The Last Boy (44 page)

So the party continued. Johnson says she tried hard to get him to quit, or at least cut down, talking to bartenders behind his back to “make him think he was getting a strong drink when actually he wasn’t, claiming I had a headache so he’d go back to the room and quit drinking.”

But every white guy of a certain age wanted to be able to say, “I bought a round for The Mick.” And then laugh or look the other way when he made a fool of himself. “I asked him once if he ever met Elvis,” his filmmaker friend Tom Molito said. “He didn’t understand why I asked. Mickey Mantle was not destroyed by alcohol. He was destroyed by celebrity.”

One night at a restaurant in New York, McDowell ran into Mantle at the bar, where a big-shot sportscaster was buying him round after round. “I turned to him, and I said, ‘Don’t you understand that you’re killing that man?’

“And he said, ‘You don’t understand, we’re friends.’ ”

On opening night at Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant on Central Park South, the hero came in the back door. The owners, Bill Liederman and John Lowy, set him up on a raised platform at a six top in the back room, where he received his public in a natty Yankee blue tuxedo.

When Liederman and Lowy first showed him the space at 42 Central Park South, they thought it might be too uptown for his taste. They didn’t know that it was the former site of Harry’s Bar, Mantle’s home away from home during so many baseball seasons when he lived at the St. Moritz next door. “I spent so much time here they used to call it Mickey’s Place,” he said at the ribbon cutting. “And now it is.”

He wanted it to be a grown-up joint like Toots Shor’s. He didn’t have to put any money down. “When you hit 536 home runs, you don’t have to invest any money,” Roy True said.

The agreement called for him to receive $100,000 the first year and
$80,000 each year thereafter, plus 7 percent of the equity. At the press conference announcing the deal, he promised, “Whenever I’m in town I’ll be here, passed out at the bar.”

Opening night was anarchy. Everybody showed—Yogi and Billy and Whitey, The Scooter and George Steinbrenner, Sly Stallone and Frank Gifford, Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite, Raquel Welch and Angie Dickinson, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Bruce Willis, Barbra Streisand, Bob Costas, and Howard Cosell, who let it be known, “Without me there would be no Mickey Mantle.”

The line at the front door stretched down the block to the Plaza Hotel. The crowd grew cold and unruly and large—at least three or four times the maximum capacity of 215. Not long after the doors opened, the New York City fire marshals threatened to shut them. “We didn’t hire security, which was stupid,” Lowy said. “We took turns trying to keep people away from him. Everybody wanted a piece of him. There were so many writers. Channel 9 and 11 were doing live broadcasts.”

The only no-shows were DiMaggio, who wouldn’t come, former New York governor Hugh Carey, who couldn’t get in the front door, and Merlyn, who wasn’t invited. She had wanted to accompany him, but so had Greer Johnson.

Mantle and Johnson dressed for the party down the block at the Park Lane Hotel, where their friends Mike and Katy Klepfer had a suite. They had gotten to know each other when Klepfer hired Mantle to appear at the thirtieth-anniversary luncheon for his trucking company in Binghamton, New York, five months earlier. It was a $20,000 gig—Mantle gave $5,000 each to Martin and Ford. When Danny Mantle located Mantle and Johnson at the Klepfers’ suite, he said he was going stag. Mantle was distressed about lying to his wife, who had also been left out of Martin’s recent wedding. He told Katy, “My father would be upset that I didn’t take Merlyn to these things.”

She told him, “Your dad’s been gone a long time, Mickey. You’ve got to make up your own mind.”

Katy sensed Mantle wanted the kind of family life she and Mike had and wanted to tell him “to just go back home.” Finally, one day she did. He said, “That’s where I belong.”

Mantle was nervous and sober when they left for the party, a result,
Mike Klepfer said, of Johnson’s edict: “You drink before an event, and I leave.” He was also conflicted about Merlyn. “The whole night he felt miserable about it,” Liederman said.

Klepfer was a former New York State trooper and trucker who, at six feet seven, had the presence and heft to help establish order in the chaos. “Myself and a New York City policeman, in civvies, we just held people back,” Klepfer said. They funneled invited guests and crashers through the front door, all of whom wanted to be able to say they were at Mickey Mantle’s the night he reclaimed New York.

Many of the notable invitees took one look at the mob scene and left. The crush was such, Lowy said, that “the hors d’oeuvres never made it past the kitchen door.”

