The Last Boy (43 page)

With Martin dead and Ford estranged, Mantle discovered his sons. They became his roadies and drinking buddies. Danny later said he was afraid of his father until they started drinking together—not physically; it was that
look
that unnerved him. Mantle’s fear was different. He didn’t know how to talk to his boys. “To go out and have drinks with his sons was communicating,” said Roy Clark. “He had nothing to talk to them about. He thought, ‘If I do nothing, I’m not hurting them. If I don’t go see them, or call them, then it’s okay. If I do call them, I have nothing to say.’ ”

He had always traveled with a minder. Roy True was the first, then Linda Howard, Greer Johnson, and finally Dominic Sandifer. And he needed minding more than ever. Mickey, Jr., David, and Danny took turns traveling with him. When his health allowed, Billy worked in
the oil fields, driving a big rig. “He treated his boys like teammates,” Sandifer said. “He treated me like a teammate. Everybody was on the Mickey Mantle team.”

It was an opportunity Mantle’s boys couldn’t resist. It was the first time he had paid them any attention. And they had nothing better to do.

In his absence from Dallas, they had adopted his reckless example. Their lives devolved into a montage of drugs and alcohol, motorcycle crashes and car wrecks, near misses and shoot-outs. David described the Mantle speedball he and his brothers concocted to Bob Hersom of the
Oklahoman
, in 1995: “Budweiser, cocaine, and sake at four in the morning. We’d heat it up in a coffee cup in the microwave. We’d go for about three days straight.”

Guns were a way of life in rural Oklahoma, and they became part of family life in Dallas, too. Mantle kept a gun in the glove compartment of his car; Merlyn slept with a .38 under her pillow. One night, Billy went around firing his gun at the ceiling of his apartment and almost shot a man in the nearby swimming pool.

Once, David wrote in
A Hero All His Life
, “when I lived in our house on Durango, I got a call from someone who threatened to come over and kill me. He said I was dating his former girlfriend. I didn’t know who it was, so I called Mickey Jr. and he came over with a couple of his friends. We had a couple of guys crouched behind the bushes and four or five of us inside the house, and guns were everywhere.

“The lights were down, the curtains closed, and we’re peering out the windows. It must have looked like the Dillinger gang was hiding out. And stumbling up the front walk, here comes Dad. He takes a few steps, stops, studies the house, and yells out, ‘Hey, y’all, it’s me. Don’t shoot.’ ”

Though David didn’t think of himself as suicidal, he told Paul Solotaroff, author of “Growing Up Mantle,” an award-winning 2003 story in
Men’s Journal
, that he’d get high on cocaine, chug some beers, and play Russian roulette while watching
The Deer Hunter
. He also cut himself with razor blades and burned himself with cigarettes. He said it didn’t hurt. The point was to feel anything at all.

Pain has been a constant for him since he and Danny wrecked their father’s brand-new Cadillac one night en route to a concert. A friend was driving. Danny, who was sitting up front beside him, suffered a broken
rib. David almost died. The whiplash he suffered when his head hit the backseat caused fluid to accumulate in his brain. Doctors drilled a hole in his skull to relieve the pressure. He was unconscious on and off for three days. Eventually, his spine was fused at his neck. Roy True, who said he was “always going out and picking the boys off the lawn,” was dispatched to tell The Mick he needed a new car.

David left Baylor University after three years. According to his transcript, he is eighteen credits shy of graduating. “That’s what it says, but I got kicked out because of drinking and drugging,” he said. “I feel bad and embarrassed that I wasted Mom and Dad’s money. Dad was so proud that I was first to go to college.”

The football coaches encouraged him to go out for the team as a walk-on. “They said, ‘We can put fifty pounds on you.’

“I said, ‘I’m not doing steroids.’

“I look back now and think, ‘Yeah, but we all do cocaine and drink.’ ”

After he left Baylor, he worked as an assistant manager at a McDonald’s in Joplin, making $12,000 a year. He sold and serviced air conditioners and hired Danny to work with him. When the trading card industry exploded, they pooled their savings and opened a card shop in the Prestonwood Mall. When their dad was in town, he’d drop by sometimes and say, “C’mon, let’s get a beer.”

“We’re working,” they’d protest, before closing up for the rest of the day.

