The Last Boy (42 page)

He drank because that’s what alcoholics do.

Everyone saw what was happening. His friend Mike Klepfer saw it at a dinner in New Jersey in the Eighties when “his face fell in a big bowl of pasta and we had to pull him out and clean him up.” Roger Wagner, president of the Claridge Hotel, saw it when Mantle failed the Breathalyzer test the hotel planned for New Year’s Eve guests. A photo op had been arranged so the local papers could promote the gimmick. “So Mickey comes down to do this photo shoot about ten o’clock,” Wagner said. “He blows in the Breathalyzer, and it’s about .2! At ten in the morning! Anyway, the Breathalyzer worked.”

Mantle’s doctor, Art DeLarios, a pal from Preston Trail, saw it in the blood chemistries that documented progressive liver disease. He warned him of the danger repeatedly—as had his previous physician. “You couldn’t talk to him about getting sober,” Merlyn told me. “Our doctor, Dr. Wade, tried to talk to Mick and he never went back.”

When he overdid it and overloaded his system, he’d call DeLarios: “ ‘All right, double-M, come on down and I’ll have a look at you.’ I hospitalized him several times, just to get him IV fluids and get him off of the booze. He was tough. He was able to recover pretty quickly if we stopped the intake of alcohol and gave him some gastrointestinal medicine to relieve his indigestion.”

DeLarios told Howard, “Linda, he’s living on a rain check.”

Everyone protected him, including the New York City police. “He drank ’til he fell out of his chair, then stumbled back to his suite at the St. Moritz,” True said. “If he had trouble making it, the police would get us to the doorman. We could have passed out on the sidewalk, and someone would have picked him up.”

Sometimes there was no rescuing him from himself. In the fall of 1986, the Claridge threw a birthday roast for Mantle and Ford. Twenty or so of their best pals showed up and played in the two-day golf tournament he hosted: Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette, Billy, Yogi, The Scooter, and Boyer. “By noon he’s already drunk,” Boyer said. “I mean, we all are. That night we had five or six hundred people there.”

The banquet was larded with hotel bigwigs, local philanthropists, and high rollers. The drunken Mantle lurched toward the microphone. “We tried to tell him, ‘Don’t get up on that dais,’ ” Boyer said. “Sitting there, right in front of this podium, is Whitey and Joan and Merlyn. You can’t hardly understand what he’s saying. So now he gets serious and he says, ‘I want to introduce my wife, Merlyn.’ ”

Whereupon Ford whispered something in his ear, Boyer said, and Mantle repeated it. “ ‘Oh, Merlyn’s not here? She’s out in the bathroom? Oh, fuck her.’

“ ‘Now I want to introduce Whitey’s wife, Joan. Oh, Joan went with her? Well, fuck her too.’ ”

Dinner was over. Riding down the escalator with Mickey and Merlyn, Burdette told the hotel’s mortified PR man, “She’s the one that should be in the Hall of Fame.”

Wagner took responsibility for the fiasco. “We shouldn’t have brought him up,” he said. “We should have acknowledged him. Instead we invited him up to say a few words and he was not in the position to say the words real coherently.”

Mantle’s contract was not renewed. But by then he had little time for “the smallest but friendliest casino on the strand.” He could make $50,000 on a weekend by signing his name.

Baseball cards were the invention of American tobacco companies. The collection at the Library of Congress dates back to 1887. They didn’t become the province of childhood collectors, card flippers, and bubble gum snappers until the mid-1930s. The protean pink goop that replaced tobacco in each pack of cards was invented by Walter Diemer, a twenty-three-year-old accountant for the Frank H. Fleer Company in 1928. He saw the future in translucent bubbles when he took five pounds of the pink glop to a Philadelphia grocery store on the day after Christmas and it sold out that afternoon. They called it Dubble Bubble.

The Topps Chewing Gum Company, makers of Bazooka, entered the trading card business in 1951, when Bowman was still the king of
cards. That fall, after Bobby Thomson’s Shot Heard ’Round the World, two Topps employees—Sy Berger, an assistant to the sales manager, and Woody Gelman, a commercial artist who had contributed to early Popeye animations—reinvented baseball cards. Sitting at Berger’s kitchen table, they created a whole new look designed to appeal to baseball-crazed boys: their cards were larger and bolder in design, and saturated with color. On the front: the team emblem and a facsimile signature were added to each player’s portrait. The year was deliberately omitted to create a sense of timelessness and a longer shelf life. On the back: a mini-biography with ht., wt., bats, throws, birthplace, birthday, and stats from the previous year, which allowed mathematically inclined Little Leaguers to compare themselves with their heroes. Mantle’s card, the Topps #311 in a series of 407, was a study in intensity: the young slugger’s hands tightly wrapped around a bat, his eyes shielded by the brim of an almost iridescent blue cap.

