CHAPTER 8
“I Love Mickey”
“Only the quiet boy from Commerce, Okla., knows how it feels to be the target of millions of eyes, cameras, and typewriters.”
—THE SPORTING NEWS, August 22, 1956
They arrived at major-league clubhouses by the hundreds. Love letters, mash notes, and billets-doux—by whatever name, they offered the same thing: a sexual proposition, a one-night affair, most promising no strings attached. Some players discarded the missives unread and returned to their wives, fiancées, or girlfriends after the game ended. Others willingly accepted the favors offered, sneaking out of their hotels and returning in the early hours before sunrise. Such antics were as much a part of the game as shoestring catches and lazy fly balls.
In 1947, at the end of his first season in the majors, Jackie Robinson received a letter from a woman living in Akron. She wrote that she stood five feet, four inches, weighed 120 pounds, and was attractive. She had won a Miss Akron Beauty Contest and been in many other beauty competitions. Her problem was that every time she heard Jackie’s name, “a thrill goes all through me.” “I want you to love me just once,” she wrote. “Just once and then I might be satisfied.” She knew that he was married and had a son, “but you don’t have to be an angel. It would be like heaven just to have you touch me.” And, she promised, “I’ll love you like you have never had love before.” No strings. His wife, Rachel, would never know about it.1
Robinson answered the letter. “You are suffering from some kind of mental delusion that can bring you nothing but trouble,” he warned. “When I married Mrs. Robinson, I exchanged vows to love, honor and cherish her for the rest of my life. ‘Honor’ means just that to me,” he continued, and he would do nothing to “destroy that very thing that enables me to hold my head up high.” Jackie’s response unequivocally ended the matter.
Mickey Mantle received countless such letters. But Mickey Mantle was no Jackie Robinson.
His wife, Merlyn, said that during the 1956 season, “lovelorn girls—and older women too” deluged her husband with proposals. Before she became too busy being Mrs. Mickey Mantle, Merlyn answered the fan mail, but it became such a burden that she eventually turned the job over to Mickey’s twin brothers and several secretaries from the Yankee organization. The joke was on the randy correspondents, however. “If they only knew that Mickey seldom reads any letters, even the ones from home! We do all our communicating on long-distance telephone.”2
MERLYN WAS NOT THE only woman he talked to over the phone. Mickey called Holly Brooke in the first week of August, just before going to Boston for two games against the Red Sox. He wanted the self-described showgirl and model to join him in the Hub. Mickey probably had his reasons, though their exact nature has been lost. The two had vague business connections. During Mantle’s rookie season the hustler Alan Savitt had signed the ballplayer to a promotional contract. Although his former agent was out of the picture by 1956, aspects of the deceptive contract lingered. Most prominent among them was Holly Brooke.3
Back in 1951, Savitt had tried to convert Mantle’s signature on the contract into cash, not by making endorsement deals but by selling percentages of the arrangement. Most of his associates were as broke as he was, but one person he represented, Brooke, had the wherewithal to come up with $1,500, which he assured her would buy 25 percent of the Mantle deal. But she wisely distrusted her own agent. Savitt might have no deal at all with Mantle. Besides, she later wrote, “a girl ought to look over her investments before making ’em though—at least that’s my motto—and I’d never set eyes on Mantle.”