Danny attended one year of classes at Brookhaven Junior College in Dallas. He worked on a pipeline in an oil field as a welder’s helper, started a landscaping company with some friends, and dabbled in real estate development—none of them jobs he says he “ever would have wanted to do for a life.”

Mickey, Jr., went to junior college, sold life insurance, worked for an oil company, got a real estate license, which, like his father, he never used. And like The Mick, he played a lot of golf, only better. He was the first of the boys to join the Mickey Mantle team and the first to start drinking with him. He returned calls, filled orders for Mickey Mantle collectibles, and filled out foursomes.

After Mickey, Jr., got married, Danny took his place on the road. It
was a revelation. “To the women, my dad and those guys were rock stars and I was their roadie, catching the overflow,” he told Paul Solotaroff. “I was fifteen, getting laid like a rug and pounding mixed drinks with Everclear or a topper of 151. The next morning, I’d sober up and realize, ‘Hey, Dad’s tagging a lot of trim.’ As kids, we’d just assumed he was working when he was gone, doing endorsements and stuff. Now I saw that he wasn’t the family man we’d always thought he was.”

They covered for him and lied to their mother, badly, when she called their room asking if anyone else was in his, David wrote. “We all played our parts.”

It couldn’t last. The gold rush inspired by the Topps #311 peaked in the early 1990s, when trading card companies papered the country with untold billions of cards, so many no one could count them all. The mad money led to fraud, forgery, and two FBI investigations. Operation Bullpen and Operation Foul Ball exposed massive counterfeiting operations, card doctoring, fraudulent authentication, and fraudulent autographs.

It wasn’t hard to do. One time at a card show in California, Snider and Mays met a man who claimed, “I can sign your name better ’n you.” He could. And he could do Mantle, too. Willie and the Duke recruited him to sign The Mick’s name to the photographs they had autographed for each other. “I gave it to a friend,” Snider said. “He never knew it was a fraud. We paid the guy forty dollars apiece.”

Mantle told Clete Boyer that when Senator Edward M. Kennedy asked him to come to Capitol Hill to talk about the trading card industry, he replied, “I’ll testify about trading cards when you tell me about Chap-paquiddick.”

Pete Rose spent five months in jail after pleading guilty in 1990 to tax evasion on memorabilia earnings. Five years later, a Brooklyn judge sentenced his boyhood hero, Duke Snider, to two years probation and a $5,000 fine after he pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy and failing to report $97,400 from card shows. Willie McCovey pleaded guilty the same day.

By 2008, what had been a $1.2 billion-a-year industry was doing only $200 million in sales, according to
Sports Collectors Digest
, the industry paper of record. “Baseball card shops have gone the way of the blacksmith,” said Vin Russo, owner of Mickey’s Place, a memorabilia shop
across the street from the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. “When Mickey died, he took the Hobby with him.”

In the world of cardboard, O’Connell said, “Mantle has been and continues to be in a class by himself. Among postwar players, Mantle lives in different zip code.” Which is surprising to Mike Berkus, because Boomers aren’t exactly booming and, he says, “the one thing you can’t do is pass on your heroes.”

The Topps #311 remains the Holy Grail of postwar cardboard: according to its spring 2010 “Population Report,” Professional Sports Authenticators, the industry leader, has graded only 970 #311s. Among them: three gem mint 10s, seven mint 9s (and two with qualifiers), and thirty near mint 8s. According to VintageCardPrices.com, the authoritative baseball card price guide, a PSA 9 sold for $282,000 in 2006 and a PSA 8 sold for $112,000 two years later.

The only nude photograph of The Mick—“Yes, you read correctly, a NUDE photo of Mickey Mantle!”—was sold on eBay for $25,000 in 2005. Astonishingly, the proud owner of the Arthur Rickerby candid preferred to remain anonymous.

Mickey, Jr., said in
A Hero All His Life
that he never intended to make his father his career. Marketing his memory—and weeding out counterfeit merchandise—became Danny and David Mantle’s life work. In 1997, the FBI estimated that 70 percent of all sports autographs were forgeries. The Mantles told the
Financial Post
in 2009 that they believe 90 to 95 percent of all Mantle signatures are phony. Some people, friends and relatives, wonder about their career choice. “I know that Danny and David have probably never done nothin’ in their lives,” their uncle Larry Mantle said. “Mickey, Jr., never did. All he did was follow his dad around. And then Billy died so young, he didn’t have a chance to do anything. I think they’ve sold just about everything they can sell. But, I mean, they gotta do what they gotta do.”

