The Last Boy (50 page)

Arthur Caplan has a different view: “Nothing dries up altruism, the willingness to donate organs, faster than the perception that the distribution of the organs is unfair. We wanted to believe something good came of this. There’s this hagiography that The Mick helped boost donor rates. I don’t think there’s any evidence that that’s true.”

Donations to the Southwest Transplant Alliance actually tailed off in 1995, according to UNOS figures, from twenty-two in February to thirteen in August. In the fifteen years since, donations from living and deceased donors have increased dramatically throughout the United States—they are not quite double what they were in 1995—but the numbers are still achingly small.

In 2008, nearly 28,000 people in the United States received transplants of vascular organs (kidney, liver, heart, lung, pancreas, and intestine), 7,990 of which came from deceased donors; nearly 50,000 transplant candidates were added to the queue; 6,600 patients died waiting for organs. “The tragic thing is, Mickey died of cancer before he got the opportunity to do the saving grace,” True said. “That would have been the happy ending.”

By the time Greer Johnson arrived in Dallas in mid-July, Mantle had begun to say his goodbyes. She didn’t realize that was the purpose of her visit. Her disconnect from the gloomy reality of Mantle’s illness was so profound that when she joined him at Pat Summerall’s house, which he had offered for a rendezvous, she thought he would be returning with her to Georgia to continue chemotherapy. They would take a planned trip to Hawaii. They would build a house and a life.

Their business relationship changed after he had signed an exclusive marketing deal with Upper Deck in 1992, and Dominic Sandifer assumed many of her daily duties. (Roy True was the executor of the contract.) Ed Nelson, her pastor in Greensboro, thought he had noticed an increasing distance between Mantle and Johnson. He wasn’t alone in that observation. Kathleen Hampton, Roy True’s assistant and office manager, thought he didn’t want to be married to anyone. Ron and Barbara Wolf had concluded that he was quite content with his two separate lives. When Nelson tried gently to allude to the possibility “that Mickey was on his way out. Ohhh, she don’t wanna hear that.”

Nelson spotted the couple sitting in the Amen Corner of his church on Mother’s Day 1995, when he delivered a sermon about what a father owes the mother of his children. Glancing at Mantle, he thought, “He’s going back to Mama.”

He had noticed other changes in Mantle, who had begun attending services at a non-denominational church that Danny and David went to in Dallas. One day on the eighteenth hole of a round of “best ball” golf, Mantle had jokingly wagered his soul on the deciding putt. “Mickey said, ‘If that’s that preacher’s ball up there on the green, he can baptize my ass out there in the pond,’” Nelson said.

Nelson made the putt and won the bet. “Mickey threw his golf club straight up in the air,” Nelson said. “He said, ‘You can’t beat God!’”

The preacher declined the opportunity to save Mantle’s soul among the water moccasins in the fetid hazard.

Increasingly, the hereafter was on Mantle’s mind. In June, Mantle
had called Bobby Richardson, the Yankee second baseman whose baseball afterlife was as a Christian pastor, to tell him about the transplant. He asked Richardson and his wife, Betsy, to pray with him. She took the opportunity to remind him “there was someone else who had died so that he might live.”

In July, Mantle asked Summerall if he could arrange a baptism. When he called Mike Klepfer, his old friend barely recognized Mantle’s voice. “He sounded like Billy Graham, not Slick,” Klepfer said.

By the time Tom Molito reached him in late July, he just sounded resigned. Molito asked if he was going to attend Old Timers’ Day at the Stadium. Mantle said, “The doctors won’t let me travel.”

“I said, ‘Why don’t you tape a message?’

“He said, ‘Tell the Yankees it’s your idea ’cause they think I’m a dumb fucker.’”

On July 22, the Yankees celebrated Babe Ruth’s hundredth birthday and played Mantle’s taped farewell on the JumboTron. “I feel like Phil Rizzuto in Babe Ruth’s uniform,” he said, a spectral figure in disembodied pinstripes looming over center field.

Mantle checked back into the hospital on July 28. Nothing was said to the press. Doctors showed Danny and Mickey, Jr., the results of a new scan and offered a grim prognosis: “Ten days, two weeks tops.”

