Cobb (4 page)

“You fouled the dice, I saw you,” growled Cobb, and then he swung.

The blow missed as the stickman dodged, but, cursing and almost falling, Cobb seized the wooden rake and smashed it across the table. I jumped in and caught him under the arms as he sagged.

And then, as quickly as possible, we were put out into the street by two large uniformed guards. “Sorry, Mr. Cobb,” they said unhappily, “but we can't have this.”

A crowd had gathered, and as we started down the street, Cobb swearing and stumbling, clinging to me, I couldn't have felt more conspicuous if I'd been strung naked from the neon arch across Virginia Street, Reno's main drag. At the corner, Ty was struck by an attack of breathlessness. “Got to stop,” he gasped. Feeling him going limp on me, I turned his big body against a lamppost, braced my legs, and with
an underarm grip held him there until he caught his breath. He panted and gasped for air.

His face gray, he murmured, “Reach into my left-hand coat pocket.” Thinking he wanted his bottle of heart pills, I did. But instead I pulled out a six-inch-thick wad of currency, secured by a rubber band. “Couple of thousand there,” he said weakly. “Don't let it out of sight.”

At the nearest motel, where I hired a single room with two twin beds, he collapsed on the bed in his coat and hat and slept. After finding myself some breakfast, I turned in.

Hours later I heard him stirring. “What's this place?” he muttered.

I told him the name of the motel—TraveLodge.

“Where's the bankroll?”

“In your coat. You're wearing it.”

Then he was quiet.

After a night's sleep, Cobb felt well enough to resume his gambling. In the next few days, he won more than three thousand dollars at the tables, and then we went sightseeing in historic Virginia City. There, as in all places, he stopped traffic. And had the usual altercation. This one was at the Bucket of Blood, where Cobb accused the bartender of serving watered scotch. The bartender denied it. Crash! Another drink went flying.

Back at the lodge a week later, looking like the wrath of John Barleycorn and having refused medical aid in Reno, he began to suffer new and excruciating pains in his hips and lower back. But between groans he forced himself to work an hour a day on his autobiography. He told inside baseball stories, never published:

“Frank Navin, who owned the Detroit club for years, faked his turnstile count to cheat the visiting team and Uncle Sam. So did Big Bill Devery and Frank Farrell, who owned the New York Highlanders—later called the Yankees.

“Walter Johnson, ‘the Big Train,' tried to kill himself when his wife died.

“Grover Cleveland Alexander wasn't drunk out there on the mound, the way people thought. He was an epileptic. Old Pete would fall down with a seizure between innings, then go back and pitch another shutout.

“John McGraw hated me because I tweaked his nose in broad daylight
in the lobby of the Oriental Hotel, in Dallas, after earlier beating the hell out of his second baseman, Buck Herzog, upstairs in my room.”

But before we were well started, Cobb suddenly announced we'd go riding in his twenty-three-foot Chris-Craft speedboat, tied up in a boathouse below the lodge. When I went down to warm it up, I found the boat on the bottom of Lake Tahoe, sunk in fifteen feet of water.

My host broke all records for blowing his stack when he heard the news. He saw in this a sinister plot: “I told you I've got enemies all around here! It's sabotage as sure as I'm alive!”

A sheriff's investigation turned up no clues. Cobb sat up for three nights with his Luger. “I'll salivate the first dirty skunk who steps foot around here after dark.”

(Parenthetically, Cobb had a vocabulary all his own. To “salivate” something meant to destroy it. Anything easy was “softy boiled,” to outsmart someone was to “slip him the oskafagus,” and all doctors were “truss-fixers.” People who displeased him—and this included a high percentage of those he met—were “fee-simple sons of bitches,” “mugwumps,” “lead-heads,” or, if female, “lousy slits.”)

Lake Tahoe friends of Cobb's had stopped visiting him long before, but one morning an attractive blonde of about fifty came calling. She was an old chum—in a romantic way, I was given to understand, in bygone years—but Ty greeted her coldly. “Lost my sexual powers when I was sixty-nine,” he said when she was out of the room. “What the hell use to me is a woman?”

The lady had brought along a three-section electric vibrator bed, which she claimed would relieve Ty's back pains. We helped him mount it. He took a twenty-minute treatment. Attempting to dismount, he lost his balance and fell backward. The contraption jackknifed and Cobb was pinned, yelling and swearing, under a pile of machinery.

