The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World (2 page)

W
E REMEMBER CERTAIN ballgames, certain players, certain plays on vanished fields.

Willie Mays is rushing out from under his cap in mad pursuit of a line-drive, ticketed three-base hit . . . until Willie outspeeds the baseball. The sizzling liner settles in the dark mitt at his belt. “Willie’s glove,” the witty Vin Scully says, “is where triples go to die.”

Stan Musial coils at home plate, slope-shouldered, balanced, taut as the bow of a stout archer. The pitch comes hurtling and Musial uncoils, his swing a mix of grace and violence. A long high drive sails out of Flatbush toward Crown Heights. “The man,” mutters a Dodger fan. “Stan the Man. He’s killing us again. But you can’t root
against
a guy that hits that great.”

The funny-looking catcher works the Bronx. Thick body. Baggy knickers. Shirt puffing at the waist. Absolutely the shortest neck in town. Yogi Berra doesn’t look like an athlete until he poles a buzzing fastball all the way into the third tier behind right field, the topmost deck of the old Yankee Stadium, the biggest, grandest ballpark in the world.

The old center fielder . . . no one ever looked
more
like a ballplayer than broad-shouldered Joe DiMaggio. He covered center with a long gliding stride and he punished pitchers. At bat, he did not stride; he didn’t need to. The punishing power flowed up from ankle, leg, and hip. “Every job has drawbacks,” said the great righthander Early Wynn. “The drawback of my job is that I gotta pitch to Joe DiMaggio.”

The memories crowd together, quickly now. Allie Reynolds throws a fastball at the head of Roy Campanella and the sturdy catcher has to dive for mother earth. Nothing personal. Nothing personal, perhaps. Reynolds is staking out his territory. Carl Furillo playing a carom off the right field wall and making a throw, a Carl Furillo throw. The runners stand still, each frozen to a base. Don Mueller spots a hole in the defense and pokes a base hit there. Mickey Mantle, the uptown strongboy, beats out a surprise bunt. Sal Maglie throws at Jackie Robinson. Jackie steals home. The Yankees overshift on Ted Williams, throttling him. Al Dark sprawls awkwardly but makes a play he has to make. The Duke leaps. Preacher throws his spitter. Bobby Thomson swings . . .

Memory revives the vanished ballfields. You see the fields; you see the ball and bat. Yet, as the Era begins, with two overwhelming stories, the fields are secondary, or seem to be. The passion of Leo Durocher and the ordeal of Jackie Robinson lead us very far from second base.

But without second base, without the ballfields in the background, neither story could ever have played out.

* * *

T
HE
HERALD TRIBUNE
entombed the story on page 24. It was the sports scoop of the century, but in 1947 managing editors confined sports stories to the back of the newspaper. Blacks rode in the back of the bus. Sports ran in the back of the paper. That was the way things were, the way they’d always been, everyone said, although of course nothing was really the way it had always been anymore.

It was a time of thunder and tectonic change. All at once people were trying to adjust to peace and television and something called “the emerging backward areas.” At last the sun was setting on the British Empire. (Hitler and Mussolini were only two years dead.) But we were also trying to comprehend virulent Stalinism, thermonuclear bombs, a brushfire conflict in Indochina, and the unspeakable revelations of the Holocaust. What was this anyway, peace or war? Had Christianity failed? we asked portentously at campfires beside a cedar-dark summer lake.

In the words of A. A. Milne, we were very young. The heavy world was lightened by dreams of goldfields and pretty girls, and those were things you could consider without furrowing a youthful brow. Assuming the Russians or the right-wingers didn’t blow up the planet, what was more important, we wondered, big bucks that could buy you a Packard convertible or a Saturday night date with blonde Cookie Bernstein, who strutted so prettily in her two-piece Lastex bathing suit, which almost but did not quite reveal the navel?

“Easy,” said Harvey Katz, handsome and bespectacled like Clark Kent, and very worldly-wise. Harvey was six months older than the rest of us, which meant that he had served a tour with the occupying army in Germany. “Make money and the pretty girls will come. In Europe, I got any woman I wanted for a tin of coffee.”

We’d heard that before. We were virgins mostly and we were tired of hearing about European women, all appealing as Eleanor of Aquitaine, all instantly available to Harvey Katz, the white slaver from Empire Boulevard, which ran east-west, just south of Ebbets Field.

