The Last Boy (46 page)

Grief group is sacred ground at Betty Ford, a place where all is bared and everything is confidential. Spiritual counselors pushed Mantle hard
to account for the feelings of self-loathing he jotted down in the margins of the journal he had to keep.
Embarrassed, angry with myself, angry, humiliated, foolish, ashamed, stupidity, inadequate, exasperated
. The answers are almost always in the distant past, counselors say, rather than in recent experience. They demand rewrites if they think the letters aren’t honest enough. Mantle didn’t need a do-over.

He read his letter to Mutt aloud to the group and then burned it, David Mantle said, as patients are urged to do in an attempt to leave the past behind.

In the confessional account he gave to
Sports Illustrated
upon his release from treatment, Mantle described the letter as an apology for not living up to his father’s expectations. He said he was sorry for the things he did and for the things he hadn’t done, the things Mutt might have done had he been afforded the chance he had given his son.
Mutt wouldn’t have turned his sons into drinking buddies. Mutt would have done the exercises prescribed for his knee
.
Mutt would have been Lou Gehrig if he’d been a Yankee. Maybe even the next Babe Ruth.

He told Mutt how much he missed him, how he wished he had lived to see him play better than he had his rookie year. He told him that he, too, had four sons. And he told him, finally, that he loved him.

Some years later, with the permission of Mantle’s family, Pizzo spent a week at Betty Ford researching Mantle’s experience for a new script for
The Mick
. One of Mantle’s counselors, Louis Schectel, described Mantle’s progress in rehab. “Louie said every time he started talking about his dad he started sobbing,” Pizzo said. “He didn’t think Mickey had it in him. In the first couple of weeks he was too shut down. He said, ‘His defenses were so high, I thought maybe we wouldn’t get him. That letter proved me wrong.’”

It took ten minutes and a lifetime to write. When he was done, he called Mike Klepfer, his friend in upstate New York, with whom he hadn’t spoken in years. “He was crying like a baby,” Klepfer said. “He said, ‘They made me write Mutt.’ He didn’t even say ‘my dad.’ And he said, ‘They made me tell him what I wanted to tell him.’”

They had spent many hours and many long nights talking about their fathers—“two strong men who dominated us in our early life,” Klepfer
says. And what he concluded from Mantle’s call was this: “He wanted to tell Mutt to stop running his life.”

The grief letter afforded him that opportunity. “He went back to the famous story about the hotel room in Kansas City where Mutt grabbed his stuff and said, ‘Okay, come on, you coward, we’ll go home and you’ll go in the mine.’ And he said, ‘I shoulda grabbed my dad right then and told him, “Hey, I’ll make my own decisions. Get outta here.” But I was too young then.’

“I got off the phone, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this letter wasn’t saying he was sorry but was telling Mutt that he shoulda gotten outta his life and let him fall on his butt.’ In other words, if he had taken control earlier and not lived his whole life based on what Mutt wanted him to do, he would have been better off. Somehow he found that in Betty Ford.”

Mantle described the contents of the letter to Linda Howard, with whom he had remained friends, and to Greer Johnson, in much the same way.

In saying goodbye to Mutt’s ghost, Mantle had to face the here and now—and what was left of his family. “He was terribly guilt-ridden about his behavior towards his family,” Greenberg said. “And appropriately so.”

Perhaps that’s why Mantle invited Johnson to Family Week instead of his wife or sons.

She thought it was because he didn’t feel close to them. “It was safer than having to face my family,” Mantle explained in the chapter he wrote for
A Hero All His Life
.

The collateral damage was enormous. Danny, who had some liver disease by the time he went to rehab, was born with a congenital abnormality in his pancreas—two openings instead of one. When it becomes inflamed, the pain that visits him in the wee hours of the morning is so intense, he told me, “I’m just rolling up on the floor, trying to eat crackers.”

The condition was diagnosed at age thirty-eight, when he had his gallbladder removed. He’s had surgery to remove blockages from his bile duct and precancerous polyps removed from his colon. Doctors follow him closely. “I guess we just weren’t put together too good,” he once said.

