The Last Boy (39 page)

Mickey Mantle Day at Yankee Stadium was the third one, actually. And unlike the previous jubilees, it was intended to celebrate his retirement rather than to prevent it. The Yankees billed it as “A Day to Remember.” It was also the day he joined the past tense. Merlyn said it was the worst day of her husband’s life.

There were more than 60,000 fans on hand in the big ballpark in the Bronx when number 7 was retired. Yogi and Joe D., big league coaches now, detoured off road trips to attend the festivities. Harry Craft, his minor league manager, came; so did Tom Greenwade, who had given him over to Craft’s care, and Greenwade’s son, Bunch. Tom reminded Harry that he owed him a new felt hat because he had said Mantle was too small to make it to the major leagues. Harry demurred. But two weeks later, he sent a pair of alligator shoes that Bunch admired in a store window with a note: “To Tom, here’s your goddamned hat.”

The Yankees thought one of Mantle’s sons should make an appearance. They flew Mickey, Jr., to New York—he was sixteen and the only one of the boys old enough to have seen him in his prime. The others stayed home to watch a backhoe dig a new pool in the backyard. Merlyn was looking forward to having a husband and father who came home and stayed home. She didn’t know—as his lawyer, Roy True, did—that Mantle had reserved a room in the hotel for his current girlfriend. “It was a busy weekend,” True said.

Mel Allen was hauled out of retirement to preside over the revels, the first summons since he had been summarily dismissed after the 1964 World Series. The Voice filled the Stadium again with a sugar-cured baritone: “Ladies and gentlemen, a magnificent Yankee, the great number seven, Mickey Mantle!” The ballpark “throbbed with love,” George Vecsey wrote in the next morning’s
New York Times.

The choreographed ceremony called for DiMaggio to present him with a plaque, which, DiMaggio noted with customary grace, “will be right along in a modest spot out there in center field.” Mantle replied in kind but with actual kindness, handing Joe D. a plaque, which, he said, “has got to be hanging a little bit higher than mine.”

And it did for a while until the plaques were taken down to be re-bronzed and put back at equal height. Mantle’s graciousness spoke volumes about the difference between them. “People have always placed Joe and Mickey on a pedestal,” Tony Kubek told
Daily News
columnist Bill Madden years later. “The difference is Joe always liked being there and Mickey never felt like he belonged.”

Two months later, when Mantle suited up with the Old Timers for the first time, the ovation for him so dwarfed Joltin’ Joe’s that the public relations department decided to reverse the order of introductions the following year, hoping to ensure that DiMaggio got his “full cheer.” The Clipper was so angry he swore he would never return to the Stadium. He was wooed back with sweet nothings and lucre. But when Mantle’s monument was unveiled in center field in 1996 at a ceremony emceed by Billy Crystal, DiMaggio actually punched him in the stomach because he failed to introduce Joe D. as “Baseball’s Greatest Living Player.”

His jealousy was palpable. “He would never look at Mickey Mantle
until Mickey spoke to him—every time,” Clete Boyer said. “Mickey never said a bad word to the public about Joe D. Just to us.”

But he had ways of making his feelings known. One day in the dugout at yet another command performance of the Living Legends, Mantle asked his aging comrades, “Ya wanna see me piss the sonofabitch off?” Of course they did. DiMaggio did not observe professional courtesy and refused clubhouse requests for autographs. “Mickey gets one ovation at home plate,” Boyer said. “Then he walks down the third base line, waving. He gets another two-minute ovation. You think he’s through. He comes back, walks down the first base line. He gets another ovation. You figure, ‘Okay, that’s it.’ Then he walks out to the mound. You could just see Joe D., thinking, ‘You SOB, get off of there.’ The next year Joe D. made George buy him one of those big Mercedes and Mickey says, ‘Joe D. is pissed off because it only had a half a tank of gas.’ ”

The Clipper managed to mask his resentment on Mickey Mantle Day. When Allen intoned, “And now, Mickey Mantle, Yankee Stadium is all yours,” the ovation lasted five or six or eight or ten minutes, depending on which morning paper you read. The roar of the full-throated Stadium was a sound unlike any other. “Like an animal might make,” Mantle once said.

