The Last Boy (45 page)

In fact, he had not kept the secret entirely to himself; nor was Anna Bea his only abuser. He had confided pieces of the story in Linda Howard, Greer Johnson, Larry Meli, and Mike Klepfer. One evening at Mickey Mantle’s, Meli was watching a football game with him at the bar. Meli was troubled by Mantle’s decision to take Johnson to the house in Dallas when the boys were there and have her sleep in his wife’s bed. “I told him how wrong it was,” Meli said.

Mantle told him about Anna Bea. “It was almost like ‘Screw the sons, look what I had to go through!’ ” Meli said. “He was sober and melancholy. Mickey was so embarrassed that it was a half sister that he said it was an aunt!”

Years earlier Mantle had raised the subject with Klepfer over a hand of gin rummy. Theirs was an intense two-year friendship late in Mantle’s life, so close that the Klepfers outfitted an apartment in their basement for Mantle and Johnson. Mantle fished in their pond, tucked into Katy’s home cooking, and learned how to build a fire in the fireplace. On trips to New York, he and Mike would play cards while Katy and Greer went shopping. The two men had a natural kinship. Like Mutt, Klepfer’s father, Ellis, was a miner—he went to work in the coal mines of Kentucky at age nine. Like Mutt, whose mother died when he was eight years old, Ellis got little maternal nurturing; his mother, Mike said, was “a coal-town whore.”

He told Mantle about his father’s wretched childhood. “That’s when he broke out talking about his early childhood. He started telling me, ‘If you wanna know about abuse as a child…’

“And then he more or less shut up, went quiet, and said, ‘I can tell you stories about that. I just know what it’s like.’

“He asked, had anybody ever fiddled with me?”

Klepfer had never told anyone what had happened to him on the porch on Doubleday Street in Binghamton, New York. But he told Mantle the
whole story. “They were playing with my johnson. I didn’t know what was going on because I was so damned scared.”

“Yeah, I know about that,” Mantle said.

He listened closely as Klepfer described his inability to fend off the assault. Like Little Mickey, Klepfer was a small boy who grew into a hulk of a man. Mantle had osteomyelitis; Klepfer was asthmatic. “I couldn’t fight anybody because I couldn’t breathe. And Mickey laughed and said, ‘Everybody talks about my arms and how strong I was. I was a piss-ass sissy, too.’”

Mantle told him that an older boy in the neighborhood had pulled down his pants and fondled him and that it had happened more than once. “He told me, ‘Well, that’s how I learned how to run like lightning,’ ” Klepfer recalled. “‘If I got wind that something like that was going to happen, I got the hell outta there. And I could run.’

“What happened to him as a kid drove him nuts. He lived with his situation where he was being abused for a while, long enough for it to be indelible. It was something that he had never forgotten.”

Mantle alluded to the abuse by Anna Bea but never told Klepfer the details. Anytime the subject came up after that, Klepfer said, “He would just get drunk.
Massively
drunk. The drunkest ever. There’d be no talking about it the next day.”

There is no way to know how often or for how long he was abused by the neighborhood boys or by his half sister—he told Merlyn that it continued until Anna Bea moved out of the house. She worked in the bars around Commerce, married, and died young. By 1956, when New York scribes descended on Commerce to document his all-American childhood, Anna Bea had been written out of the family script.

In high school, he was seduced by one of his teachers, Merlyn told me. “She just laid over him,” she said. He took her to Independence, Missouri, to meet his roommates his first year in the minors. “She was a hot date,” Jack Hasten recalled.

Mantle laughed when he told Greer Johnson about her decades later: “That’s how I got through high school was screwing the teachers. That’s the only way I was able to graduate.”

No doubt the “Mrs. Robinson” attentions of an older woman made him the envy of the Independence Yankees. But the seduction was no joking matter. It may have assuaged lingering, unarticulated hurts and
insecurities but it was also a violation of innocence and trust, an exploitation of a hormonally charged teenager who wet his bed until he left home to go away that season.

Richard Gartner, a New York psychologist and the author of the definitive work on the subject,
Betrayed as Boys
, says the incidence of abuse does not necessarily determine its impact, nor does the age at which it occurs. “I’ve treated people who have had one relatively mild incident and yet were deeply affected all their lives, sometimes more than people who were chronically abused,” he said.