For years after the crack-up in their daddy’s Cadillac, David required pain injections up and down his spine; he has migraines resulting from a motorcycle accident and getting hit in the head once too often, as well as advanced hypertension that caused a stroke-like episode in 2002. Spread
across the width of his back is a tattoo comprised of Japanese characters, which, he told me, he calls his spiritual shield.

No one was more damaged than Billy Mantle, who lived with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma for seventeen years. His life spiraled into a nightmarish succession of debilitating chemotherapy treatments and drug treatment programs. Three times his cancer went into remission; four times he went into residential rehabs. In 1993, the cancer staged its third assault, and treatment was excruciating. He became addicted to the painkiller Dilaudid. He had one prescription in Houston and another in Dallas. “He didn’t have to do without,” David said.

Billy used the catheter port doctors had put in his chest for chemotherapy to facilitate his drug use. One day, his father walked into his trophy room in Dallas and found Billy grinding pills into a powder, which he mixed with water to make an injectable solution. “He was putting it in the syringe and shooting up,” David said. “He got completely cured from cancer and it left him an addict.”

As his drug use increased and diversified—speed, crack, and alcohol—his parents grew desperate and scared. Mantle summoned Billy Martin, then managing the Texas Rangers, to have a talk with his namesake. Martin arrived so drunk he was too tongue-tied to speak. When their house was burglarized, Merlyn suspected his drug friends of the crime. She sold the house she had picked out in 1958 and moved into a condo.

One overdose left Billy in the hospital, on a ventilator. Mantle forced his brothers to go see him. He hated drugs. On at least one occasion that David recalled he tested them for drugs. He always reminded them that drinking wasn’t against the law.

Billy’s attempts to get sober received little familial support. “Every time he went and would come back, we’d go to dinner and we’re all shitfaced and he knows we’re getting ready to do cocaine,” David said. “He would last about three months and then go off. But who can blame him? We all said, ‘Billy you can’t do this’ while we’re doing it.”

“I had a lot of guilt,” Danny said. “You’re not supposed to put a person back in the same element where it got started.”

In 1994, David became the third Mantle to enroll at the Betty Ford Center. “Mom was already in Al-Anon,” he said. “Danny and Kay had gone. Dad had gone. I had familial reinforcement.”

Billy was still living at home with his mother when she had a heart attack in 1993. “What took her so long?” was Yogi Berra’s response to the news. She was still in the hospital recovering from double bypass surgery when Billy went missing. His heart was damaged as well. He had been admitted to the same hospital for a double valve replacement and a double bypass. He had a stroke on the operating table that left him partially paralyzed; he would drag his left leg for the rest of his life.

He overdosed soon after he went home. They found him in bed bleeding from his nose and mouth. After the ambulance took him to the hospital, a nurse found his stash hidden beneath the mattress.

In an interview with Roy Firestone on ESPN after leaving the Betty Ford Center, Mantle tried to express the guilt he felt about the boys’ addictions. “When I think of what I did to my sons…” His voice trailed off. He couldn’t complete the thought—because it was unthinkable to him.

A decade later, David was very clear about the lines of responsibility. “That was one of Dad’s regrets later on—that we became his drinking buddies,” he told me. “That’s not his fault. It’s not Mom’s fault. It was my fault. I made the choice to drink. I chose to do drugs. I don’t blame anything on my childhood. It’s me.”

As he was leaving the Betty Ford Center, counselors warned him: “Your first test will be in the airplane sitting in first class and they offer you a drink,” Johnson recalled.

Mantle just laughed. They flew back to Atlanta. A limousine sent by the governor of Georgia was waiting at the airport.

Three weeks later, Billy Mantle died in jail. He was in custody because “he had gotten too many DWIs,” Merlyn told me. “He had been arrested for driving while intoxicated.”

He was incarcerated at the Dallas County Judicial Treatment Center in Wilmer, Texas, a state facility described on a government website as “a residential, correctional treatment center for the diversion of drug-involved felony offenders from long-term incarceration.”

On Friday, March 11, 1994, he complained of chest pains. In the
morning, guards took him to Parkland General Hospital, where he was examined, and released back into the prison population. “He was walking to lunch when he clutched his chest and fell to the ground,” Merlyn told me.

Billy was dead of a heart attack. He was thirty-six years old—his father’s age when he played his last game for the Yankees.

