The last boy, p.45
The Last Boy, page 45
She did not know that her son had designated himself as an organ donor until the day he died.
Despite Klintmalm’s preemptive measures, despite testimony from UNOS officials and from Dillard Worthy and other transplant recipients, the public outcry was loud, immediate, and lasting.
The fix was in. It had to be. How else could he have gotten a liver so fast? And even if it wasn’t fixed, he shouldn’t have gotten it anyway because he destroyed his own liver.
“The truth is more mundane than what people think happened,” UNOS spokesman Joel Newman said.
Several factors worked in Mantle’s favor, Newman says—none of them his fame. He had the most common blood type, O, shared by 45 percent of the population, increasing his chances for a match. The population density in the Dallas metropolitan area made the Southwestern Transplant Alliance one of the highest-volume organ-procurement organizations in the country. And, Newman said, the prominence of the transplant program at Baylor, then one of six centers in the U.S. participating in an experimental protocol to treat liver cancer patients with transplantation and chemotherapy, “translated into higher liver donation rates than in other parts of the country.”
Fifteen years later, Mantle’s liver remains fodder for conspiracy theorists, medical ethicists, sports radio loudmouths, and sitcom wise guys, among them Larry David, who worked riffs on the transplant into a two-episode story arc on Curb Your Enthusiasm with the comic Richard Lewis entitled “Lewis Needs a Kidney.” With each new “celebrity” transplant the blogosphere erupts with renewed howls of protest. The New York Times attributed the resurgence of “dark theories” occasioned by Steve Jobs’s 2009 liver transplant to a “holdover from the case of Mickey Mantle.”
Arthur Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, says the uproar over presumptive favoritism obscured other equally important questions about organ allocation. “I don’t believe he jumped the queue, although I think arguably he could have been too sick,” Caplan said. “The combination of alcoholic cirrhosis and hepatitis C might have led some transplant teams to say, ‘Yeah, he’s sick, but he’s way too sick.’”
Klintmalm said every possible diagnostic test then available was done prior to surgery to detect whether Mantle’s cancer had spread. “We kind of smelled that there could be a tumor there, and we did virtually everything in the world to find that tumor, but we couldn’t find it,” he said.
The bile duct, an organ no bigger than a pinky finger, is difficult to biopsy, especially when a patient lacks enough platelets to clot blood. “It’s something you never get close to with a needle,” Klintmalm said, “and if you do, the patient usually bleeds like a pig and dies.”
With today’s enhanced imaging technology, he said, “We probably would have had a much better chance to make a positive diagnosis. If we had found the tumor before the transplant, we would not have done it. If we could have figured that out [during surgery], we would have interrupted, closed him up, and brought back a backup patient.”
In 2002, UNOS instituted a new system of organ allocation that ranks every patient in the country waiting for a liver on an objective numerical scale that determines the risk of dying within ninety days without a transplant. Patients with cancer in danger of progressing get additional points and move up the list. But if a tumor is found to be beyond a certain size or there is evidence of metastatic spread, that score drops. The goal is to give organs not just to the sickest patients but to “the patients who have cancer with the best possible prognosis,” Mulligan said.
Added Caplan, “They’re really more oriented toward outcome than they were then. It doesn’t make sense just to say, ‘Who’s sickest?’ If they’re almost dead, then you’re not going to rescue them.”
In Caplan’s view, Steve Jobs, a California resident who received a transplant in Tennessee, illustrates the advantage of celebrity: money. “It’s not that they get a liver,” Caplan said. “It’s that they get admitted to the waiting list in the first place. You don’t even get considered if you’re some poor homeless guy whose liver’s blown out because you’re drinking wine in the park. You’re going to be dead. That’s where Mantle or David Crosby or Evel Knievel, the drug-damaged livers of the Fifties and Sixties, had an advantage.”
3.
When Mantle awoke after surgery, doctors told him what they had already told his family: the operation was a success, but the prognosis was uncertain at best. It was a bittersweet result—the gift of a new life might prove to be no opportunity at all. In the hospital, he was inundated by an outpouring of public affection—20,000 cards and letters were delivered to him c/o Baylor—and a torrent of outrage. Robert Goldstein told reporters that Mantle wouldn’t have gotten out of the hospital alive without the surgery. Mantle told the New York Daily News that doctors had told him he had just one day to live.
