The Last Boy (40 page)

In school, he was teased about being Mickey Mantle’s numbskull son.
“I wasn’t good at sports like Mickey, Jr.,” he said. “I had heart. I played softball with Mickey, Jr., when they needed somebody. I slid into second and broke my ankle. I finished the game. I wasn’t going to be a quitter.

“When Dad was at one of our things, he’d be in the car. He never said if we screwed up. One game, I struck out three times. The guy’s jumping up and down on the mound, ‘I struck out Mickey Mantle’s son!’

“Dad, he’d never get mad or anything. He never forced baseball on us. We had to do it on our own. Like with Mickey, Jr., if he woulda worked with Mickey, Jr., shit, there’d be two Mantles in the Hall of Fame.”

Mickey, Jr., the oldest, was most like his father and just as hardheaded. He floundered in school, quit the military academy his parents had hoped would instill discipline in him, earned a GED, and made a belated stab at a baseball career, in part to please his father, in part to gain his attention—but it was too late. He didn’t blame his father. “It was Mickey Mantle who kept saying what an awful father he was, not his sons,” Mickey, Jr., wrote in
A Hero All His Life
. “I thought he was a great dad. He wasn’t what you would call a regular dad. But then, he didn’t lead what you would call a regular life.”

He had a hard time believing that they loved him. One day David awoke to find his father sitting on the edge of the bed in the room he shared with Billy. “He was sitting there at the foot of the bed. And I said, ‘Dad, what’s up?’

“He said, ‘You hate me, don’t ya?’

“I said, ‘No, Dad, I love you.’

“When I said that, I remember him walking out of my room and saying, ‘Merlyn, he said he loved me.’ ”

Upon seeing a homemade Father’s Day card his friend Tom Molito received one year from his son, Mantle told him, “ ‘I never got a card like that from my sons. They don’t love me.’ I had to reassure him that they did.”

Merlyn said: “He thought no one ever loved him.”

On August 30, 1970, Mantle went back to doing what he knew best. He climbed back into pinstripes to coach first base for the Yankees, a team that couldn’t get anyone aboard. He quit his part-time gig as part of
NBC’s
Game of the Week
broadcast team without bothering to tell anyone at the network. He described his new job as “patting a guy on the ass and saying, ‘Nice hit.’ ” He never listened to the first base coach. Why would they listen to him?

For these two months of hard labor, he earned $37,500, including the $12,500 the Yankees paid him for making himself available on important occasions. He hated it. Hated the way the Yankees trotted him out to the coaching box for the middle three innings, embarrassing himself and the incumbent first base coach, Ellie Howard, who had to go sit on the bench until the bottom of the seventh. It was like being a lawn jockey.

But writers wanted to hear what he had to say, to size him up in column inches, which was the whole point. Diane Shah, the elegant sportswriting pioneer, interviewed him for the September 7
National Observer
—a story headlined: “A Lady Fan Has a Chat with Mickey Mantle.” He told her about the dream he’d had the night before—where he couldn’t get into the Stadium and nobody knew who he was. The Dream became a recurring nightmare and a recurring narrative theme. Soon, every interviewer wanted to hear about The Dream. He told it funny. He told it sad. He told it to further an unstated agenda. On the golf course one day, Tom Callahan, of
Time
magazine, asked, “Did you really dream that?” “Nah,” Mantle said, “I was just trying to get laid.”

It was the beginning of life as performance art. He became his own ventriloquist. When reporters came around, he had time for them he never had before—hell, he said he missed some of the old beat guys—and he had answers to their questions ready to go when the red light flickered on, polishing sound bites of self until all the edge was gone.

That summer, Jim Bouton committed the ultimate betrayal of clubhouse protectionism. He squealed—loudly.
Ball Four
was a shocking exposé of groupies and greenies and “beaver shooting” with The Mick from the balcony of a Washington hotel. It may appear positively Victorian by today’s debased standards, but baseball responded with righteous indignation. The public evinced hand-wringing shock, as if it had never crossed anyone’s mind that the Bombers might be Bad Boys. The Yankees excommunicated “The Bulldog.” Forty years later, Arlene Howard, Elston’s wife, still referred to Bouton as “a person who’s such a dog, I hate to mention his name in the same breath as Mickey.”

