On April 14, a day before the Yankees departed Grand Central Station for opening day in Washington, the New York Times announced, “Mantle, Rejected for Army Duty, Flying to Rejoin Bombers Today.” Once again, army physicians had dismissed him because of his anklebone infection. Relieved, he couldn’t wait to reunite with the Yankees. Yet some Americans, including some Yankees fans, grumbled over his draft status, while others questioned his patriotism. After all, more than five hundred baseball players had served in the military during World War II, including Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial, and many players were serving in Korea. In an age of national consensus over foreign policy, Americans expected baseball players to interrupt their careers for the good of the country.19
Mantle’s fame turned his draft status into a cause célèbre. Had he performed like an ordinary prospect, destined for the anonymity of the minor leagues, few would have cared about his military disqualification. But because his name appeared in newspapers every day for over a month, he became the most famous 4-F in America. Yankees general manager George Weiss supposedly requested that military physicians reexamine Mickey. Although Weiss denied having any contact with Mantle’s draft board, he admitted that his office received angry letters from fans. Certainly he understood the political implications of signing Mantle to a major-league contract. Despite failing the army’s physical, critics still demanded that Mickey put down his bat and pick up a rifle. Swept up in the anti-Communist hysteria, “armchair generals” argued that soldiers with flat feet were marching through Korea. Why couldn’t Mickey do the same?20
Before he had even played his first game in Yankee Stadium, Mickey found himself at the center of a political debate that prompted Americans to question his character. In that unforgiving city, Mantle would have to prove that he was a true Yankee, a loyal American who possessed the kind of courage that made DiMaggio a hero. Yet, while DiMaggio may have enlisted in the army in 1943, he never got deployed overseas or saw combat, and he frequently complained that the war had cost him part of his prime and tens of thousands of dollars. Playing exhibitions in the Honolulu sunshine for the Seventh Army Air Force team, Sergeant DiMaggio found little satisfaction in entertaining the troops. Nonetheless, baseball fans considered him a patriot for his service and expected Mantle to make the same sacrifice.21
As the team train rolled toward the nation’s capital, Mickey recalled Casey Stengel tapping him on the shoulder. The manager wanted Mickey to meet Weiss and owners Del Webb and Dan Topping in the smoking lounge. Mickey nervously asked Stengel about his chances of making the team. Casey told him that he had a good shot. After Mantle and Stengel greeted Weiss and the team owners, Casey did all the talking, arguing that Mickey should start the season with the club. Weiss disagreed. Mickey needed more seasoning, he said. The youngster wasn’t ready for big-league pitching.22
As Mickey later recalled, Casey insisted: “I don’t care if he’s in diapers. If he’s good enough to play for us on a regular basis, I want to keep him.”
It was hard for anyone in the drawing room to argue against Stengel. In just 102 at bats, Mickey had finished spring training with a .402 average, nine home runs, seven doubles, and thirty-two RBIs. The owners recognized that he was more than a talented prospect; he had become a commodity, a ticket-selling attraction. The Yankees had just set a spring training attendance record, mostly because of public curiosity around Mantle. Webb and Topping were convinced that the publicity around Mantle would generate profits for the club.
Stengel agreed. He was so confident that Mantle would perform that he suggested Weiss pay the rookie $2,500 above the minimum. Mickey could hardly contain his excitement. He knew the minimum was $5,000. After making only $225 each month playing minor-league ball in Joplin, $7,500 sounded like ransom money. He wanted to shout, “I’ll take it!”