Though Merlyn complimented her husband on his newly trim shape—she hadn’t seen his stomach that small since he was twenty—Mulligan saw little of the joy he usually sees in transplant patients, an indication, perhaps, that Mantle sensed how little time he had. But when Klintmalm asked him to go public with his support for organ donation, he readily agreed. “Mickey was absolutely committed,” True said. “I told him, ‘If you promote it, you’ll save so many lives it will eclipse baseball.’ He said, ‘I know.’”
True began making plans for “Mickey’s Team.” Mantle coined the slogan for a campaign he wanted to announce at Arlington Stadium at the end of August: “Be a Hero, Be a Donor.”
He left the hospital on June 28, exactly one month after he checked in. He went back to the house he shared with Danny and Kay and to the accustomed routine, organizing his days around the clubhouse at Preston Trail. At first he was strong enough to ride a stationary bike a bit. But two weeks later, the stomach pains returned and there were new ones in his chest. It was hard to eat; he subsisted on protein drinks and lost forty pounds. One Monday morning, he called Pat Summerall from the clubhouse and said, “Get your ass over here, I need to talk to you.”
It was an hour’s drive. When Summerall arrived, he was dumbfounded by Mantle’s request. “He said, ‘I want you to have a look at my ass.’ He pulled his pants down. It was all bruised and black and blue. He said, ‘I used to have a good ass. I wanted you to have a look because you remember what a good ass I used to have.’”
Chemotherapy left him anemic and in need of transfusions. He returned to the hospital for treatments, and surgeons implanted a catheter in his chest, like the one Billy Mantle had used and abused.
At the end of the first week of July, as Mulligan was packing up his apartment to move to Cleveland for his new position at Case Western Reserve University, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News came to interview him for a profile of his newly famous mentor, Göran Klintmalm. Mulligan had been up all night doing his last transplant at Baylor. When the reporter asked how Mantle was doing, Mulligan showed him the data on survival rates of patients with his cancer. An unexpected and unwelcome headline appeared in the morning paper: “Mantle’s Outlook Uncertain.” Mulligan was quoted as saying, “There was tumor left behind that was unremovable. There was no way we could remove all of it.”
Goldstein tried to quell the furor, dismissing Mulligan’s comments as those of a “junior” surgeon who hadn’t seen enough cases to justify such pessimism. Klintmalm’s protégé had performed 104 transplants during his two years at Baylor.
On July 11, Mantle held his last press conference. It was a standing-room-only crowd. He greeted reporters he knew, including Jerry Holtzman from Chicago, and acknowledged Barry Halper, a limited partner in the Yankees, a memorabilia maven. “Hey, Barry, did you get my other liver?” Mantle asked.
His comic timing was still acute, but the robust physique, the Popeye biceps, and the untroubled face of American plenty were gone. His tracksuit hung on his desiccated frame. His face looked like a dry riverbed. The band on his blue-and-white 1995 All-Star Game cap couldn’t be made tight enough to fit his skull. He looked like death. In fact, he looked a lot like Mutt in the family photograph taken just before he went off to Denver to die.
When he pointed his thumb at himself, it seemed as if his chest might collapse. “God gave me a great body and an ability to play baseball,” he said. “God gave me everything, and I just…pffttt!”
What would be remembered most was the anguished plea directed at children: “I’d like to say to kids out there, if you’re looking for a role model, this is a role model. Don’t be like me.”
Some scorned the tortured mea culpa as the moral equivalent of a death row confession. “The most decent thing he ever did may be the only decent thing he did that ever mattered,” the sports columnist Jerry Izenberg said. But even the most hard-boiled scribes agreed it was his finest inning. David Mantle said the family received hundreds of letters, saying, “We used to hate you, but you doing that on national TV, apologizing and making amends, you have got new fans.”
