The Last Boy (11 page)

Early one morning, he sat on the front porch with Mutt and Mallon, confiding his fears that he would never be good enough. “He was hitting, like, .230,” Mallon said. “And his dad said, ‘You wanna go back in those damn mines? You haven’t even given it a chance yet. Here you wantin’ to quit.’ He mighta said some cusswords too.”

Mantle was afraid the Yankees would send him home before his $750 bonus kicked in on June 30. His insecurity was palpable; teammates found him softhearted and unexpectedly tender. Keith Speck recalled the last day of the 1949 season, when Mantle cried on the team bus because the guys “weren’t going to be together again.”

“I think Mickey was probably more fragile than most folks realize,” Bunch Greenwade said. “His feelings ran deep.”

They all heard about his uncle Tunney, who had died two years earlier, and his grandfather, who had died three years before that. “Every part of my family’s dying,” Mantle would say, crying on roommate Carl Lombardi’s shoulder. They all remembered it because it was jarring to hear a teenage boy say he didn’t think he’d see age forty. He fretted about a recurrence of osteomyelitis and limped on the base paths. “He feared that more than anything,” Lombardi said. “He said to me many a time, ‘You know, this can kick up anytime.’”

His teammates barely recognized him when he reported for spring training with the Class C Joplin Miners in 1950. “What the hell did you do?” demanded Steve Kraly.

He looked like a blacksmith and sprinted like a cheetah. “The ground shook when he ran by,” Jack Hasten said.

His strength and speed were equaled by intensity and temper. Teammate Al Billingsley remembered a game in 1950 when Mantle struck out and flailed out in anger and frustration, hurling his bat and several choice words. “That’ll be the last damn time he gets me out.”

Then he hit two home runs. “When he got angry the best came out,” he said. “I think he fed off of it. There was something special about him and maybe he knew it.”

Billingsley also recalled a 3-for-4 game, with a home run, after which
Mutt reproved his son: “You would have had four hits if you would have hustled on that groundball.”

Failure also made him petulant. When Mutt asked Lombardi how Mickey was doing, Lombardi replied, “He’ll be great if he quits pouting.”

Manager Harry Craft asked Smotherman to stick by Mantle’s side and see if he could steady the boy. He sat beside Mantle on the bench and on the team bus, sometimes passing him a piece of gum on which to take out his frustrations. “I lived mentally with him as much as anybody could,” Smotherman said. “He had mood swings. He expected to get a hit each time he was at bat. He was never, ever satisfied.”

When the last game ended and the pennant was won, Mantle was despondent. He hadn’t gotten enough hits. “He was the league leader in every department, including strikeouts,” Smotherman said.

He needed a way to blow off steam. When the Miners were home in Joplin, Mutt took him back to Commerce after the game, in part, Lombardi said, to save the rent, and in part because he was concerned about how much time his son was spending in the local pool hall drinking beer. It was often enough, Lombardi said, that “sometimes Mickey used to come to the ballpark and say, ‘Hey, Carl, I don’t feel that good. You’d better cover up for me.’ Not that I wanna condemn him for it, because we all drank. We all had beer, but it continued when he went home with the boys and went to the pool hall.”

Mantle finished the season with a batting average of .383 with 199 hits, 30 doubles, 12 triples, 26 home runs, 90 strikeouts, 94 walks, 136 RBIs, and 141 runs and was named the Most Valuable Player of the Western League. In his end-of-year report Craft called him “just an average ss” and recommended sending him to the Yankees’ Double A team in Beaumont, Texas, in 1951 to learn another position and incubate for another year.

The Yankees rewarded him with a two-week call-up to the major leagues. Smotherman took him to a men’s store in St. Joe’s to buy a big-league suit. Mantle asked him to pick it out. No one figured he was going up to stay. And no one would have predicted they had seen Mantle as whole as he would ever be in a baseball uniform. “I saw him at his peak,” Hasten said, “when he was eighteen years old and could do anything on the ball field.”

At the end of September 1951, when Mutt and his friends headed to New York for the World Series, the local newspaper reported that Miss Merlyn Johnson, an employee at a Commerce bank, had gone west to take a job in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Though she was still wearing her engagement ring, no wedding date had been set. She and Mickey had agreed to date other people. A week after Miss Johnson decamped for the Southwest, the same paper noted that she had returned to Picher. The dispatch gave no explanation for the change in plans, but it was just about the time Mutt told his son, “Go home and marry Merlyn. She’s one of our kind.”

