The Last Boy (30 page)

Hurricane Esther headed for the East Coast and the Yankees headed for Baltimore, followed by a throng of fifty reporters and unkind headlines: “Maris Begins the Big Sulk.” It was make or break in The Babe’s hometown.

Mantle wasn’t in the starting lineup on September 19—he pinch-hit in the ninth inning of the first game of a doubleheader and struck out. He didn’t leave the bench in game two, the 153rd game of the season. Maris went 1 for 9 again. He had fifty-eight home runs and one more day to upstage the Babe.

On the morning of September 20, before the Yankees’ 154th game of the year, Maris went to Johns Hopkins University Hospital to visit the son of a former teammate who was dying of cancer, stiffing Milton Gross of the
Post
on a scheduled interview. He refused to explain his absence even to Big Julie, who had arranged the appointment. Gross ripped him in the next day’s paper. The boy died two days later.

That night, Houk was forced to realign his outfield when Mantle declared himself unfit to play. “Eye infection,” Houk explained.

Maris hit his fifty-ninth home run and barely missed a sixtieth. The Yankees clinched their eleventh pennant in thirteen years, celebrating in the usual manner by pouring bad champagne all over each other. Maris exhaled. Chest heaving with emotion and exhaustion, he told Leonard Schecter of the
Post
: “I tried. I really tried.”

The next morning, Mantle stayed in bed. His “recovery from the sniffles” had been “complicated by a penicillin rash,” the
Tribune
reported. “Nothing bad,” Houk assured the reportorial scrum.

Mantle was with the team when they left for Boston but was said to be “peaked” and unlikely to play. In the first inning Saturday afternoon, he hit his fifty-fourth home run, the most he would ever hit in a season. He was replaced by Tom Tresh after singling in the seventh inning. On Sunday, he
went 0 for 3 and left the game in the bottom of the sixth. On the plane back from Boston, Mel Allen mentioned he knew a doctor named Max Jacobson.

Most patients left Jacobson’s New York office feeling energized. Billy Crystal’s grandmother would come home after her “vitamin” treatments and “make nine pot roasts in an hour,” her grandson said. No wonder. Jacobson was injecting patients with up to 30 to 50 milligrams of amphetamines—speed—a highly addictive stimulant that made them feel as if they could run forever, sing forever, or cook forever. But Mantle left the doctor’s office in excruciating pain. The needle felt like a red-hot poker, he wrote in
The Mick
. Jacobson advised him to play hurt. Walk it off. “Don’t take a cab. You’ll be fine.”

He wasn’t fine. An elderly Good Samaritan offered to call a doctor when she saw him staggering down the street. “No, just a cab,” he replied.

“Mick drug his leg all the way back to the hotel,” Merlyn told me.

The next morning he was burning up with fever. She was due to arrive that afternoon. The hotel sent someone to meet her train. He awoke to find his wife at the foot of his bed, asking, “What happened to you?”

“I just got sucked dry by a vampire.”

“Mick told me, ‘I think the guy wanted to hurt me,’” Merlyn said. “He said the place was filthy and he had blood on his coat.”

Jacobson’s son, Thomas, a cardiologist practicing in Arizona, said his father never kept any of his records. They spoke about Mantle only once, a brief conversation in which Dr. Max acknowledged treating him but offered no details about his care. “He’d taken care of so many well-known people that it was just matter-of-fact,” Thomas Jacobson said. “I don’t think he had any of these special amphetamines or anything that I know of.”

The
New York Times
exposed Jacobson’s practices in a series of investigative reports in 1972. His medical license was revoked three years later, after the New York State Board of Regents found him guilty of forty-eight counts of unprofessional conduct and one count of fraud or deceit. Unable to account to the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs for quantities of amphetamines in his possession in July 1968 and March
1969, Jacobson was also found guilty of manufacturing and combining “adulterated drugs consisting in whole or in part of filthy, putrid and/or decomposed substances.”

Mantle said he never knew what was in Jacobson’s syringe, and he never paid the bill, either. Mark Shaw, the Kennedy family photographer, paid with his life, dying of amphetamine poisoning in 1969. Tennessee Williams’s brother told the
Times
that the playwright had spent three months in a mental hospital that year as a result of taking drugs prescribed by Jacobson. Truman Capote collapsed after a series of injections and had to be hospitalized with symptoms of withdrawal. When Mel Allen was fired by the Yankees after the 1964 season, the infamous medical referral was widely cited as cause.