Mantle did not want to live the last weeks of his life as a public figure. He told doctors not to release any information about his condition. He watched the O. J. Simpson trial (he wasn’t crazy about Marcia Clark and thought Simpson would get off) but didn’t want to hear updates about his condition on TV. Doctors finally persuaded him to videotape a statement in order to forestall inevitable leaks. It aired on ABC’s
Good Morning America
on August 1. “Hi, this is Mick,” he said, identifying himself in the way he liked to be greeted. “About two weeks ago, the doctors found a couple of spots of cancer in my lungs. Now I’m taking chemotherapy to get rid of the new cancer. I’m hoping to get back to feeling as good as I did when I first left here about six weeks ago.”

Rumors swirled. Grief junkies and profiteers gathered. Security guards stationed outside his suite nabbed hospital personnel in stolen scrubs trying to steal his blankets; one tried to sell his MRIs on eBay. They were returned after legal action was threatened. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was in Dallas to attend a political summit organized by Ross Perot, asked to pray with The Mick and was turned away. “He just come to see what was going on, I guess,” Merlyn told me. “Just wanted to get on camera.”

Mantle turned other visitors away as well. “Let me get my legs underneath me,” he wrote in a note to Billy Crystal and Bob Costas. “Maybe next week,” he told Dominic Sandifer. But he couldn’t forestall the bad news Mark Zibilich brought after a new biopsy: there was cancer in his new liver and both lungs, his pancreas, and even the lining of his heart. “He said, ‘I would still like to see all of my buddies,’” Zibilich recalled. “That’s all he said.”

On Monday, August 7, when doctors told him there was nothing else they could do, he said he didn’t want to know how long. He had signed a living will instructing them not to perform any heroic measures. He told his sons, “Somebody call Roy.”

The singer made arrangements to fly to Dallas.

Mantle’s doctors promised to make him comfortable, but it wasn’t easy. His legs were so swollen the skin cracked. Flesh was hanging from his arms. Fluid had to be aspirated from his stomach.

Visitors were urged to come quickly. Although she was still in Texas, at Pat Summerall’s house, Greer Johnson did not receive an invitation. That was Mantle’s decision. “He did not want a showdown,” she told me. “He didn’t want a scene, and that’s what it would have been.”

They spoke on the phone, Johnson said, “right up until maybe a week before, when he started going in and out of consciousness.”

But no one had told her the gravity of the situation. “Of course, I’m not wanting to think that he’s gonna pass away,” she said, recalling his leave-taking from Summerall’s house for what she thought was a routine chemotherapy appointment. “And I see Danny and Mickey drive off in the car, not having a clue that’s the last time I’m ever gonna see him again. I never got to say goodbye.”

Merlyn was staying in an adjoining room in Mantle’s hospital suite, asserting her wifely prerogative over what little remained of her marriage. By
then, she told me, “We were probably more like good friends.” But she had never given up hope that they would live together again under the same roof.

On Wednesday, his condition was downgraded from stable to serious. He was sitting up in a wheelchair when Barbara, Ted, and the twins arrived. The tube feeding him morphine got tangled up in the wheels, and Barbara rushed to his aid. When she touched him, she knew the end was near. “I said, ‘Boy, you’re cold,’” she remembered. “He was so cold.”

Larry came alone. He was proud to be the youngest brother of the man he considered “the best baseball player that’s ever played”—though it might have been nice if Mickey had called him something other than Butchie. Larry would regret that Mickey never saw him as an adult.

After he left for college in 1960, their lives diverged, so much so that four decades later he was hard pressed to say whether he missed him. Still, it was hard taking his leave from the hospital. “Before I left and pretty much said my last goodbye, he started cryin’,” Larry said. “He said, ‘Hey, Butch, I may be cryin’, but everything’s all right. We got all this shit under control.’”

As always, Mantle rallied for his teammates Hank and Blanch and Moose, whom he called every day after his double-bypass surgery that spring. They talked about golf and the home run he hit off Ray Herbert in 1964, when he threw down his bat in disgust and broke his gamer, thinking he hadn’t gotten it all.

They lifted him out of his chair and helped him to the bathroom. When Bauer saw the color of his urine, he knew time was short. “We bring him back and he lays down in bed and he closes his eyes and I said to Moose, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’” Bauer said. “And he woke up and said, ‘You guys aren’t leaving already, are you?’

“I said, ‘Oh, God!’”

They stayed a little longer. Blanchard averted his eyes. When it was time to go, they “hugged up,” Skowron said, and told him they loved him.