Savitt introduced Holly to Mickey at Danny’s Hideaway. By the end of the dinner—or at least the next night—she judged Mickey a sound investment. Mantle was equally as impressed with her—a beautiful redhead, seven years older than him and a hundred years more experienced. Within a week or two she was his steady companion. With his fiancée Merlyn back in Oklahoma, Mickey spent much of his free time with Brooke, treating her to drinks and dinners at Danny’s Hideaway and quick breakfasts at the Stage Deli after spending nights together. “Plenty of times we’d sit in my car in the wee small hours of the morning and watch the sun rise over Manhattan,” she recalled. “Those all-night rendezvous might come after an afternoon baseball game,” but, she confessed in sensational tabloid style, “the Mick was never too tired for a night game.”4
For Brooke, Mantle was a better lover than financial investment. “Mickey was collecting too many dividends on my investment,” she observed. “I was beginning to wonder who owned a piece of who?” Although he told her not to worry about the deal—that “the Yankees will take care of it”—by 1956 she was having doubts. That summer, it was difficult to open a newspaper without seeing something about Mickey Mantle in it: his aw-shucks, country-boy smile appeared on magazine covers; his buttoned-down Madison Avenue image graced advertisements; and he charmed television audiences like a practiced performer. Perhaps Holly Brooke wanted a dividend on her 25 percent.5
Or maybe Mickey just wanted her. A baseball season is long and grueling—a seemingly endless string of games played under a blistering sun, long train rides between cities, and lonely nights in hotel rooms. Booze and an occasional “Baseball Annie” might relieve the stretches of monotony, but never entirely. Mantle called her toward the end of a brutal road trip. The Yankees had played three games in Chicago, three in Kansas City, four in Cleveland, and three in Detroit—thirteen contests in as many days. And they would not get a day off for another full week. Furthermore, going into Boston they had dropped six in a row. Poor batting and only slightly better pitching had marked the slump. Holly had been there for Mickey when he had been sent down to the minors in 1951. She had visited him in Kansas City, Columbus, and other minor-league towns when his spirits had flagged, and he felt the need for a woman in the night. Perhaps Mickey wanted Holly to lighten the pressures of a season once again.
While Mickey spoke on the phone, Holly heard “Come On-A My House” playing on the radio in the background. It was their song. But she no longer danced to Mickey’s tune. “Here I was five years after I’d made that deal and I had yet to get my money back,” she would soon write. “No one could say I hadn’t watched over my securities… and then some. But it had all been in vain.” She stayed in New York while he went to Boston. With Mantle at the height of his popularity, she knew that she could leverage his fame to recoup part of her investment.6
Mickey would soon find that while sports stars could also be celebrities, sports stars and celebrities were not always treated the same. Sportswriters carefully crafted an image of him as a family man with a winning grin who joyfully played a boy’s game and then went home for a glass of milk. The sports journalists who knew him best largely hid that he wasn’t remotely like his public persona and was instead an often moody, angry, hard-drinking, philandering, flawed man. They sold Mickey like political columnists sold America during the Cold War. Mickey and his nation stood for revered ideals. Yet, as his popularity transcended sports, he would soon find himself at the mercy of tabloid journalists and their muckraking publications. They scoured celebrityland for the cracks in the facade, searching for contradictions between image and reality, and Holly Brooke had just the kind of information that they bought and sold.
ALTHOUGH SPORTSWRITERS AVOIDED reporting on players’ personal lives, they could be unforgiving toward recalcitrant stars or lesser performers. Mickey’s button-lipped style early in his career, his angry outbursts and general distrust of reporters, won him no popularity contests with the Yankee beat writers. But in 1956, when he learned a few of their names and smiled as he gave several bland comments after a game, they started to fawn over him almost as much as they did Yogi Berra and Casey Stengel. Above all, they needed daily copy. The ball players fed the beast or suffered the consequences. If Mickey still needed an example of how the system worked, he got one during the Yankees’ early-August series against the Red Sox.
