The Last Boy (28 page)

In late September 1961 Mantle was feeling poorly. Sportswriters following the team followed his condition closely, diagnosing a cold, a head cold, a heavy cold, a virus, an eye infection, and an upper respiratory infection that lingered through a long home stand, Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit. When he was still under the weather on September 24, Mel Allen offered help: “I have a doctor. He’ll give you a shot that’ll fix you right up.”

The voice of the Yankees made an appointment for him to see Dr. Max Jacobson on Monday, September 25, an off day for the American League champs.

All summer Mantle and Maris had chased each other and Babe Ruth’s unassailable home-run record across America. “Sixty, count ’em, sixty!” The Babe had crowed that September afternoon in 1927. “I’d like to see some other sonofabitch do that!”

For much of the season, it appeared that both of the M & M boys
might just do that. The pursuit played out against the backdrop of new administrations in Washington and in the Bronx. Ike and the Ol’ Per-fessor had ceded center stage to JFK and Ralph Houk, the new Yankee skipper. The country was charged with energy and change. Mattel had given Barbie a boyfriend named Ken. Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard had defied the gravitational pull of the Earth. Audrey Hepburn’s soignée gamine Holly Golightly had
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. A struggling young comic named Vaugh Meader was perfecting his long Boston A’s for an impersonation of JFK and the First Family.

Vigor—make that
viggah
—was the watchword of the day. Youth would be served by youth. No one suspected how much Dr. Max Jacobson contributed to the vitality of the young American president. Nor did anyone suspect how much Mantle was flagging until he confided in Mel Allen on the flight back from Boston on Sunday, September 24. The day before he had hit his fifty-fourth home run, his first since September 10.

Like President Kennedy, Mantle had a secret that required discreet medical intervention. When he arrived at Jacobson’s Upper East Side Manhattan office, Dr. Max told Mantle to pull down his pants and filled a syringe with what Mantle later described as a smoky liquid. He squirted some into the air and plunged the needle deep into Mantle’s hip. Too high, Mantle said later. It hit bone and raised the question: how many demons can dance on the head of a hypodermic needle?

Dr. Max Jacobson already had a cabinet full of files on famous patients, many with secret and special needs. He had flown to Europe with Kennedy aboard Air Force One for the Vienna summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961. Although his name was carefully omitted from the official presidential traveling party, he accompanied Kennedy to the residence of the American ambassador, treating the President forty-five minutes before Khrushchev was scheduled to arrive. The chairman, however, was running late. So Jacobson sat on a windowsill in a vestibule outside the music room where the leaders of the world’s two superpowers met in case the President needed a pick-me-up.

Jacobson first treated JFK in the fall of 1960, when Kennedy’s back acted up under the rigors of campaigning. He continued to treat the President at the White House, in Palm Beach, and at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port until three weeks before his assassination. In the summer of 1962, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy attempted to have Jacobson’s magic potion analyzed at a government laboratory, but the test sample was too small to yield results. “You don’t know what’s in that,” Bobby Kennedy told his brother. Replied the President, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It works.”

In New York, Jacobson was known as Dr. Feelgood to the jet-setters, celebrities, and pols who visited his office day and night for injections of amphetamines laced with vitamins, human placenta, and eel cells. Among them: Eddie Fisher and Johnny Mathis, Cecil B. DeMille and Otto Preminger, Anthony Quinn, Emilio Pucci, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote. In time, he would treat JFK’s girlfriend Judith Exner as well as Jacqueline Kennedy, whose depression and headaches following the birth of John F. Kennedy, Jr., in November 1960 concerned the President enough to summon Dr. Max to Palm Beach in May 1961.

Mel Allen, whose livelihood depended on his baronial vocalization, trumpeted Jacobson’s virtues, raving to friends about the medications “Miracle Max” prescribed. “Man, what he can do!” Allen exclaimed. “Those pills, they work.”

On the first day of spring training—the last time the Yankees trained in St. Petersburg—Ralph Houk called Mantle into his office to give him new marching orders. Houk was known as “The Major” because of his valor under fire at the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. “Have you seen my helmet,” he asked when I visited his retirement home in Florida, and led the way to a back room where the helmet that saved his life sat on a bookshelf. He fingered the hole where the bullet went in and the exit hole just above the brow. “You see, we had a liner in there,” he said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about Mickey Mantle.”