A reporter asked Mantle if he had signed a donor card. “Everything I’ve got is worn out,” he said. “Although I’ve heard people say they’d like to have my heart…it’s never been used.”
Two days later a CAT scan showed cancer in his right lung.
One day, not long after, Halper pulled up in front of Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant and asked Bill Liederman to come out to the curb. Halper said he had “some shit in the car” he wanted Liederman to see. “He actually had a bag of shit,” Liederman said. “Mickey sent him a bag of shit.” And a pair of signed shit-stained examination gloves. “He was going home to put it in the freezer.”
Liederman thought it was Mantle’s final comment on the memorabilia industry that had made him a rich man, a very Mantle way of saying, “You’re all full of it.”
Ten thousand donor cards were distributed at the All-Star Week FanFest at the Ballpark at Arlington. Interest in organ donation surged. “Before the transplant and the news conference most organ donation agencies were getting a call a week, if that,” Silvestri said. “Post–Mickey Mantle, calls were in the thirty-to-forty-a-week range. People were saying ‘Where can I get that Mickey Mantle donor card?’ ‘What do I have to do to be a donor?’ Or ‘I’m ripping up my donor card because of what happened to Mickey Mantle.’ Just getting people to talk was our goal because it wasn’t a conversation people were having.”
That was enough to persuade her that The Mick had done his job. “At a time when he didn’t feel good and his family didn’t feel good, they opened their lives to anyone who wanted to talk about organ donation because they felt like they could do some good,” she said. “And the bottom line is, they did some good.”
Arthur Caplan has a different view: “Nothing dries up altruism, the willingness to donate organs, faster than the perception that the distribution of the organs is unfair. We wanted to believe something good came of this. There’s this hagiography that The Mick helped boost donor rates. I don’t think there’s any evidence that that’s true.”
Donations to the Southwest Transplant Alliance actually tailed off in 1995, according to UNOS figures, from twenty-two in February to thirteen in August. In the fifteen years since, donations from living and deceased donors have increased dramatically throughout the United States—they are not quite double what they were in 1995—but the numbers are still achingly small.
In 2008, nearly 28,000 people in the United States received transplants of vascular organs (kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas, and intestine), 7,990 of which came from deceased donors; nearly 50,000 transplant candidates were added to the queue; 6,600 patients died waiting for organs. “The tragic thing is, Mickey died of cancer before he got the opportunity to do the saving grace,” True said. “That would have been the happy ending.”
4.
By the time Greer Johnson arrived in Dallas in mid-July, Mantle had begun to say his goodbyes. She didn’t realize that was the purpose of her visit. Her disconnect from the gloomy reality of Mantle’s illness was so profound that when she joined him at Pat Summerall’s house, which he had offered for a rendezvous, she thought he would be returning with her to Georgia to continue chemotherapy. They would take a planned trip to Hawaii. They would build a house and a life.
Their business relationship changed after he had signed an exclusive marketing deal with Upper Deck in 1992, and Dominic Sandifer assumed many of her daily duties. (Roy True was the executor of the contract.) Ed Nelson, her pastor in Greensboro, thought he had noticed an increasing distance between Mantle and Johnson. He wasn’t alone in that observation. Kathleen Hampton, Roy True’s assistant and office manager, thought he didn’t want to be married to anyone. Ron and Barbara Wolf had concluded that he was quite content with his two separate lives. When Nelson tried gently to allude to the possibility “that Mickey was on his way out. Ohhh, she don’t wanna hear that.”
Nelson spotted the couple sitting in the Amen Corner of his church on Mother’s Day 1995, when he delivered a sermon about what a father owes the mother of his children. Glancing at Mantle, he thought, “He’s going back to Mama.”
He had noticed other changes in Mantle, who had begun attending services at a non-denominational church that Danny and David went to in Dallas. One day on the eighteenth hole of a round of “best ball” golf, Mantle had jokingly wagered his soul on the deciding putt. “Mickey said, ‘If that’s that preacher’s ball up there on the green, he can baptize my ass out there in the pond,’” Nelson said.
Nelson made the putt and won the bet. “Mickey threw his golf club straight up in the air,” Nelson said. “He said, ‘You can’t beat God!’”