Mantle played only two complete games after September 17 and started only two after seeing Jacobson on September 25. The morning after, New York papers were filled with medical bulletins: Cerv was in Lenox Hill Hospital, having surgery on his right knee; Mantle showed up at the Stadium looking as if he hadn’t seen daylight in a year. “He’s limping as heavily as he ever has in his life,” the
Post
reported. “He says he’s stiff. Some of the injections he’s been taking to cure the cold have proved painful. It’s possible that Mantle is hurting more than either he or the Yankees will admit.”

On Tuesday evening, September 26, Merlyn kept Pat Maris company in a box beside the Yankee dugout. Mantle left the game after walking in the first inning. He watched Maris hit his sixtieth home run on the clubhouse TV. Mrs. Babe Ruth cried.

When Mantle did not report to the Stadium the next day, the Yankees sent a doctor to examine him. He was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital with a 101-degree fever. Sidney Gaynor, the team physician, operated that night, incising and packing an abscess in the area of the right hip. It was “like a boil,” Gaynor explained, only under the surface of the muscle. In the
Post
, Schecter came up with an explanation befitting a fretful grandma: Mantle had contracted the infection “possibly as a result of playing on a wet field.”

Sunday, October 1, was a beautiful day to make history. Maris did not feel up to it. The 35-inch, 33-ounce bat with which he had hit number sixty felt empty. The crowd was as sparse as his hair—paid attendance
23,154—despite the $5,000 reward a California restaurateur had offered for the sixty-first home-run ball. The right field stands, however, were packed. “He did not want to play the last game of the season,” said Whitey Herzog, who became close to Maris during their tenure with the St. Louis Cardinals. “His teammates talked him into it. He really didn’t want to break that record.”

It was 2:42
P.M.
when he came to the plate in the bottom of the fourth inning. The game was scoreless, the bases empty, the count 2–0. Tracy Stallard, the young Red Sox pitcher, threw the ball—“a strike,” he said later, “knee high on the outside corner of the plate”—and Maris hit into the right field stands, six or seven or fifteen rows deep and just to the right of the Yankee bullpen, where it was caught on the fly by a nineteen-year-old Coney Island boy named Sal Durante. As the scoreboard flashed the official news—
MARIS
61
HOMERS BREAK RUTHS
1927
RECORD FOR A SEASON
—his teammates forced him to take a second curtain call.

In the clubhouse, a radio guy asked, “As you were running around the bases, were you thinking about Mickey Mantle?”

It would always be about The Mick.

“Nobody knows how tired I am,” Maris replied.

All they had to do was look at him, slumped on a stool, drinking a beer, inhaling another cigarette. He was smoking two or three packs of Camels a day. It was close to 8
P.M.
when he and Pat left the Stadium with Julie and Selma Isaacson, heading downtown for dinner at Joe Marsh’s Spindletop. There was time for a late Mass at the Catholic church across the street from the restaurant before dinner. “Two minutes later, here comes Rog and Pat,” Isaacson said. “I said, ‘That’s a quick Mass.’ He said they spotted him in the church. Priest started talking about ‘Roger Maris is here.’ So he walked out.”

They made another stop at Lenox Hill to visit Mantle and Cerv. Mantle sat up in bed when Maris came in. “Rog went over, and they hugged one another,” Isaacson said. “He said, ‘It should have been you, Mick.’

“His eyes started to tear up, Mick.”

Maris was too exhausted to eat. Big Julie had invited Milton Gross along to dinner to make up for the snub in Baltimore and he re-created the scene in the
Post
the next day. A little girl approached their table to
ask Maris for an autograph. “Would you put the date on it, too, please?” the she asked.

“The date?” Maris said. “What is today’s date?”

“The date is the one you did what nobody else ever did,” Big Julie replied.

Maris would never be that good or that healthy again. Although he played five more years in New York, it was almost as if he ceased to exist after ’61.* “Six years of hell,” he called them. The accomplishment of a lifetime became a source of pride and torment. The mosaic tile he commissioned for the bathroom floor in his Kansas City home showing him mid-home-run stride attested to the former. The sportswriters he had long and loudly disdained contributed to the latter, seeing to it he never got his rightful place in the Hall of Fame, an omission that appears more glaring with each passing year and every steroid-soaked revelation. His bat is in Cooperstown, his jersey, too, and the ball Sal Durante gave him without asking for anything in return.