When he was in Dallas, Mantle organized his life around the clubhouse at Preston Trail, the posh all-male Dallas golf club he had joined as a charter member in 1965, trying to re-create the camaraderie of the locker room. He made new friends, among them doctors Art DeLarios and Mark Zibilich, who would later help with his medical care; Bill Hooten, a commercial real estate broker; and Lanny Wadkins, the 1977 PGA champion. “I think the places he felt comfortable were probably the Yankee clubhouse and Preston Trail,” Wadkins said. “Outside of them, he couldn’t be himself. And in both situations, they were men’s places. His stories were laughed at and appreciated, and you never got tired of hearing them.”

Mantle behaved as if the same locker room rules applied, which explains his penchant for playing a round of golf or two in the buff and passing through the buffet line buck naked. His liberal interpretation of acceptable attire necessitated action. “You had to wear something,” Zibilich said. “The Mick was fond of coming out of the hot tub, trying to ward off the effects of last night’s party, and then would walk into the dining room with nothing on at all, which would not be appetizing to anybody. So we had to have a rule that said you have to be wearing at least your skivvies or a towel!”

But one day Mantle abruptly ordered True to sell his membership, telling him, “They’re presidents, vice presidents, rich, I don’t have anything in common with them.”

Of course, all they wanted to do was play a round with The Mick to brag on later. But he didn’t feel that he belonged—anywhere. When he and Merlyn were invited to a state dinner at the White House in 1976, he called True from the shop where he was getting fitted for his tuxedo and said he wasn’t going. “What the hell do they want me there for?”

True reminded him that the Secret Service clearance was done; that Merlyn, who didn’t get many opportunities to go places with him, was counting on it. “You can’t back out now,” True said.

After an hour, Mantle relented, only to call again at 5
A.M.
to say, “I’ve been up all night. I don’t have a thing to say. I won’t understand what the hell they’re talking about.”

After another hour, he said, “Oh, fuck it, I’ll go.”

He sat with President Gerald Ford and talked about golf. Merlyn sat with Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and talked about children. In the
afterglow, Merlyn and Mickey indulged in some rare alone time. “They had the best time in the world,” True said. “So good they went to Vegas, booked a room, and had three great days together.”

The second honeymoon didn’t last any longer than his encore in pinstripes. By the time Mantle reported to spring training camp in 1971—three days late—his coaching career was over.

In retirement, he no longer had to genuflect before Bomber pomp and circumstance, the Yankeeography that dictated, for example, the identity of his boyhood hero. Given the opportunity, The Mick unloaded on the canon with a Bronx cheer.

In 1973, when the Yankees celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the House That Ruth Built, the public relations department sent a questionnaire to former players. It read:

I consider the following my outstanding experience at Yankee Stadium:

In the lined space provided below, Mantle wrote:

I got a blow-job under the right field bleachers by the Yankee bull pen.

This event occurred on or about: (Give as much detail as you can)

It was about the third or fourth inning. I had a pulled groin and couldn’t fuck at the time. She was a very nice girl and asked me what to do with the cum after I came in her mouth. I said, don’t ask me, I’m no cock-sucker.

Signed: *Mickey Mantle

Beneath that, he added:

*The All-American Boy

Marty Appel, who crafted the questionnaire, and received and edited the infamous reply (substituting the Barney Schultz home run for posterity),
gave the original document to Barry Halper, the minority team owner and memorabilia maven who would later sell his vast collection for more than $30 million. The X-rated writing sample circulated through the baseball underground for years before emerging into the LED glare of the World Wide Web. Appel was appalled. Mantle was just trying to shock the Yankees’ straitlaced PR chief, Bob Fishel, he said.

Absent Mantle’s impeccable 1930s Palmer Method penmanship, the asterisks and the appellation, it’s just another example of locker room crude. The self-mocking touches turn it into something altogether different and far more interesting—a send-up of Yankee grandiosity and a self-knowing appraisal. Who knew he had a sense of irony?

