The last boy, p.23
The Last Boy, page 23
When he was sent down to the minors, she spent three days with him in Columbus, Ohio, she said. When he was recalled by the Yankees, she visited him in Washington. He always wanted her to stay the night. “But it had already reached the point where Mickey was collecting too many dividends on my investment.”
It went on that way for a couple of seasons, she wrote, until she was “lured out to Hollywood with the promise of a Warner Brothers contract.” But they stayed in touch—she had heard from him as recently as August 1956—and she was still hoping to see her dough. So when he asked her to meet him in Boston, she went. “Don’t worry, the Yankees will take care of it,” he said when she asked about her money. Their song was playing in the background. Her unsentimental conclusion: “It’s time he went to bat—for me.”
At every layover en route to Havana, Mantle and Youngman bolted from the plane and bought every copy of the offending issue of the magazine off the newsstand to prevent Merlyn from seeing it. When she got home, a stack of Confidentials was waiting at the front door.
Mantle was hardly the first baseball player with an expansive definition of “to have and to hold.” Extramarital sex was a perk of the job. The endless hours in faraway hotels had to be filled somehow, and there was no shortage of willing playmates to help fill them. “These girls, these women, would just do anything,” Bolding said. “They’re like flies.”
Green flies, ballplayers called them. They swarmed the team hotel, and buzzed every bar and lobby. Home or away, there was a plethora of opportunities.
Mantle knew New York’s demimonde as well as its café society. Irv Noren introduced him to a celebrity essential: the fixer. Julius Isaacson, the president of the International Union of Doll, Toy and Novelty Workers, also known as Big Julie, a would-be pitcher who threw with such velocity he could knock down a wall—but only if he didn’t aim at it. He was a pugilistic presence—six feet three inches and a couple of hundred pounds. He later managed Ernie Terrell when he became heavyweight champion of the world. Julie was a good friend to have when falsely accused of getting someone pregnant. “Mickey had a problem,” Isaacson said. “A girl was trying to shake him down. It wasn’t his. We had the girl come over to the Edison. We met her there. Took her to the East River and told her she had two choices: leave Mickey alone, or this.”
Mantle was one of millions of Americans on whom FBI director J. Edgar Hoover kept tabs. He never was the subject of an FBI investigation, but when his name surfaced in other probes, Hoover kept the notes—just in case. In 1969, John Ehrlichman, counsel to President Richard M. Nixon, requested a background check on Mantle, along with a group of other baseball personalities. The FBI responded, “Our files reveal that information received in June, 1956 indicated that Mickey Mantle was ‘blackmailed’ for $15,000 after being found in a compromising situation with a married woman. Mr. Mantle subsequently denied ever having been caught in a compromising situation. Mr. Mantle readily admitted that he had ‘shacked up’ with many girls in New York City, but stated that he has never been caught.
“A confidential source, who has furnished reliable information in the past, advised in June, 1957, that a very prominent Washington, D.C. area gambler and bookmaker arranged dates for members of the New York Yankees baseball club at a Washington, D.C. house of prostitution. Allegedly, Mr. Mantle was one of the members of the team who was entertained at this house of prostitution.”
The names of the other players were expunged when the file was released in 1998 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Merlyn had no knowledge of her husband’s FBI file, but she had no doubt who was leading him astray. “Why can’t you get Whitey Ford to room with Billy on the road?” she asked Noren.
He told her, “Merlyn, he won’t do it.”
At one point, Del Webb became concerned enough to ask his friend Bayard Taylor Horton, a doctor at the Mayo Clinic, to have a talk with Mantle. Tom Horton was sitting with his father in Webb’s box when the Yankees’ co-owner passed the doctor a note: “See Mantle.”
Horton, who later authored several Yankee biographies, accompanied his father to the clubhouse. “ My father said, ‘I want to see you, Mr. Mantle.’ He took him in the office for twenty or twenty-five minutes. When Mantle came out, he was crying. I asked my father what he had said. He said, ‘It’s a medical problem.’
“There was no question he said, ‘You gotta stop doing this, and you gotta start doing more of that.’ I think he was saying, ‘You will get a social disease if you keep this up. You gotta quit the booze.’
