The Last Boy (26 page)

It wasn’t the first such altercation. In June 1958, a thirteen-year-old girl punched him as he got out of a cab, pulling his hair and slapping him as he plowed through the throng outside the players’ gate. The
Times
dubbed him “The King Whose Homage Is Catcalls” and sent a young
reporter named Gay Talese to probe the source of home crowd displeasure. “The all-American out,” one fan called him. The manager of a local movie theater compared him to a blank screen. Harry Greenbaum of the Bronx cited lingering resentment over Mantle’s exemption from military service.

The antipathy bewildered him. Frank Petrillo, a New Jersey car dealer who befriended Mantle in the early Fifties, kept him company one evening after a particularly trying day at the ballpark. “He was actually crying,” Petrillo told his son, Frank, Jr. “He said, ‘I don’t know what the fans want me to do. I don’t know what more I can do. My knees are killing me. I can’t perform any better than I’m performing, and it’s not good enough.’”

In the aftermath of the May 30 brawl, the Yankee switchboard was flooded with angry calls condemning Mantle and accusing him of accosting innocent children. “I hit quite a few,” Mantle told Stan Isaacs of
Newsday
, “but tell them I got the worst of it. They weren’t all kids, either.”

Later, he heatedly denied having hit anyone purposefully: “Anyone who said I did is a damn liar.”

The
Times
columnist Arthur Daley deplored the mob mentality and defended Mantle’s right to protect himself. The Yankees formed the “Suicide Squad,” a flying wedge of beefy ushers who formed up on the lip of the infield grass in the bottom of the ninth inning to escort Mantle off the field.

Six weeks later, on the afternoon of July 19, while reading fan mail in the visitors’ locker room at Cleveland Memorial Stadium, Mantle opened an envelope postmarked July 16, 8:30
A.M.,
at Tonawanda, New York. The handwritten letter said: “I had a son that was drafted with a bad leg & bad eyes he got killed but a rotten draft dodger that could run like you gets turned down. I have a gun with micrscopic [
sic
] lenses and I’m going to get you thru both of your knees and its [
sic
] going to happen soon.”

Police were alerted. The FBI was called in. A case file identifying Mantle as a potential victim of extortion was opened. Mantle went 1 for 5 with a single and a run batted in.

Agents interviewed him in the locker room the following day. He told them that it was the first “really bad or disturbing letter” he had ever received,
which wasn’t true. There was the 1953 Fenway Park death threat, and a female stalker who threatened to kidnap Merlyn and Mickey, Jr., and demanded he buy her a diamond ring. Merlyn took the threat seriously and began keeping a gun by the side of the bed. The letter he received in Cleveland worried him, but he thought that if an attempt were made on his life it would be in the Bronx, where he was accustomed to hostility. And where, he told the case agent, “some person could stand on the rooftop on one of the buildings surrounding Yankee Stadium and take a shot at him.”

Long before the letter arrived, Mantle talked about dying young. Yogi Berra tried to jolly him out of it. Whitey Ford tried to reason with him. “Look, Mick, you got doctors watching you every day,” Ford told him. “The doctors are better. You eat better. You’re not in the mines like your father. You’re not going to die young.”

“He’d listen to me for a while,” Ford said, “but I don’t know how much he believed it.”

By 1957, when Jerry Coleman told him about the new pension plan being negotiated with ownership, Mantle took attenuated mortality for granted. Coleman was the Yankees’ player representative as well as the American League representative in the talks that resulted in $100-a-month in life insurance, a huge step forward in benefits. “He said, ‘I’ll never get it,’” Coleman recalled. “I knew what he meant. And he knew I knew what he meant. I know he had a death wish from very early. It’s like he was waiting for it to happen before it should.”

He wasn’t morbid, and he didn’t talk about it all the time. But, Johnny Blanchard said, “If you got him in a private moment, yeah, he would talk. Not often, but he would talk different.”

Blanchard lived with Mantle one season in his suite at the St. Moritz. One night they were watching
The Honeymooners
. “It was a real quiet night, just me and him laughing. Gleason and Carney made both of us just laugh like you can’t believe. And right in the middle of it, he leans over to me and says, ‘Hey, Blanch, you ever think about dying?’

“Well, Chrissakes, if I ever did at that moment it was the last thing in the world that I was thinking of. I said, ‘Mick, what are you thinking about dying for, we’re laughing our fannies off?’

“He said, ‘It just run through my mind.’”