Weiss hesitated, looking at Mickey as though reading a balance sheet. A stout, middle-aged man with thinning black hair and a pulpy face, he looked like the shrewd, ruthless businessman that he was. In New York—and baseball generally—the Brooklyn Dodgers’ long-winded president Branch Rickey overshadowed him with his gregarious personality. “Deacon Rickey” charmed reporters, seducing them with a combination of sanctimonious philosophy and Barnumesque salesmanship, convincing journalists and baseball fans that he believed in more than the bottom line. Weiss, on the other hand, was stolid and colorless, known as a calculating and efficient executive. Before he became general manager in 1947, he had been the director of the Yankees’ farm system, and in that position he shrewdly stockpiled talent, planting the seeds for an unprecedented run: in eight seasons, between 1936 and 1943, the Yankees won seven pennants and six World Series.23
After his promotion to general manager, he continued shaping the roster, buying and selling players like an aggressive day trader at the New York Stock Exchange. Following a strict philosophy for team building, the “Yankee Kingmaker” was determined not to let the team grow old. Securing young talent, he argued, was the key to sustaining the franchise. Each season, he called up three to four promising prospects. Perhaps, Stengel suggested, he should take a chance on Mickey Mantle. If the kid failed to stay with the team for the entire season, Casey said, then Weiss would only have to pay him the minimum.24
Weiss finally relented and agreed to promote Mickey to the majors.
Mickey couldn’t wait to call his father. The following day, when Mutt learned that Mickey had signed a contract with the Yankees, all his friends at Eagle-Picher congratulated him. Mutt had never been prouder of his son.
NEW YORK, E. B. WHITE observed, “can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck.” It was a truism Mickey would soon experience. He arrived in Manhattan carrying his father’s dreams, as well as his entire wardrobe in a cardboard suitcase. He was, teammate Hank Bauer recalled, “a hayseed.” Wearing cuffed blue jeans that exposed his long white socks, rubber-sole shoes, a tweed sport coat, and a wide tie decorated with a peacock, Mantle looked unfashionably out of place, a country bumpkin lost in the big city. Bauer, a decorated marine who had fought at Guadalcanal, Guam, and Okinawa, had learned more about life on the battlefield and between the chalk lines of Yankee Stadium than he ever had in eight years of school. Yankees, Bauer taught the rookie, didn’t travel in blue jeans and tweed jackets. He took Mickey to Eisenberg & Eisenberg and bought him a tailored suit. Years later, Mantle often joked about his shoddy wardrobe, but in truth he was painfully insecure about his appearance. For the first time, living in New York, he realized just how poor he had grown up.25
Mantle’s experiences were not unique. John Steinbeck may never have met Mickey, but he would have understood him well. In 1925, when the struggling writer first moved to New York from a small farming town near Monterey, California, he found work as a day laborer, hauling cement at the new Madison Square Garden. Eventually, after leaving New York and publishing The Grapes of Wrath, he returned to the city in 1941 as a prominent national voice for the downtrodden and the dispossessed. In New York, an expansive, tireless metropolis, Steinbeck observed ordinary migrants who aspired to a better life but discovered that the city was “a dark hulking frustration,” a hard lesson Mantle learned early in his career. “The transition from small town to New York,” Steinbeck wrote, “is a slow and rough process.”26
“I was a country boy,” Mantle said years later, “not the least prepared for [New York].” When he first moved to the city, he stayed in a room by himself at the Concourse Plaza Hotel in the Bronx. Located at the top of a hill where 161st Street intersected the Grand Concourse, the eleven-story redbrick building, with its limestone facade, looked like a grand Parisian resort. Since the 1920s, numerous Yankee players, including Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio, had called the Plaza home.27
At the time, the Bronx consisted of lower-middle-class ethnics, mostly Italians and Jews, but to Mickey it seemed as fashionable and exciting as Manhattan. Wandering along the Grand Concourse, the busiest thoroughf
are in the Bronx, he absorbed the colorful scenery: the wide, tree-lined streets dotted by bright yellow taxicabs and red-and-white buses, the sidewalks packed with shoppers, the storefront windows, fruit markets, delis, and soda parlors. To Mickey, the contrast between Commerce and the Bronx could not have been starker.
After playing afternoon games at the stadium, Mantle would walk up the hill toward the Plaza with little to do except replay every at bat in his head. Sometimes he stopped at a diner for a quick bite. Sitting at a crowded counter, he often heard factory men arguing about baseball in nearly incomprehensible New York accents. The Yankees, he quickly learned, were the pride of the borough. When he reached his cramped hotel room, he would sit in his bed reading the newspaper while roaring El trains interrupted the silence. He later claimed that he often stared at the walls, thinking about how much he missed his friends and family.