Abuse by an older sibling is a violation of the gravest taboo—incest. Abuse of a heterosexual boy by other boys undermines an emerging sense of manhood. Abuse by an older woman in a position of authority is an abuse of power, even if, Gartner says, it “made him feel like a man.”

Every boundary had been crossed—familial, gender, professional—which could account for why Mantle crossed so many lines of behavior and decorum. If it was okay for others to violate his boundaries, it was okay for him to violate those of others.

To experts in the field, Mantle’s story is consistent with a cluster of symptoms often seen in survivors of childhood abuse: sexual compul-sivity or extreme promiscuity; alcoholism or substance abuse; difficulty regulating emotions and self-soothing; bed wetting; a distorted sense of self; self-loathing, shame, and guilt; a schism between a public image and the private self; feelings of isolation and mistrust; and difficulty getting close to others.

Those deeply held feelings of isolation and shame abide. Mantle nodded tearfully when Bob Costas told him in a 1994 interview that he had always sensed a deep sadness in him. “I don’t get close to people,” Mantle replied, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. “I’m weird or something, I guess.”

One night, over a candlelight dinner at the Klepfers’ house, after grace had been said, Mantle looked up at his friends and asked: “Why do you people have anything to do with me?”

Today, many victims of childhood sexual abuse are diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder—the term used to distinguish long-term trauma. “A sense of a foreshortened future” is one of the clinical criteria for making a diagnosis of complex PTSD

Like many abused boys, Mantle may well have downplayed these early traumatic experiences. He would have had good cause to do so. As Gartner points out, American culture leaves no room for men to see themselves as victims; if they are victims they are not men. Nowhere would it have been more essential to hide those feelings than in a major league locker room.

On Labor Day, 1988, Mantle returned to Cooperstown—as a paying customer—with Greer Johnson and Mike and Katy Klepfer. He told them that he hadn’t been back to the Hall of Fame since his induction. In fact, he had filmed
A Comedy Salute to Baseball
there with Billy Crystal in March 1985. As they got into the car with a thermos of Bloody Marys—Katy always poured light—Johnson remembered the five-by-seven-inch autographed cards she always brought along when they went out in public. She went back into the house and got a thick stack of them, anticipating a swarm in Cooperstown.

Mantle was wearing a white Oklahoma Sooners windbreaker, a white Sooners cap, and a pink golf shirt. Though he had seen his plaque when it was presented to him in 1974, he had never taken the time to visit the Hall of Fame gallery on the first floor, where the earliest inductees are honored. Klepfer hung back as Mantle read every plaque, squinting through the dollar cheaters that Klepfer had purchased at the drugstore. Then he put his hands up to his face and cried. “ ‘Y’know,’ he says, ‘until today I thought I was a pretty good ballplayer.’”

Klepfer thought, “He was humbled by greatness.”

Or perhaps they were “what if” tears. Mantle articulated his regret in a private conversation with Costas: “He said, without a thimble-full of bravado, but wistfully and with affection and respect for the other players involved, ‘I know I had as much ability as Willie. And I had probably more all-around ability than Stan or Ted. The difference is none of them have to look back and wonder how good they could have been.’”

No one disturbed him. No one asked for an autograph. No one recognized Mickey Mantle—not even the staff at the Hall of Fame Museum.
“Toward the end, he took his hat off and said, ‘Well, maybe if I don’t have my ball cap on they’ll recognize me,’” Klepfer said.

They posed outside on the front steps, trying to attract attention.
Hey, Mickey, a little over to the side, Mickey. Hi, Mickey! How are you, Mick? You’re here in Cooperstown!
No one noticed. They had lunch at the Otesaga, the old inn on the lake where inductees annually gather for the Hall of Fame Weekend. Klepfer tried one more time. “‘Do you have a reservation for Mantle?’ The girl says, ‘No, I’m sorry, we don’t. You don’t need a reservation. You can go right in.’”

