The Last Boy (23 page)

Women—none more beautiful than he was—staked out hotel lobbies. When Elston Howard’s wife, Arlene, met him for the first time, she thought, “My God, who is that? Just the physical body, I’d never seen anything like that. There was something about his presence that was just absolutely stunning.”

“He was adorable,” said Gil McDougald’s wife, Lucille. “We used to joke about it. Who wouldn’t hop into bed with him, given the opportunity, just for the fun of it?”

His teammates were equally impressed. “He filled out that uniform like you wish you could have filled it out,” said pitcher Roland Sheldon.

In the locker room, they tried not to stare:
What’s he talking about? What’s he doing
? Later, they would laugh, embarrassed and relieved to find out everyone else was doing the same thing. “It was the ungodliest feeling in the world,” Clete Boyer said.

Not quite everyone in New York was in his thrall. At the Stadium, he shared his locker with Frank Gifford, the splendid flanker for the New York football Giants. “Excuse me, he shared a locker with me,” Gifford corrected.

They both had Hollywood good looks and a 1956 championship ring. The Yankees called Gifford “Sweetness.” Gifford called Mantle a “total asshole. Not a nice person. I didn’t know him, but I didn’t want to know him. The little bit I was around him I didn’t want to be. We deified somebody who hit the ball a long way, ‘cause he’s got a bad knee. Other than that, what did he do? What did he really do to help society in any way?”

Gifford, whose extramarital athletics were videotaped in a 1997 tabloid sting, has survived his own public shaming, but he has hardly softened his stance on The Mick. “I’m just not a Mickey Mantle fan. I never was. He hit a ball a long way, and he was a sexist. He was not my kind of person. We were MVPs that same year. I would hate to think I was even close to what he was.”

In his 1949 essay “Here Is New York,” E. B. White offered a caution to restless American souls who come east to conquer the big city: “It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

Mantle was willing. And he got lucky. The “Copa Caper,” as it became known, might not have become public had it occurred on the watch of the
baseball beat writers whose unstated code of honor was to look the other way. News-side reporters had no vested interest in maintaining cordial relations in the Bronx. When they broke the story, it was the first major breach in the Fifties seawall between “on-the-field” and “off-the-field” sports reporting.

Baseball writers ate, drank, and traveled with the team. Their tab was often paid by the team. “You couldn’t write one word of it, the debauchery,” said Jack Lang, the longtime executive secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America. “It wasn’t just liquor. It was the women.”

One of the more egregious examples of sports desk omertà was recalled by Bert Sugar, a Hall of Fame boxing writer who learned his trade at the rail at Toots Shor’s. One day, John Drebinger, the
Times
man who, over forty years, wrote the lead story on 203 consecutive World Series games, regaled him with a tale from an overnight train on a western trip with Babe Ruth’s Yankees. “The writers had their own car, and dinner had been served,” Sugar said. “They’d cleared the tables, and they’d just dealt out a hand of bridge when the door to the back of the car flew open and Babe Ruth ran down the aisle naked. And about ten feet behind him a woman, equally naked, with a knife in her hand, comes running out! And Drebby says one of the guys looks up from the table and says, ‘Well, that’s another story we won’t cover!’”

The relationship between ballplayers and writers was no different when Mantle became the face of the Yankees. “They would be making $30,000 or $40,000, and we’d be making $10,000 to $20,000,” Sugar said. “They
talked t
o each other. They would tell you things and—you kept ’em to yourself.”

In 1957, the sports department definition of controversy was: “Casey-Weiss Feud Flares on Brawl Penalty.” Stop the presses: Stengel calls Yankee higher-ups “those fellows.”

So when a blind item appeared in Dorothy Kilgallen’s column in the
Journal-American
on May 19, no one followed it up or wondered who had leaked it. Kilgallen wrote, “The prelude to the Hank Bauer night club fracas has been worrying the Yankee brass for some time. Ask anyone who lives in the neighborhood of the colorful Stage Delicatessen where Hank and Mickey Mantle used to be quite famous—and not just for playing ball.”

The locker room code of honor was inviolable: What happens in
the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse—even if it doesn’t take place in the clubhouse. Which explains why Mantle refused to tell his sons what really went down at the Copa. “He wouldn’t say,” David Mantle said. “We asked.”

