The Last Boy (41 page)

He bet college football, too. Bill Handleman, a young reporter for the
Asbury Park Press
in New Jersey, spent a soggy Saturday October afternoon with him at a VFW hall in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he was making a promotional appearance. The Yankees were on the TV perched above the four-stool bar. Mantle wasn’t interested in the World Series game and he wasn’t interested in Handleman’s soliloquy about how Mantle stories in the
International Herald Tribune
were the reason he’d learned to read. “He says, ‘Yeah, so? What are you telling me for?’ ”

When Mantle got up to use the restroom, he said, “See if you can find the Brown score,” Handleman recalled. “He hands me this folded, mimeographed sheet, maybe a half an inch thick. He’d bet every game! Brown was one of his bigger games.”

If Mickey Mantle Day put him in the past tense, his induction into the Hall of Fame in 1974 was an embalming. He chartered a bus to Cooperstown for family and friends—including Carl Lombardi, Joe Warren, Phil Rizzuto, Whitey Ford, the other inductee—and his mother, Lovell, who later exclaimed upon examining his ring, “Well, who in hell is in the Hall of Fame?”

Her son said, “Well, that’ll putcha down, won’t it?”

The bus was ambushed by autograph hounds. Ford and Rizzuto escaped. Mantle stayed and signed and was blamed when he couldn’t satisfy them all, Lombardi recalled. At 1
A.M.
he was still working on his speech. He wrote two versions, one clean, one unexpurgated, and shared the latter with his minor league buddy. Lombardi told him, “Don’t you dare say that. We’ll all be in jail.”

Mantle delivered the clean version but left in the chicken joke Merlyn had begged him not to tell. It was the slogan he’d penned for Mickey Mantle’s Country Kitchen—“to get a better piece of chicken, you’d have to be a rooster.” He also praised her for staying married to him for twenty-two years. “That’s a record where I come from,” he said.

After the ceremony Mantle made a quick getaway. “I had to leave,” he told Billy Crystal ten years later. “I said, ‘Get the fuck outta here.’ It’s like a cemetery to me.”

After his internment in Cooperstown, Mantle’s thirst went from steady to nonstop. No one could keep up with him. En route to a baseball clinic in Central Park one tar-melting New York summer day, the limo driver took the scenic route through Harlem. “We stop at a red light,” said Mantle’s companion Howard Berk. “There’s an old black guy with a bottle of gin, just pouring it down. I said, ‘This guy’s gonna die. He’s going to explode from drinking that gin.’

“Mickey says, ‘Watch this. We’ll stop him from drinking.’

“He rolls down the window. ‘Hi, old-timer.’

“The guy says, ‘Mickey Mantle?’

“He looks down at the gin bottle. ‘Mickey Mantle!?!’

“He throws the bottle away.’ ”

But who was going to tell Mickey Mantle? One day near the end of the Me Decade, he met up with Ryne Duren at a bar in Madison, Wisconsin. After multiple stints in rehabs and hospitals, Duren had gotten sober and was training to become a drug counselor. He told Mantle about his recovery and tried to get him to confront his alcoholism. “He had the classic denial,” Duren said. “He thinks, ‘You’ve got to have a drink every day.’ Mickey said, ‘I’ll go home and won’t drink for ten days or two weeks.’ ”

Duren told him, “ ‘Laying off doesn’t make any difference. It’s not how much you drink. It’s what you do when you do drink.’

“He never asked the big question, which is ‘Do you think I’m an alcoholic?’ In fact, he told me he wasn’t an alcoholic. I tried to contact meaningful people in his life, doctors, lawyers, family. I had no luck with anyone who would go to bat to do the thing necessary to be part of an intervention. I told Merlyn, ‘You may have to go to the point of divorcing him.’

“She said, ‘I couldn’t do that. He’s so good to me.’ ”

Duren gave up. “You couldn’t get Merlyn, and you couldn’t get his lawyer to do it. Everybody wanted to be Mickey Mantle’s friend. Then they shake their heads at the sickness.”

The toll was beginning to show. Eli Grba, a Yankee teammate and recovering alcoholic, said, “It took a long time for alcohol to really mess him up badly. It took Mickey longer because Mickey was performing. He was
doing
. When you can’t do shit and you’re drinking just the same, now comes the slide down. Fast.”

Mantle had to leave spring training camp in 1972, abandoning the gilded title of “hitting instructor,” to have his gallbladder removed. Four years later, Dick Young sounded a warning in the New York
Daily News
: “Mickey Mantle has friends worried about his soaring blood pressure, which led to an unscheduled visit to a Dallas hospital. He has been told to slow down.”