As he waited for Mickey Mantle’s flight to arrive at the airport in Palm Springs, Mark Greenberg reminded himself, “He’s just another drunk.” Greenberg was an administrator at the Betty Ford Center, and Mickey Mantle was his childhood hero. When the plane taxied to the gate, he steeled himself, “Don’t get sucked up in who this guy was. Get sucked up in who he is.”

Five days earlier, Greenberg had found a note on his desk saying, “Call Mickey Mantle.” Since then, he had been on the phone negotiating Mantle’s admission, finding a bed, and making concessions he didn’t want to make to celebrity. But nothing in his professional training prepared him for the moment Mantle stepped off the plane. “All he was was a broken-down alcoholic,” Greenberg recalled. “For Mickey to have to come face-to-face with the fact that he’s being admitted for his disease that’s torn himself and his family apart—just
really breaking down at that airport—I stood there. I didn’t know what to do.”

Mantle had hit bottom. An MRI showed what his friend Jim Hays already knew: “His liver looked like a doorstop.” He would need a transplant eventually.

Ten years of warnings and hospitalizations, abnormal blood tests and panic attacks, binges and blackouts—
I did what?
—had coagulated into a forgotten decade, which was just as well, given his most egregious behavior. Even his dearest, most forgiving friends were sometimes appalled. Barbara Wolf, who lived at Lake Oconee, cooked for him the way his mother did—“none of that plate art stuff”—chicken, and biscuits, and beans, and a tropical fruit trifle made with angel food cake, sugar-free, fat-free vanilla pudding, fat-free milk, Cool Whip, and tropical fruit cocktail. “All out of cans,” she said. “But he loved it.”

One night, after dinner, he blew his nose in one of her good linen napkins. Dismayed, she reprimanded him. “When I called him on it, he handed it over to me and said, ‘Do you want me to sign it for you?’”

He was invited back, but thereafter she used paper napkins.

The wife of his Georgia physician, Dave Ringer, would not allow him to be around their children. You never knew what he might say—like the message he scrawled on a ball autographed for one young boy: “You’re lucky. Your mom has nice tits. Mickey Mantle.”

He raised $220,000 for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Oklahoma through the annual golf tournament he hosted at the Shangri-La Resort in Joplin, Missouri, according to former president and treasurer Mike Bass. But, one year he was so offensive that Jimmy Dean, the country singer, summoned Jim “Mudcat” Grant, the pitcher turned poet, to the microphone for some soothing verse. “Well, Mud, I think you better read your poem at this time to calm the people down,” Grant recalled him saying.

Moodiness devolved into nastiness and paranoia. He started to get “belligerent and mean in 1992,” David wrote, calling his sons by “hyphenated names.” He squeezed Bill Liederman’s testicles every time he saw him at the restaurant. “Just enough so it hurt a little bit,” Liederman said.

The restaurant staff saw what he was doing to himself, starting at ten in the morning with his “Breakfast of Champions”—brandy, Kahlua, and cream—but they were too intimidated to say anything. “God forbid,” said onetime chef Randy Pietro. “This is Mickey Mantle.”

Some nights when he was in Dallas, he would call his sons to come get him but couldn’t say where he was. True said sometimes the Dallas police drove him home to get him off the road. He lost a rental car he didn’t remember parking. He bought a ’49 Plymouth convertible at his own charity auction that he didn’t remember buying. Sometimes he locked himself up in the house at night, not to prevent intruders from getting in but to keep himself from leaving. Because when he went out, Hays said, he might pour two shots of vodka into a glass of wine. Or decide he liked the looks of the concoction the folks at the next table were drinking at the Harbor Club—lime shooters, he’d never had one of those—and tell the bartender to bring twenty of them.

There were moments when the 100-proof scrim lifted. Like the night he called Tony Kubek from a Dallas restaurant where he was having dinner with Merlyn and the boys—a $700 to $800 bar bill wasn’t uncommon. “He looked at the check, which he never did, and saw what it was for—round after round of drinks, bottle after bottle after bottle of wine,” Kubek said. “He said that’s when he knew there was a problem, and it was all of them.”

But when his filmmaker pal, Tom Molito, screened footage for him that he had shot at a banquet of Mantle at his drunken worst in an effort to make him confront his alcoholism, it made no impression.

