Advertisers were eager to pay for Mickey’s services because they understood customers were not drawn merely to the product. They bought a brand, what David Ogilvy, “the father of advertising” described as “the sum of a product’s attributes.” Mantle’s public image, his brand, was representative of Middle America, the innocence and strength of the heartland. He was a winner, the face of American sports. Ogilvy understood the advantages of transforming a symbol or a character into a brand. “Don’t bunt,” he advised fellow admen. “Aim out of the park. Aim for the company of immortals.”20
With his bright smile, Mickey was the perfect face for national advertising. His appeal derived from his small-town roots and folksy lifestyle, seemingly unchanged and uncorrupted by life in the city. “Mick is a kid from a small town who doesn’t ever want to become a big-city guy,” Billy Martin said. “He’s most comfortable when he’s home with his buddies in Commerce. He feels they understand him better. When I was in the Army, Mickey visited me at Fort Carson, Colorado, and all my buddies thought he was the greatest guy in the world. He’s the most modest, unassuming, kindest guy I’ve known.”21
Sportswriters portrayed Mantle as the antithesis of Babe Ruth, who was remembered as an overgrown adolescent who possessed an insatiable appetite for whiskey and women. Mantle, on the other hand, “seldom drinks and still is not at ease with a cigar,” the New York Journal-American’s Hugh Bradley wrote, failing to mention that he endorsed Viceroy cigarettes. Bradley insisted that there was no truth to rumors of Mantle’s late-night carousing. “I know what I’m talking about,” he wrote. “There are no secrets on a ball club.”22
The New York beat writers acted as if they were on the Yankees’ payroll, protecting Mantle’s wholesome image. And Mantle fully understood that the code between players and writers insulated him. “In those days,” Mantle reflected years later, “there was an unwritten rule among the baseball reporters: If the way you spent your free time didn’t hurt the club, then it was off the record.”23
Journalists sanitized his private life, manufacturing the Mantle myth. “The Mantles definitely are not club folks,” Dan Daniel explained, neglecting the fact that Mickey regularly frequented Toots Shor’s, the Copacabana, and Danny’s Hideaway without his wife. Columnists portrayed him as the ideal husband and father. Teenage sweethearts, Mickey and Merlyn were “happily married” with two young sons, living the dream of suburban affluence in their summer home in River Edge, New Jersey. Advertisers trumpeted the fairy tale of domestic tranquility. “If we had gone knocking on doors looking for the typical young American family which had been clean-scrubbed and was handsome to boot, we couldn’t have turned up a finer one than the Mantles,” said an adman from Madison Avenue.24
America might have known Mickey as the greatest baseball player in the game, but at home he was just a husband and father. “We hardly ever discuss [baseball],” Merlyn said. “When he comes home he plays with little Mickey or we go to a drive-in movie. I like to go to the games, but I don’t feel I know enough about baseball to discuss it with Mickey.” The Mantles were portrayed as prototypical 1950s family: “Mr. Mantle” worked in the city, and “Mrs. Mantle” stayed home and raised the children. Mrs. Mantle was “strictly down-to-earth and unaffected by her husband’s fame,” a reporter noted. “The red-headed ex-drum majorette is the kind of gal who has to be reminded that her spouse is Mister Big in Baseball.”25
In the city, far enough away from home, the Yankees front office knew a different Mickey Mantle. In early June, the team’s executives learned that the FBI was investigating an attempt to extort $15,000 from the premier player. The blackmailers claimed that Mantle had been caught in “a compromising situation with a married woman” and threatened to go to the tabloids. Mickey claimed that the report was a lie. He admitted that he had “shacked up” with many women in New York but claimed he had “never been caught.”26
Family man—this is the image of Mickey Mantle created by the New York and national media in 1956. Mickey with his wife, Merlyn, and his sons, Mickey Jr. and David, living the suburban dream in New Jersey. Mickey was also living another, less publicized life. Courtesy of Getty Images.