It’s possible
, if not likely, that if Ted Williams could have played baseball in empty stadiums, with no reporters present, he would have spent his career in quiet contentment. The game would have been akin to trout fishing—only Ted with his bat facing a pitcher rather than with a reel matching wits with a fish. Unfortunately, he played before passionate, opinionated Red Sox fans and a bevy of sportswriters famous for their sharp wits and critical eyes. They wanted more from their star than consistent, year-after-year play. They demanded something over and beyond Hall of Fame greatness. And Ted, a product of a tough childhood, emotionally fragile and inhumanly stubborn, was “goddamned” if he was going to give it to them. “The newspaper guys in this town are bush,” he complained in 1956. Not to put too fine a point on it, he called several of them “gutless, syphilitic cocksuckers.” He blamed them for whipping up the Boston fans against him, but that did not mean that he forgave the Red Sox faithful for their fickleness. “Some of those fans are the worst in the world. What do they want from a guy? I’ve hit over .340 for 17 years in this league, and every time I walk up there, they give me the business. What do they expect me to do, smile at them?”7
On August 7, during an afternoon game at Fenway Park before a standing-room-only crowd of 36,350, the stadium’s largest since the end of World War II, Williams exploded as unexpectedly as a piece of buried ordnance. It was a blustery day. Winds played tricks with the ball, and intermittent rains peppered the players and made the field slick. The weather turned the contest into a pitchers’ duel between Don Larsen and Willard Nixon. Going into the top of the eleventh, the score was still 0–0. With two outs, Mantle came to the plate and hit a fly ball to short left field. With rain in his face, Williams charged the ball but failed to secure it in the webbing of his glove. As it bounced onto the grass, Mantle rounded first and streaked for second. A chorus of boos let Ted know that he was personally responsible for a two-base error and, perhaps, the game.8
Yogi Berra, the next batter, lined a much more treacherous shot at Williams. The ball looked like it was headed for the wall but was knocked down by the wind. Sprinting into left center Williams made a magnificent catch at the scoreboard. And just as quickly boos became cheers. Ted hadn’t lost the game; he had kept Boston’s hopes alive.
But Williams’s moods were not as capricious. He never thought he deserved to be booed in his Fenway Park—not after hitting .406 in 1941 and establishing himself as the greatest batter in the game—and as he ran back to the dugout, he was hot, angry at the fans, sportswriters, and anyone else in his line of vision. At the first base line, he spit at the spectators behind Boston’s dugout; before descending to the bench, he issued another volley of phlegm toward the distant sportswriters; and, not wanting any part of Fenway to escape his wrath, he stepped out of the dugout and lobbed a glob toward the Yankees’ dugout and the fans between home and third. “Oh, no,” Red Sox announcer Curt Gowdy winced, “this is bad.”9
After what Red Smith dubbed his “great expectorations,” Williams retreated into the tunnel between the dugout and the clubhouse and assaulted a water fountain. It was, noted utility player Billy Consolo, “one of those big metal water coolers, bolted to the concrete wall. Ted just knocked it over, ripped it off the wall. Water started spurting everywhere.” It flooded the tunnel, almost requiring scuba gear to make it back to the clubhouse.10
Williams was not through. In the bottom of the eleventh inning, Boston loaded the bases, and he came to the plate again. An angry Williams was a fearsome sight for any pitcher, and reliever Tommy Byrne was not about to give Ted anything to hit. Byrne hoped that Williams’s rage would make him chase a bad pitch. But even a furious, spit-launching, water-fountain-busting Williams had the best batter’s eye in the game. He laid off balls outside the strike zone, and given Williams’s emotional instability, the umpire was not about to call anything close against him. On this note of anticlimax, Byrne walked home the winning run. As he moved away from home plate, Williams flung his bat toward the heavens. Some said it ascended thirty feet in the air; others claimed it climbed more than fifty.
