The Last Boy (47 page)

“He said, ‘Go ahead, I’m done with that.’

“I said, ‘Maybe I should be doing that.’”

Mantle recited the mantra of recovery: “If you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, don’t drink it.”

It took Jones another three years to reach that point, but he credits Mantle with planting the seed that saved his life.

The sober Mantle discovered the joys of domesticity—he took delight in cleaning up the kitchen. He bragged to Danny and Kay about the jobs he had been required to do at Betty Ford. “Like it was a thrill,” Danny said.

The sober Mantle was helpful, autographing a ball for a woman whose boyfriend had commitment issues: “Marry this woman,” he wrote.

The sober Mantle was forgiving. He made peace with Jim Bouton, who had sent a condolence note after Billy’s death. “I hope you’re feeling okay about
Ball Four
,” he wrote.

Mantle had never read the book—excerpts and secondhand reports were sufficient reasons to shun its heretic author. One day, in the spring of 1994, Bouton came home to find Mantle’s familiar twang on his answering machine: “Hey,
Bud
.”

Mantle thanked him for the letter, said yes, he was okay about
Ball Four
, and assured him that he was not responsible for Bouton’s banishment from Old Timers’ Day. “I always felt somehow, I dunno, guilty having done a bad thing and that Mickey would never, ever forgive me for that and that I would never be able to make it right with him,” Bouton said. “To have him effectively forgive me, tell me, ‘It’s okay’—it’s just a wonderful thing for him to do. On some level he didn’t want me to carry that.”

The sober Mantle was contrite. He welcomed newcomers to his last fantasy camp by saying, “For you first-time guys, it’s the first time for me
too.” And he apologized to the returning veterans who had fallen into a black hole in his memory. Encountering Bob Sheppard at the ABC studios in New York when he arrived for an appearance on
Good Morning America
on June 8, 1994, Mantle blanched. “He said, ‘Bob, did they think I wouldn’t make it?’” Sheppard recalled. “I said, ‘Oh, Mickey, no, no, they were sure that you’d show up.’”

Sheppard explained that he had been asked to introduce him, and he did so with the familiar intonation: “In center field, number seven, Mickey Mantle, number seven.”

Mantle told the show’s host, “Every time I heard Bob Sheppard say that, shivers went up and down my back.”

Sheppard replied, “Mickey, every time I said it, shivers went up and down my back.”

Sam McDowell hadn’t seen Mantle since the abortive intervention he had organized years earlier at Tony Kubek’s behest. He wasn’t sure what to expect when he ran into him that winter at Sardi’s, the theater district restaurant in New York. Given Mantle’s blackouts, McDowell wasn’t sure whether Mantle would remember him at all. “He was sitting there with a whole bunch of different friends, which I thought was interesting to begin with,” McDowell said. “I went over and shook his hand and said, ‘Hi, Mick. How are you?’ And I told him who I was.

“He looked at me and there was total silence. Then he stood up and he came over. There was tears in his eyes. And he hugged me. It was like two lost brothers who’d never seen each other before. Apparently somebody had told him about the intended intervention. And all he said was ‘I thank you, brother.’”

They talked that night, McDowell said, the way only two alcoholics can. “He was very, very proud of his sobriety. Bottom line is that he was one of the rarities. He was able to have internal peace. He was able to have honest happiness before he died.”

It was baseball’s worst off-season. The players’ strike that forced the cancellation of the 1994 World Series depressed the memorabilia industry—and everyone else. Upper Deck was hurting and demanded that Mantle give up more than $2 million from his three-year contract. Roy True filed suit for $5.5 million, claiming breach of contract. Upper Deck countersued, claiming that Mantle’s treatment for alcoholism had diminished his marketability.

In January 1995, tickets to the annual dinner held by the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America were a tough sell. They needed—baseball needed—Willie, Mickey, and The Duke again. An award was created in their name to lure them to the intimate black-tie dinner for a thousand disaffected baseball fans.

It was a long trip around the bases from Lou Walters’ Latin Quarter, where they had first shared a stage as members of
Look
magazine’s 1954 All America Team, to the dais at the New York Sheraton. Mantle had grown remorseful; Mays had grown cranky; Snider was growing old in California with the same girl he had stolen from Pete Rozelle in high school, which is a whole other metric for deciding “Who’s better?”

Terry Cashman sang their song, and Mays got up to speak. “He talked about what an honor it was to be remembered with Duke and Mickey,” Cashman recalled. “He said, ‘When I die, I want a plane to fly over New York and have my ashes sprinkled there.’ The whole place was in tears, including Mickey.”