Later that season, Mickey moved into a Manhattan apartment above the Stage Deli on Seventh Avenue near West 54th Street. Rooming with teammates Hank Bauer and Johnny Hopp made the nights less lonesome, though he frequently spent afternoons by himself, sitting in dark movie theaters watching Westerns. At night, he absorbed the sights and sounds of Times Square, “a glittering cityscape lit by the world’s most elaborate advertising signs.” Looming skyscrapers, massive structures made of concrete and steel, and those “Broadway lights, the neon glowing,” mesmerized him. Broadway, wrote theater critic Brooks Atkinson in 1951, was unlike any other strip in America. Crowds of people trudged up and down the streets, gazing “with a kind of bemused curiosity at the blazing signs that surround[ed] them—flashes of news nervously whirling around the slender Times Tower, a sheet of water pouring down the luminous wall of the Bond store’s sign, rings of steam puffing out of the face of a stupendous Camel cigarette smoker.” Atkinson observed that “nothing like this ever went on night after night and year after year on such a monstrous scale.”28
Mantle had encountered a new world. He was living in the largest city in America, the epicenter of everything: television, theater, art, advertising, publishing, writing, banking, business, and, of course, baseball. Every morning millions of people poured into Manhattan Island, packing its skyscrapers, factories, department stores, offices, and restaurants. The pace of the city startled him. Tourists and traveling salesmen rushed to Grand Central and Pennsylvania stations, while commuters hustled to the subway, pushing, shoving, and cramming their way into cars.29
E. B. White observed that New York drained people faster than other cities did. “The normal frustrations of modern life are here multiplied and amplified—a single run of a crosstown bus contains, for the driver, enough frustration and annoyance to carry him over the edge of sanity: the light that changes always an instant too soon, the passenger that bangs on the shut door, the truck that blocks the only opening, the coin that slips to the floor, the question asked at the wrong moment.” New York, White wrote, had “greater tension and greater speed,” less tolerance and less patience.30
New Yorkers’ impatience, combined with the immediate success of previous Yankee stars, created unrealistic expectations for the team’s rookie right fielder. When twenty-five-year-old Babe Ruth first joined the Yankees in 1920, he led the major leagues with 54 home runs—crushing his own single-season record of 29—and 135 RBIs. In his first season in New York, the Sultan of Swat not only redefined the importance of the home run, hitting more of them than fourteen of the other fifteen big-league clubs, but inspired new attendance records. In 1936, a year after the Bambino retired, DiMaggio broke in with the Yankees and was anointed by beat writer Dan Daniel as “the replacement for Babe Ruth.” Despite missing a few weeks of the season with a foot injury, DiMaggio managed to hit .323 with forty-four doubles, twenty-nine home runs, and a league-best fifteen triples. In his first season, he made the American League (AL) All-Star team, appeared on the cover of Time, and led the Yankees to a World Series victory over the New York Giants, the first of four straight titles. If Mickey was ever to overcome his reputation as a hayseed and replace Ruth and DiMaggio, then just as they had, he would have to win New Yorkers’ admiration right away.31
DiMaggio’s experience with fickle New York fans was not dissimilar from Mantle’s. He may have won respect soon after arriving, but New York reporters and fans did not totally embrace him at first. During a time of intense ethnic prejudice, writers emphasized his Italian heritage, dark features, and supposed indolence. “Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease,” a Life profiler wrote, “he keeps his hair slick with water.” Surprised, the writer noted that DiMaggio didn’t smell like garlic. Photographers posed him at the dinner table eating giant plates of spaghetti. Before he became the esteemed “Yankee Clipper,” writers called him “the Walloping Wop” or “the Daig.”32
Then, in the summer of 1941, a half year before Benito Mussolini declared war against the United States, native-born Americans began questioning the loyalty of Italian immigrants. In New York, even though the city had an Italian American mayor, Fiorella LaGuardia, Italian nationals were scrutinized like criminals, fingerprinted, photographed, and forced to register with the government. The New York Police Department and the FBI raided Italian homes and businesses, arresting “aliens” suspected of sabotage.33
Against this backdrop of nativism and political turmoil, DiMaggio distracted the country with his record fifty-six-game hitting streak, and Americans came to see him as one of their own, a symbol of assimilation. DiMaggio, like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig before him, affirmed that baseball was a melting pot—the meritocratic notion that the game welcomed white men from the old country. As the son of an Italian fisherman, DiMaggio could easily be seen as embodying old-fashioned Americanism. Unlike gangster Al Capone, he didn’t break the law; unlike anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, he expressed no political opinions; and unlike boxer Primo Carnera, a giant circus strongman controlled by the mob, he played “that clean American game” for “the team whose very name stood for America.”34
DiMaggio’s ascendance as a great American culminated that summer, when Les Brown’s band recorded a hit song played on radio stations from New York to San Francisco. “Jolting Joe DiMaggio” was more than a popular tune celebrating the achievements of the Yankee Clipper. It announced his arrival as a real American. Now he belonged to everyone, not just Italians. “Joe… Joe… DiMaggio… we want you on our side.”
