Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? (6 page)

She had a glass of No-Cal ginger ale in her hand, but she saw to it that a Scotch and water, a stiff one, too, was produced for her visitor.

She is a large, pleasant woman with light hair. She had on a green blouse and gray skirt and only one bit of jewelry. Which was enough. It was a ring big enough to shake up the Van Cleefs. Her first name is Joan and she is a Whitney. She is of the world of the Social Register and charity drives and art museums and chauffeured Rolls-Royces. Her husband, Charles Payson, is Wall Street. International Wall Street. But this soft-talking fifty-nine-year-old dowager sat and talked of heavyweights and horses and night clubs and first basemen. She could be the best person to come into baseball in our time. This is one who does not come to get contracts to build a ballpark or to maneuver for capital gains. This is a lady who comes for the sport of it. And it says here that she knows more about how to lose with a laugh than anybody working for her except Mr. Stengel.

“Just before last season opened,” she was saying, “this wonderful writer from the
Daily News
, Dick Young, told me not to expect anything good at all. I said, oh, couldn't we beat out the Cubs and Phillies? They weren't particularly good clubs, you know. He said absolutely not. So I said to him, ‘Well, can't we please expect to finish ahead of the other new team, Houston?' He said, ‘No, I told you to expect nothing.' So I said, ‘All right then, I'll settle for tenth place.' I certainly was not disappointed.”

“If you had to do it all over again, would you go in with all that money to buy the team again?”

“Oh, of course,” she said. “How else in the world could we have gotten Marvelous Marv into New York? I think the whole thing was just wonderful.”

Then she talked about how things went in Greece last summer. A few days after the Mets opened the season, Mrs. Payson and her daughter and son-in-law left for the Greek islands. She asked to be informed of the Mets' doings by telegraph. The telegrams came as requested, one right after the other, with the score always spelled out so there would be no error, and finally the lady couldn't take any more of them. She wired back:

“That was about the last word I heard from America,” she recalled.

Mrs. Payson and her party finally established a pool on what day a wire would arrive saying the Mets had won a game. After some time, the fun went out of that.

“The pot became too enormous,” she said.

“You know,” she said, “you can't tell when this thing will end. It should be better this year. Dear, let's hope so. But you have no idea when there will be success. I felt so badly for some of those players. Charley Neal with that bad hand. And Gil Hodges having such bad luck. It must have bothered them terribly. It's a shame about Ashburn leaving us, isn't it? He was our only .300 hitter.”

It was explained to her that Richie Ashburn, at thirty-five, had decided that the Mets would have to go with young players this year, his .300 average or not, so he accepted an announcing job for Philadelphia Phillies games. He preferred that to sitting on the bench.

“Oh, I don't think he would have been on the bench,” Mrs. Payson said.

“They would have had to put him there. The problem here is to break in players for the future.”

“Well, perhaps. But he wouldn't have been on the bench for the whole season.”

“Yes, only the guy said he sat on the bench for a while with another team once and it bothered him badly. And he said that if he ever had to be a benchwarmer for the New York Mets he'd commit suicide.”

She broke up. The lady, you see, understands.

Now all of this is not to say that the lady is going to be sitting down and laughing about the Mets for the next fifteen years. No, the Whitneys do not come that way. The first thing they lost at hasn't been discovered yet. Just for openers, her brother Jock—John Hay Whitney—once decided to go into producing movies as a sideline. In 1938 he boarded a plane in New York that was taking him to California. Under his arm were the galley proofs of a book by a woman named Margaret Mitchell. It was about the South in the Civil War. It already had been turned down by Samuel Goldwyn, who sniffed, “Who needs a movie about the Civil War? And the losers in it already?” Jock Whitney read the galleys. When the plane stopped for fueling at St. Louis, he was out on the telephone telling somebody in his office to send this Mitchell girl $50,000 to hold the rights to this book of hers.
Gone With the Wind
was the most successful American movie ever made. They started showing it in 1940, and they'll still be reissuing the thing, and making a bundle with it, thirty years from now.