“I said, ‘You can’t talk to Mickey that way. He’s making a lot of money.’”
The next day Mantle hit two home runs. Webb told Horton, “Good job, Doc.”
4.
Martin was still a Yankee on June 11 when the team arrived in Chicago for a three-game series with the league-leading White Sox. Two days later, in the bottom of the first inning, Yankee starter Art Ditmar threw a pitch that buzzed Larry Doby’s head. Doby took umbrage. “He said, ‘If you do that again, I’m going to stick a knife in you,’ ” Ditmar recalled. “We both started swinging, and the umpire jumped between us. Skowron come in and pinned Doby to the ground, and then [Walt] Dropo got on Skowron and then [Enos] Slaughter got on Dropo. I walked back to the mound and watched everybody fighting. Mickey didn’t get involved. Mickey was the pacifist.”
“He never left his position,” said Bill Fischer, who watched the free-for-all from the Chicago bullpen. “He said, ‘I’m in enough trouble.’”
Things had just about quieted down when Martin asked Ditmar what Doby had said. Ditmar told him. “Martin went after him in the dugout,” Ditmar said. “ ’Course, Billy always got the first punch in.”
Twenty-eight minutes and four suspensions later, order was restored.
Mantle once said that Martin was the only guy he knew who “could hear someone give him the finger.” He negotiated life with a chip on his shoulder, and those in the know gave him a wide berth. Even the Yankees were dismayed by his brawling on the field in Chicago—an act of wanton self-destructiveness, given the trading deadline just two days away, and the Yankees heading for a weekend series with the Kansas City A’s, Weiss’s personal farm team. On Saturday night, one hour and nine minutes before the trading deadline, Stengel summoned Martin from the bullpen, where he’d been trying to avoid the inevitable. “You’re gone,” the Old Man said.
Actually, Martin was staying right where he was—he was the A’s new second baseman. Stengel also passed on a message from Dan Topping that the Yankees would refund the $1,000 he had been fined for the Copa melee (they would do the same for the others at season’s end).
The Three Musketeers retired to the closest bar and cried into more than one beer. Publicly, Martin said all the right things. That’s baseball. But he refused to talk to Stengel for years until Mantle negotiated a reconciliation.
The Yankees won twenty-four of their next twenty-eight games.
“Did Mickey stop drinking when Billy left?” Ditmar said. “No. Did he stop going out? No.”
On June 24, 1957, the Copa Six were summoned to appear before a grand jury at the Criminal Court Building in lower Manhattan. The Manhattan DA had declined to prosecute Bauer, so bowler Jones pursued his only remaining legal remedy: a citizen’s arrest on a charge of felonious assault. He demanded $250,000 in damages. Bauer exercised his right to have the case presented to a jury of what his lawyer no doubt hoped would be Yankee-loving peers.
Mantle was the last of five players to testify. He took the stand with a mouth full of bubble gum. Admonished about his lack of courtroom decorum, Mantle obligingly removed the offending wad and stuck it to the bottom of his chair. “I was so drunk I didn’t know who threw the first punch,” he testified. “A body came flying out and landed at my feet. At first I thought it was Billy, so I picked him up. But when I saw it wasn’t, I dropped him back down. It looked like Roy Rogers rode through the Copa on Trigger and Trigger kicked the guy in the face.”
The grand jurors were still laughing when they handed down their decision.
Hank Bauer Freed by Grand Jury, Left-Fielder Cleared of Assault Charges
—The Sporting News, July 3, 1957
The next day at Toots Shor’s, Mantle announced the formation of the Mickey Mantle Hodgkin’s Disease Research Foundation at St. Vincent’s Hospital in honor of his father. On July 3, Bauer sued Edwin Jones for false arrest, seeking $150,000 in damages. New York’s most famous bowler was never heard from again.
5.
It was a liquid time in America. The language, the culture, and the national pastime were suffused with booze. Raise a glass. Wet your whistle. Line ’em up. And always have one for the road. As Toots, the Prohibition bouncer turned saloonkeeper, declared: “I never felt guilty about a drink in my life. It’s beautiful, legal or illegal.”