Houk didn’t believe in team captains but he believed in Mantle. “I told him, ‘You should be the leader of our club because everybody respects you and you don’t like to lose,’” Houk said. “He didn’t think he could do it. I just remember him saying, ‘Ralph, if that’s what you want me to be, I guess I gotta be it.’”

“I said, ‘You just do it in your own way. But I want you to know that I’m gonna tell the press.’”

Mantle figured Houk had made the same speech to Berra and Ford; he hadn’t. Houk understood the value of Mantle’s understated example, how his tolerance for pain lent perspective to an everyday charley horse. “I knew he was what we needed,” he said. “Mickey, if he struck out three times and the team won, he was a happy guy in the clubhouse. But he could have a great day and nobody’d know it.”

It may have been the first time in Mantle’s adult life that he was charged with responsibility rather than absolved of it. “It changed me over in my thinking,” he told Howard Cosell in 1965. “When Ralph came here, I didn’t feel at ease playing the game. People were still booing me, and I didn’t know how to take it. Ralph come over, and he says, ‘This is our leader,’ which I really wasn’t. He kept saying all this—I was the leader and I got a lot of guts because I play on bad legs. I started thinking, ‘Maybe I am a little better than I thought I was.’”

A baseball lifer, bullpen catcher, and perennial third-stringer—Houk had the affection of his players, many of whom he had managed in the minor leagues. He also had the support of the front office, where he was regarded as a company man. He did not consciously define himself in opposition to Stengel, but he did do some things differently. Gone were the clubhouse sandwiches, replaced by a post-game buffet of hard-boiled eggs, cottage cheese, and soup. Gone were the erratic starting assignments. Ford would pitch every fourth day and win twenty-five games. Gone was Stengel’s hated platoon system. Houk stuck with a set lineup. Elston Howard was installed as the regular catcher; Berra established a new residence in left field.

But the biggest difference between the regimes was perhaps also the subtlest: Houk’s invitation for Mantle to rethink himself. “I was close to Mickey, him being an old country boy like he was and me being one too,” Houk said. “Mickey liked me. He knew that I fought for the players even as a coach before I became manager. I knew he would do anything I asked him to do.”

Unlike Houk, Mantle was a follower, not a leader—everyone said so, including himself. In coaxing him to take on a new role, Houk appealed to the better angels of Mantle’s nature, his conscientiousness, and sense of
responsibility. “He was so modest I had to let him know what he meant to the ball club and what he meant to me,” Houk said.

He got Mantle the salary he wanted, got him to report to spring training three days early, and got—ordered—Moose Skowron to go out on the town one night in St. Pete with Mantle and Ford. Mantle took it personally when teammates turned down an invitation. “They rented a car, they give me a chauffeur’s cap, and we go to these bars in St. Pete-Tampa,” Skowron said. “I’d meet the maître d’, I’d say, ‘I got Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford,’ and they didn’t believe me ’til they come outside and open up the door. They’d go inside, freeload food and booze, and then the next day, my name’s in the lineup. I said, ‘Ralph, I can’t play.’ And Mickey and Whitey were along the fence, laughing like hell when I was taking infield.”

Skowron sighed. “I guess Ralph just wanted to make him happy.” “Ralph is the best thing that ever happened to me in my life,” Mantle later said.

When the season opened, Mantle was living alone in a suite at the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South. Merlyn had stayed home in Dallas with the boys. Spring rains on the East Coast had played havoc with the first week of the season, scrambling schedules and pitching rotations. More wet weather was predicted.

When the April 19 game against the Angels was postponed, Mantle invited his former teammate Eli Grba up to the suite for a party. Grba, who’d gone to the expansion franchise in the off-season draft, gladly accepted. As soon as he arrived, Grba said, “Mickey took off. So here we are. Two guys and four of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever seen in my life. As he’s leavin’, he says, ‘Take your pick.’ And they’re not prostitutes. Lord have mercy!

“It wasn’t like he was pimpin’. They were friends. He went someplace with Bobby Layne. Left us there. ‘Here, party!’”

Grba got home at 4
A.M.
and awoke six hours later to find a cloudless sky and unwelcome news in the morning paper: “Doubleheader: Yankees
vs. Angels, Game 1, starting pitchers, Ditmar and Grba. “Oh, shit,” he said.