Others, including Bill Liederman, the former owner of Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant, have a different take. “The kids went into the family business,” he said. “That’s America.”

Late one November afternoon, Mantle was at the bar at the Pierre Hotel in New York, telling the same old stories to the same old guys. Only one problem: he had a load on, and a flight to catch at JFK, and if he didn’t make it he’d catch hell from Merlyn. Billy Martin called on George Lois to get Mantle out of the bar and into a cab. Lois guided him to the coat check to claim his bag. “We go up to the check room woman, a good-looking woman in her forties,” Lois said. “He peels off a hundred-dollar bill—a lot of money back then. He put it on her chest. I grabbed him—‘Mickey, calm down, you’re drunk.’ ”

Lois was already seeing 72-point headlines in the morning papers. But his agita proved unnecessary. All she wanted for her trouble was an autograph for her eight-year-old son, whom she had named Mickey. Naturally, Mantle was his hero. He scribbled his name, and Lois shoved him through the revolving door onto Fifth Avenue. By the time Lois got done making amends—she kept the $100—Mantle was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared into the rush hour dusk. Raw as it was, Lois was schvitzing: “Oh, my God, I’ve lost Mickey Mantle.”

Frantic, he surveyed the pedestrian bustle. It didn’t occur to him to look down. Mantle was lying in a swell of slush by the curb. “Literally, his face was in the gutter,” Lois said. “I said, ‘Holy shit, Mickey, are you hurt?’

“He says, ‘Fine place to be for America’s hero.’

“I swear to God—it was beautiful. He was very aware that everybody was looking at him and he had made a fool of himself.”

Everybody, including sometimes Mantle himself, could see what was happening. But nobody did anything.

Not his family. “We tried,” David said. “But we were so into our disease.”

Not Major League Baseball.

“They could have done something,” Bouton said. “They
should
have done something. It’s just stupid not to take care of its greatest heroes. Mickey Mantle still markets baseball. He’s going to be marketing the game forever, and they didn’t do anything.”

Not his teammates.

Some had the same problem; others were as financially dependent on him as they had been for their World Series checks. Many people had a vested interest in his continued success. As his pal Mike Klepfer put it: “He was the big poppa bear.”

One night, his friend Jimmy Orr, the football player, was at the Greensboro, Georgia, condo Mantle shared with Greer Johnson when Whitey Ford called. Orr answered. “Whitey says, ‘Take care of him, ’cause I ain’t made enough money off his autographs.’ ”

Ford was kidding. But Orr wasn’t: “He’s pretty hard to take care of,” he told Ford.

Mike Ferraro, who bunked with him one season at the St. Moritz and later ran Mantle’s fantasy camp, said, “To me, Moose and Hank are the guys who should have said, ‘You need to take better care of yourself.’ ”

But that would have been a violation of Baseball Code. “We don’t interfere,” Tony Kubek said. “We’ll go out and drink with him. But no, we don’t tell him the one important thing: ‘You’re drinking yourself to death.’ I have personal regrets. We all have regrets. I think we were all enablers. Players, including myself, feel guilty, and they should feel guilty.”

“We should have done more,” Carmen Berra said. “What could we do?”

In the Eighties, Kubek recruited Sam McDowell to organize an intervention. “There had been three or four different people who had called me over the years about trying to step in and help Mickey,” McDowell said. “Just by sitting down with an alcoholic, you’re not gonna help him. No way. It has to be orchestrated. The individual has to be put into a corner in which his only answer is ‘Yes, I want help,’ then instantly taken to a rehab.

“When I got the call to help, I was the director of the sports psychology program in the employee assistance program for the Texas Rangers and the Toronto Blue Jays. We contacted many individuals that Mickey had known, two other past players that were close to him. They could come up with certain stories, which you have to have that are directly related to the alcoholism.”

Kubek recalled, “Some guys wouldn’t do it. Sam said, ‘It might work, but chances are good it won’t. And it if doesn’t, chances are Mickey’ll hate you.’ ”

In the end, Mantle was tipped off by friends McDowell declined to identify. “On one individual’s part I would say it was strictly ignorance,” he said. “On the other person’s part it was protecting a relationship. The assumption was that if Mickey ever got sober, he would pull away from these people, which he probably would.”