In the summer of 1978, he was hospitalized in critical condition with a bleeding ulcer. Six months later, he was back on the job, knocking back straight vodkas as a “vice president in charge of special marketing” for the Reserve Life Insurance Company, a gig that paid him $50,000 a year to play golf and attend cocktail parties. He dismissed the ICU episode with bravado as a publicity stunt. “I wasn’t getting enough ink,” he said.

Less than a year later he told a reporter from a Florida newspaper, “I can see how a guy can commit suicide.”

He was living the half-life of a fading star. Dimmed as that light may have been, he was still the celestial Mick. The gravitational pull of celebrity rendered those in his orbit mute. “I just think at this point he was going to do what he wanted to do,” said Wadkins. “It’s a tough situation to have the skills and the talent he had, and then say, ‘What am I good at?’ All he was good at was destroying himself.”

Mantle was in Fort Lauderdale shooting a commercial when Julie Isaacson reached him at his hotel. “What are you calling me for?” he demanded.

“Mick, Roger died.”

The line went dead. “He slammed the phone,” Isaacson said. “I called him back. I said, ‘Mick, did you hear me?’

“He starts screaming at me,
screaming
, like he was right across the table. ‘Damn you, damn you!’ ”

Mantle knew Maris was dying of cancer. He called Maris once a week, every week, for the last two years of his life and persuaded him to go to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where Billy Mantle was treated. But Maris’s lymphoma had too good a lead. He died there on December 14, 1985, at age fifty-one. Mantle took it hard. In fact, he took it personally.

Once again, he hadn’t done enough. “Roger was a better family
man,” he would tell friends later. “If anyone went early, I should have been the guy.”

Maris had left the Yankees on a gust of bitterness, traded to the St. Louis Cardinals after the 1966 season. He played two years for the Cards and made a new life away from the banquets and the Old Timers games, running his beer distributorship in Gainesville, Florida. He didn’t return to the Stadium until Mantle escorted him onto the field on opening day in 1978 to raise the Yankees’ first championship banner since M&M were the heart of the order. Maris thought he’d be booed. Applause rained down on him; Reggie Jackson, the newest Yankee slugger, was pelted with Reggie bars.

Maris’s funeral was held in his hometown, Fargo, North Dakota, where he is memorialized in the only museum willing to have him, in the West Acres Shopping Center. Cooperstown’s snub was as cold as Fargo on the day he was buried.

Ed Hinton, a reporter for
The Atlanta Constitution
, arrived the night before. It was minus 18 degrees when he checked into Fargo’s only Holiday Inn and followed Whitey Ford down a corridor to a private meeting room where the ’61 Yankees were attempting to drown their sorrows. Clete Boyer, who knew Hinton from his years with the Atlanta Braves, waved him in, offering the writer’s bona fides to skeptical teammates. “They were trying to remember the good things,” Hinton said. “The only people who weren’t drinking were Bobby Richardson ’cause he was a Baptist and Ryne Duren ’cause he was a recovering alcoholic. Mantle swayed, and he says, ‘Before you take out that notebook, let’s get one thing straight. I am not drunk!’

“I said, ‘Okay, Mick, that’s fine.’

“So we stand there and drink a few minutes. You hear the wind howling outside. I said, ‘Did you guys ever imagine you’d end up burying Roger Maris in a blizzard in a little old town in North Dakota?’

“Mantle stood there, and little tears started to run down his cheeks, no expression on his face whatsoever. He was very collected, very serious, very emotional in the way that alcoholics can be. And he said, ‘I want to go back to Commerce, Oklahoma.’ ”

By the next morning it had warmed up to three degrees with a wind chill of minus eight. The funeral director organized the twelve pallbearers, among them Mantle, Ford, and Big Julie, at the bottom of the
steps leading into the Cathedral of Saint Mary. “I looked at Mickey, he was half bombed, I guess with fear,” Isaacson said. “So, I says, ‘Mickey, don’t drop this casket or I’ll kill you.’ ”

There were only eleven steps to negotiate with Maris’s coffin. But they were icy and precarious; their balance was hindered by the glare of camera flashes hitting the ice. The funeral director called out a cadence: “Step, step.” “It took us maybe twenty minutes to get the casket to the top,” Isaacson said.

Felt like it, anyway. Struggling up the steps with his share of the burden, Mantle muttered under crystallized breath: “Roger, you sonofabitch, I knew you’d screw me one more time.”

