The Last Boy (3 page)
Authors: Jane Leavy
I retraced his steps to Commerce and the corrugated metal shed that was the backstop to his father’s dream. I checked into fantasy camp in Fort Lauderdale and visited the Yankees’ new spring training home in Tampa. I paid a call at Monument Park at the old Stadium, where tourists clad in John Deere baseball caps trampled newly planted geraniums in an effort to get close to him. In Carthage, Missouri, I attended the sixtieth reunion of the Class D Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri (KOM) League, where he played his first games as a professional. I paid my respects at the Mantle shrine in the all-male clubhouse at the Preston Trail Golf Club, his home away from home in Dallas, and at his grave at the Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park. I attended the 2003 family auction at Madison Square Garden, where I listened as
über
-fan Frank Martin bragged to David Mantle, “Nobody knows Mickey like I did, I’ll challenge him to a trivia contest.” David cheerfully explained that he hears lots of things about his father he’s never heard before—especially from people like me. In the background, I could hear his brother Danny on his cell phone telling someone, “I really didn’t know him until I was sixteen.”
People who loved him and loathed him agree he was an uncommonly honest man, a trait he bequeathed to his family. His surviving sons, Danny and David, and their late mother, Merlyn, answered the most intimate questions as honestly and fully as they could, asking only that I try to find his good heart. But his prolonged absences from their lives left gaping holes in their knowledge of their own history.
They spoke about failed marriages and their addictive inheritance and the deaths of two brothers. So I was puzzled to hear sometime later that Danny was upset that I had been questioning the length of a home run his father had hit in a spring training game sixty years ago. It wasn’t my intention to diminish the feat. On the contrary, I was asking questions about March 26, 1951, because that was the day Mantle announced himself to the world. Then I realized: calibrations of clout are among the only unsullied measures of the man they have left.
In an effort to calculate how far those baseballs actually traveled, I bought a radar gun and surveyed the USC campus where that home run
was hit. I asked Eric R. Kandel, a Nobel Prize winner for his research into the biochemistry of remembering, to explain muscle memory. I persuaded Preston Peavy, an Atlanta hitting coach, to transform grainy Mantle game films into kinetic diagrams of his swing. I importuned Alan Nathan, a distinguished physicist and Fenway Park partisan, to climb to the roof of Howard University Hospital in Washington, D.C., to gauge the distance of the first Tape Measure Home Run.
In an effort to find his good heart, I spoke with more than five hundred people—friends and family (brother, sister, wife, sons, cousins); opponents and teammates (sandlot, high school, minor and major league); friends and girlfriends; agents and lawyers; writers who covered him and writers who wished they hadn’t. I interviewed linguists, coaches, physicians, batboys, and clubhouse men. I asked each of them the question posed by his minor league teammate Cromer Smotherman in reply to my own query: “What’s the one thing you’d ask Mickey if you could talk to him today?” After a choked pause, Smotherman replied, “Mickey, what happened? Why did you do it? Why did you choose to live the life you did? Because you were not that kind of person. That was not you.”
When Mantle faced the cameras for the last time a month before his death, he was a husk of a man, shrunken by cancer. The stiff brim of his 1995 All-Star Game cap dwarfed his brow. There was no Mantle Roll. He looked straight into the cameras and told us all, “Don’t be like me.”
The transformation of The Mick over the course of eighteen years in the majors and forty-four years in the public eye parallels the transformation of American culture from willful innocence to knowing cynicism. To tell his story is to tell ours. And mine.
I saw the best and the worst of The Mick during the weekend I spent with him in Atlantic City but I wrote little of the latter in the piece that appeared in
The Washington Post.
In 1983, it would have been a firing offense to write what had really happened. Today it would be a firing offense
not
to write it—one measure of how much the landscape of public discourse has changed.
I have tried to balance the claims of dignity and fact. I recognize that some of the material in the pages that follow may offend and disappoint. More than once I was tempted to put his sweater back in the closet.
Well into the late innings of my research, I was still unsure what to
write, how to write it, and whether I wanted to write anything at all. Many of his intimates offered opinions—scientific, psychological, and spiritual—about how to tackle the job. Bobby Richardson’s wife, Betsy, beseeched me not to “glorify the flesh” and “to pray to do justice to the truth without doing injustice to that which breaks God’s heart.”
It was good advice but I also believe that denial is treacherous and taking refuge in generalities is the same as giving him another pass. Nobody knew the danger of that better than The Mick.
So how do you write about a man you want to love the way you did as a child but whose actions were often unlovable? How do you reclaim a human being from caricature without allowing him to be fully human? How do you find the light within the darkness without examining the dimensions of both?
