The Last Boy (29 page)

Mantle didn’t behave and Merlyn absorbed the worst of it. Back in Oklahoma, before the move to Dallas, she had the help and support of her sister and her parents. They could do only so much. One particularly liquid night in the winter of 1954, after Mantle had been publicly upbraided by Stengel, and challenged to grow up, he came home to find the door locked and the house empty; he cut his hand on the glass while breaking in. Merlyn had left, taking Mickey Jr. and all her belongings, Mantle recounted in
The Mick
. He was still drunk when he showed up at her parents’ house, hand stitched and bandaged, demanding the keys to the car. Merlyn’s father told his son-in-law he was too drunk to drive. Mantle threw Merlyn’s clothes and the family groceries on the lawn and got behind the wheel. He took out a telephone pole, ripped the car door off its hinges, and landed in a ditch. She and Mickey, Jr., returned home the next day.

“Merlyn took a terrible mental beating that winter,” Mantle confessed in
The Mick
.

The following year on Christmas Eve, when she was nine months pregnant with their second child, she came home after opening gifts with her parents to find a crew of drunken revelers on her front lawn. One of Mantle’s pals had made off with his house keys. He blamed her. “He grabbed me by the arm and pushed me aside,” she wrote in
A Hero All His Life
. “If I had fallen, I probably would have had the baby then and there.”

Lovell gave him what for when the twins told her what had happened. David Mantle was born two days later.

His father was away on a hunting trip with Billy Martin in 1958 when
the Mantles’ third son was born. Billy Giles was named for his daddy’s hunting partner and for his maternal grandfather, who had driven his daughter to the hospital.

Sometimes she tried keeping him company in the fast lane, but that had consequences, too. Like the time they both had too much to drink and she almost ran him over, on purpose; and the dinner a couple of weeks later with the Berras, when Yogi told her not to let him drive. She cracked her head against the windshield at seventy miles per hour. The investigating officer was their next-door neighbor. No charges were filed.

By the summer of 1961, he was leading the life of a leading-man bachelor. He knew women in every American League city or where to meet them. In Baltimore, ballplayers favored a joint called the Club Troc, short for Trocadero, where a dancer known as Fern “The Flower Woman” reigned. Baltimore native Frank Deford, a Princeton student who would become one of sportswriting’s most literate and graceful writers, recalled Fern’s determination to show The Mick a good time one night when the game was rained out. “She says, ‘I go home with Mantle. He gives me a hundred dollars.’ That was a lot of money in those days.

“She probably was a ten-dollar hooker. She says, ‘Man, I gave him everything for that. I’m up with him all night. And I know he’d been drinking. So I take the one hundred dollars and bet it against the Yankees. I figure anybody spends the night with me ain’t gonna play baseball the next day.’”

The way she told it, his game-winning home run the next day cost her a bundle.

Stengel fretted about Mantle’s sexual profligacy, once telling writer Gerald Astor: “You can’t tell me he ain’t getting some of them all the time. He’s got enough ailments, so’s he don’t need to get the clap, too. His taste with broads isn’t great, except for that one he’s married to and hasn’t been together with for a million years, so you can see what I mean about his taste.”

Some Yankees were direct beneficiaries of Mantle’s little black book. Others derived pleasure from basking in the aura of his prowess. “Everybody got their rocks off on Mantle,” said
New York Times
columnist George Vecsey, who covered his first Yankee game that year. “One player
told me once he couldn’t get anywhere with some blonde. Mantle said, ‘Let me give it a shot.’ They hear gasps of pleasure. They were this far away. It was as if they all participated through Mantle.”

His reputation was hardly a guarded secret. Among the Yankee wives there was empathy for Merlyn. Lucille McDougald wondered: “Oh, my God, how can Merlyn stand it? I think that’s why she stopped coming up after a while.”

She had become as adept as her husband at hiding pain. “I would know stuff but turn the other cheek,” she told me. “It can be very devastating to the wife. My pride hurt me too.”

Left alone to his vices and devices, Mantle was a danger to himself. “We all told him, ‘Mickey, go home, don’t stop at another bar,’” Carmen Berra said. “He hated that—that he didn’t go home. He loathed himself.”

Finally, she and Yogi lured Mantle and a handful of other Yankees to their house in Montclair for a home-stand retreat. “Yogi said, ‘We’ll make Mickey come out and we’ll keep him out there,’” recalled Joe DeMaestri, one of the guests. “We were trying to sober him up, so to speak. I guess it was ’61, because Houk was involved with this, too. He said, ‘Yeah, good idea, take him out there.’ We were going to stay for like four or five days. Mickey was there for, I think, two days, and he says, ‘I gotta get out of here. I gotta go back to town.’”