GEORGE WEISS WAS NOT afraid of resorting to gimmicks to put fans in the seats. During World War II, when Major League Baseball suffered through years of abysmal attendance, the Yankees, like most teams, created Ladies’ Days, offering gifts and reduced admission to women. As enticements, baseball clubs offered women free cosmetics, flowers, and leggings at the entrance gate. But it would take more than free nylons for the Yankees’ female fans to return to the ballpark after Ladies’ Day 1956. It was June 9, a Saturday, and the Indians crushed the Yankees 15–8.27
Don Larsen pitched his worst game of the season. After starting on opening day, he gradually lost command of his pitches, and Casey Stengel lost his patience. After Larsen surrendered five runs in five innings, including two homers, Stengel pulled him with the bases loaded in the sixth. After the game, the skipper told reporters that he had seen enough of Larsen on the mound. “Larsen has had 10 starts now,” he grumbled, “and too many times he’s been out of there by the fifth or sixth inning. Maybe it’s time for someone else to get a chance.” Stengel demoted the pitcher, with his ballooning 5.56 earned run average, to the bullpen, unsure when he would return to the starting rotation.28
Larsen’s erratic pitching added to the immense stress in his personal life. His “extra-curricular activities,” one reporter noted, “are legendary.” He enjoyed the life of a bachelor, carousing and drinking well into the night. “Larsen was easily the greatest drinker I’ve known,” Mantle later recalled, “and I’ve known some pretty good ones in my time.” When Larsen arrived at spring training earlier that year, he announced that he would act more responsibly. “I’m through living it up,” he declared. “I’m buckling down to business. This time I mean it.”29
About a month later, though, at around 5:00 a.m., he crashed his brand-new Oldsmobile convertible into a telephone pole. Fortunately, he suffered only a chipped tooth. Reporters didn’t press him when he claimed that he had fallen asleep at the wheel, though he later admitted to Casey Stengel that he had visited St. Petersburg’s “watering holes.”
Writers were surprised that the Yankees didn’t punish Larsen. “Fine him?” Stengel said. “He oughta get an award, finding something to do in this town after midnight.”30
By the time Stengel demoted him to the bullpen, Larsen had stopped speaking to his wife. What nobody knew—not even his teammates—was that he had married a woman named Vivian about a year earlier, after she called him and said that she was pregnant. Initially Don wanted her to put the baby up for adoption, but she refused. He decided that he would marry her but they would not live together. Larsen felt trapped in a marriage he never wanted. “I’m not ready to settle down,” he told her. “I prefer to live a free and carefree existence.” So he stopped returning her calls, struggling to protect his secret.31
DON LARSEN WAS NOT the only Yankee laboring to little effect against the Indians. After going 1–4 at the plate, Mantle’s batting average fell below .400 for the first time since May 23. Some New York fans were worried, now that the Indians were only 2.5 games behind the Yankees, but if Mantle was concerned, he didn’t show it on the night of June 9, when he appeared on the popular crooner Perry Como’s television show.