I decided to abandon an orthodox biographical structure in favor of an approach that could accommodate my stubborn fandom. At intervals throughout the narrative, I revisit Atlantic City and my weekend with The Mick. This time, the account is full and unexpurgated. It chronicles my journey from childhood thrall to adult appreciation.
This is my attempt to understand the person he was and, given who he was, to understand his paradoxical hold on a generation of baseball fans, including myself, who revered The Mick despite himself, who were seduced by that lopsided, bucktoothed grin.
My course charted, I went to the storage unit to unearth notebooks and transcripts of taped interviews from April 1983. There, in the typed pages of onionskin, I found warming words not among the sound bites
CBS Sunday Morning
had aired in Bob Lipsyte’s report.
“Can’t we get her a
smaller
one?” Mickey said. “She’s gonna
fuckin’
freeze.”
He saw me as I was, cold and small. I needed to see him as XXL.
INNOCENCE LOST
Atlantic City, April 1983
I
met Mickey Mantle in the Atlantic City hotel where my mother lost her virginity, three weeks after Pearl Harbor. It was the spring of 1983, the year Mantle’s hometown of Commerce, Oklahoma, was named one of the most toxic waste sites in America. I was a reporter for
The Washington Post
and a devoted second, who had taken up the gauntlet in the endless verbal duels of protracted childhood:
“Who’s better? Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays?”
He was the newly appointed Director of Sports Promotions at the Claridge Hotel and newly banished from baseball because of his affiliation with its casino.
My parents’ honeymoon had been brief, one winter night by the Jersey shore—Christmas Day 1941, the only day they could find a rabbi in the pre-nuptial rush to commitment prior to his shipping out. After my father received his orders—he was stationed in the Aleutian Islands for four long, bitter years—my mother moved back in with her parents at 751 Walton Avenue, one very long, very loud foul ball from Yankee Stadium.
The building was called the Yankee Arms and featured a leaded stained-glass window in the lobby with bats crossed over a heraldic shield; the colors were home white and pinstripe blue and yellow-gold to evoke the blond-ness of ash.
Groundbreaking was in the fall of 1927, just after The Babe swatted his sixtieth home run. Such was his clout that a whole new subdivision of luxury buildings—the Neighborhood That Ruth Built—sprang up in his shadow. Bordered on the east by the Beaux Arts mansions of the Grand Concourse and on the west by the Harlem River, the Stadium area embodied upward mobility. For a time, The Babe himself lived on Walton Avenue, ten blocks north of my grandmother’s kitchen.
The apartment had all the latest amenities of 1920s construction: windows that swiveled on a pivot for washing; a dumbwaiter that brought groceries up from the basement and took trash away; a refrigeration system that circulated cold water through pipes to keep the groceries cold. The halls smelled of butter and borscht, chicken schmaltz and stuffed cabbage. I could smell my grandmother’s sweet-and-sour salmon two floors away.
The lobby attempted dark Tudor elegance: heavy, brocaded furniture and ocher-colored shellacked stucco walls. Shafts of blue and gold light poured through the stained-glass window, pooling on the hard stone floor. I hop-scotched from blue to gold, my party shoes clicking like baseball spikes against a concrete runway.
It was there that I fell in love with Mickey Mantle.
My grandmother’s apartment, 2A, faced east toward the Concourse, away from the Stadium. During home stands, the roar of the crowd threatened the kibitzing in her parlor, ricocheting off the buildings on 157th Street, past the candy store and the greengrocer on the corner of Gerard Avenue, past Nick, the shoemaker, and Mr. Kerlan, the kosher butcher, and through her double-hung windows. Crouched beneath the grand piano—with a damaged right leg as precarious as The Mick’s—I listened to Mel Allen’s honeysuckle baritone, punctuated by the crack of the bat. And then the roar came again as the sound waves vibrated up the street. It was my own primitive version of surround sound and it rattled the glass. I turned up the volume when Mickey was on deck.
In my worldview, Celia Zelda Fellenbaum and Mickey Charles Mantle were linked by something far deeper than mere proximity. Both were stoic in
the face of pain and selfless in pursuit of pleasing others. My diabetic grandmother injected her thigh daily with the insulin she kept in the icebox along with the sweets she stocked for me and my cousins: six-packs of Pepsi, platters piled high with homemade rugelach, and her own seven-layer chocolate cake. How different was it, really—Mantle’s insistence upon being in the lineup no matter how much he hurt and her risky determination to fast on Yom Kippur? Weren’t they both team players?
“Who’s better, Dad? Mickey or Willie?”
My father grew up on the other side of the Harlem River in a tenement hovering above Coogan’s Bluff. In the winter of 1927, he patrolled the Polo Grounds as a water boy for the New York football Giants. “Willie,” he replied firmly, citing the latest box score.