Mrs. Payson and her brother also are in racing. They own the Greentree Stable, and under those colors they have trotted out a few things like Tom Fool, who was about as big a runner as anybody ever threw a saddle on. It is the same with art. When Mrs. Payson starts swinging with a museum she wants the place to wind up with the finest collection this side of an easel, and it always comes out that way.

So this is not a woman who came to be a nice happy loser. At the same time, she's not about to cry. This one knows the game. She is not somebody who merely sits off with her cash and looks at life from the window of a private Pullman car. She has been around. A little bit.

In 1944 her firstborn son, Daniel Carroll Payson, eighteen, entered the Army as a private and was put into an infantry line company. He asked for no help. Nobody in the family forced any on him. He was still eighteen and a private when he was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

The mother just says, “He did things that way.”

And there was one recent night when Ruth Arcaro, whose husband was the greatest rider of race horses in history, sat in the den of her house in Garden City, Long Island, and talked about the lady.

“When Eddie was set down that time for a whole year, we had to try and make it on his salary for exercising Greentree Stable horses. Well, every once in a while I'd get a nice little note from Mrs. Payson asking how the baby was doing. And she'd send a nice little check with the note. She knew.”

On another afternoon, a huge ex-heavyweight fighter named Abe Simon spoke of her. In 1936 Simon was signed to a contract by an outfit called White Hope, Inc. This was a group including Jock Whitney, Pete Bostwick, Tommy Hitchcock, and Bernard Gimbel. Their object was to find a heavyweight who could lick Joe Louis. In 1936 only the Lord could handle Joe Louis. But White Hope, Inc., selected Simon, 6 foot 5 and 265 pounds, as their standard-bearer. Presently, here was Abe, banging the light bag in the gymnasium of the Whitney Estate at Manhasset.

“I went there for heat treatments for my left arm and for calisthenics and some bag-punching,” Simon recalls. “Every day, just as I was finishing, somebody would come and ask me to stop by at the main house and see Mrs. Whitney. That was Mrs. Payne Whitney. Mrs. Payson is her daughter. So I'd come up and sit down with them and all they wanted to do was talk with a prizefighter for an hour or so. Those were probably the nicest people I ever met in boxing. Hell, I love them. Later on, the White Hope thing broke up. Things happened good for me, and I wound up boxing Louis twice for the title. But sitting with those people is something I'll always remember. I'll tell you. Baseball got some break when Mrs. Payson decided to get into the business.”

When you look at it, the only surprising thing about Joan Payson's being in baseball is that she didn't own a team long before this. She was brought up on the game. Her mother once had a breakfast cereal called Wheaties brought in by the caseloads, and the boxtops were ripped off as quickly as possible and sent in so that Joe DiMaggio would be named the most popular player in the cereal company's contest.

Her team always the Giants. Her heroes were Mel Ott and Bill Terry, and her thrill was something that began on a Sunday in September of 1951.

The Giants were in Boston and they had just won their last game of the season, the one that clinched a tie for the National League pennant. Down in Philadelphia, the Dodgers were playing their last game. If they won, it would mean a playoff with the Giants. A loss would give the Giants the pennant. Don Newcombe, in the finest day of his career, was pitching relief for Brooklyn, even though he had shut out the Phillies the night before. The game was in extra innings because Jackie Robinson of the Dodgers had made plays baseball people still talk of.

Joan Payson sat in a loge seat at Madison Square Garden with her husband. Out on the sawdust floor, the opening acts of the rodeo were coming on, but her only interest was in the portable radio she kept jammed against her ear. She was listening to the Dodger game in Philadelphia and hoping for all she was worth that somebody on the Phillies would hit a home run. The portable radio conked out as the game went into the tenth inning. That was the end of the rodeo for her. She tapped her husband on the shoulder, said good-by, then left him to calf-roping and hustled upstairs to the bar of the Madison Square Garden Club, where she could hear the end of the game.

The Dodgers won it, 9-8, when Robinson hit a home run in the fourteenth inning. In the eleventh, he had knocked himself unconscious in a dive for a low line drive hit by Del Ennis. If he had not made the catch, the game would have been over. It was one of the matchless individual performances baseball has seen.