Mantle followed Mays to the podium.

“If I knew we were going to be dying, I’d have prepared different remarks,” he said. He acknowledged his long absence from the annual event and the untoward remarks that had scandalized a previous gathering—he had called George Weiss a “cocksucker.” “I don’t remember anything from the last time I was here. All I know is what I heard from other people, and I know I never got invited back until now. I guess after I got out of Betty Ford they figured it was okay to invite me back.”

Then, he turned to Mays. “I’m often asked who was the best of us…”

He had answered the question many times—when they posed together for the cover of
Esquire
magazine in 1968 and when the Yankees retired his number a year later—but never so publicly or soberly. He and Snider had become good friends—“there was a closeness there,” Snider said. Mickey Mantle’s had hosted The Duke’s book party and Mantle autographed a photo of the two of them that night:
Duke, you were the best
—
until I came along.
Now the two old friends, New York’s two other center fielders, exchanged a look and Mantle said, “We don’t mind being second, do we, Duke?”

Atlantic City, April 1983

I
n the backseat of a limousine, I made Mickey Mantle cry.

We were headed to the airport in Philadelphia for his next flight in a life of endless flights. “Still looks like winter up here,” he said, peering at the world through another smoked glass window. “I always thought Atlantic City was right by New York. Someone told me it’s right on the Mason-Dixon Line.”

Disorientation was the inevitable consequence of a life long divided into road trips and home stands. And that hadn’t changed, except that now the destinations weren’t always big league. He figured he was making ten to twelve appearances a year, gigs that paid a minimum of $5,000; he wouldn’t take less. Still, he worried that he was pricing himself out of the market. They only pay so much to lead an apple harvest parade. The Claridge was planning a couple of card shows with Whitey, Billy, and Rog, his three favorites, maybe Willie and The Duke, too, and there was talk of an autobiography. “To get even with Bouton,” he said.

He got to thinking about how much things had changed, which led to a
discussion of women in the locker room, an indignity he was spared by retiring before people like me barged in. He grinned. “I told you
—
they called me Pee Wee.”

Turned out I had remembered all too well his parting words by the elevator when I said I wasn’t going upstairs with him. He was good at cutting himself down to size.

He shrugged. “You can’t be worse than what’s-her-name.”

What’s-her-name
—
Diane Shah
—
had dared to quote him accurately in a 1980 profile in
New York
magazine. He had been a hero to her as well, and she, too, was nervous when they met, blurting the first question that came into her head. “Do you still hunt and fish?”

“Yes,” he told her.

“What?” she asked.

“Puss,” he replied.

The rules of engagement with the fourth estate had changed, but he hadn’t. And, he grumbled, she didn’t even quote him right. “I thought I said ‘cunt.’ Puss don’t even rhyme with hunt.”

I tried to explain the new journalism. “She was trying to give a flavor of the way you are.”

“But she didn’t say I was kidding,” he protested. “I didn’t care except that it hurt Merlyn’s feelings, and whenever it hurts Merlyn’s feelings it hurts me.”

He was pensive for a moment, then asked, “Was it in there about the Mickey Mantle look-alike contest?”

It was
—
there were two contests at the Longview Mall in Longview, Texas, one for kids, one for grown-ups. Only one adult entered. He looked like a middle-aged Howdy Doody, Shah reported. A dozen or so blond, freckle-faced boys vied for a $100 mall coupon. “I picked the kid,” Mickey said, a boy named Stanley. For this he earned $2,500.

Nobody looked more like Mickey Mantle than his oldest son and namesake. I had spoken to Mickey, Jr., as well as Yogi Berra’s son, Dale; Carl Yastrzemski’s son, Mike; Don Shula’s son, Dave; Hank Aaron’s son, Larry; Joe Frazier’s son, Marvin; Vince Lombardi’s son, Vince; and George Allen’s son, George, for a story about fathers and sons in sports. “With this name you aren’t sneaking by anyone,” Mickey, Jr., had told me.

“Did you really talk to Little Mickey? Did he tell you about when I took him to spring training?”

“No.”

“Well, then, what did he say?”

In 1977, Little Mick was in his mid-twenties and, like his three younger brothers, trying to find a place for himself in a world that had room for only one Mantle. He spent a few weeks at a rookie camp where Mike Ferraro, one of several Yankees once projected as the “next Mickey Mantle,” was working as a coach. Ferraro had to tell Mantle that Mickey, Jr., did not have what it took. “He showed skills,” Ferraro told me. “Mostly, he showed he didn’t play a lot.”