Stengel divided the Yankee clubhouse into “them milk drinkers” and those he called “whiskey slick,” which is how Mantle and Ford came by their shared nickname—Slick. His notion of drinking responsibly was to warn his players not to patronize the hotel bar because “that’s where I do my drinking.” His idea of punishment was to put transgressors in the starting lineup. After one dispiriting loss, he threatened to make nonper-formers “go out and get a double Scotch and a woman.”
Yankee bon vivant Don Larsen summed up the big league ethos: “You got to have a little fun, for God’s sakes. You’re going to play in big cities and watch TV? Or go to movies? Those weren’t even invented.”
No one in baseball thought Mantle’s drinking was exceptional because it wasn’t. He could quit when he wanted to and “handle it”—baseball’s ultimate praise—when he had to. He always took Stengel’s preseason admonition to heart: “Son, you’re the Yankees now.”
Only Merlyn’s father seemed to think his drinking was problematic. One day after his Triple Crown season, Mantle volunteered to babysit while Merlyn went shopping. He took Mickey, Jr., with him to his favorite Commerce watering hole. When they didn’t return as expected, Merlyn’s father, the church deacon, went looking for them. When he found them at Men-denhall’s, his son-in-law was on the floor wrestling with another patron. Mickey, Jr., was sitting on the bar holding his father’s beer. “The first time I went to a bar and tasted my first beer,” Mickey, Jr., recounted in A Hero All His Life. “It wouldn’t be worth telling except that I was three years old.”
“Grandpa took the beer out of his hand and grabbed Mickey, Jr.,” Danny Mantle said. “When he walked by, he picked up Dad’s head and went, ‘Don’t ever do this again’ and dropped it back down. Dad went back to fighting, and Giles walked out with Mickey.”
Merlyn told me, “Dad was furious about that.”
“That night I slept at my grandparents’ home,” Mickey, Jr., wrote. “Dad didn’t say much when he picked me up the next morning, but I know he hated to face Grandpa Johnson. He didn’t think there was anything immoral about taking me to the bar. He wanted to show me off, and this was where he was most likely to bump into his friends.”
He was only doing what his father and other fathers in town had done. He told his late-in-life companion Greer Johnson that his father would take him to bars and set him on a stool.
It’s unlikely that any of Mantle’s drinking buddies in Commerce—or New York—would have recognized the genesis of his alcoholism. They would have thought he was “irresponsible,” said “Sudden” Sam McDowell, who lost his fastball and his family and came close to losing his life before getting sober in the 1990s and becoming a drug counselor. “In 1956 and 1957, unless you were a trained therapist, you would have thought nothing was wrong,” said McDowell, who developed drug and alcohol programs for the Texas Rangers and Toronto Blue Jays. “He didn’t go out and act like that all the time. No alcoholic does. Up until close to 1960, you would see very little progression in the disease. He was an undiagnosed highly functioning alcoholic.”
In 1957, Mantle won his second consecutive Most Valuable Player Award and became only the fourth player in major league history to get on base more than half the time over the course of a season. In June, he batted over .400. On July 26, he hit his 200th career home run. He was three years younger than Babe Ruth when he reached the same landmark. He was hitting .369, with 34 home runs and 91 RBIs, when he landed in the hospital on September 6 with what the Yankees called “shin splints.” He had injured himself playing golf with Sturdivant on a day off, which, unlike imbibing, was against Stengel’s rules. Hurling his putter in frustration, he had broken a tree limb and sliced his leg down to the shinbone. He missed five games, his first of the season.
While he was recuperating at Lenox Hill Hospital, America was reading about the hijinks in Hank Bauer’s apartment above the Stage Deli in 1951 in the September issue of Confidential magazine: “There was no umpire around when…These Yankees Had a Ball!”
Mantle, Martin, and Bauer appeared arm in arm, grin to grin beneath the cover line. The story was a follow-up to Holly Brooke’s spring exposé and Dorothy Kilgallen’s May column in the Journal-American. It detailed the fun and games that had taken place in the apartment above the famous deli during Mantle’s rookie season.