The preacher declined the opportunity to save Mantle’s soul among the water moccasins in the fetid hazard.
Increasingly, the hereafter was on Mantle’s mind. In June, Mantle had called Bobby Richardson, the Yankee second baseman whose baseball afterlife was as a Christian pastor, to tell him about the transplant. He asked Richardson and his wife, Betsy, to pray with him. She took the opportunity to remind him “there was someone else who had died so that he might live.”
In July, Mantle asked Summerall if he could arrange a baptism. When he called Mike Klepfer, his old friend barely recognized Mantle’s voice. “He sounded like Billy Graham, not Slick,” Klepfer said.
By the time Tom Molito reached him in late July, he just sounded resigned. Molito asked if he was going to attend Old Timers’ Day at the Stadium. Mantle said, “The doctors won’t let me travel.”
“I said, ‘Why don’t you tape a message?’
“He said, ‘Tell the Yankees it’s your idea ’cause they think I’m a dumb fucker.’”
On July 22, the Yankees celebrated Babe Ruth’s hundredth birthday and played Mantle’s taped farewell on the JumboTron. “I feel like Phil Rizzuto in Babe Ruth’s uniform,” he said, a spectral figure in disembodied pinstripes looming over center field.
5.
Mantle checked back into the hospital on July 28. Nothing was said to the press. Doctors showed Danny and Mickey, Jr., the results of a new scan and offered a grim prognosis: “Ten days, two weeks tops.”
Mantle did not want to live the last weeks of his life as a public figure. He told doctors not to release any information about his condition. He watched the O. J. Simpson trial (he wasn’t crazy about Marcia Clark and thought Simpson would get off) but didn’t want to hear updates about his condition on TV. Doctors finally persuaded him to videotape a statement in order to forestall inevitable leaks. It aired on ABC’s Good Morning America on August 1. “Hi, this is Mick,” he said, identifying himself in the way he liked to be greeted. “About two weeks ago, the doctors found a couple of spots of cancer in my lungs. Now I’m taking chemotherapy to get rid of the new cancer. I’m hoping to get back to feeling as good as I did when I first left here about six weeks ago.”
Rumors swirled. Grief junkies and profiteers gathered. Security guards stationed outside his suite nabbed hospital personnel in stolen scrubs trying to steal his blankets; one tried to sell his MRIs on eBay. They were returned after legal action was threatened. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was in Dallas to attend a political summit organized by Ross Perot, asked to pray with The Mick and was turned away. “He just come to see what was going on, I guess,” Merlyn told me. “Just wanted to get on camera.”
Mantle turned other visitors away as well. “Let me get my legs underneath me,” he wrote in a note to Billy Crystal and Bob Costas. “Maybe next week,” he told Dominic Sandifer. But he couldn’t forestall the bad news Mark Zibilich brought after a new biopsy: there was cancer in his new liver and both lungs, his pancreas, and even the lining of his heart. “He said, ‘I would still like to see all of my buddies,’” Zibilich recalled. “That’s all he said.”
On Monday, August 7, when doctors told him there was nothing else they could do, he said he didn’t want to know how long. He had signed a living will instructing them not to perform any heroic measures. He told his sons, “Somebody call Roy.”
The singer made arrangements to fly to Dallas.
Mantle’s doctors promised to make him comfortable, but it wasn’t easy. His legs were so swollen the skin cracked. Flesh was hanging from his arms. Fluid had to be aspirated from his stomach.
Visitors were urged to come quickly. Although she was still in Texas, at Pat Summerall’s house, Greer Johnson did not receive an invitation. That was Mantle’s decision. “He did not want a showdown,” she told me. “He didn’t want a scene, and that’s what it would have been.”
They spoke on the phone, Johnson said, “right up until maybe a week before, when he started going in and out of consciousness.”
But no one had told her the gravity of the situation. “Of course, I’m not wanting to think that he’s gonna pass away,” she said, recalling his leave-taking from Summerall’s house for what she thought was a routine chemotherapy appointment. “And I see Danny and Mickey drive off in the car, not having a clue that’s the last time I’m ever gonna see him again. I never got to say goodbye.”