When he got to the ballpark, a teammate pulled him aside and said, “What did ya do to Mickey last night? He doesn’t feel too good. Sonofabitch isn’t gonna play.”

“But, see, I know better,” Grba said. “Because when Mickey wasn’t as strong, he hit the ball further. He didn’t swing as hard. I get out there, and I’m pitching a pretty good ball game. First inning. I get a man on base. He comes up. The sonofabitch hits a home run. I hung a slider. What the hell—he’s Mickey Mantle.”

In the bottom of the fifth inning, with two on and two out, the score 2–2 and Mantle due up next, Angels’ manager Bill Rigney walked to the mound for a conversation. “Do you wanna pitch around him?”

Grba considered his options. His control was never that refined. He decided to waste a pitch inside anyway. But which pitch to waste? “I have a hard time hitting your fastball,” Mantle had told him the night before. “Your ball is like a metal ball.”

He’s setting me up
, Grba reasoned.
He’s gonna look for the fastball. And he’s gonna hit that sonofabitch nine miles
.

So he threw Mantle a hard slider inside. “Well, that’s what he was lookin’ for all the time,” he said. “He hit that sonofabitch nine miles.”

As Mantle circled the bases, Grba circled the mound, calling him every name he could think of, beginning with Okie.

Mantle drove in five of the Yankees’ seven runs and was personally responsible for five of their first seven wins of the season. When he hit his fourth homer of the year the next day, the
New York Times
took the measure of his auspicious start: “…he’s eight games ahead of the pace set by Babe Ruth when he hit sixty homers in 1927…”

The drumbeat of historical imperative sounded often and early. By the end of the second week of the season, he had seven home runs; had driven in the winning runs on April 17, 21, and 26 and had saved two games with his glove. Cartoonists puffed out his chest. West Point cadets saluted him, awarding him an adjutant’s pin with three stars.

Mantle Finally Meeting Destiny. Mickey Taking Charge of Yanks with Stengel Gone—the
Boston Globe

On May 2, he hit a tenth-inning grand slam to beat Camilo Pascual in Minnesota. “Never felt better in my life,” he said. Two days later, he hit his ninth home run and embarked on a 16-game hitting streak. “Just like 1956,” he observed.

Maris was batting .200.

All baseball players lead bifurcated lives—home and away, season and off-season. The sport’s immutable schedule causes stress fractures in even the strongest marriages. Tom Tresh, who made his major league debut in 1961, once calculated that he saw his family perhaps six weeks between February and September. “I was an absentee father,” said former Detroit Tiger Denny McLain. “Mickey was an absentee father. That’s what we did for a goddamned living.”

Mrs. Mickey Mantle, envied for the presumed benefits of being married to a baseball demigod, was often miserable. Her life was equal parts glamour and loneliness, comfort and emotional deprivation.

The Yankee wives, as they are collectively known, mostly to team broadcasters, were an entity in name only. Yes, there were bus rides through the city streets at World Series time, when New York’s finest escorted them from one borough to the next, sirens wailing, half of them pregnant and counting their blessings that they didn’t deliver on the Brooklyn Bridge. Yes, there were picnics and barbecues and birthday parties, but the quotidian life was one of isolation. “We did things as wives together very seldom because we all had children,” said Lucille McDougald. “We would get together maybe once a season when they were on a long road trip. But there was not a whole lot of socializing going on.”

Like many former tenants of the Concourse Plaza Hotel, the Mantles moved across the Hudson River to the New Jersey suburbs when they had the means to do so and the families to house. Merlyn hated the rentals, especially the one with a painting of a couple in flagrante delicto in the master bedroom, and cat poop behind the furniture. “My sons got boils,” she told me. “They were sick all summer.”

By 1961, she had four boys under the age of ten—not including her husband—and she was overmatched. “When we all moved over to New Jersey, Merlyn just stayed with the kids,” Lucille McDougald said. “She rarely came to the ballpark. She more or less faded into the background.”

The Mantles, Berras, and McDougalds occasionally shared a baby-sitter named Martha Helen Kostyra, a young grammar school student who was embarking on a career of entrepreneurial domesticity by organizing birthday parties for neighborhood kids. “They behaved for Martha,” declared the empress of style herself, Martha Stewart. (Yogi and Carmen didn’t remember her.)