His apprehension may have been understandable, but some people who knew him well, among them Ralph Houk and Clete Boyer thought he exaggerated and exploited the fear; Pat Summerall thought it was a ruse that he “allowed himself to buy into.” Howard Cosell thought it was a triumph. His interview with Mantle on WABC in New York on August 19, 1965, was the first widely disseminated public airing of his fatalism. Cosell was at his prosecutorial best. “It’s a fact that you’ve lived with the memory of your father and often thought about the possibility of early death yourself, isn’t that so?” he demanded.

“Well, I don’t worry about it, Howard,” Mantle replied mildly. “Of course, I’ve got a good chance of it. I don’t know if it’s hereditary or not. I hope not.”

Cosell was insistent. “Do you really think about this a lot?”

“Nah, I try not to.”

“You don’t feel that you’re a tragic, courageous hero?” Cosell hectored in a subsequent interlocutory. Afterward, he ballyhooed his role as psychic healer. “He did a half-hour show with me and he felt like he had a cathartic,” Cosell declared. “He felt cleansed.”

The refrain of doom became the subtext of every profile. Mantle began to describe his life as a tragic epic as well. “The story runs I’m the first Mantle—the first Mantle boy—to ever make it past forty,” he told Cosell, who didn’t challenge Mantle’s recall (he’d forgotten Grandpa Charlie) or his logic. Apparently it had never occurred to him that an equally lethal genetic inheritance from his mother’s side of the family might prevail.

Ultimately the fear became a public embarrassment. Who wants to go through life known as the doomed Yankee slugger? “That was overplayed,” he told me. “People wrote about it, but I don’t think I ever thought about it that much. Maybe I thought about it, but it didn’t bug me. I didn’t sit around saying, ‘Oh, fuck, I’m going to die’ all the time.”

Nonetheless, it became convenient for others to excuse his self-indulgent behavior as a fatalistic entitlement. Merlyn told Gil McDougald’s wife, Lucille, “I see him wanting to enjoy himself while he is alive because
he fully expects not to live. And I let him do it because if he goes like his dad and his uncle, he won’t be alive by the time he’s forty.”

Frank Scott, the Yankees’ onetime traveling secretary and Mantle’s agent, shared Stengel’s perspective with the author Gerald Astor, who quoted him in an unpublished book,
Eyes Open, Mouth Shut
. Exasperated, Stengel said, “This kid still has everything and he has a lot of career ahead of him, that is if he don’t screw up and he comes close to screwing up every goddamned day of his life. In the first place he has little sense about people, and I’m always worried about whether he is going to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

“It’s not Martin and it’s not Whitey it’s Mantle himself with all that shit about how he’s going to die soon because everybody in his family it seems dies of that Hopkid or Hopskid whatever it is disease so he may as well kill himself with fun shit.”

The “yanked Yankee,” as the
Post
called him, was booed when he returned to the Stadium on Monday, August 15, for his 1,353rd major league game. Hoots followed him as he ran out a ground ball to shortstop in the first inning against the league-leading Baltimore Orioles. Stengel had declined to say what other sanctions Mantle might face.

Historically, Mantle visited his rage on inanimate objects—balls, water coolers, cement posts—abusing them when he was most angry with himself. He kicked the dugout posts so often his toes turned black and blue. Sometimes he restrained himself. Noren remembered one night when Mantle granted the beleaguered water cooler a reprieve. “Just as he’s about to kick it, the motor went on and Mickey said, ‘Okay, you sonofabitch, I won’t kick you this time.’”

Jack Reed recalled another night in Kansas City when Mantle made a beeline for his preferred target after popping up. “He looked at the water cooler. I started to kind of shy away from him. And he looked at me and kind of laughed, and I relaxed. And all of a sudden, he kicked it! Knocked the side off it. The next two times at bat, he hit two of the longest home runs I ever saw.”

With Maris swathed in bandages from waist to shoulder, the Yankees needed Mantle’s furious clout against the Orioles. No doubt Maris’s unavailability influenced Stengel’s refusal to divulge what punishment he would exact for that dawdle down the first base line. In the fourth inning, with a man on first and the Yankees down by two runs, Mantle beamed his frustrations on a fastball for his twenty-ninth home run. As he touched the plate with the tying run, he was bathed in a sweet cascade of applause. He tipped his cap in grateful appreciation. The gesture is accepted baseball etiquette but one Mantle eschewed, wishing not to inflict further distress on an already wounded pitcher. This time, he acknowledged the fans and their disappointment in him the day before. “Figured I better get on their good side while I could,” he told reporters after the game.