Despite Klintmalm’s preemptive measures, despite testimony from UNOS officials and from Dillard Worthy and other transplant recipients, the public outcry was loud, immediate, and lasting.
The fix was in. It had to be. How else could he have gotten a liver so fast? And even if it wasn’t fixed, he shouldn’t have gotten it anyway because he destroyed his own liver.
“The truth is more mundane than what people think happened,” UNOS spokesman Joel Newman said.
Several factors worked in Mantle’s favor, Newman says—none of them his fame. He had the most common blood type, O, shared by 45 percent of the population, increasing his chances for a match. The population density in the Dallas metropolitan area made the Southwestern Transplant Alliance one of the highest-volume organ-procurement organizations in the country. And, Newman said, the prominence of the transplant program at Baylor, then one of six centers in the U.S. participating in an experimental protocol to treat liver cancer patients with transplantation and chemotherapy, “translated into higher liver donation rates than in other parts of the country.”
Fifteen years later, Mantle’s liver remains fodder for conspiracy theorists, medical ethicists, sports radio loudmouths, and sitcom wise guys, among them Larry David, who worked riffs on the transplant into a two-episode story arc on Curb Your Enthusiasm with the comic Richard Lewis entitled “Lewis Needs a Kidney.” With each new “celebrity” transplant the blogosphere erupts with renewed howls of protest. The New York Times attributed the resurgence of “dark theories” occasioned by Steve Jobs’s 2009 liver transplant to a “holdover from the case of Mickey Mantle.”
Arthur Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, says the uproar over presumptive favoritism obscured other equally important questions about organ allocation. “I don’t believe he jumped the queue, although I think arguably he could have been too sick,” Caplan said. “The combination of alcoholic cirrhosis and hepatitis C might have led some transplant teams to say, ‘Yeah, he’s sick, but he’s way too sick.’”
Klintmalm said every possible diagnostic test then available was done prior to surgery to detect whether Mantle’s cancer had spread. “We kind of smelled that there could be a tumor there, and we did virtually everything in the world to find that tumor, but we couldn’t find it,” he said.
The bile duct, an organ no bigger than a pinky finger, is difficult to biopsy, especially when a patient lacks enough platelets to clot blood. “It’s something you never get close to with a needle,” Klintmalm said, “and if you do, the patient usually bleeds like a pig and dies.”
With today’s enhanced imaging technology, he said, “We probably would have had a much better chance to make a positive diagnosis. If we had found the tumor before the transplant, we would not have done it. If we could have figured that out [during surgery], we would have interrupted, closed him up, and brought back a backup patient.”
In 2002, UNOS instituted a new system of organ allocation that ranks every patient in the country waiting for a liver on an objective numerical scale that determines the risk of dying within ninety days without a transplant. Patients with cancer in danger of progressing get additional points and move up the list. But if a tumor is found to be beyond a certain size or there is evidence of metastatic spread, that score drops. The goal is to give organs not just to the sickest patients but to “the patients who have cancer with the best possible prognosis,” Mulligan said.
Added Caplan, “They’re really more oriented toward outcome than they were then. It doesn’t make sense just to say, ‘Who’s sickest?’ If they’re almost dead, then you’re not going to rescue them.”
In Caplan’s view, Steve Jobs, a California resident who received a transplant in Tennessee, illustrates the advantage of celebrity: money. “It’s not that they get a liver,” Caplan said. “It’s that they get admitted to the waiting list in the first place. You don’t even get considered if you’re some poor homeless guy whose liver’s blown out because you’re drinking wine in the park. You’re going to be dead. That’s where Mantle or David Crosby or Evel Knievel, the drug-damaged livers of the Fifties and Sixties, had an advantage.”
3.
When Mantle awoke after surgery, doctors told him what they had already told his family: the operation was a success, but the prognosis was uncertain at best. It was a bittersweet result—the gift of a new life might prove to be no opportunity at all. In the hospital, he was inundated by an outpouring of public affection—20,000 cards and letters were delivered to him c/o Baylor—and a torrent of outrage. Robert Goldstein told reporters that Mantle wouldn’t have gotten out of the hospital alive without the surgery. Mantle told the New York Daily News that doctors had told him he had just one day to live.