A wedding was all Mutt wanted for Christmas. “He knew he was dying,” Merlyn told me. “He wanted him to be settled. He wanted a redheaded, freckle-faced grandson.”

She fell in love with Mickey Mantle the first time she laid eyes on him at the annual Picher-Commerce football game. She was a twirler in the Picher High School band. She and her friend Lavenda Whipkey spotted
him in the stands sporting his varsity jacket and a crew cut. “I thought he was the most handsome guy I’d ever seen,” Merlyn told me.

He was meticulous about his appearance, immaculate, and he smelled so good. “I thought he had a perfect body, big shoulders, tiny waist, muscles he made hisself,” she said. “They wasn’t fake-looking.”

She barely noticed the residual blemishes of youth that were airbrushed out of publicity photos. She loved him so much, she wrote later, “I wanted to crawl inside him and live underneath his skin.”

His high school classmate Ivan Shouse made the introduction at the Coleman Theater in Miami. “We were sitting upstairs in the balcony. The girls were downstairs,” Shouse said. “He sent me downstairs to negotiate a date.”

That first night the boys took them to the Spook Lights, a local lovers’ lane illuminated by mysterious, unexplained lights—an Indian holding a torch while looking for his head, legend has it. Mantle was paired up with Lavenda. “Next morning, Mickey said ‘I want to make a change,’” Shouse said.

In
The Mick
, Mantle offered a slightly different account: he said he called Merlyn because Lavenda was busy. Pretty soon, Merlyn and Lavenda were cruising the main drag in Commerce looking for him. His friends at the local pool hall teased: “Merlyn’ll be by here in a minute.”

They didn’t have that much in common except being young and country. He lived for baseball; she thought the seventh inning stretch was the time to go home. She was a gifted soprano who would give up a scholarship to Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College to become Mrs. Mickey Mantle. Decades later, she was wistful about that choice. “It would have given me stability in my life to do something else,” she told me. “I do regret it.”

They set the wedding date after the doctors at Johns Hopkins cleared him to go home at the end of October 1951. Three weeks before the wedding, the Yankees summoned him to New York for a reexamination of his knee. He had been complaining about pain in his right thigh. “We called him back here for a check to determine whether the cartilage in his leg was affected by the accident,” team physician Sidney Gaynor told the
Times
. “Examination reveals the cartilage was not damaged and that the torn ligament on the inner side of his right leg has completely healed.”

Gaynor gave him a weighted boot and a set of exercises to strengthen the quadriceps muscle and give support to his knee. Mantle ignored his instructions, preferring, he said later, to sit around, watch TV, and feel sorry for himself.

He didn’t have to worry about limping down the aisle. The ceremony took place at the Johnsons’ home on December 24. The bride emerged from the bedroom on her daddy’s arm. The groom made his entrance from the bathroom, hair slicked back, a boutonniere in his lapel. Mutt’s best friend, Turk Miller, was the best man. Miller’s brother-in-law, Paul Thomas, the undertaker, was the photographer.

They were married in “a setting of flowers and lighted candles,” a local newspaper reported. The bride wore “a faille suit with collar and pockets trimmed with seed pearls and rhinestones, a close-fitting chartreuse feathered hat and a pale pink rosebud corsage accented the delicate champagne color of her ensemble.”

“Next to me the groom’s father was the happiest person in the room,” she wrote later in the family memoir,
A Hero All His Life
. “Mick was somewhere in the top five.”

Would he have married her without his father’s dying command? Five decades later she wasn’t sure. “I do know he wasn’t ready to get married,” she told me. “He was very immature.”

Mantle invited Bill Mosely, home on furlough from the Army, to come along on their honeymoon. He and his wife, Neva, hadn’t been able to afford one of their own. “I said, ‘You kiddin’, Mick?’ He said, ‘No, no.’

“So come to find out, we was goin’ to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and I believe the baseball player Johnny Sain had a motel and a bar there. So he told Mick, when he got married, ‘You come down, bring anybody you want to. Everything’s gonna be on me.’”

The girls took turns behind the wheel on the 340-mile drive. The boys sat in the back. “Maybe havin’ a drink or two,” Mosely recalled. “We had some good times there in that place. Johnny told everybody it was Mickey Mantle, put up with whatever he gives you, you know. And they did. They had a bouncer there that Mickey started callin’ Hoghead. I said, ‘Mick, let up. That guy’s bigger ’n both of us.’

