The Last Boy (6 page)

He called his father and said he wanted to come home. “I was down, really down.”

“You wait right there,” Mutt said. “I’ll be up there.”

The day before he left for Kansas City, Mutt called Ed VonMoss at the Blue Goose Mine to say he wouldn’t be at work the next morning. “I gotta go get that lazy kid of mine,” Mutt told him.

According to VonMoss’s son Jerry, his father reassured Mutt that there was still a place for Mickey in Commerce: “I’ll have a job for him.”

It is unclear exactly when Mutt delivered his ultimatum. The June 1997 edition of the Ottawa County
Emporium
, a historical newsletter featuring reprints of newspaper stories from Miami, Oklahoma, included this report: “Mr. and Mrs. E. C. Mantle and their son, Larry, as well as their daughter, Barbara, and Miss Merlyn Johnson, visited Mickey after his home debut for the Blues on Sunday, July 22nd.”

In his many tellings of the woodshedding session, Mantle edited
everyone else out of the meeting at the Aladdin Hotel. But Mutt took the whole family along. Merlyn remembered the long, quiet drive to Kansas City. So much was at stake. When they got to the hotel, she recalled, “Everybody was in the room. Then we went outside, but you could hear. I heard him say, ‘If that’s all the man you are, then get your clothes and let’s go home.’ Mutt did not yell. He spoke with authority. Mick was crying, of course. He was embarrassed because he wasn’t cutting the pie.”

Mantle had expected solace and support, not paternal fury. “I thought he was coming up to give me a pep talk,” Mantle told me. “He comes up, walks in the hotel room, and starts throwing all my shit in a bag. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘I thought I raised a man. You ain’t nothing but a goddamn coward.’

“I said, ‘Wait a minute.’

“He said, ‘Ah, bullshit, you come and work with me in the mines. I didn’t raise a man. I raised a baby.’

“He was crying, and I was crying. I said, ‘Well, let me try again.’

“He said, ‘Bullshit. Come on. I came on all the way up here. You’re going back with me. You ain’t got a gut in your body.’

“He made me feel I was about that tall. Finally he says, ‘I’m gone. If you can’t play, get a bus and come home.’”

The message was delivered with vehemence that the younger Mantle couldn’t possibly understand. True, he had noticed that his father’s khakis were hanging loose on his frame. True, he had always worried about the old man’s smoking. But most nineteen-year-olds don’t spend their days contemplating parental mortality. Mantle was too young, too immature, too caught up in the thrall of his new life to see the signs of fatal illness and desperation in his father’s gaunt, angry face.

There was no opportunity for Merlyn to be alone with him, much less comfort him. “I wouldn’t have,” she told me. “Nobody did.”

Truth to tell, she wouldn’t have been disappointed if he had come on home.

After they all went out to dinner, the group headed back to Commerce at Mutt’s cautious 35 miles per hour, leaving Mantle to decide whether to pack for a three-week road trip or buy a ticket for Commerce. “I thought about it a long time that night,” Mantle told me.

He opted for the future Mutt wanted for him. And he began to hit—four hits in one game in Milwaukee, a home run in Louisville, two more the next day in Indianapolis (one left-handed, one right-handed), then another one the following day. Two days after that, in Toledo, he hit for the super cycle, banging a single, double, triple, and two home runs. Within the month, he had 11 home runs, 52 runs scored, and 60 RBI.

By late August he was on his way back to the Bronx, but not without another Army-mandated detour—a third reconsideration of his draft status prompted by angry letters to the White House and front-office concern about negative PR. When he finally arrived in the Yankee clubhouse, he found lucky number 7 hanging in his cubicle. Pete Sheehy had given away number 6 in his absence.

The Yankees clinched the pennant in Philadelphia on September 28, the same day the Giants tied the Dodgers for first place in the National League. Mutt, his brother Emmett, and his pals Turk Miller and Trucky Compton drove east for the World Series. The kid showed them the town. In
The Mick
, Mantle described his father’s parochial confusion upon seeing the statue of Atlas in front of Rockefeller Center: “Shoot, the Statue of Liberty’s smaller than I thought.”

The Oklahoma boys didn’t know how much money it cost to go to the movies; they didn’t know where to get off the subway for the ballpark (and ended up walking three miles). They sure didn’t know how to hold their big-city liquor; riding the train, pressed between New York City straphangers, Compton threw up in the hat of an unlucky passenger.