Though Merlyn complimented her husband on his newly trim shape—she hadn’t seen his stomach that small since he was twenty—Mulligan saw little of the joy he usually sees in transplant patients, an indication, perhaps, that Mantle sensed how little time he had. But when Klintmalm asked him to go public with his support for organ donation, he readily agreed. “Mickey was absolutely committed,” True said. “I told him, ‘If you promote it, you’ll save so many lives it will eclipse baseball.’ He said, ‘I know.’”
True began making plans for “Mickey’s Team.” Mantle coined the slogan for a campaign he wanted to announce at Arlington Stadium at the end of August: “Be a Hero, Be a Donor.”
He left the hospital on June 28, exactly one month after he checked in. He went back to the house he shared with Danny and Kay and to the accustomed routine, organizing his days around the clubhouse at Preston Trail. At first he was strong enough to ride a stationary bike a bit. But two weeks later, the stomach pains returned and there were new ones in his chest. It was hard to eat; he subsisted on protein drinks and lost forty pounds. One Monday morning, he called Pat Summerall from the clubhouse and said, “Get your ass over here, I need to talk to you.”
It was an hour’s drive. When Summerall arrived, he was dumbfounded by Mantle’s request. “He said, ‘I want you to have a look at my ass.’ He pulled his pants down. It was all bruised and black and blue. He said, ‘I used to have a good ass. I wanted you to have a look because you remember what a good ass I used to have.’”
Chemotherapy left him anemic and in need of transfusions. He returned to the hospital for treatments, and surgeons implanted a catheter in his chest, like the one Billy Mantle had used and abused.
At the end of the first week of July, as Mulligan was packing up his apartment to move to Cleveland for his new position at Case Western Reserve University, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News came to interview him for a profile of his newly famous mentor, Göran Klintmalm. Mulligan had been up all night doing his last transplant at Baylor. When the reporter asked how Mantle was doing, Mulligan showed him the data on survival rates of patients with his cancer. An unexpected and unwelcome headline appeared in the morning paper: “Mantle’s Outlook Uncertain.” Mulligan was quoted as saying, “There was tumor left behind that was unremovable. There was no way we could remove all of it.”
Goldstein tried to quell the furor, dismissing Mulligan’s comments as those of a “junior” surgeon who hadn’t seen enough cases to justify such pessimism. Klintmalm’s protégé had performed 104 transplants during his two years at Baylor.
On July 11, Mantle held his last press conference. It was a standing-room-only crowd. He greeted reporters he knew, including Jerry Holtzman from Chicago, and acknowledged Barry Halper, a limited partner in the Yankees, a memorabilia maven. “Hey, Barry, did you get my other liver?” Mantle asked.
His comic timing was still acute, but the robust physique, the Popeye biceps, and the untroubled face of American plenty were gone. His tracksuit hung on his desiccated frame. His face looked like a dry riverbed. The band on his blue-and-white 1995 All-Star Game cap couldn’t be made tight enough to fit his skull. He looked like death. In fact, he looked a lot like Mutt in the family photograph taken just before he went off to Denver to die.
When he pointed his thumb at himself, it seemed as if his chest might collapse. “God gave me a great body and an ability to play baseball,” he said. “God gave me everything, and I just…pffttt!”
What would be remembered most was the anguished plea directed at children: “I’d like to say to kids out there, if you’re looking for a role model, this is a role model. Don’t be like me.”
Some scorned the tortured mea culpa as the moral equivalent of a death row confession. “The most decent thing he ever did may be the only decent thing he did that ever mattered,” the sports columnist Jerry Izenberg said. But even the most hard-boiled scribes agreed it was his finest inning. David Mantle said the family received hundreds of letters, saying, “We used to hate you, but you doing that on national TV, apologizing and making amends, you have got new fans.”
A reporter asked Mantle if he had signed a donor card. “Everything I’ve got is worn out,” he said. “Although I’ve heard people say they’d like to have my heart…it’s never been used.”