Three days after this, it was a dark, miserable day at the Polo Grounds, and Mrs. Payson, in her box seat behind first, was ill. Out on the field a player named Billy Cox of the Dodgers had done things with a glove that baseball players, even the best ones, simply cannot do. Because of him, the Dodgers had the deciding game of the playoffs won. Then, all of a sudden, it was the ninth inning and runners were on base and here was a Brooklyn relief pitcher, Ralph Branca, throwing a pitch a little high and a little inside to Bobby Thomson. He, of course, hit it into the lower left-field seats for a home run nobody in New York will ever forget.

Joan Payson figures it was probably the happiest day of her life. She closed her eyes as she sat in this railroad car and talked of it.

“I was brought up on the Giants,” she was saying. “But nothing ever was as magnificent as this. Frankly, I still can't get over the Giants. Last year when they had that playoff with the Dodgers on the Coast we all were at Idlewild Airport and we leaned on the counter and listened to the final game, waiting to see whether we would fly to Los Angeles or San Francisco for the World Series. We were all dying. I found myself rooting for the Giants as if they were back here in New York.”

Then she clasped her hands behind her neck and leaned back. This is the way Jack White and all those people sunned themselves during a game. And at night, if the Giants lost, they put up a big sign, ‘No Game Today,' in front of the bandstand at the 18 Club.”

She was talking about the late Jack White, a comedian who subsisted on brandy and ran a saloon called the 18 Club. White was considered the town's Number 1 Giant fan. It was natural that he considered Joan Payson a pal. The 18 Club is no more, and the only reminders of it left are Pat Harrington, the great old comic, and Jackie Gleason, who was a third-stringer in the 18 Club lineup. When the 18 was operating, waiters would spit ice cubes at customers and White either was loaded or was out on the floor telling unprintable stories. A line score of the day's Giant game always hung in front of the bandstand. But only if they won. The “No Game” sign went out after a loss. It was Mrs. Payson's idea of a helluva night joint.

Every afternoon when the Giants were at home, the mob from the 18 Club, White, Harrington, bartenders, waiters, a big singer named Hazel McNulty, and the inevitable group of loan sharks, would sit in the upper tier in left field, open shirt collars, lean back, and get the sun. About the eighth inning, they would walk around to home plate, say hello to the likes of George M. Cohan and Joan Payson, watch the finish, and then head for the exit.

White was a particularly voluble fan. One afternoon in 1939, with the Giants trailing the Cubs 4-1 in the ninth, he was in agony as Mel Ott stepped in with two on. Ottie lifted his foot and hit the first pitch into the right field stands to tie the game. White jumped, then started running. He raced down the ramp to the lower tier, skipped down the steps, then broke through a gate and tore onto the field, arms out, to hug Ott at home plate.

White then turned around and trotted through the lower tier, up the ramp, and back to his seat in the upper tier. He got there just in time to see Hank Lieber, the next Giant hitter, hit one six miles to win the game. The ball was just about to reach the seats when White, in ecstasy, took off again. Down the ramp, through the lower tier, and onto the field he came. This time he was staggering as he reached home plate. White went three steps up the line to greet Lieber, then fell on his face. The ballplayer stopped, picked him up, and crossed home plate with White in his arms. Then he turned and, still carrying White, he went to the center-field dressing room.

“It took two bottles of brandy to straighten White out,” Harrington recalls. “One for Jack and one for his personal Shy-lock. I think the Shylock looked the worst when Jack collapsed.”

“Mrs. Payson,” Harrington says, “was always around in those days. We liked her so much we insulted her worse than anybody in the joint. That was the mark of somebody who made it big in our joint.”

With this kind of background, Joan Payson was one of the first names anybody thought of when the Continental League was about to be founded. Dwight Davis, a New York financier, had been speaking to Bill Shea about ownership of the New York team. Davis went to Florida and spoke to Mrs. Payson. At first she said no. Then Branch Rickey went down to see her, and she changed her mind.

“I wasn't too enthused about a team in the third league,” she says. “But later when I found we could have a New York team in the National League I became excited.”