But Mutt knew trouble when he saw it.

Her name was Holly Brooke. Mantle introduced her to his father as his “very good friend.” He recounted the conversation in
The Mick
:

Maybe she winked at me. I don’t know. But Dad knew something was up—and he didn’t like it a bit. Later, he took me aside.

“Mickey, you do the right thing and marry your own kind.”

“It’s not what you think, Dad.”

“Maybe not, but Merlyn is a sweet gal and you know she loves you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“The point is, she’s good. Just what you need to keep your head straight.”

“I know.”

“Well, then, after the Series you better get on home and marry her.”

I half turned from him, nodding silently. There was nothing more to discuss.

“She was older,” Merlyn told me. “She had a kid almost as old as Mick. She more or less got in with this attorney. Mutt saw the situation. He knew it was trouble. Mick could be very easily swayed.”

While Brooke trysted with him in major and minor league cities, Merlyn was back in Oklahoma, wearing his engagement ring and receiving love letters penned on Yankee letterhead. In one letter, written early on a sleepless road-trip morning, he pleaded with her to write to him the way the other wives did. Another letter, written in the clubhouse, began:

Honey I sure will be glad to see you—I’m going to make up for all the loving I have missed from you when I get home—The only thing is I will just want to stay there and hate it all the more when I have to leave you again. We haven’t been together very much since we have been engaged have we? When we get married we’ll make up for it.

It was signed, “All of my love, Mickey M—”

“He wrote like he loved me,” Merlyn told me six decades later.

Mantle’s dalliance with Brooke set a precedent for a double life that persisted long after the relationship ended and would continue throughout his married life. Nor was Brooke that summer’s only leggy temptation. Among them was a Copa girl named Peaches, a close personal friend of the mob boss Joe Bonanno. Mantle was too eager and too innocent to understand his dangerous indiscretion.

“He was gonna have Mickey rubbed out,” said Mike Klepfer, a friend in later life whose longshoreman father heard the waterfront scuttlebutt about a contract on the amorous ballplayer. Decades after the fact, Klepfer’s father told Mantle, “I remember when they were going to kill you.” “Mickey looked like he’d seen a ghost,” Mike said.
On October 3, Yogi Berra was making his way home from the Polo Grounds, trying to beat the traffic on the clogged streets of upper Manhattan, when “whatchamacallit” came to the plate in the bottom of the ninth inning of the deciding play-off game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. With the Giants trailing 4–1, Berra thought the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Like everyone else in New York, Berra was sure the Yankees would face the Dodgers in game 1 of the World Series the next day.

Bobby Brown also missed Bobby Thomson’s historic at-bat, which was seen across the country on the first coast-to-coast baseball telecast. Brown was waiting for his father behind the wheel of his new Chevrolet outside the press gate at the Polo Grounds. He had given his dad his ticket to the game. They learned the outcome at a red light on Amsterdam Avenue from the driver of a car in the next lane—Brown couldn’t afford a radio in his new sedan.

Mickey and Mutt were still in the ballpark when Thomson stepped to the plate. Like most everyone else in the Polo Grounds, the Yankees were rooting for the Giants. “Bigger ballpark, bigger World Series money,” Gil McDougald said.

They saw Ralph Branca lumber to the mound, summoned by Dodger manager Charlie Dressen to relieve the exhausted Don Newcombe. Probably they didn’t notice, as Dodger center fielder Duke Snider did, the ominous change in Dressen’s demeanor. “Usually Dressen liked to bring the relief pitcher up to date, give him all sorts of instruction,” Snider said. This time, Dressen was mum. “I said, ‘Charlie’s worried,’” Snider recalled. “So I became worried.”

They saw Willie Mays, New York’s other rookie center fielder, kneeling in the on-deck circle. “Willie, he was scared to death,” Snider said.

Mays was still kneeling in the on-deck circle when Thomson rounded the bases at 3:58
P.M.
Snider had a better view than anyone else of the ball that broke Brooklyn’s heart, a line drive that sent Andy Pafko to the left field wall. “I ran over,” Snider said. “It was a low line drive. I was there to receive the carom. I thought I was going to hold him to a double.”

Thomson’s home run would soon be known as the Shot Heard Round the World and the Miracle at Coogan’s Bluff. When Snider saw it dip
over the fence, he said, “I took a right turn and went into the clubhouse in center field and didn’t break stride.”