Fifty years after the fact, Carmen Berra was still reluctant to say anything that might contradict her husband’s syntactically brilliant party line:
Nobody did nuthin’ to nobody

“The bouncer did it,” Yogi said.

“The bouncer did it,” Whitey said.

“The bouncer really screwed up,” Bauer told Gil McDougald.

“That’s probably right,” Carmen said. “The bouncers weren’t going to let anything happen to the New York Yankees.”

Anthony Zingales, attorney for the pummeled bowler, pointedly noted that his client had “
also
been slugged by a bouncer as he was going down.”

Mantle gave varying accounts over the years: “Somebody said, ‘Meet us around the corner.’ You don’t have to tell Billy but once and Hank also. Next thing I know, the cloakroom is full of people and everybody’s swinging and throwing punches.”

“Maybe Hank,” Merlyn said.

“Probably Billy,” Arlene Howard said.

As far as the Yankee higher-ups were concerned, Martin was the chief suspect because he always was. Just who hit whom is far less important than the precedent set by the morning’s 72-point headlines. His birthday party was prima facie evidence that things weren’t exactly as they appeared in the Wheaties ads featuring The Mick’s all-American mug. The Copa kerfuffle was the first public intimation of Mantle’s off-field embrace of
la vida loca
.

Whitey, Mickey, and Billy: grown men with little boy’s names. Stengel called them his Three Musketeers. In 1956, under the full-time influence of Billy the Kid, who was released from the Army just in time for the 1955 World Series, Mantle had one of the best years anyone has ever had in a baseball uniform. “I wish somebody would influence me like that,” Martin said later.

Martin was Mantle’s closest friend and polar opposite. Mantle was tongue-tied, country-fed, and shy; Martin was swaggering, street-smart, and volatile. “Billy was a fighter, not a lover,” said Irv Noren, who roomed with Mantle while Martin was in the Army. “Mickey was a lover, not a fighter.”

When Martin rejoined the Yankees, they resumed their prank-playing partnership. Water guns, water balloons, whoopee cushions, and other simulations of flatulence were standard props. They water-bombed Eddie Robinson and his bride from the balcony of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.

They staged water-gun battles in the locker room and took aim at unsuspecting female noncombatants standing on the ticket line from the safety of the clubhouse. “The Yankee clubhouse was, like, below street level,” Mantle told me. “We had windows, like, where people are walking along. Girls used to come stand there, and we used to shoot water guns up in their puss. We could see ’em kind of flinch. They’d be looking around trying to figure out where the fuck that water is coming from.”

They were gleeful peeping Toms. One night, at the team hotel in Detroit, they crawled onto the window ledge—dead drunk—hoping to see a teammate get lucky. Twenty-two stories above the street, acrophobia kicked in—and there was no going back. They had to crawl all the way around the building through decades of pigeon shit to get back to their room. To their great regret they didn’t cop a glimpse of anything but macadam.

One year during the World Series, they made early-morning crank calls to their teammates. Lucille McDougald always took the phone out of the bedroom the night before a big game so her husband could sleep early and deeply. When the phone rang, she ran to answer it, worried that it might be bad news—why else would anyone call at that hour? “ ‘Oooh, Lucille, it’s Billy. Mickey and I have just been in a dreadful accident. He’s hurt bad. We need Gil to come and help Mick.’

“I said, ‘Billy, call the cops. Where are you? I’ll call them.’

“ ‘No, we don’t want the Yankees to know.’

“ ‘Well, if he’s hurt bad, they’re going to know about it. Where are you?’

“I finally knuckled under and woke up Gil, and he comes out to the kitchen to the phone and says, ‘What’s going on?’

“Billy says, ‘Oh, Gil, Mickey’s hurt bad.’

“Gil said, ‘Yeah, he’s hurt bad. Go home. Go to bed.’

“He knew right away it was a joke. And they did this to every ballplayer on the club they could rouse that night. Next time I saw Billy, I put my hands around his neck. And they thought that was hysterical. Laughter like you never heard. Two boys, two little boys, playing pranks. They thought they were Babe Ruth, could drink all night and play all day.”

Martin wasn’t Mantle’s only ally in misadventure; Ford also did his bit. One day, after missing a train from Baltimore to Washington, they hired a cab to drive them to D.C. A fifth of bourbon eased their way on down the road. Stopping at a fireworks stand, Ford helped himself to a haul of Roman candles, which they proceeded to shoot at each other upon reaching the Shoreham Hotel, destroying their room and Mantle’s brand-new suits. Ryne Duren saw the wreckage and thought, “My God, they’re killing the franchise.”