By the summer, Frank Scott’s most marketable client commanded a league-leading $1,000 per television appearance. Before the show, Como’s producer insisted that Mickey study the script, suspecting that the star center fielder might be too much of a hayseed to read the teleprompter. Scott maintained that Mickey didn’t need that kind of preparation. If he fumbled his lines, Scott promised, then he would refuse the booking fee. Mantle delivered his lines like a Broadway thespian, impressing the host. “He can’t miss,” Como said afterward. “Everything he says, he says with a smile, and I’d say his smile is fifty percent blush. That makes the audience a pushover.”32
/>
Television made baseball stars like Mantle into celebrities. People who were not necessarily Yankees fans or even baseball fans knew Mickey Mantle because they had seen him on TV. New Yorkers could watch every one of his home games and most road games, and fans throughout the country could tune in for the nationally televised Game of the Week, which often featured the Yankees. By 1956, more Americans had watched him play on the small screen than had seen Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio in person. Most fans had only listened to a radio announcer describe the Babe’s swing or heard the crack of DiMaggio’s bat. But with television, viewers could witness Mantle’s strength, speed, and grace. Seeing him perform convinced many fans that he was the best player of all time—because he was the best player they had ever seen.33
Television substantially increased Mantle’s income. One paid appearance could earn him a bigger paycheck in ninety seconds than his father made in an entire month toiling in the zinc mines. Playing for the Yankees increased the demand for his services. “The biggest names, of course, are always the easiest to sell on TV,” Frank Scott told The Sporting News. Earlier in his career, Mantle had shied away from TV appearances, but once he realized how much money he could make just for smiling on camera, he eagerly agreed to visit the studios. “He likes to fondle those checks he’s stacking up to take to the bank,” Scott said. “He never used to ask how much we were getting for a show. Now he likes to make those big scores.”34
In 1956, Mantle cashed more checks from endorsements and appearances than any other player in baseball. He earned nearly $60,000 above his regular salary—about double what the Yankees paid him.
But if Mantle kept hitting home runs for the rest of the summer, his endorsement earnings would far outpace his salary. Although he and Willie Mays earned the same player salary, the Giants center fielder, a former MVP, made only about $8,500 in royalties, television appearances, and testimonials, a paltry sum compared to Mickey’s. Both men were stars playing in New York, represented by Frank Scott. The difference, of course, was that Mays was black. When a Cincinnati “food outfit” approached Scott about using “All-Stars” for a national advertising campaign, he suggested the ads include four leading black players. The advertising director, horrified by the idea, berated the agent and demanded four white players. Scott balked at the order and called off the deal.35
Major League Baseball—and its corporate partners—marketed the game for a white audience. Eager to capitalize on the baby boom and baseball’s popularity among America’s youth, Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., the premier baseball card manufacturer, presented the players as heroes in order to sell bubble gum. For a nickel kids could buy a package of seven cards and two sheets of gum. As much as newspapers, books, or sports announcers, baseball cards educated children about the sport, race, and American values. In the early years of integration, when Major League Baseball promoted itself as a democratic, meritocratic game offering equal opportunities to black players, the overwhelming number of cards children saw showed white faces. At the same time, as black Latinos broke into the major leagues, Topps whitewashed their images, anglicizing the names of players like Roberto Clemente. Without his permission, Topps transformed the proud black Puerto Rican into “Bob Clemente,” recasting him as more “American” and less threatening.36
In 1956 every kid who opened a package of Topps Baseball Picture Cards wanted card number 135. Holding the Mickey Mantle card made them feel special, like they had touched greatness. Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Image used with permission from The Topps Company, Inc.
In the 1950s, advertisers feared that white consumers would not buy products promoted by “Negro” spokesmen, which meant more business went to Mickey Mantle than otherwise would have. His emergence as a popular icon occurred at the same time that black players were excelling. Between 1951 and 1959, blacks won eight of the nine National League MVP awards. And yet, corporate sponsors were far less interested in Mays, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Ernie Banks, and Hank Aaron than in Mickey Mantle.
If the National League witnessed the emergence of a generation of black stars, the pace of integration in the American League was much slower. Black American Leaguers were invisible. Some appeared on the field in supporting roles, but they were nowhere to be found when the year-end awards were passed out. During the 1950s Yogi Berra won three MVP awards and Mantle won two, but no black player won the league MVP until Elston Howard in 1963.