They assigned him number 76
—
his father’s two numbers
—
but neither brought him any luck. He soon washed out of the Yankee system and spent the rest of the year with the Texas Rangers Class A team. He was traded to the Alexandria Dukes of the Class A Carolina League the following season. His father told him to take whatever he could get. They offered $500 a month.

For the Dukes it was a loss leader. For Mickey, Jr., it was a shot in the dark. One night on the road, after striking out four straight times, he heard a voice in the crowd: “Go home and tell your daddy how you’re playing.” Little Mick went into the stands after the guy.

“Well, what
did
he tell you?” Mickey asked.

“He told me, ‘I thought I’d try it, more or less for his’
—
your
—
‘sake but I never really loved it, which you have to do. I wasn’t really disappointed.’”

I summarized Mickey, Jr.’s scouting report on Mickey, Jr. “He said he obviously couldn’t hit a curveball, and he knew it and everybody knew it and that was it. He said he played because he knew how much you loved it and how much you wanted one of your kids to play. How he did it for you.”

Mickey considered Little Mick’s act of filial devotion. “If he would have had my dad for a dad he would have made a major league ballplayer. I know he would have. Hell, he never played high school or Little League or anything. All of a sudden he’s twenty-five years old, says, ‘Dad, I’d like to play ball.’

“I said, ‘Fuck, I’ll take you to spring training with me.’

“I’ll tell you how good a coach I was. I didn’t even know how to work the batting machine. I put a ball in it and I had it turned up too high and the sumbitch was going a hundred twenty miles an hour and hit him right on the knee, the first pitch. Damn near broke his leg.”

Mickey, Jr., batted .070 in seventeen games for the Dukes (4 for 57, 4 1B, 0 BB) and hung ’em up. By the time we spoke he was working in public
relations for an oil company in Texas. “I play a lot of golf,” he told me. “I go out to dinner a lot.”

He had followed in his father’s footsteps after all.

“I’ll tell you who’s pretty good, Dale, Yogi’s son,” Mickey said. “He didn’t tell you no Yogi stories, did he? ’Cause they won’t hardly tell them. Carmen, if she’s had a couple of drinks, she can tell you some funny stories. Like one night they were watching Steve McQueen in a late-night movie and Yogi said, ‘He musta made that before he died.’”

Mickey always cracked her up. She loved to tell about the time he was hurt and hanging around the hotel pool with the wives. This was after George Steinbrenner bought the team. Mrs. Boss was late for lunch with the girls. She couldn’t find a place to park and didn’t want to tell anybody she was Mrs. Steinbrenner. “I don’t blame you,” Mickey said when she arrived. “I wouldn’t, either.”

He seemed to relax some, what with the Yogisms and the vodka, and I figured the time was as good as it was ever going to be. “Listen, I’ve got to ask you about something.”

Of course, I didn’t have to ask him about his dying son. I wanted to ask him. I wanted a scoop. I wanted what the
Post
newsroom called a “Holy shit story.”

Mickey looked at me expectantly.

“Given what happened to your Dad, what’s happening with your kid must be really tough.”

For the next two minutes, the only sound was the rasp of rubber meeting the road on the Atlantic City Expressway. My tape recorder timed his anguish. “What?” he finally stammered.

“What’s happening with Billy must be really tough.”

It was almost Shakespearean in its diabolical symmetry. Billy had received the death sentence Mickey had spent so much of his life anticipating. After chemo and remission, and more chemo, and another remission, cancer was all over his body. Merlyn said the doctors gave Billy a 25 percent chance to live. “Yeah. I don’t want to talk about that, okay? We’re hopin’ he gets okay and I think he will. I certainly hope he will.”

A tear formed and fell. The heretic gene had given The Mick a pass but it hadn’t spared him. “It’s worse for me than with my dad” was all he could manage by way of reply.

I told him I was sorry, that I sympathized, that everyone would, especially when they understood he had taken the job at the Claridge to pay for Billy’s medical bills. “Everybody is. I don’t like to talk about it because I don’t like to act like a pussy. It really…”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s a bitch and a half. Billy is sick. We’re fightin’ it.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s just really hard for me to talk about.”

“You obviously love him a lot. I wish I could say something to make you feel better.”

“Sometimes I tell my wife it’s better to die in an automobile accident.”

