A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (37 page)

When Bo threw his no-hit game on May 5,
immediate rewards were proffered. His contract was
increased to the promised $8,500, along with a “lipstick red”
Cadillac, a gift from the club. Bud Furillo assumed the role of
Bo’s “social director,” introducing him to Beverly Hills attorney
Paul Caruso, who in turn introduced him to the controversial gossip
columnist and movie voice, Walter Winchell.

Winchell was the staccato
voiceover of the TV show
The
Untouchables
, starring Robert Stack as
Elliot Ness. Winchell used his New York column to rail against
Communist infiltration during the McCarthy era. McCarthy’s demise
put Winchell on the outs in New York. The scathing film
The Sweet Smell of Success
portrayed him through a fictional character played by Burt
Lancaster as an incestuous brother who uses his column to destroy
people through Communist aspersions.

Winchell had moved to Hollywood, hoping to
start over. When Furillo introduced Belinsky to the show biz crowd,
the Bo-Winchell relationship became a marriage made in . . .
Hollywood.

“I know every broad who matters,” Winchell
told Bo. Winchell arranged through his publicity contacts for every
aspiring model and actress in L.A. to date Bo Belinsky, alerting
the press to each liaison so that it could all be dutifully
recorded in the trades.

Gilligan’s Island
beauty Tina Louise; actress Connie Stevens (and
her younger, blonder sister); Dinah Shore; Queen Soraya, the
divorced ex-wife of the Shah of Iran; a DuPont heiress;
Carnal Knowledge
star
Ann-Margret; Bo squired all of them and many more to every haunt on
the Sunset Strip: Peppermint West, Barney’s Beanery, Dino’s,
Chasen’s, LaScala, the Rainbow, Gazarri’s, the Whisky.

He found himself invited to party with the
Beautiful People: Jane Wyman, Merle Oberon, Maureen O’Hara, Frank
Sinatra, Lionel Hampton. In New York he was feted by Toots Shor,
given tables reserved for celebrities and Mobsters at the Copa, the
Forum of the Twelve Caesars, and 21.

In Washington, Bo and Dean Chance were told
that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wanted to meet them.

“Jesus Christ, they’re turning it into a
Federal case,” exclaimed Chance, who thought Hoover’s invite was an
inquest into some kind of illegal inter-state activity. Hoover just
wanted to meet them.

“J. Edgar?” Bo later told Pat Jordan. “Man,
he’s a swinger. He let Dean and I shoot Tommy guns at FBI
headquarters.”

As the season played out, Bo continued to
“pitch and woo.” His record went to 6-1, but then he began to lose.
Off the field, he was as wild as ever. Naturally, Rigney and Haney
questioned whether he could effectively pitch on little or no rest.
The papers and trades were filled with near-daily Belinsky items,
mostly fed by Winchell. Madonna at her hottest never got so much
attention. Belinsky courted it. He never hid from the publicity. He
ate it up with a fork and spoon.

The team would arrive at L.A. International
Airport in the wee hours of the morning, hoping only to get home
and sleep. Bo would be met not by one but two delicious girls. He
would depart into the L.A. night, leaving his bags to the equipment
manager while his teammates watched in awe and wonder, exploding
into an ovation.

He moved into a Hollywood Hills pad that had
once been occupied by the abstract Spanish artist Pablo Picasso,
who had painted a mural on the wall of what was now Bo’s living
room.

The club tolerated it because the publicity
was good for business, the team was winning, Bo was still
effective, and Autry admired his employee’s style. But a five A.M.
incident on Wilshire Boulevard brought everything to a boil. Bo and
Dean went out for a night on the town, picking up on two girls.
Bo’s was some kind of “showgirl,” or so she said. The four of them
piled into Bo’s “lipstick red” Caddy.

“Now we are tooling down Wilshire Boulevard
and everything is fine,” Bo recalled. “Well, one thing led to
another, and this girl starts mouthing off about she loves me and
will stay with me and wants to cook breakfast and all that bull.
I’m really in no mood for that, so I tell her to keep her big mouth
shut or I’ll throw her out.”

According to Bo, the girl kept yakking, so
he pulled the car over to a side street, demanding she get out. She
resisted. Bo tried to force her out. In the process she smashed her
head against a window, cutting herself, and causing her to start
screaming bloody murder.

