The Last Boy (48 page)

“Will you send me a copy?”

“Yeah, I will. And I’ll be scared about whether you’ll like it.”

“I’ll like it,” he said. “I can tell. I’ll like it.”

The limo pulled up to the curb outside the terminal and the driver got out to open the door. Mickey put on his cowboy hat and ducked his head the way he always did rounding the bases. He said goodbye and smiled that smile, the one part of him that never got old.

I don’t remember whether I kept my promise to send him the story. I do know I thought long and hard about whether to do so. I didn’t have to think about whether to write what he’d told me
—
he said it was off the record. Eleven years later, when I heard that he had entered the Betty Ford Center for treatment of alcoholism, I wondered if I’d done the right thing.

On March 19, 1995, Mickey Mantle went home to Commerce to bury his mother. Lovell’s surviving children—Mickey, Ray, Roy, Larry, Ted, and Barbara—gathered at the cemetery, where an empty space on Mutt’s headstone had been waiting for her for forty-three years. Her children didn’t see much of each other, maybe two or three times a year, except, of course, the twins, who worked back-to-back shifts in the casinos in Vegas for years and lived in houses with adjoining yards. In college football season, they consulted Larry, the football coach, on the point spread.

Barbara hadn’t seen her famous big brother since he had gotten out of rehab. She was glad to see him looking so well and made a point of saying so.

He had made it clear that he didn’t want a lot of people at the funeral just as he hadn’t wanted them at Billy’s, which puzzled her. Maybe, she thought, he didn’t want people to see him cry. Maybe he was just tired of
burying people. “I hope I’m next,” he told Danny’s wife, Kay, “because I’m not going through this shit again.”

He had said the same thing when Roger Maris and Billy Martin were buried.

For a long time, he had kept his distance from Lovell, which wasn’t hard to understand, given his schedule and her cantankerous ways. Years passed without a visit, and those did not always go well. Once she took a swat at her grandson David, which did not sit well with his daddy at all. She had never remarried, and lived for many years with Barbara’s family in Oklahoma City. In the car on the way back to Barbara’s after a visit in Dallas, she asked her famous son to arrange a tryout with the Yankees for Barbara’s son. He demurred, saying he had never seen the boy play and didn’t know how good he was. “She said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you one thing, he’s better ’n you were!’” said his friend Joe Warren, who went along for the ride. “We got his mother to his sister’s house. We took her suitcase in. His mom walked in the door, and Mickey said, ‘Let’s go.’ We walked out the front door, and first thing he said, ‘Did you hear what she said?’ I think that really stung him.”

Lovell moved in with Faye Davis, Ted’s widow, for six months before Alzheimer’s disease forced them to move her into assisted living. She was a big woman, and it took two people to get her out of bed. “I don’t think he had a great lot of motherly love for her,” Davis said, and she could understand why. “The mother-in-law from Hell,” she called her. “After she got Alzheimer’s she was as nice as she could be.”

Mantle paid for her care and paid a lot more attention after he got sober, arranging for flowers to be delivered to her room every day. After she was buried beside Mutt, he and his siblings posed for a family photograph just as they had at the funeral for Barbara’s first husband. The shutter clicked and Mickey said, “Well, guys, I guess I’ll see you at the next funeral,” Larry recalled.

Mantle knew time was short when he left the Betty Ford Center. He peppered Danny and Kay with questions before they went out for the evening and sometimes begged them not to go.
How do you call an ambulance? What do I do if I can’t breathe?

He told his minor league teammate Jack Hastens, “I’m gonna die.”

“I said, ‘No, you’re not.’

“He said, ‘Yes, I am. I’ve led a terrible life. I’ve done too many bad things.’”

He set about righting the things he could in the time he had left. He left everything to Merlyn—including his name. According to his will—executed after they separated in 1989—Mantle provided that his entire estate would go into trust for Merlyn’s benefit during her lifetime and thereafter to his sons and their heirs. At the time of his death, he and Merlyn jointly held assets of $6.9 million in cash and property, half of which by law automatically went to her; the other half constituted his estate. The will, on file in public documents in Texas, provided that his sons would be able to license his name and his memory in perpetuity.

He also gave them a glimpse of the good heart they so much needed to see and wanted the world to know. “He had a lonely heart and it was a good heart and it was open and it was big, and the mantle he put around him was not his name,” his friend Margie Bolding said. “It was a facade, and he did not like it to be penetrated and it wore him out finally.”

Now, the facade was crumbling. Now he let his boys in. On Father’s Day 1994, the first David could remember sharing with him, Mantle apologized for not being the daddy he should have been. For the first time, he told his boys he loved them.