He told True and Liederman that he was having trouble performing sexually. Sometimes he spoke of suicide. “I’m not sure he cared if he died,” Merlyn told me. “Mick just felt guilty. He wanted to lay down on the railroad tracks.”

“The misery would be over,” David said.

One day he asked True to meet him for a drink. “He told me he was thinking of killing himself,” True said. “Yeah, it scared me. I stayed with him and talked to him and talked to him.”

The moment of crisis passed. “We got off on other subjects because he was drunk,” True said.

The breaking point came in December 1993 at a fund-raiser for the
Harbor Club’s Christmas Fund that Mantle and Johnson had organized to raise money for gifts for needy children in Greene County, Georgia. Mantle was holding court at a table surrounded by good ol’ boys and enablers, some of whom worshiped at the church of the preacher Wayne Monroe, who administered the fund. Monroe stopped by the table to thank Mantle for his efforts. As he walked away, “there was a lot of noise—all of a sudden a lot of laughter,” Monroe said. “I never heard anything that was said. But Greer come running up to me afterward and said, as I was leaving, ‘Oh, please, forgive Mickey for what he said. He didn’t mean it. He’s drunk.’”

What he said was: “Here comes the fuckin’ preacher.”

What upset Monroe most was the complicity of the other revelers. “Because they were sittin’ with Mickey Mantle, they just felt great and wonderful,” he said. “And they were all laughin’ at what he said. ‘Yeah, Mickey! Tell that guy!’”

The next morning, Mantle had no memory of the incident. When Johnson told him what happened he was distraught because he thought Monroe had heard him. “He said, ‘I need professional help,’” Johnson recalled. “And I said, ‘Yes, you do. I can’t help you, and you can’t help yourself.’”

It was a sobering realization and perhaps, Dominic Sandifer said, the first adult decision of Mantle’s life. In making it, he was following his youngest son’s example.

One night that fall, while on a trip to California for Upper Deck, Danny had disappeared from the hotel where he and his father were staying. He went out for a drink and blacked out for three days. When he came to, he put himself on a plane and checked into the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage. “Dad never saw me again for a month,” Danny recounted in
A Hero All His Life
. “I ducked out on him.”

It was the only way to save his life and his marriage. “It ruined our lives,” he said of his addiction. “You wake up, you’re thirty-five. It’s such a waste of time and life. When I went to Betty Ford, I was thirty-three. I already had a little bit of liver damage. I had been drinking pretty hard for ten years.”

His wife, Kay, would join him at the Betty Ford Center soon after. Furious and threatened, Mantle refused to attend Family Week, a five-day educational and therapeutic program, during week three of the monthlong
stay. Merlyn went alone, fortifying herself on the plane with vodka to steady her nerves in the air. She didn’t drink during Family Week but ordered a stiff one at the airport as she got ready to board the flight home. A high school friend who had come to see her off, a recovering alcoholic, asked whether she thought it was wise to drink in front of Danny and Kay. In the air, she began to chastise herself. “Here you are so happy that your child got sober and here you are still drinking,” she wrote in
A Hero All His Life
.

That was her sober date: November 2, 1993. She joined Al-Anon, the support group for relatives and friends of alcoholics, and got herself a sponsor. “Al-Anon saved my life,” she told me. “I was so angry when I got there. It helped get rid of the anger.”

Danny’s example was deeply affecting. Roy True and Pat Summerall, who received a new liver after his own stay at Betty Ford, had urged Mantle to check in. At lunch one day with Danny and Sandifer, Summerall told Mantle, “Mickey, you need to get help.” That led to a series of conversations. After a round of golf one morning at Preston Trail, Mantle asked Bill Hooten to join him and Summerall at their favorite watering hole. “He asked Pat some very serious questions,” Hooten recalled. “ ‘What’s it like after? Was it tough getting through? Do you miss it?’”

He also asked, “Did you have any fun?”

“I said, ‘Mick, I don’t think that’s what you go to do,’” Summerall recalled. “He said, ‘Do they get into any religious stuff?’

“I said, ‘Yeah, that’s part of recovery.’

“Finally one day he asked me if I could get him in. I called a friend and said I needed a bed. He said there were no beds.”

Summerall told him who the patient was. A bed became available on Friday, January 7, 1994.