He had watched Gary Cooper deliver Lou Gehrig’s farewell address in
The Pride of the Yankees
. Now he was standing in the same spot, invoking Gehrig’s parting words: “I always wondered how a man who knew he was going to die could stand here and say he was the luckiest man in the world. Now I think I know how Lou Gehrig felt.”

What was lost in all the huzzahs attendant to the occasion—the last lap around the Stadium in a bullpen cart with hand-painted pinstripes—was that he cast himself as a dying man. In fact, he was already planning his funeral. His friend Roy Clark had just recorded the Charles Aznavour ode to wasted youth, “Hier Encore,” recast as a country anthem, “Yesterday, When I Was Young.” Mantle heard him sing it for the first time at a golf tournament that spring.

Yesterday, when I was young

There were so many songs that waited to be sung,

So many wild pleasures that lay in store for me

And so much pain my dazzled eyes refused to see,

I ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out and

I never stopped to think what life was all about
.

When Clark returned to their table, Mantle’s eyes were wet. “But he was laughing at the same time,” Clark said. “He said, ‘I want you to sing that song at my funeral.’ ” Every time they saw each other for the next twenty-four years, Mantle reiterated the request. “Don’t forget,” he’d say. The last time, at the golf tournament Mantle hosted in Joplin, Missouri, in 1993, he sat on the stage at Clark’s feet as he sang, “tears just drippin’ off the side of his face.”

The moment was preserved in a photograph. Jim Abercrombie, the tournament chairman, commissioned three oversized copies. Mantle autographed Clark’s: “Hang in there. I want to hear ‘Yesterday’ at my funeral.”

The summer of 1969 was one of meta-events: Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Charles Manson rampaged, and Muhammad Ali was convicted of draft evasion. Woodstock and the Stonewall Inn became part of the American lexicon. The Mets conjured a miracle in the World Series.

It was the summer of love and Mantle’s first season of freedom. It was like “getting out of prison,” said True. “Put out on the streets to find himself.”

Mantle tried fast-food franchising with Mickey Mantle’s Country Kitchen.
Forty-five franchises sold!
Mickey Mantle’s Men’s Shops marketed the Mantle look.
Fifty-five franchises sold!
He and Broadway Joe Namath were going to supply office temps to the greater metropolitan area through an employment agency backed by George Lois, Mantle Men and Namath Girls. From their offices in the Chrysler Building they were placing five hundred secretaries a week.

By the end of the year, Mickey Mantle’s Country Kitchen had gone belly up, posting losses of $1,279,777. Mickey Mantle’s Men’s Shops went into reorganization. Mantle Men and Namath Girls was in bankruptcy by February 1972, followed soon thereafter by the company that had
bought his share in his Dallas bowling alley. He was hauled into court to account for money he had received for endorsing bowling products.

Every time another deal went sour, Mantle would tell his brother Larry, “I dumbed this” or “I dumbed that.” Driving through Harlem one day with Yankee VP Howard Berk en route to a baseball clinic in Central Park, he gazed out the limousine window at the crumbling neighborhood and said, “How come I didn’t invest in this?”

True, the Dallas attorney who became a confidant and consigliere, unscrambled the financial mess. But, he said, the biggest losses were psychological, not financial. “Mickey never lost a lot because he didn’t have a lot,” he said. “He was going to get rich through the restaurant and clothing business. That evaporated. He didn’t have any money. He always lived the first-class life. I had to loan Mickey money. He never knew how much he had or asked or cared. I paid all his bills. Mickey didn’t know he didn’t have any money. He had a ten-to twenty-thousand-dollar rotating line of credit with me. I didn’t want to tell him. He would have been depressed.”

On October 20, 1970, the day he turned forty, Mickey Mantle woke up and he wasn’t dead. “I don’t know what to do,” he told his friend Joe Warren. “Nobody’s ever lived this long.”

There were two possibilities: Go home, meet your wife and children, and thank your lucky stars that you are not another doomed Mantle man. Or consign yourself to the living dead.

He treated the reprieve like a death sentence.

“He had no job, he felt useless,” Merlyn told me when she and her sons, Danny and David, met with me at her home in Dallas. The Mick was everywhere—in the famous psychedelic rendering by LeRoy Neiman, in the batter’s box, in center field, in an auction catalog on the coffee table. “He lost the thing he loved most, to play ball. He felt like a has-been. He was happy only if he was smashed and not coherent.”