Snider left the Polo Grounds with his parents, counting effigies of the luckless Ralph Branca hanging from Brooklyn light poles. The Yankees headed to a pre-Series bash at the Press Club; Mantle went to the hotel room of Tom Greenwade, the scout who had landed him there. Greenwade’s wife, Florence, answered the door. “He said, ‘Would you mind if I came into your room and just stayed here awhile ’til he gets back?’” their son Bunch recalled.

He didn’t offer an explanation for his appearance at her door or for his glum mood. Florence Greenwade assumed homesickness was the cause. It was a Mantle story she often told, and her daughter Angie remembers it well: “So he spent his evening sitting with my mother. She said he was so miserably unhappy; wondered what he’d gotten himself into. I think he was scared and nervous. He knew that so much was expected of him.”

Mrs. Greenwade didn’t ask any questions. She didn’t ask anything of him at all. Angie said, “He basically sat there quietly. I’m sure he knew nobody would be knockin’ at the door looking for him. He didn’t have to do anything but
be.
”

On October 4, 1951, parking meters were installed in downtown Brooklyn, adding insult to the injury of the heartbroken borough.
An American in Paris
opened at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan. And in the Bronx, Mantle played in his first World Series game.

Baseball was on the cusp of radical change. Babe Ruth was three years dead; DiMaggio was taking his curtain call. His successor, Mickey Mantle, the first telegenic star of the new broadcast age, was installed in right field. Mantle’s charismatic foil, Willie Mays, was playing center field for baseball’s first all-black outfield.

Unlike Mantle, Mays arrived in New York without tabloid fanfare. Unlike Mantle, Mays pleaded to be sent to the minors when he struggled during his first days with the Giants. But they had more in common than it appeared, more than a shared future on similar real estate.

Born the same year to fathers who rolled baseballs across the floor to baby boys who could not yet walk, they were in their major league infancy. What the 65,000 paying customers at Yankee Stadium saw that afternoon were two works in progress whose unlimited potential would
fuel unending debate. They would improve each other and everyone who played with them and against them.

Arriving at the Stadium that morning, Mantle was startled to see his name in the starting lineup—batting leadoff. The Giants had had no time to catch their breath or sit still for the usual briefings. “We just went out and played,” outfielder Monte Irvin said. “We didn’t know anything about anybody.”

Their scouts had alerted them to Mantle’s uncompromised speed; nonetheless, when they saw him on the base paths in game 1, they were stunned by the fact of it. “Fastest white guy we’ve ever seen to first base,” shortstop Alvin Dark said.

Adrenaline carried the Giants to a 5–1 victory in the first of the sixty-five World Series games Mantle would play. The second of them would be the most pivotal game of his career.

Fifth inning, game 2. DiMaggio is in center; Mantle is in right. Mays steps to the plate. The collision of fates is almost operatic, triangulating the future of the game. On the mound, Eddie Lopat goes into his windup. Mays gets wood on the ball but not a lot. The result is a tepid opposite-field fly ball, not deep, not well hit, not difficult to catch except that it’s what ballplayers call a tweener, splitting the difference between DiMaggio in center and Mantle in right.

Here’s DiMaggio, shaded over toward left center, asserting his proud prerogative—
This is my turf! Mine!
And here’s Mantle, chasing the future across America’s most famous lawn. Isn’t that what Stengel had told him to do?
The dago’s heel is hurtin’. Go for everything.

He was new at this outfield play. Hell, everything was new for him. Maybe he didn’t understand the etiquette—if the center fielder can get there, it’s
his
ball. Especially if that center fielder is DiMaggio. Hank Bauer learned that the first time he made the mistake of taking a ball hit between them. Jogging back to the dugout, DiMaggio gave him a lethal stare. “I said, ‘Joe, did I do something wrong?’

“He said, ‘No, but you’re the first sonofabitch who ever invaded my territory.’ Center fielders don’t call for nothin’. When I heard the grunt, I got the hell out of the road.”

The past and the future converged on a routine fly ball in Mantle’s ninety-eighth major league game. Imagine Mutt watching. He sees
the geometry of disaster. The ball is dropping. Joe’s coming. Mickey’s charging. “I was running as hard as I could,” Mantle told me. “At that time, I could outrun anybody. I ran over to catch it. Just as I was getting ready to put my glove up, I heard him say, ‘I got it.’ Well, shit, you don’t want to run into Joe DiMaggio in center field in Yankee Stadium. I slammed on my brakes like that.”