Until then, it had been a very good year to be a living legend. In March 1985 baseball’s new commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, had reinstated Mantle and Mays, rescinding the fiat imposed by his predecessor and landing himself on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
between the parolees. Mantle’s autobiography,
The Mick
, became a best seller. Larry Meli, the general manager of SportsChannel, the Yankees’ cable outlet in New York, made good on a promise to himself that someday he would repay The Mick for what he had meant to him as a child. Meli had recoiled at the sight of Mantle making a living by cutting ribbons at gas station openings—“
That’s
what became of Mickey Mantle?”

After witnessing Mantle’s delirious welcome home at the Stadium on opening day, his first appearance since August 1982, Meli hired him to join the SportsChannel broadcast team.

In November, Mantle and Ford hosted their first fantasy camp in Florida, dividing the profits equally among their seven children. The worrisome lump on Mantle’s neck that reminded him of the onset of Billy Mantle’s disease had proved to be no more than a buildup of calcium gravel. The
Daily News
hailed the diagnosis: “Mickey Mantle no longer fears he has cancer.”

But Billy’s prognosis was poor. After several years in remission, his cancer had returned in 1981, spreading from his lymph nodes to his liver
and his bone marrow. “That’s when he was angry at the world,” Meli said. “It was supposed to be him.”

Billy had entered an experimental program at M. D. Anderson, an agonizing and toxic regimen that attacked the cancer cells but also caused him to lose all the hair on his body. Merlyn moved to Houston to be with him. Two years later, Mantle was offered the job at the Claridge Hotel. “We needed the money,” Merlyn told me. “We were paying for two homes. I think Mick was embarrassed he had to go to that to make a living.”

In 1983, memorabilia madness was not yet certifiably mad. An old baseball was still just a baseball. When Glenn Lillie, the hotel’s vice president of marketing, asked Mantle to bring some things from home to display at the Claridge, he showed up with two old grocery bags stuffed with home run balls—including one of the last thirty-six he hit—a glove, a pair of spikes, and a Babe Ruth Crown he won at the Top in Sports banquet in Baltimore. “He said, ‘Is this the shit you wanted?’ ” Lillie recalled. “It wasn’t memorabilia then. It was just shit.”

Mantle’s job at the hotel was to schmooze the high rollers and put a good face on the gaming industry. Sometimes he ate lunch in the cafeteria with employees whose checks he helped deliver—many of them didn’t know who he was. Doorman Darrell Hammie saw how hard it was for Mantle to remake himself into a people person. “Mickey wasn’t the most outgoing guy,” he said. “Do you think if it was up to him to take this job, do you think that’s in his character? It was like walking on eggshells every time he walked out the door.”

He was a good employee, Lillie said, always on time for visits to Grandma’s House, a nonprofit shelter for young, pregnant, homeless women, or to the Pop Lloyd baseball stadium in Atlantic City, named for the great Negro League shortstop. He perfected his signature until it looked as if it had been carved. “By a surgeon,” Lillie said.

There were perks that came with the job and Mantle took advantage of them. He had a succession of serious extramarital relationships after he retired from baseball. He had been involved with a woman from Florida when Roy True became his lawyer in 1969. She ended the affair after ten years, True said, because she wanted to get married and have children. In 1980, Mantle began seeing Linda Fetters, who later became a Hollywood
stuntwoman and the wife of Ken Howard, the star of
The White Shadow
. He introduced her to Merlyn as his secretary and Howard says she was on the payroll. “Mickey always used the same line with these girls,” True said. “‘Would you like to be my business manager?’”

One weekend, Mantle brought both the women in his life to the Claridge, sharing his bed with his wife while his mistress/agent slept in the suite’s second bedroom. Maris was also at the hotel that weekend. “Roger called up to the room, and Mickey was sitting on the couch between us,” Howard recalled. “Roger said, ‘So, Mick, what you got goin’ up there? A king and a rollaway?’ ”

Mantle was still seeing Howard in January 1985, when Greer Johnson arrived at the Claridge for a Super Bowl party on the arm of a VIP gambler who made the mistake of asking his genial celebrity host to entertain his girlfriend. For years, after she’d broken up with the gambler, after Mantle had called to ask permission to see her, after they had become an item, he’d say, “I’m still entertaining her.”

In short order, the Georgia schoolteacher became Mantle’s new agent and the woman with whom he would share most of the last decade of his life. She arrived at a propitious moment in the development of the nascent memorabilia trade. She would become his companion, his drinking buddy, his lover and employee, playing an indispensable role in the re-branding and marketing of The Mick.