“Well, Hoghead wouldn’t do nothin’ ’cause Johnny’d already told him, ‘Whatever Mick does, that’s all right.’”

Back home, the newlyweds rented a room in a cheap motel near the bowling alley in Commerce—Dan’s Motor Court. “I was named for that motel,” their youngest son, Danny, would tell me later. “It was a dump,” his mother recalled. “It had an open gas fire. Mutt would come every night to see if we were all right. He was scared to death we’d get gassed.”

By then, Mutt wasn’t sleeping much. He was in too much pain to lie down. “He had a color,” his nephew Jim Richardson said. “Kind of a yellowish brown.”

After the wedding, Mickey and Merlyn took him to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. They stayed five nights in a fleabag hotel while doctors performed exploratory surgery. “One night we were both lying in bed reading and watching TV, and Mick scratched his head and he had crabs,” Merlyn told me. “We jumped up. We both started washing our hair. Probably a dollar-a-night place. That was awful.”

The medical report was icier than the roads they negotiated at fifteen miles per hour on the long, painful trip back to Oklahoma. “Take him home,” the doctors said. “Let him die in peace.”

Mantle avoided physicals for years.

Mutt had watched his father, Charlie, and his brother, Tunney, melt away with cancer. “When my Dad died, he had it in his stomach,” his son Max said. “We found out on July 4. On August 6, he died. He went from 225 to 90 pounds in a month. When it was Uncle Mutt’s turn, he didn’t want the rest of us to see.”

Three weeks after Mickey and Merlyn went to Florida for spring training, Mutt and Lovell left for the Spears Chiropractic Sanitarium and Hospital in Denver in Paul Thomas’s ambulance.

“He didn’t want to die around his kids,” Larry said.

In Mantle’s retelling, Mutt always dies a hero’s death, a lonesome, solo voyage into the hereafter, going it alone in order to spare his family. But Lovell never left his side. An aunt and uncle stayed with Larry, Barbara, and the twins. They never saw their father alive again, and they didn’t see their mother for two months.

It was a 700-mile drive to Denver on rutted, rudimentary roads and a misery for all. Thomas and his wife, Wanda, sat up front. Lovell sat in back with Mutt. He was too ill to talk, too weak to sit up. “Too sick to make a trip like that,” Thomas said. “That stuff was all over the body. We drove out to Liberty, Kansas. I said, ‘We better stop and get a motel and get some rest.’ That wind blowed that night. I mean, I thought that wind would blow us away.”

The Spears Chiropractic Hospital had been the subject of litigation and controversy since it was founded in 1943. Its controversial proprietor, Dr. Leo Spears, papered the Midwest with advertisements promising cures for everything from cerebral palsy to muscular dystrophy using the “Spears Painless System” of spinal manipulation. A glossy forty-eight-page brochure trumpeted a new “Chiropractic Answer to Cancer…Sensational Guarantee…Cancer
Relief
or Money
Back
!”

Mutt probably did not see the May 26, 1951, issue of
Collier’s
magazine that listed Spears among America’s most infamous “Cancer Quacks.” Spears sued
Collier’s
for $24 million. “At trial he admitted that five out of six persons giving testimonials in the Spears cancer pamphlet were actually dead,” according to
At Your Own Risk: The Case Against Chiropractic
, by Ralph Lee Smith. “It also came out that Dr. Leo did not recognize a malignancy in a child that was brought to the hospital; she was treated for rheumatism. He lost the case.”

Paul and Wanda Thomas left Mutt and Lovell in Dr. Leo’s care and headed home. “When my wife and I got back,” Thomas said, “they called and said, ‘Come back and get him. There’s nothing we can do for him.’”

Merlyn’s father, Giles Johnson, and Ted Davis volunteered to make the trip. “Merlyn’s dad had epileptic seizures, and he was driving the ambulance,” Barbara said. “He went into one of those seizures and Theodore was trying to get the wheel, but he was so strong with that seizure that he had to literally kick his leg off the gas.”

When they got to Denver, Thomas said, “Mutt told them, ‘Well, boys, I’m not going to go. They said they can cure me.’ They turned around and come on back.”