One day, Big Julie Isaacson got a call from a friend who owned a bar down the street from the St. Moritz. “Mickey was in the bar the night before,” Isaacson said. “Two girls tried to roll him. Mickey always walked around with a lot of money. My friend took the money. Got him back to the St. Moritz. Called me. Twelve or thirteen hundred bucks. Gave it to me. Gave it to Mickey. Never knew it was missing. Roger said, ‘Jules, we got to take Mickey out of the St. Moritz.’”

Isaacson had rented a two-bedroom apartment in Queens on the Van Wyck Expressway for Maris and his roommate Bob Cerv. The building was popular with stewardesses who flew in and out of nearby Idlewild Airport.
“We go to the St. Moritz and talk to Mickey. Roger says, ‘Mickey, you got your own bedroom, furnished apartment.’ Mickey objected a little at first. ‘I’m not going to go out to God’s world.’ Queens is God’s world to Mickey.”

In Cerv’s recollection, it was Mantle’s idea to come to Queens, and he wasn’t sure it was a good one. “I was skeptical about it,” Cerv said. “I didn’t know if I wanted him or not, ’cause I knew what he did. Roger and I talked it over and he said, ‘Oh, hell, let him come.’

“So I said okay. But I said, ‘These are the rules. If you break them, you’re outta here—no partying, no girls.’ We talked to him pretty heavy. He said, ‘I’d like to have a summer like that.’”

Mantle and Maris appeared so opposite that people assumed they couldn’t possibly be friends. But they had much in common. Both were miner’s sons. Both were three-sport, high school athletes (both halfbacks recruited by the University of Oklahoma). Both married their high school sweethearts, who stayed home to raise their families in the shadow of the big time. Together they had the best summer of their baseball lives.

For fun, they Frisbee’d Big Julie’s collection of Yiddish LPs across the Van Wyck from the balcony of their apartment. Over breakfast, they read Dick Young’s account of Mantle/Maris acrimony in the
Daily News
and then read it aloud in the clubhouse again for everyone’s benefit. “We all laughed that summer—‘Mantle/Maris feuding’—and we were living together!” Cerv said.

Isaacson recalled one Sunday-morning SOS from Whitey Ford. The M & M boys had banged up their car and were sleeping it off at a gas station. He went to ransom them and pay off the gas station attendant. “Gave him a hundred dollars,” Isaacson said. “I told him, ‘Anybody finds this car, you’re a dead pork chop.’

“It was Roger’s car, license KC-9. Pushed the car into the garage. I took Mickey, Roger in my car. We went to the ballpark. Captain Kelly, police captain, is in charge, a good guy. I said, ‘Captain, can I see you a minute?’ He looks inside. ‘Captain, you got plenty of cops. You put Roger between two of them. I’ll take Mickey.’”

They deposited the heart of the order in the clubhouse in care of trainer Gus Mauch. It was a Sunday to remember, but Cerv doesn’t.

Maris had one home run at the end of April, twelve at the end of May, and twenty-seven at the end of June. Joe Trimble of the
Daily News
was the first to ask Maris if he thought he could break The Babe’s record. “How should I know?” Maris replied with impolitic honesty. Between May 17 and June 22, he hit twenty-four home runs in thirty-eight games, an astonishing accomplishment that went largely unremarked in Mickey thrall. When Maris leaped ahead by six home runs on June 20,
The Sporting News
declared, “Time to sit up and take notice.”

A week later they appeared together on the cover with Ruth and Gehrig:

Dial Double M for Murder and Mayhem—
The Sporting News
, June 28, 1961

At the All-Star break, Maris had thirty-three home runs; Mantle had twenty-nine; and baseball commissioner Ford Frick had a problem. Before he was named commissioner in 1951, before he became the PR man and then president of the National League, Frick was known primarily as The Babe’s Ghost. He was “quite aroused,” as Dan Daniel put it, at the assault on The Babe by a pretender feasting on diluted American League pitching.

On July 17, Frick issued his convoluted and controversial “asterisk” decision, which never actually mentioned the word. What it boiled down to was this: Mantle and Maris had to break Ruth’s record in 154 games—the number he played in 1927—or would have some “distinctive mark in the record books” attached to the accomplishment.
The Sporting News
later included Frick’s edict among the thirty most shameful acts in baseball history.