We lit our cigarettes, Chesterfields and Camels and Virginia Rounds. We hit the jukebox. For a nickel Frank Sinatra sang:

In dreams I kiss your hand, Mam’selle,

Your dainty fingertips . . .

“
And there was this French one,” Katz continued. “What a time I had one night in Paris . . .”

“
Shut up, Harv,” we said, our envy turning into anger.

The temperature in New York City dropped to 39 degrees on May 8, 1947. That, decreed George Anthony Cornish, managing editor of the
Herald Tribune
, was front-page news.

“I think the baseball story should go outside, too,” said Rufus Stanley Woodward, a huge, volcanic, bespectacled sports editor and classicist who insisted on being called “Coach.” The men were arrayed for a story conference in Cornish’s office, five stories above West 41st Street. A bust of Adolf Hitler glowered near a window. Or maybe winced. Bullets from a dozen Garand rifles had pierced the bronze.

“I think not, Stanley,” Cornish said. He was a courtly Alabaman who enjoyed being called “Mister.”

“The baseball story is more important than the weather.”

“I think not,” Cornish repeated in a refined and gelid way.

Cornish controlled the front page; the issue was settled.

The strike against Jackie Robinson, racist and hateful and newsworthy as hell, would have to go inside the paper, twenty-four pages behind the front-pager on the weather.

That chilly May, veterans were saying they could not remember a baseball year like this one, and here we were still in the middle of spring. They could not remember a baseball year like this one for an excellent reason. There had not been a season like 1947 before. It was exciting even in January, four months before feisty, gabby Harry Truman, who was sixty-two, threw out the first ball at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

Leo Durocher, a lifetime .247 hitter, was the loudest .247 hitter in the annals. In a time of ornate nicknames — the Wild Horse of the Osage, the Sultan of Swat — Durocher was simply the Lip. He was a slick shortstop for four different teams and after that a slick manager across twenty-four seasons. He possessed charm and fire and a gambler’s wits, but cruelty marred his character. He is the only person I’ve heard seriously knocked by the knightly Stan Musial of St. Louis.

The cruelty ran strong and deep. Up top Durocher offered flash and glitter, which created a powerfully appealing manner, just the sort of fellow you would love to shoot pool with, even though he’d take your shirt and pants and wallet.

When 1947 began, Durocher was manager of the Dodgers, who had narrowly missed the pennant in 46. The Dodgers tied the St. Louis Cardinals across the 154 games of the season but lost two straight in a special playoff and had to go home. Durocher fled West to Hollywood for consolation and presently recovered sufficiently to seduce the popular hazel-eyed movie star Laraine Day. When Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe in 1954, the mating of a ballplayer with an actress so aroused gossip columnists that some called the tortured couple Mr. and Mrs. America. (That marriage lasted nine months, no more.)

The Leo-Laraine affair differed in significant ways. Unlike Marilyn, Laraine was a high-neckline sort of girl, comfortable playing a prim and lovely nurse in lightweight movies about young Dr. Kildare. There was a sweetness to Laraine onscreen and a sense of churchly propriety, characteristics not commonly associated with Monroe. But Laraine was steamy enough to win the heart of Cary Grant in a film called
Mr. Lucky
, where Grant played a dissolute gambler and Laraine played a noble society lady with what the Freudians might call intense suppressed sexuality. Press releases described her as a devout Mormon who neither drank nor smoked.

Now, incredibly, the Lip, Loud Leo, had seduced the upright, or formerly upright, Mormon beauty. Someone, possibly Leo, said he had consummated the act for the first time with Laraine on her living room piano bench.

An additional consideration further piqued national interest. Laraine was married to somebody else, one J. Ray Hendricks, who ran the Santa Monica airport and who, Laraine charged, drank too much. As the Hendrickses’ marriage staggered toward divorce, the husband went public with his troubles. He’d welcomed Leo Durocher into his home as a friend, Hendricks insisted. Served him food and drink. Now his house guest had seduced his wife. The
Los Angeles Examiner
summed up Hendricks’s complaints in a clear headline:
DUROCHER BRANDED LOVE THIEF
.

On January 20, 1947, Laraine Day divorced J. Ray Hendricks in California. On January 21, she married Leo Ernest Durocher in Mexico. A predecessor of Kitty Kelley named Florabelle Muir reviewed matters for the New York
Daily News:

Leo (The Lip) Durocher is what they call dynamic, which means that you can’t tell which direction he’s going to explode in. People like that act first and pick up the pieces afterward.