Just then, an L.A.P.D. squad car pulled up.
Chance, who had a pregnant wife back in Ohio, made a run for it but
was caught. Arrests were made and it all hit the papers, to the
great consternation of Haney and Rigney.

The girl decided not to press charges on the
condition that Bo stay with her for a week, but later she found an
attorney and sued Bo, forcing him to pay her off.

“You just can’t trust broads,” was Bo’s
assessment.

While all of this was happening, Bo
discovered to his chagrin that the “lipstick red” Caddy, a “gift”
from the club, was late in payments. He assumed that it was paid
for in full. Instead, he had to “assume” the monthly installments
plus insurance payments. He was trying to live the life of Frank
Sinatra on $8,500.

The Angels, in first place on July 4, pushed
the Yankees into August before tailing off towards the end, but the
season was a spectacular success for a second-year team. Their
veterans had played well, and youth was served. The future looked
bright.

Bo finished 10-11, a disappointment after
starting 5-0 with a no-hitter, but a solid year nevertheless. The
team’s brass held its breath, hoping that perhaps he would mature,
calm down, and make use of his natural talents in a way that would
allow him to enjoy a good career for the Angels.

Chance was 14-10 with a 2.96 earned run
average. One of the greatest schoolboy athletes in American
history, he had been a high school basketball rival of future
Indiana coach Bobby Knight in Ohio. Chance became Bo's "wingman" in
swingin' Hollywood, never lacking confidence on the field or in the
bar. A combination of his wicked slider, blazing fastballs and the
after-effects of "Johnny Grant parties" made him virtually
unhittable in head-to-head match-ups with New York. Mickey Mantle
was virtually helpless against him and once said, "Every time I see
his name in the line-up card I feel like throwing up." It was a
half-reference to alcohol consumption as well as Chance's pitching
skill.

"All we gotta do is beat Roger Mustard and
Mickey Mayonnaise and we can win this pennant," said Chance. "The
only difference between them and me is they get paid more."

Bo was always playing practical jokes on the
farmboy Chance, who could be taken in and was still a gullible
youth. On one occasion, Bo had one of his girlfriends call Dean in
his hotel room from the lobby. She identified herself as "Jane,
Jane from Sacramento," and told the pitcher that she was pregnant,
he was the dad, and "what are you gonna do about it?"

Dean hung up and rushed down to the lobby,
where he saw Bo. "Bo, Bo," he exclaimed. "I gotta talk to you."

"What's the matter, Dean?" asked a calm Bo.
"You look like an expectant father."

Dean blanched, realizing he had been
had.

Then there was center fielder Albie Pearson.
He was 5-5 1/2 and weighed 141 pounds. A local kid from the L.A.
suburbs, Pearson was the opposite of Bo and Dean; a devout
Christian and happily-married family man. His way of life was
always coming into conflict with Bo.

During Spring Training, Bo set up one of his
writer friends with a blind date. When Albie showed up in the hotel
lobby and said hi to Bo, she thought he was her guy. "Albie's real
cute and adorable and this broad wants to mother him," recalled Bo.
" 'I love you, I love you,' she kept saying to Albie. 'Let me take
you home and take care of you.' "

Albie broke away and drove from Palm Springs
to Riverside to be with his wife. He called every hour on the hour
to make sure she was gone before he returned. Albie's only vice was
a "lipstick red" Caddy, just like the one Bo drove. One night one
of Bo's minor league flames, an Oriental honey named Zenida, showed
up in L.A. Bo told her to meet him in the player's parking lot,
where he parked his Caddy. She found the "lipstick red" Caddy, all
right, except it was Pearson's.

"So Albie comes out of the clubhouse and
he's with his wife," recalled Bo. "Zenida sees this guy with a
broad on his arm and figures it's gotta be me, so she starts waving
at him; her legs twitching out of this tight Suzie Wong dress.
Albie's wife sees this Chinese chick sitting on her husband's car
and she's just pissed."

****

“You
can
play for the Mets. If you want
rapid advancement, play for the Mets. We’ve got the bonus money.
We’ll even buy you a glove. So join us. Take the bonus money. Play
a year or two. Then you can go back to school.”