By the time it was released, football season had arrived. Orders were low. Sales were disappointing. The unsold cards were returned to the Topps warehouse in Brooklyn, where they remained until 1960. With storage space tight and even carnival brokers uninterested in purchasing the remainders, Berger needed to dispose of the inventory. He intended to burn it all, but when he got to the dump he saw scavengers going through the trash and said, “The hell with them.” He called a friend whose father had a tugboat. One fine summer day, Berger climbed aboard a barge loaded with Topps’ excess stock (some packaged, some loose cut cards) including a mother lode of Mantle #311s, and headed for open water, attached to the garbage scow by a safety wire. “All of a sudden, they pulled the thing, the floor opened up and they got drowned,” Berger said.

He had no idea that the #311s he sent to their watery grave would become the most valuable baseball card of the postwar era; that the trading card frenzy would crystallize around the cardboard mug of Mickey Mantle. If he had known that, he would have kept one for himself.

In 1978, the cost of a Mickey Mantle autograph at a card show on Long Island was the price of admission—$3.00; $600 was a good price for a #311. Two years later, at the Philadelphia Card and Sports Memorabilia Show, in March 1980, three Mantle # 311s were put up for auction. According to Pete Williams’s
Card Sharks: How Upper Deck Turned a Child’s Hobby into a High-Stakes, Billion-Dollar Business
, the promoters,
Bob Schmierer and Ted Taylor, prefaced the sale by recounting the tale of the drowned #311s. When the gavel dropped at the end of the day, they had sold the first card for $3,100; and the second and third each for $3,000. “It was incredible,” said Robert Lifson, owner of Robert Edward Auctions, who was there. “It went from $600 to $3,000 practically overnight.”

The proud buyers of the three #311s, Rob Barsky and Bob Cohen, were deluged with interview requests; the stories were picked up by the wire services. The #311 went viral.

A year later, the Major League Baseball Players Association went on strike for fifty-one days. Terry Cashman penned his hymnal to the good old days—“Talkin’ Baseball,” with its “Willie, Mickey, and The Duke” refrain. The song became a prospectus for the fledgling memorabilia industry and a sinecure for the onetime minor leaguer who has since written lyrics for all twenty-eight major league teams.

The confluence of nostalgia for a less mercenary time and Baby Boomer upward mobility was a boon for The Mick. The boys who had sent him their old scrapbooks hoping for an autograph in return had grown up and grown rich. And they were willing to spend hundreds, thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on talismans from a gilded era when baseball was played for the love of the game. Savvy card dealers quickly grasped the emotional calculus. As Mike Berkus, cofounder of the National Sports Collectors Convention, put it: “To get the card back was to get childhood back.”

For a couple of years after the ground-zero sale in Philadelphia, the market for #311s waxed and waned. Then, in 1986, a card dealer named Alan Rosen found a trove of about 5,000 high-number Topps ’52 cards, including about 75 pristine #311s. Most sold for about $2,000; the last one garnered twice that. Three years later, the same card sold for $40,000. Woody Gelman’s original art fetched $110,000 in 1989.

The Hobby, as it was then known, quickly became big business, an investment opportunity that spawned a cadre of competing professional authenticators. “The Topps #311 both fed and was propelled by the astronomical growth” of the industry,”said T. S. O’Connell, editor of
Sports Collectors Digest.

“Mantle led that revival,” said Dominic Sandifer, who became Mantle’s
handler when he signed an exclusive deal with Upper Deck in 1992. “He
was
the demand.”

He traveled the autograph circuit for a decade, sometimes with Willie and The Duke (they were at the Claridge in December 1983). More often he took his old pals, Moose and Hank and Blanch, along for a sorely needed payday.
You want me? You take them, too
.

Greer Johnson earned 20 percent of whatever bookings she arranged. He grew dependent on her to make the travel arrangements, to make sure he got where he had to go and got back in one piece. The restaurateur Bill Liederman, former owner of Mickey Mantle’s, called her “the tour guide.”