Our side. If war broke out, the United States would need DiMaggio, a man who reminded the country that he and his Italian American brethren were nothing like the fascists fighting for Il Duce.35
KNOWING HOW HARSH New York could be to the most innocent newcomers, sportswriters wondered if Mantle would survive. Could he withstand the competition? Would he wither under pressure? How would he respond when he struggled? Could he adjust to life in the Big Apple?
Local writers crafted a narrative based on the tension between his country roots and his new urban life. Initially, they portrayed him as the “typical All-American boy,” modest and innocent, unfazed by the demands of playing for the Yankees. “His physical appearance,” Gilbert Millstein wrote, “serves to evoke the image, traditional and dear to Americans, of the clean-living country boy grappling, at great odds but ultimately in triumph, with the big city and its perils.” In May, the New York Post’s Arch Murray wrote that Mickey was “completely untouched by the surging tide of publicity that has all but completely engulfed him.”36
But that wasn’t really true. Every day reporters huddled around his locker, asking questions about every game, every hit, and every strikeout. There were so many writers that—even if he tried—he could hardly tell them apart. Interviews made him uneasy and self-conscious. Mantle could play baseball far better than he could talk about it. “I’m no good at answering questions,” he admitted in a sharp country twang. Curious what the writers had to say about him, he couldn’t resist reading the newspapers. Knowing that reporters evaluated him daily added more pressure. So did the photographers
who snapped his picture without asking. Publicists and booking agents approached him about appearing on radio and television shows, making all sorts of promises.37
Posing as an agent, a conman straight out of Damon Runyon’s Guys and Dolls named Alan Savitt duped Mickey into signing an exploitive contract that gave Savitt’s “Hollywood Enterprises” half of Mantle’s income from endorsements, testimonials, and appearances. After meeting Mickey at the Grand Concourse, Savitt knew that he lacked an instinct for business. He could have offered Mantle shares in the Brooklyn Bridge, and Mickey would have bought them. Shortly after Mantle signed the first contract, Savitt had him sign another, which he claimed superseded the first, giving the agent 10 percent of Mantle’s outside earnings for ten years. When Yankees officials learned about the arrangement, the team’s lawyers advised him to cease contact with the hustler. The deal, they argued, would not hold up anyway, since Mickey had signed it as a minor. In the future, the lawyers suggested, he should not enter into any formal business agreements without the team’s approval. Although he did not honor the contract with Savitt, it would later jeopardize his all-American image.38
Sometimes Mantle felt as if his life no longer belonged to him. Everywhere he went—the ballpark, train stations, restaurants, movie theaters, and hotels—strangers wanted to talk to him, shake his hand, or ask for his autograph. The fans meant well, but they always seemed to remind Mickey what they expected from him. There was hardly a moment when he could get away from it all. “I was surrounded,” he told reporter Charles Dexter.39
A Season in the Sun Page 4