Two days later a CAT scan showed cancer in his right lung.
One day, not long after, Halper pulled up in front of Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant and asked Bill Liederman to come out to the curb. Halper said he had “some shit in the car” he wanted Liederman to see. “He actually had a bag of shit,” Liederman said. “Mickey sent him a bag of shit.” And a pair of signed shit-stained examination gloves. “He was going home to put it in the freezer.”
Liederman thought it was Mantle’s final comment on the memorabilia industry that had made him a rich man, a very Mantle way of saying, “You’re all full of it.”
Ten thousand donor cards were distributed at the All-Star Week FanFest at the Ballpark at Arlington. Interest in organ donation surged. “Before the transplant and the news conference most organ donation agencies were getting a call a week, if that,” Silvestri said. “Post–Mickey Mantle, calls were in the thirty-to-forty-a-week range. People were saying ‘Where can I get that Mickey Mantle donor card?’ ‘What do I have to do to be a donor?’ Or ‘I’m ripping up my donor card because of what happened to Mickey Mantle.’ Just getting people to talk was our goal because it wasn’t a conversation people were having.”
That was enough to persuade her that The Mick had done his job. “At a time when he didn’t feel good and his family didn’t feel good, they opened their lives to anyone who wanted to talk about organ donation because they felt like they could do some good,” she said. “And the bottom line is, they did some good.”
Arthur Caplan has a different view: “Nothing dries up altruism, the willingness to donate organs, faster than the perception that the distribution of the organs is unfair. We wanted to believe something good came of this. There’s this hagiography that The Mick helped boost donor rates. I don’t think there’s any evidence that that’s true.”
Donations to the Southwest Transplant Alliance actually tailed off in 1995, according to UNOS figures, from twenty-two in February to thirteen in August. In the fifteen years since, donations from living and deceased donors have increased dramatically throughout the United States—they are not quite double what they were in 1995—but the numbers are still achingly small.
In 2008, nearly 28,000 people in the United States received transplants of vascular organs (kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas, and intestine), 7,990 of which came from deceased donors; nearly 50,000 transplant candidates were added to the queue; 6,600 patients died waiting for organs. “The tragic thing is, Mickey died of cancer before he got the opportunity to do the saving grace,” True said. “That would have been the happy ending.”
4.
By the time Greer Johnson arrived in Dallas in mid-July, Mantle had begun to say his goodbyes. She didn’t realize that was the purpose of her visit. Her disconnect from the gloomy reality of Mantle’s illness was so profound that when she joined him at Pat Summerall’s house, which he had offered for a rendezvous, she thought he would be returning with her to Georgia to continue chemotherapy. They would take a planned trip to Hawaii. They would build a house and a life.
Their business relationship changed after he had signed an exclusive marketing deal with Upper Deck in 1992, and Dominic Sandifer assumed many of her daily duties. (Roy True was the executor of the contract.) Ed Nelson, her pastor in Greensboro, thought he had noticed an increasing distance between Mantle and Johnson. He wasn’t alone in that observation. Kathleen Hampton, Roy True’s assistant and office manager, thought he didn’t want to be married to anyone. Ron and Barbara Wolf had concluded that he was quite content with his two separate lives. When Nelson tried gently to allude to the possibility “that Mickey was on his way out. Ohhh, she don’t wanna hear that.”
Nelson spotted the couple sitting in the Amen Corner of his church on Mother’s Day 1995, when he delivered a sermon about what a father owes the mother of his children. Glancing at Mantle, he thought, “He’s going back to Mama.”
He had noticed other changes in Mantle, who had begun attending services at a non-denominational church that Danny and David went to in Dallas. One day on the eighteenth hole of a round of “best ball” golf, Mantle had jokingly wagered his soul on the deciding putt. “Mickey said, ‘If that’s that preacher’s ball up there on the green, he can baptize my ass out there in the pond,’” Nelson said.
Nelson made the putt and won the bet. “Mickey threw his golf club straight up in the air,” Nelson said. “He said, ‘You can’t beat God!’”