Mickey and Merlyn Mantle’s first marital address was a swank one. In 1952, the Concourse Plaza Hotel at the corner of 161st Street and the Grand Concourse was still the locus of Bronx society—its gilded ballroom hosted everything from bar mitzvahs to the annual Yankees welcome-home luncheon. Its residential apartments offered temporary refuge to generations of Yankee rookies and their brides. The apartments varied. Suites had white linen and room service; efficiencies had Murphy beds. When Frank Scott, the Yankees’ traveling secretary, showed Yogi and Carmen Berra their first apartment, Yogi said, “Whaddya supposed to do, sleep standing up?”

The Mantles’ efficiency apartment had no air-conditioning and no television. One of those cost $10 a month to rent. They had four walls, a bed, a chair, a closet, and a telephone. In hot weather, they put on their bathing suits and positioned themselves in front of a fan to watch TV in Billy Martin’s apartment.

When the Yankees were home, they ordered lobster downtown at Toots Shor’s and prayed that Toots would cover the check. When the Yankees were on the road, their wives depended on the generosity of the bellboys to augment their hot-plate meals and accessorize their bleak accommodations. Joey the bellhop saved the leftovers and opulent floral arrangements from the weddings and bar mitzvahs held in the ballroom. “Desserts, lots of desserts,” said Donna Schallock, whose husband, Art, pitched briefly for the Yankees in 1952. “He’d say, ‘Go down and take what you want before they throw them out.’”

Since blue jeans were not permitted in the lobby, women who wore them were asked to use the freight elevator that serviced the hotel kitchen. That’s how Schallock acquired a complete set of professional copper pots and pans, which she was still using six decades later. When the Schallocks moved out, Joey the bellhop asked, “What have you got, half the hotel?”

When the Yankees left Florida for the opening of the season, Merlyn drove north alone, a daunting journey that foreshadowed years of loneliness as a baseball wife. The transition to New York was even more overwhelming. She didn’t know how to put on makeup. She didn’t know how
to dress and she couldn’t afford the right clothes anyway. “Didn’t know how to be,” she told me.

When Donna Schallock took her shoe shopping on Fifth Avenue, she wrote a check and signed it “Mrs. Mickey Mantle.” “Yeah, right,” the salesman said. “Wait, she
is
Mrs. Mickey Mantle,” Schallock told him. “Oh, yeah, she got the shoes.”

As a new Yankee wife, Merlyn was still blissfully oblivious to the more blatant expressions of adoration showered on her handsome young husband. She was clueless about the peroxided and painted exotica that fluttered around celebrities at Manhattan nightspots and hotel lobbies. She had not read the New York gossip columns.

Tom Morgan and Gil McDougald were in their second year with the Yankees, and their wives tried to make Merlyn welcome. Tom’s wife, Wanda, invited Merlyn to stay at their home in New Jersey while the Yankees were away on a road trip. When Lucille McDougald met the two women there, she blurted out to Merlyn, “Thank God you two got married and you’re here.

“And she said, ‘Why do you say that?’

“ ‘Oh, well, now we can be done with these nasty headlines.’”

When Lucille left, Merlyn asked Wanda Morgan just what she had been talking about. She told Merlyn about the juicy tabloid items devoted to her tomcatting young husband. “Apparently, when he came back from the road trip, she lit into him like a blue dart,” McDougald recalled. “And he would never talk to me again after that.”

Merlyn couldn’t help but notice the girls who dawdled on 161st Street, waiting for him to make his way up the hill from the ballpark. She loathed their audacity, how they grabbed at him as if he belonged to them, not to her. Their bold sense of entitlement was her first intimation that she had married public property.

It was an uncertain time. He was still limping when he reported to spring training as DiMaggio’s heir apparent. The
Times
labeled him “an uncertain factor on the physical side,” pointing out that he had not “shown any of the hustle and assurance one would expect of a young man about to move into an important post.”

On May 3, the Yankees traded the other Golden Boy, Jackie Jensen, to Washington for Irv Noren. Jensen had been Mantle’s rival for the throne
but had fallen into disfavor. Noren was an excellent outfielder and contact hitter. The trade gave the Yankees insurance in case Mantle’s knees didn’t hold up. But it also cleared the way for him to make center field his own, news he ordinarily would have shared with his father. He had not spoken to Mutt since leaving for spring training the third week of February. He had not written to his father, either.