National League star Hank Aaron knew the score. “Baseball has done a lot for me,” he said. “It has taught me that regardless of who you are and regardless of how much money you make, you are still a Negro.”37
MICKEY MANTLE WAS IN no mood to spend his day off watching a Broadway play, especially one about the Yankees losing the pennant. On the evening of June 11, after dropping two of three games to Cleveland, Mantle and his teammates boarded a team bus. Most of the guys didn’t want to go to the 46th Street Theatre. Some didn’t even show up. And Mickey wished he hadn’t.38
Damn Yankees! was the first—and Mickey claimed the last—play he ever saw. In the opening scene, Joe Boyd, a hapless middle-aged Washington Senators fan, curses the Yankees after watching them defeat his beloved team on television. His wife goes to bed, but Joe continues to grumble about the lowly Senators. He swears that he would sell his soul for the Senators to acquire a young power hitter who could “lick those damn Yankees.” Suddenly, the devil disguised as a mysterious man named Applegate makes him an offer he can’t refuse: for the price of his soul, the disheartened real estate agent can become a supernatural hitter—Joe Hardy—and save the Senators from futility—if he agrees to leave his wife.39
Boyd accepts the offer, but in the end, after living out his baseball fantasy, he misses his wife too much. Breaking the deal with the devil, he returns to his natural form at the precise moment he makes a remarkable game-winning catch to secure the pennant.
Joe Boyd first appeared in 1954 as the protagonist in a novel written by Douglass Wallop, a frustrated Senators fan and closeted “Yankee admirer.” In The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, Joe sells his soul after Applegate suggests that it’s almost tragic that he might die and never see another team win the pennant. What matters most to Joe, more than the Senators’ triumph, is the demise of the Yankees dynasty. Wallop understood the unlikelihood that the Senators—“First in war, first in peace, last in the American League”—would steal the pennant away from the Yankees. Only the devil could make that happen. Or the Cleveland Indians. On September 18, 1954, six days after the New York Times reviewed Wallop’s novel, the Indians clinched the American League championship.40
It seemed miraculous that the Yankees didn’t win the American League pennant that season. Between 1927 and 1953 the Yankees won fifteen championships in sixteen World Series appearances. After winning five straight titles between 1949 and 1953, Casey Stengel’s team appeared destined to win the pennant in perpetuity. Disgusted by the Yankees’ dominance, a Chicago writer groused, “The day the Yankees lose the pennant will be the greatest since V-J Day.” But a year later, Chicagoans celebrated with Cleveland when the Indians won a record 111 games and the AL pennant. The Yankees may have fallen short of making the playoffs, but with 103 wins the Bronx Bombers still had their best record since 1942.41
For nearly two decades, since Joe DiMaggio first arrived in New York, baseball fans across the country had cried, “Break up the Yankees!” Club executives, fans, and writers accused the team of being a baseball monopoly. The Yanks won more championships, the Los Angeles Times’s Jim Murray charged, because they had “more fans paying more money than any other club in the history of the game.”42
There was some truth to Murray’s claim, but the Yankees’ formula for success was not that simple. The New York team consistently generated higher revenues because it drew more fans on the road and therefore received a greater portion of the gate receipts than any other AL club, appeared in more World Series, and profited from greater broadcasting fees. As the
biggest road draw in baseball, the Yankees pocketed a greater share of ticket receipts. Furthermore, they did not have to split revenues from local radio or television broadcasts with visiting teams. The owners also agreed to allocate national television receipts based on how often a team appeared on CBS’s Game of the Week. Fortunately for the Yankees, the network preferred to show their home games more than those of other clubs at a time when the network only paid the home team for telecasts. These inequities further exacerbated the competitive imbalance. By the end of the 1950s, the Yankees were making more than $1 million a year from broadcast fees, while Joe Boyd’s lowly Senators only received $150,000.43
The whole system seemed rigged in favor of big-market teams. St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck lamented that the broadcasting agreement created league-wide disparities. “With all that TV money they’re getting,” he said, “the Yankees can continue to keep outbidding us for talent. They’ve signed $500,000 worth of bonus players in the last couple of years, paying them with all that TV money we help provide.” Veeck recognized that media revenues had become increasingly important over the previous decade. In 1956, radio and TV income represented 17 percent of total team revenues, up from 3 percent a decade earlier. “None of us is ever going to catch up with the Yankees at that rate,” he concluded.44
A Season in the Sun Page 14