“That may be the best thing I’ve ever heard about him,” said Robert Pinsky, the bard of Red Sox partisans, and the former poet laureate of the United States. “He’s saying, ‘I am not going to be your all-American boy.’ ”

The literary effort can also be read as a bad boy’s cry for help. “He was looking to get caught,” Bouton said. “ ‘Stop me before I fuck up too much.’ ”

No one did. Mantle lurched from city to city, banquet hall to banquet hall, fashioning a life and a living from a string of absurdist events. He raced Whitey Ford at harness tracks and won praise as a “sulky sitter,” piloting Big Time to victory over Ford’s Anchor Boy. He accompanied Max Patkin, the Clown Prince of Baseball, on a grand tour of minor league ballparks. He made a promotional appearance at a Florida mobile home community and toured the Lone Star State on behalf of Cameron Wholesalers, hawking Mickey Mantle Grand Slam Specials.

Buy fifty doors and get one free.

He batted in a home-run-hitting contest before the second game of a doubleheader between the Rochester Redwings and the Memphis Blues; he celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Astrodome, where he had hit the first indoor home run, by hitting three more. He flacked for New York’s new Baseball Instant Lottery and was signed by the Oklahoma Malt Beverage Association to appear in ads endorsing the proposed legalization of beer sales in the Sooner State. He received the Earl Smith Nostalgia Award from baseball writers in Kansas City and the Pride of the Yankees Award at the team’s annual Welcome Home dinner; and he graced the dais at social functions, though not always
graciously. “Craig, you’ve gotten fat,” he said by way of greeting his former Whiz Kid teammate, bank president Ben Craig.

But he astonished Joe Torre at the 1971 MVP award banquet by recalling Torre’s first home run as a major leaguer a decade earlier—in an exhibition game. To be remembered by The Mick told you something no award could about who you were. He counseled students at the Saints Philip and James School in the Bronx and Quaker Ridge Junior High in Scarsdale not to drop out. He earned his real estate license. His golf pal Bill Hooten arranged for him to take the broker’s exam. Though Mantle didn’t know what kind of real estate they were in, he called Hooten every year when it was time to renew the license. “It was a big deal to him,” Hooten said. “It was something he got on his own.”

In 1973, Alan R. Nelson Research ranked him second behind Stan Musial as America’s most trusted pitchman. But there was little to pitch. After he and Willie Mays sang their off-key praises for Blue Bonnet margarine in 1980, gnawing on margarine-slathered ears of corn and wearing calico bonnets, Mays asked for five pounds of the stuff to take home. Who could blame him? It wasn’t as though they were raking in big bucks. Mantle got $500 for his first post-retirement gig in 1969.

He wanted to do something that mattered, but he didn’t know how or what. “Is there something I can do to really help people?” he would ask Roy True, gazing out a smoke-tinted limousine window. True took him to meet executives from the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation at the Rainbow Room, a planning session for a youth sports commission for the state of New York. Mantle was to head up a program for inner-city children. He was uninterested and too uncertain of himself to join the conversation until it turned to golf.

That commission never materialized. Mantle settled for random and frequent acts of charity, such as the time he saw a young couple in a broken-down pickup outside a 7-Eleven on a sweltering Dallas afternoon; the daddy was buried under the hood, as the baby on its mama’s lap howled in discomfort. Mantle emptied his pockets, sent a friend to deliver the contents, about $5,000 in cash, and took off.

He played a lot of golf—for money, for charity, and for fun. He hit the ball a ton but didn’t always know where it was going. One of the game’s
great players, Tommy Bolt, the 1958 U.S. Open champion, assessed his skills this way: “He was nice. But he couldn’t play golf.”

One year at the Reynolds Plantation course in Georgia, Glenn Sheeley, the golf writer for the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, watched Mantle attack the par-4 second hole, which had a low brick wall and a muddy ditch in front of the green. Two of his first three approach shots stuck in the mud; another ricocheted into the great beyond. His fourth ball reached the green. “Instead of walking around the wall, he decides to hoist himself up on the wall and falls back into the creek,” Sheeley said. “Everyone’s going, ‘Mickey, Mickey, are you all right?’ ”

Number 7 emerged muddy but unscathed. “Tough fuckin’ hole,” he said.

He needed the action. He learned to hustle with the best of them, thanks to his homeboy golf tutor Marshall Smith, who likes to tell about the day Wadkins, the future Hall of Famer, challenged Mantle to a round at Preston Trail for $100 a hole. “Mickey said, ‘If you give me two putts and two drives, I’d play you,’ ” Smith said. “So when they finished, Lanny owed him $2,300.”