After we freed him and helped him to a chair, he told the lady—in the choicest gutter language—where she could put the bed. She left, sobbing.

“That's no way to talk to an old friend, Ty,” I said. “She was trying to do you a favor.”

“And you're a hell of a poor guest around here, too!” he thundered.
“You can leave any old time!” He quickly grabbed a bottle and heaved it in my direction.

“Thought you could throw straighter than that!” I yelled back. Fed up with him, I started to pack my bags.

Before I'd finished, Cobb broke out a bottle of vintage malt scotch, said I was “damned sensitive,” half-apologized, and the matter was forgotten—for now.

While working one morning on an outside observation deck, I heard a thud inside. On his bedroom floor, sprawled on his back, lay the Georgia Peach. He was unconscious, his eyes rolled back, breathing shallowly. I thought he was dying.

There was no telephone. “Eavesdroppers on the line,” Cobb had told me; “I had it cut off.” I ran down the road to a neighboring home and phoned a Carson City doctor, who promised to come immediately.

Back at the lodge, Ty remained stiff and stark on the floor, little bubbles escaping his lips. His face was bluish white. With much straining, I lifted him halfway to the bed, and by shifting holds finally rolled him onto it and covered him with a blanket. Twenty minutes passed. No doctor.

Ten minutes later, I was at the front door, watching for the doctor's car, when I heard a sound. There stood Ty, swaying on his feet. “You want to do some work on the book?” he said.

His recovery didn't seem possible. “But you were out cold a minute ago,” I said.

“Just a dizzy spell. Have 'em all the time. Must have hit my head on the bedpost when I fell.”

The doctor, arriving, found Cobb's blood pressure standing at a grim 210/90 on the gauge. His temperature was 101 degrees and, from gross neglect of his diabetes, he was in a state of insulin shock, often fatal if not quickly treated. “I'll have to hospitalize you, Mr. Cobb,” said the doctor.

Weaving his way to a chair, Cobb coldly waved him away. “Just send me your bill,” he grunted. “I'm going home.”

“Home” was the multimillionaire's main residence at Atherton, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula, 250 miles away, and it was there he headed later that night.

With some hot soup and insulin in him, Cobb had recovered with the same unbelievable speed he'd shown in baseball. In his heyday,
trainers often sewed up deep spike cuts in his knees, shins, and thighs, on a clubhouse bench, without anesthetic, and he didn't lose an inning. Famed sportswriter Grantland Rice, one 1920 day in New York, sat beside a bedridden, feverish Cobb, whose thighs, from sliding, were a mass of raw flesh. Rice urged him not to play. Sixteen hours later, Cobb beat the Yankees with five hits in six times at bat, plus two steals.

On the ride to Atherton, he yelled insults at several motorists who moved too slowly to suit him. Reaching home, Ty said he felt ready for another drink.

My latest surprise was Cobb's eleven-room, two-story, richly landscaped Spanish-California villa at 48 Spencer Lane, an exclusive neighborhood. You could have held a ball game on the grounds. But the rich mansion had no lights, no heat, no hot water. It was in blackout.

“I'm suing the Pacific Gas and Electric Company,” he explained, “for overcharging me on the service. Those rinky-dinks tacked an extra sixteen dollars on my bill. Bunch of crooks. When I wouldn't pay, they cut off my utilities. Okay—I'll see them in court.”

For months previously, Ty Cobb had lived in an all but totally dark house. The only illumination was candlelight. The only cooking facility was a portable Coleman camper's stove. Bathing was impossible, unless you could take it cold. The electric stove, refrigerator, deep freeze, radio, and television, of course, didn't work. Cobb had vowed to “hold the fort” until his case against PG&E was settled. Simultaneously, he had filed a sixty-thousand-dollar suit in San Francisco Superior Court against the State of California to recover state income taxes already collected—on the argument that he wasn't a permanent resident of California, but of Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and other way-points. State's attorneys claimed he spent at least six months per year in Atherton, and thus had no case. “I'm gone so much from here,” Cobb claimed, “that I'll win hands down.” All legal opinion, I later learned, held just the opposite view, but Cobb ignored the lawyers' advice.