A tower of ice cubes collapsed in his tumbler. He put down the glass and flexed his hands in an effort to control unwelcome emotion, his fingers scaling the shaft of an imaginary bat, the one sure thing in his life. “Did you read the sports pages this morning? Where are the Yankees? Do you know? They got beat by somebody. KC. They’re in KC.”

The discreet chauffeur glanced in the rearview mirror and gently changed the subject. “What’s Whitey up to?”

“ ’Bout like me,” Mickey said. “Waitin’ to die.”

Mickey poured himself another drink.

I asked where he was headed. “Louisiana,” he said. “For an eightieth birthday party.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d been paid to do that. The party was for Lorraine Green of Ferriday, Louisiana, whose daddy taught her: “If you believed in God, you also believed in the Yankees and the Democrats.”

She loved Mickey dearly, enough to make the effort to see his twin brothers play minor league ball back in 1954. “They asked her what she wanted for her eightieth birthday and she said, ‘I want to have lunch with Mickey Mantle.’ So I guess her daughter or granddaughter called, found out how to get a hold of me. So I’m going to go down and have lunch and give her a painting.”

It was a framed 14” x 16” oil painting of his own self, the work of a former University of Oklahoma football player named Tommy McDonald, autographed and personalized by The Mick. Lorraine’s grandson made the arrangements through Roy True. Before leaving for the party, Mickey called ahead to ask what to wear.

“You’re a funny guy,” I told him. “You do all these nice things and yet you don’t want people to know.”

“Well, I can’t go to everybody’s eightieth birthday. If it was known I would do that I would get a lot of requests.”

“Or maybe you’d rather not be known like that.”

“Naw, I’d rather people think I’m a nice guy than an asshole. I’ll tell you what I like. I like that everybody calls me Mick. It makes me feel they like me better if they say Mick.”

“Maybe you don’t want people to see the other side of you.”

Briefly Mickey considered the proposition, then pondered the fluttering heart of the birthday girl. “Maybe I can fuck her, who knows?”

The punch line drove me into the plush velvet corner of the town car, as far away from him as I could get. The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. That’s what he wanted: to make me recoil, to drive me away, anything to make me quit asking all these questions. So he went for the knockout. “She might be a good blow job, who knows?”

Probably he didn’t figure I’d laugh. He eyed me with those surveillance eyes. I wasn’t about to let him off the ropes. “You’re weird. You say all this crazy shit, vile things. And on the other hand you go take a painting to an eighty-year-old lady who wants to have lunch with Mickey Mantle.”

He shrugged.

“There’s two sides to you.”

“See that duplex there? I’m gonna buy it for Merlyn.”

“Am I wrong? Am I wrong to think you hide that other side?”

“Well, I don’t go braggin’ about it.”

“The question is, why do you do it?”

Mickey took a gulp of his vodka. Somewhere, sometime, he figured out that the best defense isn’t a good offense
—
it’s being as offensive as humanly possible. He deflected scrutiny like an unhittable pitch hacking away, until he got something he could handle. Most people never saw through it. The rest quit trying.

Mickey poured me a drink. “You’re slowin’ down.”

I pointed out that I was drinking Perrier.

“I’ve got cirrhosis of the liver,” he said. “How do you like that?”

Now I was at a loss for words. “I don’t like it. Do you like it?”

“Fuck no, but it ain’t gonna worry me none. I’ll die of somethin’ else
before cirrhosis. One time I was talking to Billy”
—
Martin, of course
—
“I said, ‘How’s that spot on your liver?’

“He said, ‘Now I got a little liver on my spot.’”

“Does it hurt? Are you in pain?”

Stupid question to ask The Mick. “Fuck no. When you lead the league in the clap six straight years…”

“You want me to put it in the paper?”

“I’m sorry they didn’t put it on my card.”

One more time, he trotted out the tired line about the statistic left off his baseball card. “And my wife was second in the league four times.”

“If I write it…”

“I’d say, ‘Another goddamn Diane Shah.’ I talked to Merlyn a while ago. I told her you were doing this story. She said, ‘This ain’t gonna be another one of these Diane stories.’

“Merlyn said the same thing you said a while ago
—
‘You’re too truthful, Mick.’”

“You say these things but you don’t say, ‘Don’t write this’ and then you get upset.”

“I don’t get upset. It pisses me off. But I would never call you and say, ‘You rotten little cunt.’ If you wrote it you wouldn’t care what I thought anyway, right?”

“I would care. I care too much whether people like what I write.”