Merlyn became convinced that the Claridge was her husband’s downfall. She told me it was the beginning of “the bad drinking” and “the women thing.” That surely was wishful thinking at best. But she clearly understood the corrosive synergy between his alcoholism and the heady reinvention of The Mick that began in Atlantic City. “I regretted him taking that job,” she told me. “He’d just get drunk and talk to people.”

“He’d get drunk
so
he can talk to people,” said David Mantle, who recognized something valiant in his father’s self-destructive work ethic. “I think he sacrificed himself for Billy. He did that for his son.”

It was after midnight and Mantle was still drunk when he got home from Maris’s funeral. He woke Danny and told him he wanted to drive to the family’s condominium in Joplin, Missouri. Danny didn’t want any part of a 350-mile road trip in the shape he was in. “Screw you,” his father said. “I’m going to load the damned car and go by myself.”

Danny couldn’t let him do that. He was twenty-five years old. He wasn’t ready to just say no to his father. They drank all the way there. The rest of the family joined them later that week to celebrate Christmas and Mickey and Merlyn’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. That was when she learned about Greer Johnson.

According to her account in
A Hero All His Life
, they began arguing about Mantle’s one-night stand with the wife of a prominent country singer at a charity golf tournament in Nashville. He had left their hotel room before the banquet and hadn’t returned until six the next morning. The fight escalated—Merlyn threw a wine bottle at his head, railing about Linda Howard. “Dammit, Merlyn,” he said, “there’s already somebody else, and you’re still fighting with me about the last one.”

Johnson said, “When she found out about us she called me and she told me ‘I will never divorce Mickey. I like being Mrs. Mickey Mantle.’ ”

Howard said she had ended the relationship that August when he rejected her plea to get help for his drinking. “He told me, ‘What would people think if Mickey Mantle went to rehab?’ So I chose to leave. He called me one last time, begged me and pleaded with me to come to New York. I just said, ‘If you’re still drinking, I just can’t do it.’ ”

(True recalled a different ending—a phone call from Mantle asking him to tell Howard it was over.)

After the fight with Merlyn in Joplin, Mantle disappeared for a couple of days. In his absence she resolved to travel with him more and drink with him more, which she did, resulting in scenes worthy of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Merlyn had a mild stroke—“stress-related.” She was hospitalized for several days, and was prescribed blood thinners and blood
pressure medication to treat a blocked artery in her neck. He flew home to be with her, but she was not in a forgiving mood.

There were separations and reconciliations. Once, after he’d been gone three months, he called in tears asking to come home. He stayed six weeks that time, some of which Merlyn spent in Arizona with Billy, who was in treatment for substance abuse. But the idyll didn’t last. “Near the end he was really terrible to her, humiliating her,” said a friend who spent time with them at the Claridge. “She’d say she wanted to go to the hairdresser and ask for money. Mick would peel off a $1 bill and hand it to her in front of people, making her grovel.”

Many friends wondered why she stayed. Lucille McDougald, who knew her in their early days in New York, cited two reasons for her astonishing forbearance: “She really loved him, I mean, deeply, sincerely, truly, and accepted him with all his faults. The other one: she wanted the boys to have their dad. She wanted him in their lives, and she would do anything to keep that involvement, for better or for worse. It turned out to be worse. The boys ended up with the same addiction.”

Eventually all four of their sons attended residential treatment programs for chemical dependencies, sometimes more than once. Merlyn drank, too—“not to the point the family did,” she said—first trying to keep up with her husband and then just trying to keep him. “Our holidays were all drinking,” she told me. “Mick made eggnog. By the time I had dinner ready, they didn’t want to eat.”

During one stay in rehab, Billy told her he’d had his first drink at age nine. “And why wouldn’t he?” Merlyn said. “We had the best-stocked bar in town. We made it so easy for them to do that.”

As they told it in
A Hero All His Life
, Danny and David were chugging Mad Dog and Boone’s Farm in the backyard by age thirteen. Billy, who was drinking and drugging heavily by age fifteen or sixteen, turned David on to cocaine; David almost killed himself one night when he snorted so much he couldn’t breathe. Invariably, one thing led to another. “If I didn’t drink, I wouldn’t have done the cocaine,” Danny told me. “You know you’re screwed up when you drink a gallon of vodka and don’t even feel it.”

Everyone had an opinion about why Mantle drank. He drank because he was good at it; because he got paid to do it; because he had nothing
else to do. “I think he’d drink to go to sleep,” Clete Boyer said. “After he got out of baseball, he’d drink to wake up.”

He drank, Mantle said, because “it was there all the time for me.”