The preacher declined the opportunity to save Mantle’s soul among the water moccasins in the fetid hazard.
Increasingly, the hereafter was on Mantle’s mind. In June, Mantle had called Bobby Richardson, the Yankee second baseman whose baseball afterlife was as a Christian pastor, to tell him about the transplant. He asked Richardson and his wife, Betsy, to pray with him. She took the opportunity to remind him “there was someone else who had died so that he might live.”
In July, Mantle asked Summerall if he could arrange a baptism. When he called Mike Klepfer, his old friend barely recognized Mantle’s voice. “He sounded like Billy Graham, not Slick,” Klepfer said.
By the time Tom Molito reached him in late July, he just sounded resigned. Molito asked if he was going to attend Old Timers’ Day at the Stadium. Mantle said, “The doctors won’t let me travel.”
“I said, ‘Why don’t you tape a message?’
“He said, ‘Tell the Yankees it’s your idea ’cause they think I’m a dumb fucker.’”
On July 22, the Yankees celebrated Babe Ruth’s hundredth birthday and played Mantle’s taped farewell on the JumboTron. “I feel like Phil Rizzuto in Babe Ruth’s uniform,” he said, a spectral figure in disembodied pinstripes looming over center field.
5.
Mantle checked back into the hospital on July 28. Nothing was said to the press. Doctors showed Danny and Mickey, Jr., the results of a new scan and offered a grim prognosis: “Ten days, two weeks tops.”
Mantle did not want to live the last weeks of his life as a public figure. He told doctors not to release any information about his condition. He watched the O. J. Simpson trial (he wasn’t crazy about Marcia Clark and thought Simpson would get off) but didn’t want to hear updates about his condition on TV. Doctors finally persuaded him to videotape a statement in order to forestall inevitable leaks. It aired on ABC’s Good Morning America on August 1. “Hi, this is Mick,” he said, identifying himself in the way he liked to be greeted. “About two weeks ago, the doctors found a couple of spots of cancer in my lungs. Now I’m taking chemotherapy to get rid of the new cancer. I’m hoping to get back to feeling as good as I did when I first left here about six weeks ago.”
Rumors swirled. Grief junkies and profiteers gathered. Security guards stationed outside his suite nabbed hospital personnel in stolen scrubs trying to steal his blankets; one tried to sell his MRIs on eBay. They were returned after legal action was threatened. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was in Dallas to attend a political summit organized by Ross Perot, asked to pray with The Mick and was turned away. “He just come to see what was going on, I guess,” Merlyn told me. “Just wanted to get on camera.”
Mantle turned other visitors away as well. “Let me get my legs underneath me,” he wrote in a note to Billy Crystal and Bob Costas. “Maybe next week,” he told Dominic Sandifer. But he couldn’t forestall the bad news Mark Zibilich brought after a new biopsy: there was cancer in his new liver and both lungs, his pancreas, and even the lining of his heart. “He said, ‘I would still like to see all of my buddies,’” Zibilich recalled. “That’s all he said.”
On Monday, August 7, when doctors told him there was nothing else they could do, he said he didn’t want to know how long. He had signed a living will instructing them not to perform any heroic measures. He told his sons, “Somebody call Roy.”
The singer made arrangements to fly to Dallas.
Mantle’s doctors promised to make him comfortable, but it wasn’t easy. His legs were so swollen the skin cracked. Flesh was hanging from his arms. Fluid had to be aspirated from his stomach.
Visitors were urged to come quickly. Although she was still in Texas, at Pat Summerall’s house, Greer Johnson did not receive an invitation. That was Mantle’s decision. “He did not want a showdown,” she told me. “He didn’t want a scene, and that’s what it would have been.”
They spoke on the phone, Johnson said, “right up until maybe a week before, when he started going in and out of consciousness.”
But no one had told her the gravity of the situation. “Of course, I’m not wanting to think that he’s gonna pass away,” she said, recalling his leave-taking from Summerall’s house for what she thought was a routine chemotherapy appointment. “And I see Danny and Mickey drive off in the car, not having a clue that’s the last time I’m ever gonna see him again. I never got to say goodbye.”