Hooten was surprised to learn that Mantle had registered under his own name and asked, “You think that’s wise?”

Mantle told him about seeing Ryne Duren on TV talking about his recovery. “That guy, when he was playing ball, was a wreck and he whipped it. He goes around talking, and he does a lot of good. If I can go out there and come back and the fact that I’ve whipped the drinking can help somebody else, then, sure, I want that known.”

When he met Mark Greenberg at the airport in Palm Springs, Mantle reiterated the pledge.

At the Betty Ford Center, he was just the guy in Room 202, and he didn’t much like it. He called the other patients inmates. He referred to treatment as doing time. He was contemptuous of gays in the program, and when he was assigned a roommate after having had a room to himself, Greenberg said, “He took all the coverings off the bed and put it in the bathroom and slept the night in the bathroom.”

The life of a patient at the Betty Ford Center is as structured as that of a major league baseball player. Counselors tell you where to be and when to be there: 6:30
A.M.
wake-up, breakfast, morning walk, therapeutic chores (making beds, doing laundry, setting and clearing tables), group therapy, individual therapy, spiritual counseling, and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. There are rules against fraternizing with other patients and rules about contact with the outside world.

For the first five days patients are not allowed to make telephone calls. Mantle broke the rule almost immediately, Greenberg said, walking to a building on the campus of the Eisenhower Medical Center, “requesting to get the hell out of here.”

He called Summerall three or four times. “I said, ‘You’re not thinking about leaving, are you?’” Summerall recalled. “He said, ‘If you ever see me taking another drink, I want you to promise you’ll kill me.’”

The Betty Ford Center was founded by the former first lady after she was successfully treated for alcoholism at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Long Beach, California. By 2009, the center had treated more than 90,000 patients—among them Liza Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor, and Chevy Chase. Greenberg laughed when Mantle asked for a pass to do an autograph show for Upper Deck. “He was saying that he was going to lose a lot of money,” Greenberg said. “I said, ‘There is absolutely no way that Mickey is getting a pass to leave treatment to go to work and sign autographs.’”

In Greenberg’s view, Mantle was a classic example of what Robert Millman, a New York psychiatrist and former medical adviser to Major League Baseball, calls “acquired situational narcissism”—a syndrome peculiar to the inhabitants of a celebrity caste, who are attended to by flacks,
bodyguards, agents, lawyers, personal assistants, and groupies in whose rapt eyes they see the reflection of their own importance. At Betty Ford, Mantle was looking through the mirror crack’d.

Seeing himself in the despairing gaze of the other broken human beings there was devastating. Far easier to hide in the bathroom or behind polished empty sound bites than to introduce himself at an AA meeting with the words everyone in recovery must utter: “Hi, I’m Mick, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Take the pain”—that was the fatherly advice he always gave his sons. That’s the way he had led his life. But tracing the path that had led him to Betty Ford was excruciating. The therapists wanted him to talk about his father. He had steadfastly refused to go beyond pat bromides in conversation with friends and teammates, with Herb Gluck, the ghostwriter of
The Mick
, and with Angelo Pizzo, the screenwriter his family had approved to write the film version of Mantle’s autobiography. The most Gluck could elicit was an apocryphal tale about his teammate Bobby Brown, whose father also invested his thwarted ambitions in his son. “…when you get totally wrapped up in dreams about somebody else’s future,” Mantle wrote, “…they become your own. That’s the kind of background Bobby had, same as mine, insofar as father-son relationships go.”

But finally, the guy in Room 202 had to come face-to-face with his father. If Mutt was the central character in the Mantle narrative, “the appropriateness of his grief” for his father emerged as a central theme in his treatment, Greenberg said. He had never said goodbye to Mutt. He had not called or written during the two months Mutt lay dying at the Spears Chiropractic Hospital in Denver. “Up until coming in to the Center, Mutt was still very much alive in this guy’s life and still controlling him in his actions,” Greenberg said.

At the Betty Ford Center patients are required to write “grief letters,” addressing past relationships and patterns that control or contribute to their disease. Some patients write to their addiction, others write to their drug of choice. Mantle addressed one letter: “To the drunk who shares my body” but didn’t complete it. He finished his letter to Mutt.