Whitey Ford arrived with a baseball autographed by the 1995 New York Yankees. They had spent a lot of nights together, none like this. Whitey fudged the digital numbers on the pain dispenser, trying to make the time between the doses of morphine tenable. “He’d say, ‘How much time, Slick?’” Ford said. “And he’d ask me a few seconds later, and I’d say, ‘Three seconds’ when it really was about five or six. I was just trying to make him feel like it was going to happen any second. Then, when it
would happen, he was able to talk. He just looked up and said, ‘If I knew this was going to happen two years ago, I wouldn’t have quit drinking.’”

Back in Georgia, Ed Nelson was fretting about Mantle’s soul. He called the chaplain’s office at the hospital repeatedly to ask permission to make a pastoral call but got no reply. So he was relieved to learn later that Bobby and Betsy Richardson had been by his side. By the time they arrived, Betsy said, there wasn’t much time for talk. “He was already on morphine,” she said.

She knelt at his side, offered her testimony, and when he volunteered his “Good News,” she asked how he knew he would spend eternity with God in Heaven.

“We’re talking about God?” Mantle said.

“Yes, God,” she replied.

She reminded him of God’s unconditional love and he recited the passage from the Gospel of John that attested to his faith. That, she thought later, was the moment of “realization that he doesn’t have to perform to be loved.”

Some friends were skeptical about his newfound religion. But True thought, “When Bobby Richardson came to Mickey and said, ‘You’re dying, here is a way to make peace,’ he embraced it. He wanted to be forgiven.”

After the Richardsons left, his friend Joe Warren recalled, he asked Merlyn, “Why doesn’t He go ahead and take me?”

The chemotherapy session scheduled for Friday, August 11, was canceled. For the next two days he drifted in and out of consciousness in a morphine haze. Merlyn and the boys took turns keeping him company. She had written him a letter, telling him how much she loved him and how good he had been to her, but by the time she brought it to his attention he was too sick and too tired to listen. “Oh, honey, can it wait?”

He would go to his grave with her letter in his suit pocket and whatever words of apology he might have expressed unsaid. “Apologize?” Merlyn told me. “No, he didn’t.”

David Mantle’s depression was profound. He was having trouble coming to grips with his father’s mortality. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, he’s supposed to be a god. This is not supposed to happen to
him
.’”

But it was, and the reality made him desperate. One night, Danny found him at home playing Russian roulette. He had pulled the trigger
twice by the time Danny wrestled the gun away. The gun fired and a bullet lodged in the wall.

David had written a letter, too. After watching his father gazing out the window of his hospital room at what lay beyond the green grass and the Dallas sun, David had a vision of him as a boy, running through the fields with his dog, young and whole and fast. He wrote it all down and intended to read it aloud to his father. “But then he died, so I stuck it in his jacket,” David said.

David and Merlyn were with him at the end. “He started running his feet under the covers like he was trying to fight it,” David said. “Mom was over on this side of the bed. It was like chaos and everything. He was just lying there looking at us. He raised up his hands like this. We grabbed them. He smiled. It was like all the air went out of him.”

Mickey Mantle died at 1:10
A.M.
Central Time on August 13, 1995. “Just a little past midnight,” David wrote later. “An hour he knew so well.”

Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant was packed the afternoon of the funeral, four deep at the bar, the windows draped with black and purple bunting, televisions tuned to the live feed broadcast on ESPN2 and on WCBS Channel 2. “It was like being in a funeral parlor,” the chef Randy Pietro said. “People were coming in off the street, crying and hugging each other like they were all related to him. Some people came in just to sit and run a hand on the bar, a way of saying goodbye to him.”

Lovers Lane United Methodist Church in Dallas was overflowing with 900 mourners in the main sanctuary and 700 more in an adjacent fellowship hall watching on a video screen, with another 100 or more standing in the hall and still others milling around outside. Joe DiMaggio did not attend, issuing a statement instead that made mention of Mantle’s rookie year visit to the minors. Willie and The Duke were also absent. Stan Musial, recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, came alone. Ralph Terry drove in from Kansas. Crossing the bridge over the Spring River in Baxter Springs and the park where Mantle had been a Whiz Kid when the
whole world was still ahead of him, Terry noticed a black wreath lying in the grass where home plate had been.