook him and his celebrity became an uncontrollable monster, DiMaggio became increasingly withdrawn. He was remote even from team-mates, who used to refer to his hangers-on as boboes, a slang word for caddies. They fetched errands for DiMaggio but were never close to him.

Famously, in his prime, he once drove with two team-mates in a car from California to Florida, a journey of three days. He didn't speak for the first two until one of his companions asked him if he would like to drive.

"Can't drive," he said, and continued looking out the window.

In The Summer of 1949, David Halberstam's elegy to that great post-war baseball season when the simple pastoral rhythms of the great game were finally fully restored to American life, the author captures some of the splintery awkwardness of DiMaggio's celebrity: "There was a contradiction to DiMaggio's shyness. He wanted to touch the bright lights of the city but not be burned by them."

Undoubtedly he got burned by Marilyn Monroe. The waning of his prime and the dizziness of hers made them beautiful but doomed. Their honeymoon in Tokyo was an augury, with Monroe interrupting their bliss to go to play for US troops stationed in Korea. She returned to Tokyo. "Oh Joe," she said. "It was so wonderful. You never heard such cheering." "Yes I have," the old athlete said wistfully.

Still, after their marriage ended the sincere broken-heartedness which DiMaggio quietly exuded was markedly different from today's quote-friendly jilts. He never spoke of her, but he sent fresh roses to her grave weekly and kept friends and acquaintances of whom he disapproved, most notably the Kennedy brothers, away from her funeral. Red Smith, the great American sportswriter, told a story of DiMaggio which shed light on his loneliness. DiMaggio loved to frequent Toots Shoor's bar in New York City. When there, friends and fans would gather around him respectfully and his privacy would be breached in only the gentlest ways. One evening, in the company of some sportswriters, his friend and team-mate Lefty Gomez passed the table on his way to the front door. Gomez paused, then launched into a machine gun burst of anecdote and ribaldry which left the company giddy with laughter. As Gomez passed out the door, DiMaggio said quietly to Smith: "I'd give anything to be like that."

Through late middle age and into his drawn out old age he inhabited an intensely private world. He moved back to San Francisco and immersed himself in his two great loves, family and fishing. Even his death was a drawn out drama of defiance. For months the reports seeped out about his last stand, braced against the inevitable with one foot in the grave and one foot in this life, dodging in and out of coma, on and off a life-support machine, playing hide and seek with the obit writers. His streak ended yesterday. The last line of the last column written by Red Smith, who was to sportswriting what DiMaggio was to baseball, read:

"I told myself not to worry, there would be another DiMaggio."

Wrong for once, Red.