As the summer progressed and the home runs mounted, and the Yankees advanced on their 154th game, the pressure doubled and redoubled. Maris lost gobs of hair; the circles under his eyes appeared etched in charcoal. Mantle basked; he became the beloved.

Mantle Thrilled by Fans’ Cheers—AP

“It’s a new feeling and it’s nice,” he told reporters. “Those fans, they’ve changed.”

The Yankees had to revive the postgame suicide squad, this time to safeguard him from adulation. It was an honor to be selected, to jog beside him, elbows high, scanning the crowd for potential, if unintended, danger. They formed up in the aisles beside the home dugout in the top of the ninth and greeted Mantle where the infield dirt met the outfield grass. Tony Morante was a second-generation Yankee usher and a frequent member of the squad. “Some of the people were nice, wanted to shake his hand,” Morante said. “I didn’t try to knock people out of the way until people came close. I did have to push a few out of the way to give him enough room to run. We were out there in a flash and back in a flash.”

Later Morante realized he had adopted Mantle’s loping, limping gait.

Maris was presumed to be a sacrificial rabbit in the home run race, his role to encourage and then defer to The Mick. But he declined to play the part. He hit four home runs in a July 25 doubleheader, the last of which, his fortieth of the season, surpassed his career best in 1960. Mantle hit his thirty-eighth the same day and regained his rightful place as home-run leader with three on August 6.

Blasé Broadway Buzzing Over Maris, Mantle HRs
—
The Sporting News
, August 23, 1957

Broadway Busting Buttons Over Bomber Thrill Show
—
The Sporting News
, September 13, 1957

Fans from Florida sent them a thirty-foot-long telegram. Their agent Frank Scott predicted $500,000 in endorsement income for the winner of the grand sweepstakes and finalized clothing deals worth $14,000 each. A photo-op 44 jersey prepared by the PR department on August 13 was old news by the end of the day when they both had 45 home runs, and both were sixteen games ahead of Ruth’s pace.

Newspapers across the country began running daily tout sheets;
Newsday
printed “Race with Ruth” numbers below photos of the three
protagonists. The pictures of Ruth and Maris looked like mug shots. Mantle looked like a choir boy.

When Maris didn’t fade, the righteous guardians of baseball history demanded to be heard.
Who does he think he is? What right does he have?
“It would be a shame if Ruth’s record got broken by a .270 hitter,” Rogers Hornsby intoned.

The New York Times
asked an IBM 1401 computer named Casey to predict if either one could match The Babe. Casey gave Hornsby little reason to cheer. The verdict: Maris, yes, Mantle, no.

Maris never trailed Mantle after August 15.

The Detroit Tigers arrived in New York for a decisive three-game series over Labor Day weekend. The race had been close most of the year. The Yankees led by 3
¹
/
₂
games when the Tigers arrived on Friday, September 1—The Yankees won 1–0, with a run in the ninth. On Saturday, Maris hit his fifty-second and fifty-third home runs after scoring the tying run on Mantle’s sacrifice bunt. On Sunday, Mantle hit his forty-ninth and fiftieth home runs. On Monday, Labor Day, they rested. Both played; neither homered. But the Yankees swept a doubleheader from the Senators. Four days later the Yankees led the Tigers by 10 games—and their lead would never be less. Frank Scott announced that Mantle and Maris would appear on
The Perry Como Show
during the World Series. Their fee was $7,000 each.

On Labor Day, Mantle heard the siren call of the Great White Way and returned to the city. All summer he had played by the house rules, except once, Cerv said, “when he brought a gal up there. We ran ’em both out, and pretty soon, about a couple of weeks later, that’s when he left. Labor Day, he said he had enough of this life. Went back to Times Square.”

On September 9, Maris hit his fifty-sixth home run; he wouldn’t hit another for a week. The next day, Mantle hit his fifty-third home run; he wouldn’t hit another for almost two weeks. On September 15 they both went 1 for 9 in a doubleheader in Detroit. “Maris is so tight up there at the plate that he can hardly breathe,” umpire Hank Soar said.

Maris sequestered himself in the trainer’s room with his brother for forty minutes, precipitating a rhubarb with the gentlemen of the press who had been stood up at his locker. When he finally emerged, Mantle whispered damage control advice. Reporters who remembered him as a shy, sullen rookie were stunned. He waved the white flag before the Yankees left Detroit. “I can’t make it, not even in 162 games,” he said. He had already sent a telegram of concession to Mrs. Babe Ruth, leaving Maris to soldier on alone, stalking a record no one wanted him to break.