The unasked or unreported question was: why had Mantle sought treatment from someone other than the Yankees’ team physician? “It was just prior to the World Series,” said Johnny Blanchard. “He didn’t want anybody to think that he wasn’t healthy. ’Cause anytime you go to the team doctor, immediately it goes to the front office.”

Blanchard didn’t say what “it” was. Clete Boyer finally copped to the obvious. “I can’t believe you goddamn media people are so dumb,” he said. “Nobody ever figured it out. Ever think why Mickey Mantle went to another doctor other than the Yankee doctor? Ever think about it? Why would he have gone to another doctor other than the Yankee doctor? How ’bout the clap? C-L-A-P.”

Boyer had a good laugh at the credulousness of sportswriters who solemnly reported the progress of a virus that had somehow “lodged in his buttock,” as Schecter wrote in the
Post
. “The twenty-four-hour virus, and it got
infected
?” Boyer said. “C’mon.”

Mantle certainly wasn’t the first or only Yankee to find himself in such a predicament. In the press box, writers spoke knowingly of “a rash of injuries.”

Mantle never publicly acknowledged the indiscretions that hobbled him. “I think we just did a helluva job and he had a helluva summer until
September,” said Cerv. “Then he said, ‘I’ve had enough of this. I gotta have some good times.’ In two weeks, he was so screwed up he didn’t even play in the World Series.”

His condition wasn’t news to the Cincinnati Reds’ pitching staff. Jim O’Toole heard it from Darrell Johnson, the former Yankee catcher as they watched Maris hit his sixtieth home run. “Mantle’s got a little problem.” Jim Brosnan heard it from the author George Plimpton, who said, “Mantle was not going to be stealing any bases, because if he had to slide, he’d be bleeding all over the ballpark. I asked what the hell all that was about, and then he told me. What the hell else would you get a shot in the butt for?”

The Series was over before it began. It ended the moment Jim Turner, the longtime Yankee coach now with the Reds, decided to take a contingent of pitchers and catchers on a tour of the Cathedral of Baseball. “He took us out with all the monuments like we were supposed to worship all those guys,” said Johnny Edwards, an impressionable young catcher. “I think it got us a little uptight about where we were and who we were playing.”

Their only hope was Mantle.

Mick Mends—
Daily News

Mick to Start—
Daily News

Mickey Doubtful—
Daily News

When Mantle was released from the hospital on Monday morning, October 2, he went straight to the Stadium, where reporters duly noted his pallor and his weight loss. He did not work out. Gus Mauch sent the batboy Frank Prudenti on an urgent mission up the Grand Concourse to procure a magic salve said to speed the healing process. Mantle summoned Moose Skowron, who had taken biology in college, to watch Mauch change the dressing on the wound, which had been left open in
order to allow it to drain. “I never forgot that,” Skowron said, “’cause the blood and the pus was coming out of it.”

The size of the hole was generously and variously described. “Big enough to put a baseball in,” Mantle said. “ ’Bout the size of a golf hole,” Joe DeMaestri said.

And it was deeper than it was wide. “They cut a circle about the size of, oh, I’d say a small platter,” DeMaestri said. “They cut it in four sections, like an X, and pulled back the layer of skin, of the meat, and they had to then put stuff in there. They had to fold back the outer layer of his skin to drain it.

“He’d come in and he’d lay down on the table on his side and he’d move his toes and you could see the tendons move. In the sore you could actually see the cords in there. And he’d laugh. Mickey had a funny way about himself.”

The day before the Series opened, he took five batting-practice swings and told Houk he couldn’t play. That evening he took Merlyn to dinner at the Harwyn Club but couldn’t sit long enough to eat. He played in neither of the games in New York, and the Yankees and the Reds headed for Cincinnati, tied at one game apiece.

A crowd ten deep waited behind the batting cage at Crosley Field when Mantle took his swings the day before game 3. Bob Addie described the scene for
The Sporting News
:

His mouth flew open, his face contorted with pain. He then bent over the plate and pounded his bat for a few seconds, trying to regain his composure.

The 2,000 fans who had come out to see the workout seemed to sense the drama. They were quiet. So were the players on the field. Time seemed suspended and caught in a still photograph.

Mantle straightened up and knocked the next pitch into the right field seats. He hit five more “homers,” some over the distant, center field wall.