In the eighth inning, with the Yankees again trailing, 3–2, and a runner on first base, Mantle faced the old knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm. Catcher Clint Courtney had traded his usual glove for one of those puffed-up jobs the size of a fur hand muff flaunted on a night out on the town. With two strikes, Mantle lifted a pop fly near the screen behind home plate. Courtney dropped it, keeping the at-bat alive. “Giving Mantle a second chance under the circumstances was like fondling a fer-de-lance,” Harold Rosenthal wrote in the
Herald Tribune
.

Never had he wanted to have a good day so badly, Mantle said later. He swung at the next pitch, hitting his second home run of the night, and belting the Yanks back into first place. “Even his ears were grinning,” Dick Young wrote.

“He didn’t have to run those two out, did he?” Stengel crowed.

He said he accepted Mantle’s explanation for his lapse the day before.
It was a bone head play
. Indeed. “This did him good, and it’ll do the others good,” Stengel declared. “It’ll show them they got to run it out, or else when they get their paycheck they’ll think they have taken a cut.”

Making an example of Mantle may have been tactically useful—the Yankees were hardly tearing up the American League. But it was also a frontal attack on Mantle’s sense of himself and he took up the challenge. The one thing he always did was try. “Mickey really never, ever stopped doing the best he could,” Coleman said. “There might have been lapses. There were lapses from all of us.”

Stengel had celebrated his seventieth birthday two weeks earlier. The mileage was evident in his face, his gait, and his internal organs. “Some of them are quite remarkable,” he said upon his release from the hospital. “Others are not so good. A lot of museums are bidding for them.”

Players joked about his flatulence. “Like a damn goat fart,” Mantle said. “When he was alone on the other side of the dugout, he wasn’t just thinking.”

Sometimes he was asleep. “Don’t wake him up, we’re ahead,” Frank Crosetti, the venerable third base coach, was known to say.

“Casey was sure he ran the team,” Duren said. “He made out the lineup cards. But to those regulars on the team, he was pretty much ignored.”

They had grown tired of his syntactically effusive charm, an act that besotted the U.S. Senate when Stengel testified at baseball antitrust hearings in 1958. It was a forty-five-minute excursion through appositives and subjunctive clauses that left stenographers exhausted. Mantle was the next witness. “My views are about the same as Casey’s,” he testified, under oath.

The players knew a less amusing Stengel, one who rarely came out of his office and rarely remembered their names. Veteran players hated his inflexible platoon system, his rigid adherence to playing the percentages with lefty-righty matchups. Clete Boyer was speechless when Stengel pinch-hit for him in his first World Series at-bat—in the top of the second inning. “Everybody hated him,” Boyer said. “When he come out of his mother, the doctor slapped her.”

“See, Casey, he would do anything to win,” Ditmar said. “
Anything
to win. If I had to pitch nine days in a row, I would. If he had to play Mickey with a bad leg, he would play him, because he knew he was the best and he wanted the best in there. I think Casey really had a deep love for the guy.”

If so, it was a complicated kind of love, infused with equal measures of affection and bemusement, disenchantment and disillusion. In the beginning, Mantle was the indulged teacher’s pet. By 1960, Schecter wrote, the relationship had become one of “mutual respect and mutual disappointment” with “practically no communication.”

Mantle often said that Stengel was “almost like another father,” a
truth that went deeper than perhaps he knew or wanted to acknowledge. Like Mutt, Stengel never praised him to his face. Every day when Mantle emerged from the dugout, Stengel would say, “Gentlemen, there’s the ball game,” Tom Sturdivant recalled. “He complimented him everywhere but in the clubhouse.”

In Schecter’s preseason analysis of the inner Mick, he quoted at length “a baseball man here in St. Petersburg who has read more than just record books and has watched Mantle and the Yankees and with great interest for years now.” Schecter conceded that many readers would dismiss the jargon of his amateur baseball shrink as the “Freudian prattlings of an unqualified layman.” The unnamed analyst speculated that Mantle’s propensity for striking out left-handed was an unconscious retort to the constant demands his father had placed on him to go against his nature and “to be better than he could be.” Striking out was a way of striking out against the absent, internalized father. “Showing the old man what a mistake it was to force him to bat left-handed,” the analyst concluded. “It’s a form of masochism. I think he wants the fans to boo him. It’s like having his father in the stands again.”