They told the Old Man, and Stengel said, “Fine, pay the bill.” The hotel manager took care of the mess, and Stengel did damage control. “Stengel never said anything bad about his ballplayers,” said Virgil Trucks, to whom Ford confessed the next day. “He never underrated them or overrated them. And he protected them.”

Like many Yankee families, the Mantles rented in New Jersey, on the other side of the George Washington Bridge, an easy commute to the Stadium. The only drawback was the damage inflicted on their cars by Mantle’s adoring multitudes. Charlie Silvera’s car looked like it had been through a war after one season of carpooling with Mantle. So one year a bunch of guys, including Mantle and Tom Sturdivant, chipped in $500 each and bought a 1940 Packard. “It used more oil than it did gas,” said Jerry Lumpe.

“It looked like a tank,” said Art Ditmar. “I sat in the front seat until I saw the way Sturdivant drove. He’d go up the one-way streets the wrong way. We must’ve got stopped six or seven times. Every time the cop would come up to the car, Sturdivant says, ‘Hi, officer! Have you met Mickey Mantle?’

“We never got a ticket.”

It was a giddy, high-octane time. They lived over the speed limit, and Mantle was a get-out-of-jail-free card. There were no rules—until
Mantle was taught some manners by Miss Marjorie Bolding. He met her at Manhattan’s Harwyn Club, a swell joint where Grace Kelly announced her engagement to Prince Rainier of Monaco. Bolding was a southern belle from Birmingham, Alabama, and an aspiring actress and writer. She recalled, “The maître d’ came over and said, ‘Mr. Mantle wants to meet you.’

“And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know who Mr. Mantle is.’

“He wanted me to come over to his table. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t go to anybody’s table. If he wants to meet me, he’ll have to come to my table.’

“I remembered that I’d seen him on television, advertising Chesterfield or Camel cigarettes. So I get up to go to the little girls’ room, which was very small, just one little booth. I came out of the stall, and Mickey was standin’ in the little girl’s room! He had his hand across the door and he said, ‘You’ve got the prettiest blue eyes I ever saw.’

“I said, ‘Do you really smoke those cigarettes?’

“He said, ‘Nah, I don’t smoke.’”

It was the beginning of what she called “a unique and personal” relationship. The first time they went out for a drink he asked her up to his hotel room. He said he had something he wanted to show her. She ignored her mama’s warning about etchings and went. “We’d become friends by then. He showed me what he wanted to show me and started the procedure to kiss me. But when he got a little too amorous, I said, ‘Oh, Mick, if you think I came up to your room because I’m gonna go to bed with you—let me tell you right now that’s
not
gonna happen.’

“And I got up and walked out of his room and he came runnin’ up the hall. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Marjorie, I’m sorry’. I walked out of the hotel, and he came down and got me a cab. But he realized right then that I was totally different—I was a southern lady. He liked me because I
didn’t go
to bed with him.”

What a time it was, to be a young girl from Alabama barhopping with
the
man. “There were days I don’t think we got out of the limousine for two days! He was the most fun. Nobody could play ball like Mickey, and nobody could
play
like Mickey.”

Some nights they stayed in, hanging out at her sister Bonnie’s apartment where the Bolding sisters composed lyrics in his honor—“Men in general we can handle but I have a hard time with Mickey Mantle”—and challenged him in games of Truth. “You
had
to tell the truth if you were
called on,” Bolding said. “You learn a lot about a person when you’re playin’ Truth.”

One thing she learned: “The number of women that he had gone to bed with.” Fifty years later, the exact figure was beyond her powers of recall. “But it was outrageous,” she said.

His teammates assumed she was one of them because they cleared out of his room whenever she arrived. If call girls were present, he quickly let them know she was different. And he never said a bad word about his wife. “Ever, ever, ever,” Bolding said. “He had respect, if you can call it respect, for the wife and what she represented in his life.”

Merlyn was forthright about his infidelity in
A Hero All His Life
, the family memoir published after his death. She had long ago come to understand that her husband regarded marriage as a “party with added attractions.” She was just one of the party favors. As she put it: “He was married in a very small geographic area of his mind.”