Danny and David accompanied him to his last autograph show in Atlantic City in early May 1995. The event at Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal was billed as a convocation of Yankee legends—Mantle, DiMaggio, Berra, Rizzuto, and Mr. October. Mantle and DiMaggio shared a private signing room off the main hall. Mantle’s boys had noticed how much more patient he was with the fans who assembled before him, waiting for a purchased signature and hoping for eye contact. He was too accommodating for Joe D., who sent a representative over to Mantle’s table with a request. “He said, ‘Joe D. wants you to quit shaking hands and being nice,’” David recalled. “Dad said, ‘Tell Joe D. to get another room.’”

One thing hadn’t changed: his good ol’ boy sense of humor. At fantasy camp in November 1994, he sported a baseball cap with two pins fixed to the brow: a cross for Jesus and a decal that said
BE HEALTHY EAT YOUR HONEY
.

Steve Donohue, the Yankee trainer, ministered to aching boomer
hamstrings. That week, as he wrapped Mantle’s ravaged knee, the patient grumbled: “All that’s holding this damned thing together is skin.” Doctors had warned him that his liver was too damaged to withstand the stress of knee replacement surgery. He told Donohue he was scared to have another operation. Donohue thought he was scared he wouldn’t wake up.

Mantle entered the Betty Ford Center six weeks later.

One night the winter after Mantle got out of rehab, Donohue brought his wife to Mantle’s restaurant on Central Park South. After he got sober, he sipped diet soda or iced tea at the bar, when he was there at all, maybe an occasional O’Doul’s non-alcoholic brew, which, he said, tasted “a little bit like beer.” Donohue was glad for the opportunity to introduce his wife to The Mick, flaunting their relationship by making small talk. Mantle interrupted the patter. “He told me he loved me,” Donohue said.

Donohue later counted himself among the enablers who were more interested in having a story to tell than in actually listening to him, who wanted to “protect him, not change him. You saw his pain and you wanted to help but you wanted a piece of him more.”

So he plowed ahead with his unfinished thought. “Mickey, did you see Paul?”

“He said, ‘No, Steve, I
love
you,
Steve
.’”

Mantle was on the golf course at Preston Trail with Mark Zibilich when he complained of pain for the first time in his life. “It feels like something wants to crawl out of me,” he told Zibilich, a radiologist on staff at Baylor Hospital.

Indigestion had long been a constant companion. He gobbled antacids like Cracker Jack but had little appetite for anything more. Barbara Wolf noticed that he no longer ate the comfort foods she made especially for him. His ankles were swollen. “Big enough that he tried to hide it with his pants,” said Ryne Duren, who had noticed the telltale sign of liver failure at a golf tournament in 1994, when Mantle sat down and his pants leg hiked up.

At Darrell Royal’s annual tournament that spring, he was scheduled to
team up with Mickey, Jr., but left his room only once to fulfill a charitable commitment: he raised $13,000 for families who had lost loved ones in the Oklahoma City bombing by daring all comers to better his tee shot on a par-3 hole. “He was in pain most of his last year,” Mickey, Jr., wrote later.

Liver failure can make just getting out of bed feel like a forty-hour workweek. His liver had been ravaged by alcohol and by the hepatitis C virus. Both cause cirrhosis or scarring; either can kill. In combination they are a lethal one-two punch. For a patient with hepatitis C, drinking alcohol is like pouring an accelerant onto a smoldering fire.

Mantle had been diagnosed with alcoholic cirrhosis in the early 1980s. When and how he had contracted the virus was unclear; the diagnostic test was not developed until the early 1990s.

His doctors assumed it was the result of a blood transfusion given during one of his many orthopedic surgeries. David Mantle wondered if it could be traced back to a dirty needle in Dr. Feelgood’s office in 1961.

Mantle had long ignored the warnings of his internists, Dave Ringer and Art DeLarios. Ringer couldn’t begin to guess how many drinks ago—how many doctors ago—Mantle had first been told, “The next drink you take may be your last.”

“He’d come in the examining room and just talk and talk and talk,” Ringer said. “It was like, ‘You’re gonna die. This is stupid. Why are you doing this?’”

Then: “all hell broke loose,” Ringer said. “All of a sudden one day he started bleeding and bruising. His platelet count was going crazy.”