Mantle and his party did not last long. A snarky item in the
Daily News
reported, “Mickey Mantle apparently had to get away from it all during the wild preview party Friday for his new restaurant on Central Park South. At the height of the comings and goings by the curious, The Mick was nowhere to be found. Where was he? At another restaurant, our spies report—an eatery in the nearby Park Lane Hotel. With Mickey were Billy Martin and his bride, Jill, and some mutual friends. They chatted away while a couple of doors away Mickey’s guests kept looking for him.”

The next morning, they went back to survey the wreckage. Between breakage, booze, and cigarette burns in the protective plastic coating on the brand-new wooden floor, Liederman figured the evening cost $25,000. “We were all cleaning,” Lowy said. “Myself and Bill and Jill were on our hands and knees. Billy and Mickey were sitting at a table, saying, ‘Hey, you missed a spot.’ ”

After nearly four decades and four sons, the “arranged” marriage of Mickey and Merlyn was irretrievably broken. Long after his career ended, Mantle continued to live a ballplayer’s existence—home and away. For much of the last decade of his life, he divided his time between Dallas, where he built a new house that he would share with Danny and his wife,
Kay, and Greensboro, Georgia, where he shared a condominium on a man-made lake with Greer Johnson. The name on the front door was hers. “It was the last real relationship outside his marriage,” True said.

Mantle had told Merlyn he was leaving a month before the opening of the restaurant. Their marriage counselor had recommended a separation, telling Merlyn, “Mickey is totally controlled by fear.”

In
A Hero All His Life
, Merlyn offered a remarkably candid portrait of their relationship and its dissolution. She wrote that as she helped him carry his belongings to his car, “He said, ‘You will always be my wife. I know I’m giving up the best thing I’ve ever had.’

“I said, ‘I don’t even understand what you’re talking about. What do you mean? I will always be your wife, but you don’t want a life with me?’ ”

He left without another word, Merlyn wrote, returning later in the day—she wasn’t sure why. While he was there, Johnson called. “She said, ‘I really love Mickey.’ I said, ‘I really love him, too.’ ”

There had been so many women, so many blondes, including, he had bragged, Angie Dickinson and Doris Day. “I remember Mickey telling me one time that he woke up in bed and there was a blonde there,” Pat Summerall said. “He didn’t remember who she was. He picked up her hand, and it was Merlyn. She said, ‘You sonofabitch, I married you.’ ”

David told his mother the day I visited: “People called you Mrs. God.”

“No,” she replied firmly, “they called me a saint.”

Merlyn put up a good fight. He never hurt her, though, he wrote later, “she put a lump or two on my head.” With good cause. One year at dinner during fantasy camp, with Mickey and their sons, he asked their waitress for her phone number. She took Merlyn aside and told her about it. Back at the hotel, Merlyn changed out of her party dress and put on a tracksuit—fighting clothes. She threw a bar stool at him, breaking the glass coffee table. He was sprawled out on the bed, too drunk to notice. “I jumped on the bed and straddled him. I started slapping his face, from one side to the next, like a windshield wiper. All the boys were in the room, and they were unsure how to go about pulling me off him.”

“Hey, Merlyn, that hurts.”

The guests in the next room called the police, who sent them to separate quarters. He called a few minutes later, pleading, “Honey, come back and sleep with me.” She ran down the hallway to be with him.

One thing Greer Johnson and Merlyn Mantle agreed on: he had no respect for women. Johnson traced that back to Mutt. “He always indicated to me that his dad really didn’t have any respect for women,” Johnson said.

Mantle also led her to believe that Mutt had an eye for the ladies. Merlyn said he told her about one paternal indiscretion. “I think it was a brother’s uncle’s wife,” she told me. “I don’t think it was where he thought about leaving the family. It could have been just a one-night stand.”

Mantle had plenty of those.

“Mantle loved women,” Roy True said, “then treated them like crap.”

He astonished his old friend Marjorie Bolding by calling from hotel rooms asking her to say hello to whoever happened to be sharing his bed. “Those sexual encounters were absolutely nothing to him,” Bolding said. “They were like an exercise for him.”

His language reflected that. George Macris, a fantasy camp umpire, recalled the indignation of an irate camper after Mantle had insulted his wife. She had been hanging around too much, getting in the way. “Her husband goes to Whitey and complains. ‘I’m paying $5,000. I shouldn’t have to put up with this.’ So at the banquet Mickey gets up and says, ‘I want to apologize. I wasn’t a gentleman. I called Mrs. X something I shouldn’t have.’ Then he leans into the microphone and says, ‘For the rest of you who don’t know, I called her a fucking cunt.’ ”

When Johnson chastised him for his language at a Bible Belt autograph show, he turned and looked at her. “Almost like he’s hurt,” she said. “He said, ‘Nobody has ever told me that before.’ ”

He could be verbally and publicly abusive to her, too. Tom Molito attended a planning session at the restaurant for the 500 Home Run Club video he produced in 1989. Johnson was the only woman at the table. One of the men asked, “What’s your role?”