“While waiting to go to bat, the Mick knocked off a few more highballs, then suddenly got up, started to turn white and staggered to the bathroom,” Confidential said. “Now games have been called on account of rain, cold weather or wet ground, but this is the first time one was called because it was drunk out. When Mickey collapsed, they had to call off the game in the bedroom so Mickey could be put to bed.”
His girl went home alone when “he dozed off.”
None of New York’s family newspapers pursued the story. The sporting press confined itself to musing about who would be the American League’s Most Valuable Player—Mantle or Ted Williams—and the World Series matchup between the Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves.
Yet Billy Martin’s birthday party was a watershed event, and not just because it gave Weiss the occasion to trade him. It was the day sportswriting began to grow up. The era of hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil could not withstand TV’s increasingly intrusive cathode glare or the skepticism of an irreverent cohort of young sportswriters for whom questioning authority was a generational prerogative.
Weiss saw the printer’s ink on the wall and he was plenty worried. “People have been looking for incidents since the Copa affair,” he lamented in a 1960 interview with The Saturday Evening Post. “A national TV network was considering the Yankees for the same sort of inspirational show that is built around institutions like West Point and Annapolis. This might have steered some good prospects to us, and the players could have made some extra money appearing on the program, but the project was shelved after the Copa affair.”
6.
The Russians launched the first Sputnik satellite on opening day of the 1957 World Series. Mantle crash-landed in game 3. Trapped off second base on a pick-off play in the top of the first inning, he slid back in beneath Red Schoendienst’s legs as the ball sailed into center field. Gazing in supplication at the ump, Mantle waited for adjudication, Schoendienst draped over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, until he saw where the ball had landed. “The ball was thrown high and away,” Schoendienst recalled. “I went up for it. I landed on Mickey. I stayed on top of him.”
Mantle shook him off like a bedbug, went to third, and scored the Yankees’ first run; later he singled and hit a home run. But he was badly injured on the play. No one realized how badly his shoulder hurt until Stengel removed him in the top of the tenth inning the next day. The New York Times headline reported:
Bombers Face Prospect of Losing Mantle for Fifth Series Contest; Shoulder Injury Handicap to Star; Mantle’s Inability to Throw with Usual Strength Leads to Removal in Tenth.
Mantle sat out game 5, the ninth World Series game he had missed due to injury, and the Yankees lost 1–0. They won game 6 without him but lost game 7—and the World Series—despite his return to the lineup. His throwing arm would never be the same.
The winter of 1957 would be his last in Commerce. Mickey Charles and his hometown had grown apart. “Off-ish to the community,” is how local Frank Wood described him. Half the folks in town wanted no part of him and the other half thought he didn’t give back enough. What had become of the boy who never drank, never smoked, never talked back, the all-American face in the magazine ad for the Breakfast of Champions? BillyMartinandWhiteyFord, that’s what many of the townfolks said, expectorating their names like a foul stream of chaw.
Harold Youngman, Mantle’s patron, did everything he could to entice him to stay. He gave him a house in Joplin, Missouri, and a 25 percent ownership stake in a new Holiday Inn he was building there—Mickey Mantle’s Holiday Inn, the only Holiday Inn in the U.S. of A. named after an actual person, Mantle bragged. The bar was called the Dugout.
Later, Youngman outfitted a heated fishing cabin built over a pond on his ranch for Mantle and his pals. It had a hole in the floor and an electrified winch that raised the lid so they could fish in winter without getting cold, wet, or dirty. The foreman, Charles Brinkley, stocked the refrigerator and the pond.
Youngman pleaded with Mantle not to quit his roots. He talked up the benefits of being a big fish in that small pond. But Mantle was gaited to the rhythm of big city life. Moving to Dallas made it easier to fly off to all those banquets, photo shoots, and beauty contests he was asked to judge. Merlyn went shopping for Texas real estate. Mantle leased a bowling alley, where he would put his brothers to work and show everyone he could manage affairs on his own.
After the Yankees avenged themselves against the Braves in the 1958 World Series, Mantle went to Dallas to see the new $59,500 home Merlyn had selected, the one important decision in their marriage he allowed her to make. The “Mantle manor,” The Sporting News called it. Furnished in the French Provincial style, it was located in the neighborhood where George W. Bush would settle after he left the White House.