As a result of his dynamism, Durocher and his bride Laraine Day are nervously sitting out their honeymoon while platoons of legal authorities decide whether they are man and wife, parties to bigamy or just very dear friends who have been hasty.

Superior Court Judge George Dockweiler gave Laraine her divorce last Monday. The judge, ordinarily an easy-going fellow, was considerably upset when he heard Laraine had gone to Mexico the next day for another divorce and had then married Lippy in Texas.

“
They imposed themselves on the court,” Judge Dockweiler said. “She begged for a decree and then was not willing to abide by the terms: a one year wait before the decree becomes final, a one year wait before she could re-marry.”

The judge now wants to set aside the divorce. . . .

Old baseball hands grumbled. Who needed all this gossip stuff, issues of lust and lawyers?

But the stuff was weightier than gossip. Once Judge Dockweiler calmed down, Durocher and his wife would stay out of prison, but Durocher was riding toward a debacle that profoundly affected the next decade in baseball and, in a sense, the nature of the nation.

Back East, up in the Bronx, and around his ornate offices in the Squibb Building on Fifth Avenue, Larry MacPhail, the president of the Yankees, was drinking too much. Flat-faced, hyperactive Leland Stanford MacPhail had rescued the Dodgers from bankruptcy during the dolorous 1930s. MacPhail signed on to work in Brooklyn when the Dodgers were drawing fewer than 500,000 fans a season. Only 6,500 fans a game in a sports-happy borough of 2 million people within a city of 8 million souls.

Legend insists that the Dodgers were a beloved band of comics during the Depression. “Hey,” yelps the fan in a Flatbush Avenue saloon, according to one story. “The Dodgers got three men on base.”

“Oh, yeah?” says his companion. “Which base?”

My father, a solid college third baseman who smacked rocketing line drives, took me to Ebbets Field as a special treat on spring and autumn days in the 1930s. During that period, afternoon games began at 3:15 and sometimes my father could not make it to the ballpark until three o’clock. No matter. We sat behind third base, first base, or home plate. Plenty of seats. Ebbets Field was never crowded, fortunate for my father and myself, disastrous for the owners, the feuding descendants of old Charley Ebbets and Steve McKeever. The feuding paralyzed the franchise until the Brooklyn Trust Company, which held Dodger mortgages and Dodger paper, demanded — on the threat of foreclosing on Ebbets Field — that competent management be hired. Unlike the Yankees and the Giants, the Dodgers had to spend decades crawling out of debt, which worked mightily on the shape of things to come.

Nor is it accurate to maintain that the few customers in Ebbets Field enjoyed themselves in tolerant merriment while staring at losing pitchers. No Dodger fan was amused in 1937 when the team lost 91 times and finished 33½ games behind the pennant-winning Giants (whose home attendance was 926,887).

A particularly hollow substory holds that “Dem Bums” was a local term of affection. Fantasy portrays Brooklynites washing down flagons of Trommer’s beer while regaling one another with stories of “Our Beloved Bums” hitting doubles that turned into double plays.

Trommer’s beer was brewed in Brooklyn, all right, and there was a fine beer garden serving German food alongside the brewery. But “beloved Bums”? Never happened.

“Them stinking bums” was what you heard among the ball fans, as in “I’m never gonna buy a ticket to see them stinking bums again.”

My father, courtly and elegant, disliked imprecise speech and vulgarisms such as “stinking.” Further, he explained, “bum,” a term of uncertain origin, wasn’t much of a word, and if it was intended to suggest incompetence, that usage was not appropriate. There were no incompetent ballplayers in the major leagues, none at all. Every major leaguer was at least a good ballplayer, else how would he have reached the majors? If a few looked bad, that was because they were coming up against some great ones. “Pay attention now. Let’s watch Van Lingle Mungo spot his fastball. Good pitch. Good pitch. Right up around the shoulders. They call that the high hard one, son. Say, Mungo’s almost as fast as Dazzy Vance.”

Robert Creamer, the author and critic, once began a baseball essay: “Spaniards have the gift for patient melancholy.” My father was sprung from cheerful Alsatian stock, but when I conjure up his face as he sat beside me at Ebbets Field long ago, that’s just what I see, patient melancholy. (Creamer was writing about Al Lopez, a skillful catcher, whose job it was during the 1930s to get Van Lingle Mungo to throw strikes. Patient, melancholy work.)