“Mickey steps in,” Molito said. “He says, ‘She sucks my dick.’

“She said, ‘Yeah, Mick, but not tonight.’ ”

Because he was The Mick, Molito didn’t say anything when Mantle made a pass at his wife one night at dinner.

Johnson says she and Mantle talked about getting married. With or without a piece of paper, she had come to regard herself as the de facto Mrs. Mickey Mantle. The real Mrs. Mantle received this odd piece of news from her husband the day he left her: “I don’t want a divorce but you can have one if you want it.”

Quickly, the separation turned nasty. She hired an attorney. He tapped her phone. Mickey, Jr., was so hurt by the separation, Merlyn wrote, that “he just sort of faded into the scenery” for a while. At one point, David didn’t see his father for almost a year. She turned increasingly to alcohol for solace. Though she could no longer look to True for legal advice, he told her in confidence, “Merlyn, don’t get a divorce. Mick doesn’t want one.”

Mantle offered different explanations to different people for his odd notion of marital fidelity. “He really loved Merlyn,” True said, echoing the sentiments of many friends and relatives. “He said, ‘I love her. She’s like my sister, though.’

“He told Greer, ‘I’m never going to divorce my wife.’ Greer would end up angry. They had great battles over that.”

He told Liederman he couldn’t divorce Merlyn because “the only thing she ever wanted to be was Mrs. Mickey Mantle.”

He told his Georgia friend Ron Wolf over a drink at the Harbor Club, “I never have any intentions of ever divorcing Merlyn. You can understand why, I guess, when I provide her with two condominiums in downtown Dallas, an American Express card, a nice Mercedes. Why should she ever want to leave?”

He told his Dallas attorney friend Troy Phillips, “I didn’t want to put her through the embarrassment of divorce.”

“I said, ‘My God, Mickey, how can you embarrass her more than you have?’ ” Phillips replied.

He told Pat Summerall that he did not have “the courage to get divorced or separated from the boys. But he was telling Greer at the same time that he was very much in love with her and wanted to marry her.”

He told Carmen Berra, “I don’t want you to worry about Merlyn. I will never divorce her. She will get everything. Greer is an employee. She is a ten percent woman.”

Mantle’s first panic attack occurred in the air. In April 1987, he had to be carried off a plane in Dallas—he thought he was having a heart attack. His heart was breaking, but not physiologically. The center could no longer hold.

One night, sitting at his booth in the restaurant with Liederman and Lowy, a woman approached his table. Autographs were on the house for diners, and Mantle kept a stack of postcards with him for that purpose. “He’s in a great mood,” Lowy said. “He’s the perfect Mickey. He starts to write the autograph. The pen runs out of ink. He takes it and hurls it into the wall. He threw it so hard and he was so furious, she just stood there and she started to cry. She finally had to leave.

“He could be one person one moment and a totally different person the next and go back and forth—though usually once it flipped into the bad Mickey, it didn’t flip back. When he was the good Mickey, he was funny, friendly, generous, kind, gracious even. But he could turn on a dime.”

The two Micks were as puzzling as they were unnerving. Lowy thought, “There was something from a very early age that happened to him.”

Something Mantle had never confided to his wife. One night, long after they had separated, they spent an evening in Dallas watching a TV movie about a child who had been sexually molested. “That happened to me,” he said.

He told her that often when Mutt and Lovell went out to a Friday-night barn dance, her teenage daughter, Anna Bea, babysat for her half siblings. He was four or five years old when she began molesting him, pulling down his pants and fondling him while her friends, “teenagers and older,” giggled and smirked. “They started playing with him,” Merlyn told me. “And, of course, he got an erection. They laughed at him. He remembered how embarrassed he was.” That was the only time they ever spoke about it. “It could have been why he turned out the way he did,” she told me.

“He had kept a secret to himself for nearly his entire life,” she wrote in
A Hero All His Life
. “That night I thought I understood more clearly
than I ever had why his ego was so fragile. He was a loner who loved a crowd, when they cheered from a distance. He never respected women. He demonstrated it in the ladies he chose for his one-night stands, in the crude way he talked and acted in front of women when he drank. And in the way he treated me, with too much credit for raising our sons and too little for being an adoring and faithful wife.”