Johnson says Mantle didn’t know how much money he had, what bank it was in, or how to write a personal check. All he cared about was having a fat wad in his pocket. Some friends, among them Jim Hays, a buddy from Joplin, thought she ran him into the ground. “She worked the hell out of him is what she did,” Hays said. “I mean, she was makin’ money. Little Mick called her ‘Greed.’ ”

But Danny Mantle acknowledged the family’s debt to her industriousness in more than one conversation with Sandifer. “He said, ‘The truth is, Greer helped him make a lot of money, which helped us,’ ” Sandifer said. “Whether it was Greer Johnson or Roy True or Dominic Sandifer, somebody was going to help Mickey Mantle capitalize on that. That’s not a difficult job to do. That’s as easy as picking up the phone. While she certainly arranged those things and made sure that he got there and did his job, that’s what it was.”

The money was crazy, and it loosed a kind of lunacy that Cashman first observed when Mays, Mantle, and Snider taped
The Warner Wolf Show
on October 2, 1981. “People were screaming, ‘Sign my arm!’ ‘Sign my eyelash!’ ”

Mantle was often nonplussed: “The effect I seem to have on people makes my hair stand on end.”

He never understood it, and he never got used to it. “Why can’t they get over me?” he’d ask Glenn Lillie.

When one of his old baseball jerseys sold at auction for $71,000, he offered to take off his undershorts. When somebody called Bill Liederman at Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant wanting to hire him to appear at a bar
mitzvah, Mantle said, “If they pay me $50,000, I’ll do it.” They did.

When the Say Hey Kid stood up Paul Simon the day he was to begin shooting the music video for “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” producer Dan Klores reached out to Liederman, who reached Johnson. Sure, Mantle would pinch-hit. “There were three conditions,” Klores recalled. “ ‘He needs $1,500 in cash in $100 bills in a brown bag.’ That wasn’t a problem. We paid everyone $1,500 in cash—the others didn’t get it in a brown paper bag. ‘He needs a stretch limo,’ and he wouldn’t sign any autographs.

“We shot it in a playground in Hell’s Kitchen. At the shoot, you couldn’t have gotten a better guy. He was great with Paul, great with the crew. The script was, Paul would pitch to him. Mickey would hit a home run. We were playing with a Spaldeen. He hit a pop-up. The camera made it look like a towering home run.”

That’s a wrap.

Mantle took his paper sack of Benjamins and went home. His parting words: “Suddenly, it’s like I’m Mickey Mantle again.”

But just beneath the giddy veneer of supply and demand lay incredulity and loathing. “He said several times he felt guilty,” Danny said. “He said, ‘I wish I had a job. This is the only thing I can do.’ ”

Mutt did hard business with the tangible; he toiled with a Sharpie. “He hated the whole card show deal,” Merlyn told me. “He felt like a whore ’cause they hired him out.”

He vented by abusing baseballs again, inscribing them with a potpourri of vile epigrams. “Have a Ball Cocksucker!” “Tough shit, asshole.” “Fuck Yogi.” A ball signed “I fucked Marilyn Monroe” sold for $6,700. Still, he was besieged.

Dave Ringer, his internist in Georgia, saw a posse of golf carts chase Mantle down on a fairway in Lake Oconee.
Oh, God, Mickey Mantle! Oh, man, can I get you to sign this?
“Nobody cared about Mickey Mantle,” Ringer said. “They cared about his name. They didn’t want to know who he was. He was so lonely. He even commented about that. He didn’t have any friends. He basically had ‘Mickey, I want.’ ”

On Christmas night 1989, Billy Martin was killed when his pickup truck slid off an icy, isolated road near his farm in Fenton, New York. Neither he nor the driver, identified as William Reedy, was wearing a seat belt. Reedy was charged with driving while intoxicated. At his trial the following September, Reedy testified that he hadn’t been behind the wheel that night. He said he had lied to the police and to a priest at the scene of the accident to protect Martin, not knowing he was already dead. The jury found him guilty of driving with a blood alcohol content above the legal limit of 0.1 percent.

Mantle had been the best man at Martin’s fourth wedding and was an honorary pallbearer at his funeral. He sat in the front pew at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York between George M. Steinbrenner and Richard M. Nixon. Afterward, he told the
Washington Times
, “I have no idea why I liked him so much. We never could figure it out.”

Ford and Mantle hosted their last fantasy camp a few years later. Ford withdrew from the partnership—he and Mantle’s sons cited interference by camp director Wanda Greer as the source of tension between the old friends. “She wanted me out so bad,” Ford said. “I was getting sick of it anyhow. We never, never had a problem over the fantasy camp.”