Troy Phillips was in the clubhouse at Preston Trail when he got a call asking him to keep Mantle there until one of the boys could bring the awful news. He had just gotten out of the shower when Danny arrived. He had a glass of water in his hand. Danny only had to say, “Dad, Billy.”

“He knew,” Danny told me. “He just dropped the glass of water and started walking in circles.”

He went to Merlyn’s condominium to tell her that their son was dead. That was the last night they spent together.

They had been expecting the worst for so long—every time Billy left the house, in fact—that death came almost as a reprieve. “All those nights you sit there wondering, ‘Is he going to get killed tonight or kill somebody else,’” Danny said. “I hate to say it, but it was a relief. We know where he is.”

The next morning, when Mantle was late arriving at the funeral home, they feared the worst again. In a nationally televised interview three weeks later with Bob Costas on
NBC Now
, Mantle tearfully acknowledged the temptation he felt then. Chest heaving, tears seeping through a veil of heavy pancake makeup, he said: “I’ll tell you, it was pressure, a lotta pressure.”

His old teammate Tom Sturdivant had remained close to Merlyn and the boys, offering her solace and advice during her estrangement from her husband. His son Tommy, David’s best friend, died of a heart attack in David’s arms. Mantle was not happy to see Sturdivant at Billy’s funeral. “What the hell are you doing here?” he said.

Sturdivant replied, “Mick, I saw Billy more in the last five or six years than you did.”

Somehow the tension evaporated and they began to reminisce. Sturdivant reminded him of the time Billy had left a condom filled with buttermilk hanging from the door to Sturdivant’s room at Mantle’s golf tournament at Shangri La. Finally, they laughed.

Danny and Kay were married three weeks after Billy’s death. That presented another challenge for the father of the groom. Could he take happiness straight up? He could.

Danny and David attributed his sobriety during the last eighteen months of his life to stubbornness. “Made his mind up, it’s done,” David said.

Johnson thought it had to do with the weight of expectation—he was used to accomodating those. She says he drank because people expected Mickey Mantle to drink. “After Betty Ford, he said it was that people expected him
not
to drink. He felt like people were watching him all the time to see if he was gonna take a drink. So it was the public expectations that made him drink or not drink.”

That made Mark Greenberg wonder how he would have fared long term: “I think that if it wasn’t for all the pressure, I wouldn’t have given him much hope in staying sober. He wasn’t going to the meetings. He wasn’t following up with any counselors. He was basically doing this on his own—‘white-knuckling it.’”

David Mantle went to AA meetings after leaving Betty Ford. “You like going?” his father would ask. “Dad, I need to go,” he’d reply.

Anonymity is the bedrock of AA. “Mickey M” wasn’t going to fool anyone. His recovery became America’s recovery. “What meeting could Mickey Mantle go to?” asked Dr. Kenneth Thompson, medical director of the Caron Foundation and Alcohol Treatment Centers.

“Any meeting,” came the tough-love reply from former counselors at Betty Ford.

Mantle was as stunned by the public outpouring of affection and support as he was by the absence of his thirst. He had his moments; he told Jimmy Orr about working out at Preston Trail one day when the course was closed and no one was around. “He says, ‘I think I’ll go just have one glass of wine’ over at some bar he always went to,” Orr said. “Says he got in the parking lot. Said he must have sat there fifteen minutes, debating whether to go in. And finally he says, ‘I know if I go in I’m going to have more than one.’ So he cranked up and left.”

Reliable statistics on rates of recovery are hard to come by. People who relapse aren’t in a hurry to report it. Thompson cited composite figures gathered from many different programs to predict the likelihood of a relapse: 25 to 50 percent will relapse within the first three months; 50 to 75 percent will relapse within the first year. “We know that the longer you stay sober, the more likely you are to stay sober,” Thompson said. “Somebody
at eighteen months would not necessarily be considered long-term recovery, but it is something special.”

With or without continued twelve-step support, Mantle had learned enough at Betty Ford to offer words of counsel to his friend Rhubarb Jones, the host of his favorite country-western radio show on Y106.7 in Atlanta, at the celebration of Zell Miller’s second inauguration. There was wine on the table. Jones, who had not yet begun to grapple with his own drinking problem, asked Mantle, “Mind if I have a glass of wine?”