Next morning, I arranged with Ty's gardener, Hank, to turn on the lawn sprinklers. In the outdoor sunshine, a cold-water shower was easier to take. From then on, the backyard became my regular wash-room.

The problem of lighting a desk, enabling us to work on the book,
was solved by stringing two hundred feet of cord, plugged into an outlet of a neighboring house, through hedges and flower gardens and into the window of Cobb's study, where a single naked bulb hung over the chandelier provided illumination. The flickering shadows cast by the single light made the vast old house seem haunted. No “ghost” writer ever had more ironical surroundings.

At various points around the premises, Ty showed me where he'd once installed high-voltage wires to stop trespassers. “Curiosity seekers?” I asked. “Hell, no,” he said. “Detectives broke in here looking for evidence against me in a divorce suit. After a couple of them got burned, they stopped coming.”

To reach our bedrooms, my host and I groped our way down long, black corridors. Twice he fell in the dark, and finally he collapsed completely. He was so ill that he was forced to check in to Stanford Hospital in nearby Palo Alto. Here another shock was in store.

One of the physicians treating Ty, a Dr. E. R. Brown, said, “Do you mean to say that this man has traveled seven hundred miles in the last month without medical care?”

“Doctor,” I said, “I've hauled him in and out of saloons, motels, gambling joints, steambaths, and snowbanks. There's no holding him.”

“It's a miracle he's alive. He has most of the major ailments I know about.”

Dr. Brown didn't reveal Ty's main ailment to me. Cobb himself broke the news one night from his hospital bed. “It's cancer,” he said bluntly. “About a year ago I had most of my prostate gland removed when they found it was malignant. Now it's spread up into the back bones. These pill-peddlers here won't admit it, but I haven't got a chance.” Cobb made me swear I'd never divulge his secret before he died. “If it gets in the papers, the sob sisters will have a field day. I don't want sympathy from anybody.”

At Stanford, where he absorbed seven massive doses of cobalt radiation, the ultimate cancer treatment, he didn't act like a man on his last legs. Even before his strength returned, he was in the usual form. “They won't let me have a drink,” he said indignantly. “I want you to get me a bottle of sixteen-year-old. Smuggle it in your tape-recorder case.”

I tried, telling myself that no man with terminal cancer deserves to be dried out, but sharp-eyed nurses and orderlies were watching. They
searched Ty's closet, found the bottle, and over his hollers of protest appropriated it.

“We'll have to slip them the oskafagus,” said Ty.

Thereafter, a drink of scotch and water sat in plain view in his room, on his bedside table, under the very noses of his physicians—and nobody suspected a thing. The whiskey was in an ordinary water glass, and in the liquid reposed Ty's false teeth. Nobody thought to frisk the dental fluid.

There were no dull moments while Cobb was at Stanford, one of the largest and highest-rated medical centers in the United States. He was critical of everything. He told one specialist that he was not even qualified to be an intern, and advised the hospital dietitian—loudly—that she and the kitchen workers were in a conspiracy to poison him with their “foul” dishes. To a nurse he snapped, “If Florence Nightingale knew about you, she'd spin in her grave.”

Between blasts he did manage to buckle down to work on the book, dictating long into the night into a microphone suspended over his bed. Slowly the stormy details of his professional life came out. He spoke often of having “forgiven” his many baseball enemies, and then lashed out at them with such passionate phrases that it was clear he'd done no such thing. High on his hate list were John McGraw of the Giants; New York sportswriters; Hub Leonard, a pitcher who in 1926 accused Cobb and Tris Speaker of fixing a Detroit-Cleveland game, which led to Cobb's retirement as Tiger manager; American League president Ban Johnson; one-time Detroit owner Frank Navin; former baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis; and all those who intimated that Cobb ever used his spikes on another player without having been attacked first.

After a night when he slipped out of the hospital, against all orders, and drove with me to a San Francisco Giants–Cincinnati Reds game at Candlestick Park, thirty miles away, Stanford Hospital decided it couldn't keep Tyrus R. Cobb, and he was discharged. For his extensive treatment, his bill ran to more than twelve hundred dollars.

“That's a nice racket you boys have here,” he told the discharging doctors. “You clip the customers, charge them for the use of everything from bedpans to the steam heat.”