Platelets are small, colorless cells essential to blood clotting. A normal count is between 150,000 and 350,000 per microliter. A platelet level below 20,000 is considered life-threatening. Mantle’s count, Ringer said, was about 10,000 per microliter. His bone marrow, damaged by years of alcohol abuse, was unable to produce sufficient platelets to prevent bruising and bleeding. Reviewing the numbers in the hall outside the examining room, Ringer told him, “Okay, this is it, man.”

He needed to be evaluated immediately. Ringer suggested either Emory University Hospital in Atlanta or, if he preferred, there was a smaller facility in nearby Athens, Georgia. “No, I want to go back with my family,” Mantle said.

He entered Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas on May 28,
1995. Roy True was with him when the test results came back. The cancer he had been waiting for all his life had struck where he was most vulnerable: his liver. Blood tests showed an extremely elevated level of alpha-fetoprotein, a marker for liver cancer. That spot on his liver he and Billy Martin liked to joke about appeared as a cancerous mass on a CAT scan. The tumor had blocked the duct that drains bile from the liver, leaving pockets of bacterial and fungal infection. A transplant was his only hope. “He sat up, his legs were hanging over the bed, barefoot,” True said. “He said, ‘You know what, partner? I think I really fucked up.’”

His condition deteriorated rapidly. His liver function was almost nonexistent, and his kidney function was worsening. His stomach became so distended that visitors couldn’t see his face when they stood at the foot of his bed. Jaundice had turned his skin yellow. “School bus yellow,” Danny said.

Like most transplant centers, Baylor required six months of sobriety for an alcoholic patient to qualify for a new organ and required patients to sign a contract promising to return to treatment in the event of a relapse. Dr. David Mulligan, the senior fellow on the surgical team, now the chairman of the Division of Transplant Surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, said doctors spent four days tracking down and discounting rumors that Mantle had been seen drinking beer on a golf course before they put him on the transplant list.

He was listed as “priority status 2,” the designation then used for patients who had been hospitalized in acute care for five days or longer. Only those deemed incapable of surviving a week without a transplant were listed as status 1. By June 7, he had gone to the top of the waiting list. He was the sickest patient of his blood type and weight in an area a third the size of Texas. Doctors told reporters that the wait for a new liver could be as long as a month—in part because Mantle didn’t want sportswriters all over the country taking bets on when he would die. In fact, the average waiting time for a patient with his status and blood type in that region was 3.3 days.

Göran Klintmalm, the Swedish-born head of Baylor’s Regional Transplant Institute, did not know who Mickey Mantle was when he was placed on the waiting list, an inadvertent deterrent against favoritism. “He was treated exactly the same because I just didn’t know any better,” Klintmalm said.

By the time a match was found two days later, Klintmalm had figured it out. “Oh, shit,” he said.

“He knew there would be a tidal wave of outrage and everyone would claim Mantle got favorite treatment,” True said. “Klintmalm knew it would actually harm the program because someone famous got it.”

In fact, Klintmalm said, “When the call came about the donor, I was actually tempted to turn it down. He had just been listed so recently there would immediately be suspicion that we had rigged it. But then it was also obvious that I couldn’t—for ethical reasons—turn this donor down, because he needed the transplant.”

In short, it would have been as unethical to penalize Mantle for his celebrity as it would have been to reward him for it. Anticipating a furor, Klintmalm asked officials at the Southwest Organ Bank (now the Southwest Transplant Alliance) to rerun the listing and asked the director of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) to conduct an independent review of the listing and allocation. “When they reconfirmed that he was number one for that particular donor in this region, I then accepted it,” Klintmalm said.

Mark Zibilich was on call the night before Mantle’s surgery. Mantle’s room was on the VIP floor, 16 Roberts. A sign on the door discouraged visitors: “ ‘Private, contagious, don’t come in w/o a nurse’s permission,’” Zibilich said. “It’s around midnight. I figured family would be there. But I knocked on the door, and there he is in bed. We talked for about half an hour, about golf and Oklahoma—and then he said, ‘Doc, tell them I will do anything ’cause I want to get rid of this thing and be healthy again.’”

Zibilich hadn’t expected Mickey Mantle to be all alone.

The surgery began at 4:30
A.M.
and took nearly seven hours. Robert Goldstein, the senior attending surgeon, was assisted by Mulligan and a general surgeon. Liver transplants are among the most difficult for patients and their surgeons, Mulligan says. In Mantle’s case, the task was complicated by scar tissue left by previous surgeries, pockets of pus, and, most ominously, the unforeseen extent and type of his cancer. At first they saw no evidence that it had spread beyond his liver. Lymph nodes tested during surgery were clear. The backup patient, who had been prepped for surgery, was sent back to his room. (That patient later received a transplant.)