True said, “To me he was one of the saddest, loneliest people I’ve ever known. He had no place in this world.”

Mantle had a home in Dallas but he wasn’t there often enough to get to know his sons or to be a husband to his wife. Home was a hub between connecting flights. “He didn’t want to go home,” his friend Mike Klepfer said. “He would look for a reason for Roy to send him someplace.”

His family treated each homecoming like a state visit. Dinner had to be served perfectly, plates decorated with cottage cheese and pineapple slices. The house, the kids—everything had to be scrubbed clean. Even the dog got a bath before The Mick came home. They feared that the slightest domestic misstep might set him off or send him away again. “We all walked on eggshells,” Merlyn told me. “He had profound mood swings. One moment he was happy and joking. One second later, that mood turned angry. I often wondered if he was manic-depressive.”

The boys—Mickey, Jr., David, Billy, and Danny—watched what they did and what they said. And there were few heart-to-hearts with Dad. “That’s what was bad,” David said. “It taught us how not to communicate. When Dad was at home, we just wanted to be close to him and we didn’t want to do something that might upset him that he might leave the room. I was always amazed. Why were we so scared?”

“ ’Cause we didn’t know him,” Danny replied. “That’s why.”

“No,” David said, “I think it was respect.”

“Maybe we had a feeling he might hit us,” Danny said.

That never happened, though he did challenge them on occasion when he’d had one too many. He taught them not to back away from a fight, to stick up for themselves, and to stick together, which they did, bonded by their love for an AWOL dad and by the fierce resentment they encountered in toughs who thought they had it so good. The last Christmas they spent together was the first time David could recall that his father stuck around for his birthday the next day. After his father’s death, David went through a box of several hundred family photos, looking for one of just him and his dad. He couldn’t find one. There was always somebody else in the picture.

He never asked his father to pose with him because he was worried what he would think. When Billy Crystal told the Mantle boys he wished he’d been Mickey Mantle’s son, David replied, “We wished we had been, too.”

Mantle never paid attention to what his boys did with their lives, admitting later, “I didn’t even make them finish high school.” Nor did he object when David opted to skip his own graduation because, he told me, “Dad didn’t get to go to his.”

He affected Mutt’s absolute control without actually asserting it. “Who’s the boss?” he’d ask.

“You are, Dad,” they’d reply.

“Don’t you forget it.”

He was as absent and laissez-faire as Mutt had been present and domineering. “He was not gonna repeat,” David said. “But I wish he would have. I needed discipline.”

“He never told us to do anything,” Danny said.

Billy was the wild child and also the most fragile of the boys, slighter than the others, built like his grandfather, Giles. Like his father, Billy wet his bed as a child. Like his mother and his brother, David, he struggled to read, and attended a school for learning-disabled students. “He was frustrated and scared a lot,” Merlyn told me. “Actually he shied away from the family, which broke our hearts.”

One morning in 1977, when he was seventeen, Billy woke up with a lump in a lymph node under his ear. He got the biopsy results the same day: non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the disease his father had been waiting for his entire life. Billy had to wait to tell his parents the diagnosis. The doctor wanted to inform them at the same time, and Mantle was out of town.

Danny, the youngest, said the only time he spent alone with his father was when he poured his beer while watching college football on TV. He was the practical son, the reliable child, always there to fetch another cold one, to mop up any mess. He was the first to clean up his own life when it spun out of control. He felt his father’s absence in the family occasions they missed and the stories they didn’t share. “I wish he had talked to us more about his childhood,” he said.

But then, Danny said, “he didn’t have time to be a child. It would have interfered.”

David was the poetic son, who gave his mother a talisman she always wore around her neck, inscribed
ALSO MY HERO
. He was the family clown, who hid his sadness with manic energy and verbal overflow. “In 1995, I was diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder (ADD) and obsessive-compulsive behavior,” he wrote in
A Hero All His Life
. “That should not have surprised anyone. As children, Billy and I were both dyslexic, and those disorders often go together. I might have been a much better student if the professionals figured this out thirty-something years ago.”