- Casey Stengel

Between 1958 and 1961, some former Dodgers and Giants
fans went out to Yankee Stadium to heckle the Yankees, which was
like booing an F-16 as it bombs the enemy into submission. But as
great as they were, the loss of the Dodgers and Giants was a void
they could not fill. Very few really and truly switched allegiance
to the Yankees. The Yankees “did not benefit from having the city
all to themselves,” said longtime New York baseball scribe Jack
Lang. They failed to fill the vacuum, maintaining a sense of
complacency.

Dodgers and Giants supporters were “staunch National
League fans.” Some rooted for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San
Francisco Giants; some hated them. Despite everything, rooting for
the Dodgers and Giants was made slightly palatable because both
teams were strong.

“I was a little disgusted with Giant and Dodger fans
who remained fans of the teams that had left,” said Stan Isaacs of
Newsday
. “They were traitors. I could see rooting for Pee
Wee Reese and Sandy Koufax. But not for O’Malley’s Dodgers.”

No sooner had the Dodgers and Giants departed than
talk began of replacing them. There was mixed reaction to this.
These time-honored traditions could not be replaced, but then again
something
had to be done
. The concept of franchise shifts
and expansion was obviously in the air. Four teams – the Braves,
A’s, now the Dodgers and Giants – had switched cities. The West lay
open for modern Lewis’s and Clark’s. Two teams could survive in one
city; or in New York, three teams. Los Angeles would get the
expansion Angels in 1961. The Washington Senators moved to
Minneapolis and became the Twins, an inevitable move that Horace
Stoneham says he would have made had California not opened up. A
new expansion Senators franchise filled their place.

Pro basketball would move out to L.A., with the
Lakers leaving Minneapolis. Pro football was at the forefront,
first with the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers; the merger
of sorts between the National Football League and the All-American
Football Conference; and then the creation in 1960 of the AFL.
Teams rained like Manna from Heaven on Los Angeles (then San
Diego), Oakland, and other virgin territories.

In 1958, New York City Mayor Robert Wagner formed a
study group called The Mayor’s Baseball Committee, a “blue ribbon”
panel of political heavyweights. One of its members was a leading
New York powerbroker named William A. Shea. A partner in a major
Manhattan law firm, he was considered Mayor Wagner’s top advisor.
Shea’s circle of influence was as “blue blood” as it gets. There
was New York’s Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller, one of the
wealthiest men in the world, with ambitions for the Presidency.

Then there was U.S. Senator Prescott Bush (R.-
Connecticut). Bush lived in tony Greenwich,
the place
to
live in the 1950s (if not still today). He was a member of the “old
money” Bush-Walker clan, a distant relative to British and Dutch
royalty. His family founded the Walker Cup golf tournament that Tom
Seaver’s father had won in 1932, and ruled over the oldest, most
prestigious Wall Street stock brokerage firm, Brown Brothers
Harriman. The Bush family would be part of the ownership group of
the team that eventually came into being. Bush’s son, George H.W.
Bush, had been a World War II flying ace and eventually President
of the United States from 1989 to 1993.
His
son, George W.
Bush, would occupy the White House eight years later.

The Republican Senator Bush reached across the aisle
and got the support of the Democrat Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon
B. Johnson of Texas, and Democrat House Speaker Sam Rayburn, for a
New York franchise. The
quid pro quo
was reciprocal support
for a second franchise in Houston, where Senator Bush’s son George
was a millionaire oilman, planning to run for Texas’s U.S. Senate
seat in 1964.

Shea himself was not from money. His family was hit
hard during the Great Depression, but he married well, worked hard,
and his Irish wit stood him in good stead. He worked his way
through law school and to a job with the state of New York. He
wanted to enter politics but his wife insisted he not, so Shea
resolved to always be a “mover and shaker” behind the scenes. His
clients and contacts included the Brooklyn Dodgers and urban
planner Robert Moses. When Larry MacPhail left the Dodgers,
ostensibly to join “Wild Bill” Donovan’s famed OSS, the pre-cursor
of the Central Intelligence Agency, a “sweetheart deal” to buy
cheap shares of Dodgers stock was made available. In the end,
Walter O’Malley got the Dodgers, but it allowed Shea to maintain a
broader political scope. When O’Malley and the Dodgers departed,
they left all their power and influence in New York City. Shea
filled that vacuum.