The Red Sox locker room was funereally silent. “Kid, that wasn’t a good thing to do,” manager Pinky Higgins told Williams. Ted’s teammates watched silently, as nervous as Byrne had been just minutes before. It was quiet enough to hear a jock hit the ground. Team owner Tom Yawkey had listened to the game on the radio in New York, and he fined Williams $5,000 for his actions, an enormous amount at the time. But Ted had no real regrets. Although he would not meet reporters face-to-face, he did talk with a few through a closed door. Why did he do it? “I just can’t help it,” he said. And he wasn’t a bit sorry for the spitting—just for the $5,000 fine. He had two things he wanted to get off his chest, and he made the reporters repeat them to be sure they got them right: “First, I’d spit at the same people who booed me today. Second, I wouldn’t be at the ballpark tomorrow if I could afford a… $5,000 fine every day.”11
The Williams’s spitting incident was news for weeks. All of a sudden, Ted was exhibition number one for what was wrong with pampered athletes and what was troubling the Great American Game. He was excoriated by reporters and defended by fans, ridiculed by Boston scribes and praised by the man on the street. Ted Williams’s mind became of greater public interest than Albert Einstein’s. “They’re interviewing psychiatrists now on me,” he told a reporter. “I am the spitting cobra.” Untroubled by their star’s saliva glands, most of the Red Sox faithful now stood by him. “Ted has gone through two tough wars and numerous injuries which would have killed lesser men and has come back to have some of his greatest years,” noted a letter to the Boston Globe. “Certainly fans have the right to boo players, especially if they are not performing as they should but there is a limit as to what a man can take.”12
Williams made his case even more eloquently the next night against the Orioles. Once again more than 30,000 spectators crammed into Fenway. They had come to see the “Splendid Spitter,” and he reveled in the moment, even if it had cost him $5,000 to push Mantle’s pursuit of Babe’s record into the wings. As soon as they saw him, the fans began to cheer, and they continued to sound their support every time he came to the plate or caught a ball. With the game knotted at 2–2 in the sixth inning, he knocked a home run into the right-field pavilion. As he crossed home plate and headed for the dugout, he put a finishing touch on his previous day’s antics by covering his mouth with his right hand.13
Ted was back. He had made his point. And even though he was just shy of his thirty-eighth birthday, he was not about to concede any batting titles to Mickey Mantle.
NOT LONG BEFORE THE tie-breaking homer, while still in the field, Williams wandered over to the scoreboard operator and asked if anything was happening. Mickey had hit another home run against the Senators. Once again in Griffith Stadium he had victimized Camilo Pascual. It was his thirty-eighth of the season. The next day he belted his thirty-ninth—his fifth since the beginning of the month. But with the Yankees heading into a four-game series against Baltimore, New York Journal-American columnist Hugh Bradley cautioned restraint. “Mickey Mantle hasn’t hit a homer against the lowly Orioles this year,” he wrote. Furthermore, the Birds had held him to a mere .219 batting average. Perhaps manager Paul Richards had some “magic formula.” “I wish it was true,” he said. “It would make my life a lot more pleasant.” But the story was “bunk.”14
Orioles catcher–first baseman Gus Triandos was more forthcoming. “Our guys throw about everything they have in the way of pitches, including sliders, curves, screw balls, knucklers and fastballs,” he explained. “They try to keep him from getting set.” Maybe that was the secret—keeping the slugger from digging in at the plate. Mickey wasn’t sure what it was. When quizzed on the subject, he smiled, then speculated, “Maybe the answer can be given better after the next four games are completed.… I’m not worrying—at least not yet.”15
Mickey was right. Baltimore pitchers had no secret formula. He hit his fortieth home run during
a Saturday game, becoming the first Yankee to reach that mark since DiMaggio tallied forty-six in 1937. The shot put him eleven games ahead of Babe Ruth’s record pace. The next day Mickey celebrated by hitting another homer against Baltimore. He had never hit forty homers in a year, and now on August 12, with more than a month and a half remaining in the regular season, he had eclipsed that mark. He had made a believer of Richards. “Mickey Mantle is a better player than Ruth,” the manager gushed. “Baseball has been looking a long time for a super player. Now it can stop looking because Mantle is that player.”16
LIKE RUTH HAD IN his own time, Mantle was outgrowing his sport. Every part of the entertainment industry clamored for his attention. After playing the Sunday doubleheader against the Orioles, he rushed to Midtown Manhattan to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show (Sullivan had recently been in an automobile accident, and comedian Phil Silvers was filling in for him). The variety show was a TV staple. By 1956 television had begun to reshape American culture. With more than five hundred stations and sets in almost 40 million homes—or 85 percent of the total—it had become a $1 billion a year industry. The tube alternately informed, enlightened, and entertained the nation, and in the 1956–1957 season The Ed Sullivan Show was the second most watched program, attracting just short of 15 million viewers a week. No other variety program—and only I Love Lucy—topped its numbers. The show made some careers and confirmed others. Less than a month after Mantle appeared, Elvis Presley sang and gyrated for the first time on the program.17
A Season in the Sun Page 18