Mickey was my guy. Or: I was a Mickey guy. Either way you put it, the relationship was proprietary and somehow essential. Like Mick, who had to be sent down to the minors three months after his major league debut, I had arrived prematurely. Conceived the week—perhaps the day—he hit his first home run at the Stadium, I was born two months too soon in a Bronx hospital twenty city blocks from where that ball landed. Like Mick, I had a sense of being physically flawed. Other kids practiced his swing; I practiced his limp and aped his grimace.
My grandmother gave me permission to be who I was, a little girl who liked to play boys’ games. One fine spring day, opening day of the baseball season, we took the CC train downtown to Saks Fifth Avenue to buy a baseball glove. The cars still had those old straw seats and the bristles caught in my tights and we almost missed the stop while trying to untangle me. I often got tangled up when I tried to be a proper girl.
We bought me a mitt, the only one they had, a Sam Esposito model, which was firmly attached to the glove hand of a mannequin in the Saks Fifth Avenue window. “I’ll have that for my granddaughter,” she told the flummoxed salesman.
No matter how many times he demurred—“Madam, it’s not for sale”—she would not be deterred. I took Sammy home with me and everywhere else until my mother disposed of the glove in an unhappy spring purge. I told my grandmother that Sam was a Yankee. She had no reason to know better. In the twenty-five years she lived at 751 Walton Avenue, she never once felt compelled to cross the threshold of the cathedral of baseball.
She celebrated the Jewish High Holy Days in the ballroom of the Concourse Plaza Hotel at the corner of 161st Street, where Mickey and Merlyn Mantle spent their first year as newlyweds. No matter what the temperature, she wore her mink coat to shul. It had a shawl collar and no buttons and was big enough to keep her and several grandchildren warm. In fact, her coat was two sizes too large—marked down, wholesale. She didn’t wear it to temple on sweltering fall afternoons of prayer to show off. That would have required a mere stole. It was to accommodate me, Sammy, and my red, plastic transistor radio with a tinny gold flower-shaped speaker at its center. She greeted the New Year, waiting for me by a bench in front of Franz Siegel Park, arms spread wide, an expanse of mink catching me in a satin embrace.
Services were held in the sumptuous ballroom of the hotel, which opened for business the same year as Yankee Stadium. With its vast onlookers’ balcony, the ballroom was well suited to my grandmother’s Conservative congregation, in which men and women worshiped in sacred isolation. The women sat upstairs in the gallery in ballroom chairs facing toward Jerusalem. I faced the opposite direction, called to prayer by the large, green, looming presence of the outfield wall at the bottom of 161st Street. Just down the hill, past Joyce Kilmer Park, where African-American men sold towers of undulating marbleized balloons, past Addie Vallens, the ice cream parlor where Joe DiMaggio enjoyed an ice cream soda between ends of a doubleheader. Mickey was so close, and so far away.
While my grandmother listened for the sound of the shofar, I listened to Red Barber inside a cocoon of heavy red velvet drapery that concealed his voice and my apostasy. While she prayed for my future, I prayed that no one would ever humiliate Mickey again, the way Sandy Koufax did in the 1963 World Series.
The 1964 World Series was my last opportunity to pray with her and for him. Mickey got old fast, and so did my grandmother. I was sitting in my parents’ maroon-on-black Dodge sedan with the push-button transmission in the parking lot of Montefiore Hospital when she suffered the stroke that precipitated her death at age seventy-four. The night she died, Monday, May 2, 1965, the Yankees did not play.
I didn’t go back to Yankee Stadium until September 1968. This time, it was to pay homage to The Mick. It had been an awful year of abrupt and
tragic goodbyes. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated. The cover of
Time
magazine asked if God was dead too. And Mickey Mantle was playing his last season.
The particulars of the game are hazy. Was it a Sunday? A doubleheader against the Senators, perhaps?
Memory returns in shards: traffic whizzing by the pigeons loitering on the median dividing the Concourse; the rumble of the D train below tar-patched macadam; a steel girder buttoned with bolts, blocking the view from our seats in the lower deck behind and to the left of home plate. The netting cut the batter’s box into tidy rectangles of time and space. I don’t remember what Mickey did that day. But then, my view was obstructed.
Just how little I’d really seen of him became apparent when he agreed to meet me for breakfast in Atlantic City fifteen years later. I was sitting at my desk in the sports department at
The Washington Post
when he called. “Hi, this is Mickey,” he drawled. “Mickey Lipschitz.”
“I didn’t know you were Jewish.”
“Let me tell you something a guy told me when I first come to New York,” Mickey said. “When you’re going good, you’re Jewish. When you’re going bad, you’re Eye-talian.”
He said he’d meet me at 11
A.M.